by Kiki Leach
As he reached a hand up to caress her face, Sheila dropped her arms and allowed the robe to slide down to the floor behind her. Swallowing hard, she wasn’t even sure her heart was still beating as he stepped forward and bent his face down toward hers. Lightly stroking the corner of her mouth with his own, he waited until the second felt right enough to finally kiss her the way he knew she wanted, desired, begged for.
As their lips came together in heat and electricity – crashing, burning, melding against one another, tasting scents and skin, she curled her fingers around the buttons of his shirt and loosened them one by one. By the time she reached the last one, he was helping her pull the edge of the shirt out from his pants and tossing it to the floor.
And then she went for his pants, but wasn’t as eager this time in getting them off.
Because this time wasn’t about desperation, it wasn’t about a need to feel wanted, it was about the wanting in and of itself; she wanted to take her time, to reflect and treasure this moment between them as if it was their first, as if it could be their last.
As the buckle loosened and the zipper fell, Adrian shoved his pants to the floor and stepped out of them, then feverishly wrapped his hands around her and started walking back toward the bed. Once he hit the edge, he dropped down and began kissing her stomach. He swirled his tongue around her skin, bit down and clawed and forced her to feel his every touch, his every lick, bite, scratch and need for her. When he looked up and noticed that her eyes had been closed and her head was tilted back, he reached up for her chin and softly pulled her face back down. Her eyes popped open and she stared down at him, confused.
“I want your eyes on me this time,” he said. “I want your entire focus on me, and us, nothing else.”
She nodded her head, obliging, then bent down to kiss him again.
His hands slid around to her back and he guided her down to his lap.
As she positioned her body on top of his rock solid dick, she eased him inside of her and started rocking back and forth, adjusting herself to his length.
But Adrian didn’t move at all. Instead he placed his hands on either side of her face, forcing her to stop. Out of breath, her cheeks felt rushed with heat and she suddenly felt terrified that he would think it was all a mistake, that what they were starting together was a lie.
“What is it?” she asked warily.
“I want to take it slow with you this time,” he said.
Feeling relieved that he seemed to want more and all that she was willing to give, she draped her arms around him and started rocking her body against him again. “That’s what we’re doing.”
A small smile crept upon his lips as he admired the exhilaration on her face. “That’s not what I meant.”
She continued rocking, though much slower this time to keep up the pace, and brought her hands down to his chest, scraping her fingers back and forth against his skin. “Then, what?”
“I don’t want to call this ‘making love’,” he told her, “because we’re not there yet. But I want to show you that I could love you. I want to show you how I can if you let me.”
Those words smacked her upside the head, tossed her body around the room like a bright red rubber ball and shoved her right back down on top of his lap. She was either losing her mind, being played, or for the first time in her life getting an actual dose of what it meant for a man to actually care about her and not just himself during sex.
Stroking her hair down to her back and lifting her body against him, he smiled with his eyes and leaned into her face. “Are you going to let me show you how I can love you, Sheila?”
“I…”
And then he pushed himself so deep inside of her that just a single inch separated the tip of his dick from her G-Spot. Sheila’s eyes rolled so far into the back of her head that her lids began to flutter.
Adrian rocked himself back and forth until he finally, with ultimate achievement, hit that perfect spot.
Sheila cried out at the unexpected feeling that exploded throughout her entire body, forcing her to shake almost uncontrollably against him, and sank her nails into his back until he bruised.
“Is this you letting me?” he asked, his voice hoarse as he began to lose his breath with every stroke.
She dipped her head back even further, crawled her fingers up the back of his neck, and nodded.
“Yes… yes… yes.”
Part Nineteen
Across town, the hours didn’t seem to pass fast enough for Vanessa as she spent most of the morning spinning back and forth in her chair and tossing darts at Melanie’s Attitude cover as it hung in a frame with no glass on her wall across the room.
Since she couldn’t exactly turn right back around and go home, crawl beneath the covers of her bed and pretend that a world outside of that fluffy thick fabric didn’t exist, it seemed as if poking tiny dots into the paper face of a woman who was quickly rising to the top of her shit list was the next best thing.
Though to be honest, she didn’t outright hate the woman. And though there had been many times as of late in which images of her face popped into her head that weren’t all that pleasant to look at, she didn’t even really dislike her as a person all that much. In fact, despite her remarks that morning, Vanessa even felt awful about her current plight with Oscar and under normal circumstances, would have been the first to scold him for leaving his wife and children in the dust, and offer her a helping hand and maybe even another cover shoot to help boost her spirits.
But leave it to Melanie’s sudden infatuation with Maurice to force Vanessa to see nothing but red whenever she was mentioned in even the slightest capacity.
Though it’s not as if Vanessa was worried that something would actually happen between them, physically speaking. After last night, and then again in front of the entire pop-up shop, she had been more than convinced that Maurice wanted no one else but her, just as he was convinced of the same.
But that wasn’t actually the problem, it never was. More or less, she didn’t feel as if she could continue to trust him, with anything – her thoughts, her emotions, or her body which was just as vulnerable as her heart.
This was a man she had given her entire life to – her entire self. This was a man who had her soul in his hands, presented to him by her when they were just children, long before the idea of romance between them even popped inside her head. She gave him small pieces of herself that Nathan never seemed to get a hold on or even see well enough to touch, even though she had been convinced by him throughout their entire relationship that he had.
But Nathan never saw her in the same way as Maurice, never looked at her beneath the same light or valued who she was as a person, as a woman outside of being with him; he never knew or understood or even cared about her in the way he always claimed to, in the way he always made her and everyone else around them believe that he had, which is what often sent her back to him time and time again when she knew that she would just come away with an even bigger amount of pain each and every single time.
Maurice was the man she was always supposed to be with, the one meant to take care of her, to show her that men like Nathan weren’t the rule or the exception to it, but instead a grossly misrepresented interpretation of what a man was supposed to be, how he was supposed to be when it came to showing that kind of affection for the woman he claimed to love.
Maurice was her heart and everything that she put inside of it.
And now that heart had been shattered, broken into pocket-sized pieces inside of her chest and left floating around amongst the fiery acid that spread throughout, waiting to be mended, to be put back together like the tiny pieces of a thousand part jigsaw puzzle by the very hammer that saw fit to blow it apart in the first place.
Too focused on various ways of learning how to fix herself, she hadn’t even noticed Felicia walking in to see her. She had to knock on the desk a few times to reach her younger sister’s attention at all and when she did, immediately started to realize that coming to se
e her about minor concerns regarding the magazine was probably not the best idea.
“Should I come back?” she asked.
“Must you come back at all?”
Felicia threw her hands against her hips and clucked her tongue. “Is it that time of the month already?”
“I don’t need an excuse to be annoyed with you,” said Vanessa as she sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. “You’ve known this ever since we were kids, it just comes naturally. What do you want?”
Felicia leaned over the desk to get a better look in her eyes. Noticing how dark they were, and that she must have been crying at some point before her arrival, her aggravation immediately turned to genuine concern and she stood straight. “Are you okay in here, V?”
“I’m peachy fucking keen, Fefe. Can’t you tell?”
Felicia reached out for the chair behind her and pulled it forward to take a seat. “You know that I’ve never liked that nickname--”
“Hence my point in using it. Now what do you want?”
She leaned her head and peered. “Why are you biting off my head, Vanessa?”
“Because it’s a day that ends in Y and you’re part of my daily diet for the week.”
“No,” she replied. “I mean ‘why’ as in, ‘why’ are you acting like such a bitch so early in the morning?”
“I think it sounds better in a sentence directed toward you, as in why the hell are you bothering me with bullshit so damn early in the morning? And on that note, what the hell do you want from me, Felicia?”
She stared at her sister for a long time and bit down hard on her tongue before saying something that she knew she wouldn’t be able to take back later.
Vanessa looked down at her hands and started picking at her nails as Felicia attempted to change the subject.
“You don’t want to tell me what the hell is going on with you, okay. That isn’t what I came in here for to begin with.”
“Then tell me what the hell you want and then please just get the hell out.”
“I’m only going to take so much of this shit attitude from you Vanessa before I reach across the desk and throw you around the room like a--”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll go out of my way to avoid being a complete bitch, alright? Now can you please just tell me what you’re doing in here? As you can see, I haven’t gotten a lot done so far and I’m already behind on my deadlines to the point that I’m damn near certain our Mother is gonna beat the piss out of me if she doesn’t have something written in my name on her desk before the day is over. It’s bad enough that I barely had enough time this morning to create quick notes for that photo shoot, which she probably ripped up before even reading the first one.”
Felicia shifted back and forth in the chair. “Speaking of our mother, she’s the reason I’m in here.”
“Great.” Vanessa dropped her hands on top of her desk. “She’s the reason you’re in here and the reason you came back to the city, what next? Is she going to be the reason for you sitting in this chair too?”
“I’m not here to take your job from you, Vanessa. I’m only in here because Alexis asked me to come down here and retrieve the sketches you were supposed to create last night. She’s still held up at that photoshoot but said she wants them on her desk by the time she gets back so she can look over them in peace and pick out the one she wants before the magazine goes to official press for the next issue.”
“Why the hell would she send you down here to retrieve anything when I have an assistant out there who can just as easily take those sketches and place them on Alexis’ desk herself?”
Felicia looked behind her and stared at Samantha who purposely kept her eyes focused down on her desk, despite knowing that she was currently being watched and discussed.
She turned back to her sister and grinned. “I guess it’s only a matter of time before everyone else finds out, so I’ll save you the trouble of learning it around the same time as them.”
Vanessa raised her brows and braced herself for the blow. “Learn, what?”
“That Alexis offered me a position within the company.”
Vanessa smacked her palm against the edge of her desk, then leaned her head back and pointed. “I knew it.”
“She didn’t offer me your position, V.”
“She didn’t offer you my position, yet.”
“She’s not offering it at all. She wants me in a position with her personally, as her assistant. That’s why she sent me down here, to ‘assist’ her.”
“Whatever. Assistant today, tomorrow, the entire company. It’s only a matter of time before she tries to force you into this seat and we both know it. Forget all the shit I’ve done since college in making this magazine what it’s become. She’s going to ignore all of that just as long as she can get you where she’s always been convinced that you belong.” She pointed to her chair. “Right here.”
“I don’t want your job, Vanessa. I don’t know many people who do unless all they’re looking for is to gain a name for themselves in the public eye. Even if it had been offered to me again, I would’ve turned it down flat just like I did the first time. Being in your position is hard as hell and I’ve seen from afar all that you’ve had to go through in keeping this place afloat, even with Mother being the one behind the steering wheel.”
Vanessa folded her arms and visually inspected her sister. Though doubtful it was heartfelt, she was still more than willing to accept the praise bestowed upon her.
“I’ve only done what I can in the hopes that it keeps her from tossing me out on my ass like I know she’s wanted to do for years now. Especially since I can’t seem to keep my name, or that same ass, out of the papers.”
Felicia chuckled.
“I wasn’t exactly trying to make you laugh,” Vanessa continued. “But I do have a question about something.”
“What is it?”
“Why in the hell would you want to work directly beneath her? The two of you are so much alike, which is why you’ve always been her favorite, but at some point, working so closely together will lead to nothing but an epic clash of the titans. Not that I’d be all too sorry to see that happen because we have been clashing since the doctor removed me from her womb and will more than likely continue, even as she lay gasping for air on her death bed.”
Felicia rested her elbow on the arm of the chair and swung her leg back and forth. “I don’t necessarily want to work directly beneath her, V, but I also can’t deny how much I need the money right now. And with what she’s willing to offer me here, I’d be a fool to take any other position someplace else.”
“When and how the hell did all of this even come together?”
“Yesterday, after you left.”
“Of course it did--”
“After learning about the depth of Rodney’s actions, she asked me to come back home for good with the kids. A day has barely passed since that conversation, so I have yet to officially decide or give her a real answer about it either way. But I need you to know that I’m tempted. I’m really tempted to take her up on this offer. The kids miss her like crazy and Alexander is the only granddaddy they’ve ever known thanks to Terrence skipping out on us, and Rodney’s parents dying before the girls were even born. They need to be surrounded by love and spoiled like we were at that age.”
“What the fresh hell are you talking about?” spat Vanessa. “Grandmother didn’t spoil us, Felicia. She spoiled the hell outta you, but she sure as shit didn’t spoil me.”
“You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead--”
“How is telling the truth and thus ‘shaming the devil’ speaking ill of the dead? To this day I’m still not sure if she even liked me when we were little and especially once I got old enough to see right through her ‘sweet old lady’ persona. She didn't think I'd catch onto her little snide remarks after she'd berate me about Nathan as if I was stupidly having sex with him out in the open like all of her little church going, tabloid reading, gossip mongering fr
iends seemed to be convinced of.”
“That’s not true, V.”
“Oh yes it is. Why is it that she never seemed to call me on my birthday or give me money like grandparents are supposed to do for their grandkids? I know that you don’t want to believe this, but the only time she ever called was to scold me for ‘showin’ my behind to the free world’ after the Sheila and Nathan incident went public, which was almost word for word what Alexis said when she saw me on the cover of every paper in New York City following that wretched reunion – which once again included appearances by none other than those two clowns.”
Felicia twisted in the chair and draped one leg over the other. “She took pictures of those covers and sent copies to my phone --”
“Of course she did.”
Silence filled the room as they looked away from each other. And it remained that way for at least the next fifteen or so minutes until Vanessa decided to ask her sister a question that if she didn’t get off her chest before the morning was over, was going to virtually combust inside of her.
“Do you think Daddy leaving is part of the reason I’ve become what I am?”
She knit her brows, confused. “Huh?”
“You mentioning him is leaving me to wonder about a few things that I virtually pushed out of my head years ago. And when I ask you if his leaving is part of the reason I’ve turned into this, I don’t mean when it comes to the stupid shit that I’ve done like drag Sheila across a ballroom floor. I mean when it comes to the men in my life. You know that I love Alexander and that if it weren’t for him, I’d be a hell of a lot more screwed up in the head than what I already am. But do you think it’s possible that this sense of loss and abandonment because of Terrence is where most of my problems might stem from?”
“What does your therapist say about it?”
“You’re trying to be cute with that, but I haven’t seen her in weeks. I can’t bear to keep paying somebody to tell me the same shit that I can self-diagnose with the help of Bing or a friend for free. Or you.”
“Where is all of this coming from, Vanessa?”