by Kiki Leach
So when he leaned down at her pussy and stroked it with a single finger, she couldn’t help but smile at his willingness to take her so eagerly. He slid a hand up her thigh and rested his fingers at her stomach, then dove between her thighs as if he were feasting on the appetizer leading to a four course meal.
Sheila screamed out in delight the moment he French kissed her pussy. His tongue circling her clit sent her into a wild range of emotions she didn’t even know existed inside of her. She dug her fingernails into the bed and rested her hand at the top of his head, feeling the motions from his mouth as he moved against her like a slow wave of water, in and out, in and out.
Her mouth hung open as she breathed out and brought up her other leg, lightly pressing it against the side of his face. He wrapped his hand around it and squeezed her thigh. When he felt her shaking to the point of being unable to stop without assistance, he slid up her body and hovered over her face. She reached up with her thumb to wipe the come from his lips and pressed it against her tongue. He smiled and leaned down to kiss her.
For hours they made love in every which way imaginable before collapsing into each other’s arms. He kept an arm tightly wound around her body as she lay her face across his chest and made circles around his stomach with the tips of her fingers.
“What are you thinking?” he asked her.
She shook her head against him. “I don’t know.” She did know, but was too afraid to say it out loud. “What are you thinking?”
He tightened his jaw and slightly grinded his teeth. “I’m thinking that this summer might be a good time to get married.”
She sat up and looked at him, snapping her fingers in his face to see if she was living in a dream world. “Are you being sincere?”
He nodded. “Yeah.” She dropped her face in her hands and tossed her hair behind her. “What’s wrong?”
She wrapped the sheet around to cover her breasts and turned to look him directly in the face. “I’m just so confused. I feel like you’re being hot and cold to me all the time and I can’t figure you out anymore. One minute you want to have a family, the next you don’t want to make babies. Then you’re going off to sleep in another room and now you’ve come to mine and we’ve made love again and you’re talking marriage in a way you haven’t since you first proposed. I’m trying understand what’s going on inside your head. If it has nothing to do with Vanessa--”
“What’s going on inside my head,” he said, stopping her, “is that I’ve gained perspective on what I want and what I need in my life. And that’s you. It has been you for a very long time now.” He reached up and stroked her face with the back of his hand. She grabbed his wrist and slid her fingers up, moving her mouth toward his index.
“You want to get married to me?” she asked. She swept her tongue across his finger as her eyes blazed into his.
“I do.” He struggled with saying this, even as much as he wanted to believe it with every syllable rolling from his tongue. On the one hand, he thought that finally marrying Sheila would be the answer in completely ridding Vanessa from his mind and heart once and for all. He saw an answer in her that he had continued to look past from the moment they first decided to make their relationship more than sex. On the other hand, he knew that marrying her was probably going to make things worse, because he would never be able to hide his true feelings from her forever.
Sheila looked past the worry growing on his face and bent down to kiss him. “Then we’re getting married.”
She couldn’t bring herself to really understand any of this, or why it happened, and feared if she did or questioned it further, that it wouldn’t sound as good to her as she would’ve liked it too. So she embraced it, everything from the moment to the feeling of finally being wanted by him, as if Vanessa no longer existed or at the very least, had remained a distant memory.
She moved on top of him and slid her hand down to the head of his dick, stroking it in her hand. He shut his eyes and sunk his head down into his pillow. His temples flared and he balled his fists. She slowly moved her thumb around the head of his dick and brought it back up to her face, licking the come as she did before. He pushed his fingers into her hair and smiled at her, feeling for the first time what this life could really be like if he was willing to give it a chance.
Part Thirty-Three
After Vanessa said goodbye to her mother, who conceded that the night hadn’t turned into a complete disaster despite Sheila and Nathan showing up, she and Maurice opted to walk home together, reluctantly leaving William and Nikki behind as he wanted to have more time alone with her to talk.
“I don’t feel right about them being together,” said Vanessa. Maurice held out his hand for her to take, but she was so preoccupied with her thoughts that she hadn’t even noticed and folded her arms across her chest instead. Maurice dropped his hands in his pockets and continued alongside her. “I can’t be alone in thinking this is weird. This is weird, right?”
“It’s not that weird when you think about it, V.”
“Are you kidding? He is old enough to be her fucking father, Mo! Her fucking, father. I can’t imagine what her parents will say when they find out about this, if they find out about it.”
“They can’t say any more than they would if they found out she was sleeping with her married boss.”
She lifted her brows and nodded. “Ok, so you have a point. But still, it’s gross.” She tightened her arms beneath her and kicked up her feet as she moved.
Maurice looked over at her but refocused ahead when she began to notice. “You never told me what you wanted to talk to Nathan about,” he said, staring toward the ground.
She shrugged. “I just told him to back off for good.”
“And he listened this time?”
“I think so. I didn’t waver in what I said and I didn’t hold back. I also didn’t see him again for the rest of the night after that, so I think I made my point pretty clear.”
“Now that you’ve said it, I didn’t see Sheila again after you spoke to him either,” he said. “Maybe they went home.”
She swallowed back the building bile and dipped her head, remembering that she had seen them leave together. “As they should since they’re getting married.”
He slowly nodded his head, his eyes still focused on the ground. “And you’re okay with that now?”
“I don’t have a choice but to be, right? I’ve said it before, but… I really don’t have a choice anymore. If I want him to leave me alone and he’s not choosing to be with anyone else but her, then--”
“If you had that choice, and he didn’t, would you take him back?”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“If you had the choice to be with him, if he weren’t engaged to Sheila but to someone else he didn’t feel obligated to be with. Someone he actually wanted to marry because he felt he was truly in love with her. Would you still want to be with him?”
“You’re asking if I wanted him and he didn’t want me, would I still feel this way?”
“That’s exactly what I’m asking, V.” He stopped walking and turned to her. “Would you still want him?”
She stopped to think about his question and shook her head. “I don’t know. And to be honest, I don’t know if I ever will. That answer may not be good enough, but it’s the only one I can give you for right now.” She swung her leg around and continued walking. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. I was just curious to know how you felt about it.” He walked up beside her and stuffed his hands deeper into his pockets. “Nikki said I was moving too fast with you,” he told her. “She said that I was waiting for you to catch up to me emotionally and I didn’t realize that until just now. I guess I forget sometimes that you haven’t had as much time as I have to think about things. I’m just so anxious to get things going with you that I don’t realize that it’s not just about me, but about us.”
“It is about us. Or, it will be soon enough.”
&n
bsp; “Soon enough happened for me fifteen years ago, V.”
When they reached their front door, Vanessa moved up a few steps as Maurice lagged behind. She turned to him as he moved in front of her and lay a hand on his face, stoking his cheek with the back of her fingers. She kissed him, only slipping just the tip of her tongue between his lips to give him a taste.
When she pulled back, he had licked his lips of her and grinned. It was as if that small taste had left him spellbound for an entire lifetime. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that good things come to those who wait? And even greater things come to those who have waited for fifteen years to get laid?”
He laughed. “It’s not just about that.”
“I know.” She slid her hands down his arms and took his hands in hers. He enclosed his fingers around the back of her hands and took another step forward, now standing above her. “I want this,” she said. “But…”
“I’m going to give you time, V. Real time to at least meet me halfway. It’s what you deserve. And now that I know for a fact that Nathan will no longer be a problem for us, it’ll be easier to do as the days move along. I just don’t want to have to wait forever for you to realize that.”
“You won’t have to wait forever. It might help that we live in the same house and you have a tendency to walk around without your clothes on,” she told him. “You could tempt me into almost anything Maurice Livingston, but my heart… I’m dead set against my heart being run over again and I need to get it in the right place before we do anything.”
He exhaled sharply and looked aside. “Does that mean kissing you is out of the question?”
“No. No, nooo, I meant ‘anything’ as in sex. The kissing we can keep. I like the kissing very much.”
He took her face in his hands, pressing his thumbs under her chin to lift it. He lightly pressed his lips against hers and she draped her hands on either side of him as she experienced for the first time in her life what it felt like to be respected by a man who claimed to love you.
And not just saying it, but actually showing it and showing it well. When the kiss deepened, she leaned away to catch her breath. She turned from him and reached for her keys to the door. He wrapped a hand around her and kissed the side of her throat. She felt a throb between her legs and began rubbing them together.
“Is this okay?” he asked her, his lips never leaving her skin.
She swallowed hard and nodded. “Mm-hmm, yes….” Heat arose from her skin as he moved his hand up toward her breast.
“What about this?”
“Yesss,” she said, panting as she grabbed onto the frame and curled her fingers around it while digging her nails into the wood, “as long as it’s not… inside.”
“Inside?” He lifted his face to press his cheek against hers. “So none of this…” He whispered something in Italian in her ear. She didn’t know what he had said but it sounded so sexy that she couldn’t help in rolling her eyes back into her head and imagining what the words actually meant.
He slid his hand up, stopping just sort of her pussy. She squeezed her legs together, holding his hand there as he continued whispering in her ear. His breath warmed against her and she spun around, lifting to her toes to kiss him again. She reached back for the knob to the door and they practically fell inside the foyer. Maurice slipped on a pile of mail that had fallen from the table they had bumped into.
She held tight onto his neck as he held onto her waist. She covered her mouth to laugh and rattled her head. “We’re never gonna get this right.” She released him from her clutches and lifted her shoulders. “The moment’s been lost now.” She headed for the kitchen and he stayed behind to pick up the various envelopes.
“That’s how you do me, V,” he said, sorting through them. “That’s how you do me.” He moved into the kitchen, looking down at the names on each one.
“What can I say, Mo, I got hungry. I wasn’t sure of everything you said to me out there, but I know there was some food involved.”
“There was definitely food involved.” He grinned but kept his eyes on the envelopes. “How the hell does Nikki keep getting bills here?” he asked. “She doesn’t pay anything.”
“Those might be for her acting classes or something.”
“I didn’t think she paid for those either.” When he got to the last piece of mail, he tossed it on the counter. “That one’s for you, but no name or return address.”
Vanessa looked down and scrunched her face. “Probably junk mail. It comes ambiguous like that all the time. You can just toss it into the trash.”
He went for it but stopped when he heard the phone ring from the living room. “I’ll get that.”
“If it’s my mother, tell her that I died on the way over here and therefore can’t come to the phone!” she hollered as he ran out.
She pulled a tub of ice cream from the freezer and grabbed a spoon from the drawer. She went over to the pile of bills Maurice had left on the table, snarling at each one she came across, and looked back on the counter at the envelope with her name and no address. Vanessa contemplated tossing it into the trash unopened just as she had suggested, but got curious enough to see what was inside when she noticed that her name had been handwritten with a ballpoint pen instead of felt tip, which was how most of her junk mail arrived.
She sat the tub down and slipped her finger beneath an open crease at back. She tossed the envelope aside and opened what appeared to be a note containing only six words at the top in bright bold letters:
Call me, Vanessa. I miss you.
She roamed her eyes to the bottom in search of a name, and her heart nearly jumped outside of her chest when she saw Adrian Samuels written in red ink. There was a phone number listed next to his name but no return address.
A flood of emotions she had hoped to never feel again in regard to this man suddenly overcame and overwhelmed her entire ability to even function as a human being. Her eyes became watery and she sniffed in trying to hold them back. Without even thinking, she immediately crumbled the letter in her hands and ran over to the sink to vomit. She held her head over it for a few minutes to catch her breath and rinsed her mouth with warm water, trying as hard as she could to get the bitter taste of bile out of her mouth.
She rinsed the sink and closed her eyes tight to the point of giving herself a headache. She turned off the water and stood up straight. She took a deep breath and reopened the letter again, staring down at the name just to make sure she hadn’t seen things, or that her eyes were playing nasty tricks on her soul. She shook her head in disbelief and absolute anger at his resurgence after all this time. She got the urge to vomit again and covered her mouth with her hand.
This was a man she had never wanted to speak to or hear about ever again, even more than Nathan, which said a lot about who he was to her and what their relationship still meant even after all this time. All this talking about him, she thought, has finally summoned him back up from the pits of hell.
“That wasn’t your mother on the phone,” Maurice said as he came back into the kitchen.
Vanessa turned quick and held the letter behind her back. She immediately dabbed her eyes before he could notice. “Who was it?”
“Sheila.”
“What the hell does she want?”
“She didn’t want to talk to you, she just wanted to thank you again for inviting her tonight.”
“Well, she’s welcome again, I guess. She didn’t need to call to tell me that.”
“I got the feeling she just…” He paused. “Had a good time and was in a good mood.” The idea of what Maurice meant flew over Vanessa’s had as she was too fixated on the letter in her hands, and how Maurice would react in seeing her with it, thus learning something she had tried so hard to keep hidden about herself for so long. “Have you had a chance to look at the mail?” he asked.
“What?” She stared down at the table. “Oh right, yeah, nothing but bills, bills, bills. I might have to put Destiny’s Child on repeat be
fore I go to bed tonight. Perfect for Throwback Thursday.” She smiled.
“We can take care of them this weekend.”
“I think I might stay up to try and pay a few. That way we can do other things this weekend like, make out with each other for hours on the couch or something.”
“You have a great mind, Vanessa Brown.” He kissed her again and she felt his tongue sliding against her lips. “I’m gonna take a shower before bed. You’re more than welcome to come and join me.”
“Mo.”
“No touching allowed.” He raised his hands. “I promise. We could just stand there and look at each other underneath a lot of soap and water.”
“Goodnight, Maurice.”
“Can’t say I didn’t try.”
He backed out of the kitchen. The moment she was sure he had gone upstairs, she turned back to the letter and looked down at the phone number again. “I’ll be a good gotdamn,” she mumbled. “Son of a bitch made his way back to Queens.” She dropped her hands on the counter and grunted. “Mother fuck!”
Just when she was certain she was getting her life together, fate walked in and said, I don’t think so, sis, step back. She contemplated what to do and decided to toss the letter in the garbage out back, hoping to never see something else like it again.
But it wouldn’t be so easy for her to forget, especially now in knowing that he was back in town. She wondered how long it had been and was almost tempted to reach down into the garbage to pull the number out, call him and ask him before hanging up, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The largest part of her didn’t want to care anymore. But there was still a tiny bit that seemed to care all too much. She hated that part and tried crushing it by thinking of Maurice in the shower.