by Kiki Leach
Maybe getting the hell away from everyone again would be exactly what they both needed. Maybe he could even force himself to be truly happy with her, love her as she always wanted, as she always hoped that he could if they just got back out like they had before.
Maybe this time, he could put in some real effort and show her with more than just his words, which after a while meant nothing to either one of them, that all the years she spent loving him despite his pining for someone else were not wasted. Maybe then he could finally give her the kind of life she deserved.
And maybe, just maybe, in the midst of it all, he could actually start to appreciate her worth as his woman.
Part Twenty-Two
While lying back in the arms of a man she wasn’t sure she loved yet, but was certain that she could, Sheila raised her hand high above her head and stared long and hard at the diamond on ring finger from a man she was certain she still loved, but was certain by now would never love her back the same.
As she rubbed her thumb back and forth across the diamond and stared at the memory of that ring, and how she initially felt in receiving it, Adrian reached out his hand and wrapped it around her wrist. Bringing her hand down to his face, she enclosed her fingers around his thumb and turned to look into his eyes.
But as he pulled his brows together, he kept his eyes on her hand, and that ring.
“I have to tell you something,” he said.
Sheila started to panic again as his voice seemed to darken and the whites of his eyes turned red. She shifted in the bed beside him and though she tried to appear completely calm at his actions, she could feel every other beat of her heart racing to keep up with the speed of her pulse. Her insides threatened to rip apart at the thought of him telling her the one thing she dreaded hearing the most after sex with a man who had first cared for someone else – that someone in question being Vanessa.
“What is it?” she asked him, her voice rattling against the beat of every word. She cleared her throat to feel more at ease but it seemed to make her that much more worried about what he had planned to say next.
“This doesn’t exactly feel all that right to me, Sheila.” His tone was solemn, honest.
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
He held up her hand and stroked a thumb across the gold band. “It doesn’t seem as if you should still be wearing this whenever I’m inside you.”
Now feeling reassured that he had no desire to jump out of bed in that very moment to be someplace else, with someone else, she pulled her face back into a wide smile and shook her head against the pillow. “It’s not as if you gave me much time to remove it,” she said. “Maybe the first time, but--”
“I don’t think you should be wearing it anymore at all,” he told her. “What does it mean anymore? You’re not committed to Nathan anymore, or what you have and neither is he. Otherwise, he’d be here in this bed beside you instead of me.”
“He was put in jail last night.”
“You’re saying that if he wasn’t he’d still be here?”
She ripped her hand from his and sat up in the bed. Covering herself with the sheet, she sat back against the headboard and focused her eyes across the room.
Feeling the sudden tension, Adrian sat up as well and dropped his hands to his lap. He looked over at her but she refused to turn her head.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know all that much about your relationship aside from what you’ve told me and from what I’ve seen for myself.”
“And aside from what Vanessa has told you.” She tucked her hair behind her ear in annoyance and clasped her hands together.
“Once again, Vanessa’s being brought into a conversation in which she wasn’t invited.”
“What?”
“She has nothing to do with what we’re discussing, Sheila. Even when I tell you about it, you still manage to bring her up during times when she’s not needed, or frankly, wanted in the room – especially during times like this when what we’re discussing should be about the two of us and --”
“And Nathan,” she replied.
He dropped his hand to the bed and slapped it against the mattress, aggravated. “Yes, and Nathan.”
She scrunched her face. “Why are you getting so pissy with me when you’re the one that started this entire conversation by telling me that wearing my ring during sex with you didn’t feel right?”
“I’m not getting pissy.” He turned at an angle to face her, but she still refused to look at him. He ran his hands up and down both sides of his face, then wiped each one across his mouth and breathed out. “I don’t think you should be wearing that ring during sex with me, Sheila, because it represents something that you thought you had with him. It doesn’t make me feel all that great to know that while you’re calling out my name, while I’m giving every piece of pleasure to your body that you’ve ever sought from another man but had yet to find until me, that he still has the ability to claim you as his own.”
“He hasn’t claimed me for a long time,” she said.
“The ring says otherwise.” He reached for her hand again and stroked his fingers back and forth across it, then slid one finger around the band and spun the diamond around until it was facing her palm. “You say that he hasn’t claimed you for a long time, and I believe that. But how do you think as a man that he would feel in knowing that you were wearing it while we were--”
“Making love without the love part of it?” she asked, in part to get beneath his skin.
He dropped his chin and looked to the bed. “Yeah.”
She lifted her hand and stared down at the diamond again. It was the most beautiful ring she had ever seen. A hell of a lot more beautiful that the relationship it was born from.
“He’d probably be pissed. Which is what…” She glanced at him from the corner of her eye, then stopped. “Which is what I assumed last night when I thought about telling him if he ever came back to the hotel.”
“You were going to tell him last night that we slept together?”
She nodded. “But after learning that he had gotten arrested, and why, I realized that it was probably better not to say anything just. Even if he no longer claims me on his lips, I’m still left wearing his ring.”
Adrian thought about that for a moment, then slid his fingers around that band one more time and lightly jerked it back and forth against her finger.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
After finally removing the ring and placing it on the nightstand beside him, he wrapped his hand around hers and held it tight.
“If he doesn’t claim you on his lips,” he said, “he sure as hell shouldn’t be allowed to claim you with that.”
“So what am I supposed to do then?”
“That’s your call, Sheila. I can tell you what I want. I can tell you what I think you should do in order to secure your happiness and escape the misery you’ve been living in with him for the last five years. But what I say doesn’t carry a hell of a lot of weight – it doesn’t matter much unless it’s what you want to.”
“Is what you want…?” she started, nervous. “Is what you want…?” She stopped again, too afraid to continue, and closed her eyes.
Adrian slid a finger beneath her chin and lifted her head. “Look at me,” he commanded. Slowly, her lids peeled back and her nose started to swell as tears formed behind her eyes. “I want you. And I’m going to keep wanting you. I don’t give a damn what you’ve done before, where you’ve been before. We’ve all done shit we wished we could take back. We’ve all been people we wish we never were. But that doesn’t take away from who we are now. Who you were back then doesn’t take away from the woman I see right now, today, in this bed with me. A woman I could love if she really gives me the chance she claimed that she would.”
As tears streamed her face, she wiped them back. “I’m still willing to give you that chance, to give this a chance. But I’m going to need some time. If he gets out today, I can’t just
break things off with him the moment I see him. We’ve been together too long for that and were friends even longer.”
Adrian removed his hand from her face and moaned. He wasn’t thrilled, but he was willing to wait if that’s what it took.
“I can give you time,” he said. “But what I can’t give you is any more space.”
He reached a hand behind her head and pulled her to his mouth, displaying an urgent need to feel her again, to know that what they had was becoming real, more real than he initialed imagined or even wanted.
After a few deep kisses, he removed the blankets from his lap and positioned her on top of him again.
Part Twenty-Three
After the meeting with Melanie essentially blew up in her face – and across her hand – Nikki frantically raced back to William’s hoping to hide out before the news of what she had done to the wife of the man she was once again sleeping with reached the press.
And more importantly, the producers and other actors of the play. She had worked too damn long and hard to earn the position of a lead in a respected Broadway production to have it thrown away by being so stupid in actually assaulting someone, who wasn’t just anyone.
Of all the things she had ever done, the one thing she couldn’t believe she had managed to follow through with was raising an actual hand to strike hard across Melanie’s face. Despite everything she was going through, she knew that she couldn’t even use the excuse that she had the right to do it, considering out of the two of them, she was the one who more than likely deserved to be slapped – and hard, a few times, for continuing to screw around with not only one man who happened to be married, but two, despite the other being happily divorced.
It was only fitting, she thought, that just as she was reaching new heights in career notoriety that even her parent’s never achieved, that her personal life would begin to take a nosedive straight down into the damn gutter.
When she finally reached the block leading to William’s townhouse, she searched around in her bag for the set of keys she needed to get inside, never noticing as she approached the stoop that someone had been sitting there the entire time waiting for her imminent return.
He raised his head and sat back, balling his fists and sucking in pounds of air that filled his lungs the moment he saw her rounding the corner.
“Nik,” a strong, husky voice aggressively called out.
Her head jerked back in surprise.
Grabbing her chest, she fumbled back and tripped across the curb when she realized that the person calling out to her was none other than Oscar.
There was no way in hell that this was going to end well, and they both knew it.
He stood up quick and jumped down every other step to reach her.
Before he came any closer, Nikki held up her hands and started backing away. “I don’t have time for whatever the hell this is right now.”
She spun around him, but he turned on his heel before she was even out of his eyesight and grabbed her back by the arm.
“You’re going to make time.”
Looking up into his normally cool blue eyes that often told her without speaking just how much he loved everything about her, she saw nothing but fury. She instantly suspected the reason behind it, but wasn’t sure if she could muster up enough emotion to care. As he squeezed her arm a little harder than she was used to, unless it was during sex, she tore away from him and backed into the railing of the stairs behind her.
“What the hell is your problem?” she asked. Despite knowing the answer, she wanted to hear the words come straight from his mouth.
“What the hell is yours, Nik?” He threw his arms out to either side and bent his face down to meet hers. His cheeks flushed as rage surged through him. “Do you think you can just go around slapping my wife in public like that?”
“She told you.”
“Of course she told me,” he said. “What the hell were you thinking going to see her in the first place? Calling her up for a meeting in the park? Her number is listed in the employee handbook as an emergency contact only. It was in case you couldn’t get in touch with me for any reason at work. It wasn’t for you to use so that you could go around attacking my wife in front of a bunch of strangers on a Thursday morning in Central Park!”
“First of all, this is a well off neighborhood, meaning that the people around here are fast to call the police if your voice hits higher than the octave of a pigeon or lower than a baritone. Second, I needed to ask her a few questions about something--”
“Questions like what?” he snapped.
“They don’t really matter all that much now, do they?”
“The hell they don’t! I know that the shit between all of us is complicated as hell, but it doesn’t give you license to go around contacting Melanie whenever you see fit. In fact, you shouldn’t be going anywhere near her right now, and that includes The Bean.”
“You’re baring me from my own place of business now? You can’t do that.”
“I can and I will as the owner. Besides you haven’t been to work there in a month, Nicole. The only reason I still bother to keep you on the payroll is because of our relationship and the fact that this acting thing might in fact blow up in your face as you always feared.”
Stunned at his apparent carelessness and abrasive tone, she stepped back and bobbed her head. “Muchas gracias por el aliento,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he told her, though she wasn’t the least bit convinced by the immediate sound of remorse. “I didn’t mean to put it like that – I was out of line. You know that I’ve always been your biggest champion about this and no one is more proud of you getting top billing in this play than I am. But truth be told, this shit today has me feeling a little more fired up than normal, and it’s not making me feel all that great about us.”
“Fácilmente podría decir lo mismo,” she muttered. “In fact, what ‘us’ are you even referring to? I’m starting to get a little mixed up – is it me and you? You and Melanie? Me and her, all three of us? Which is it -- ?”
“Nik,” he blurted in a harsh tone. “Melanie and I haven’t even signed the papers yet--”
“Which is evident by the fact that you continue to refer to her as your WIFE.”
“Because in the eyes of the law, that’s what she is, which is why the shit that you pulled with her today could easily cost me time with my kids if she chooses to have it documented by her attorneys! How the hell do you think that’s going to look in court and to the judge when he reads that my mistress sought out my wife and attacked her in a public park over some shit that could have -- ?”
“Mistress?” She angrily snatched her keys from her purse and pointed them toward his face. He jumped back. “Are we really back to that again, after EVERYTHING?”
Realizing his choice of words, Oscar suddenly became apologetic and reached out his hand to touch her face. “Nik--”
“No!” She dodged her head from one side to the other, avoiding him. “Let’s just get this straight – let ME get this straight since I’m still the only one who seems to be in a state of confusion.”
“Nicole--”
“Shut up!” she screamed. “Melanie is still your wife, not just on paper but in actuality. And I’m still the slut who keeps your bed warm at night. The one you choose to see when no one else is around, which means you knew the moment you showed up here that William was gone, just like before. And just like before, we are still a fucking secret. And we’ll continue to be a fucking secret, which means that even after EVERTHING, AGAIN” – she waved her arm back and forth across her chest – “absolutely NOTHING! NOTHING! has changed. You came here with promise after promise after fucking promise just like you did before and I believed you, JUST like I did before and I fucked you, I fucked you good and hard and long MORE than I EVER did before. But this time it was inside of a house that I share with a man who is proud to be seen with me, who is proud to love me out in the open and show me off and introduce me to his fr
iends and his hija, aye Dios Mio, his hija. And even with all of that, ALL of it, I am still the idiota who would darlo todo en dos segundos because of how much I am still in love with you, a man who will never, EVER have me as anything more than a quick fuck in the dark.”
“None of that is true, Nik.”
“EVERY piece of it is true, Oscar. Every. Single. Piece has been true since the very beginning of this. And I realize now that they are the only truths we will ever have.” She tightened her fingers around the keys and turned to the stairs.
But he grabbed onto her arm and tried pulling her back. “Nicole--”
“Dejar ir de mi brazo, ahora.” Her tone was stern, serious. Oscar tried to look down into her eyes, but she refused to move any part of her body until he released her.
“Those are not the only truths we have,” he said, keeping his hand around her. “The moment we got back from the Hamptons, I ended things with Melanie, just as I said.”
“And yet here you are coming to yell at me about her.”
“What the hell was I supposed to do – what would you have expected me to do? Let it slide? Have your back in slapping her when she didn’t deserve it? I may be in love with you, and you may not believe it beneath all of the anger right now, but I am, more than I’ve ever been in love with any woman I’ve ever been with before in my life. And I may want to spend the rest of that life with you. But no matter what happens with us, or when, because it will, Melanie is still the mother of my children. No matter what the circumstances are between all of us, you are going to have to respect her as such. That’s the bottom line.”
“And if I don’t?”
He looked away from her for a few seconds and allowed his eyes to close. What the hell had all of this become? And would the pain of it ever stop?
Shaking his head, Oscar was only determined to know what thing from her now.
“Then what the fuck are we doing?”