by Cat Mann
Chapter 19
Blush
“Join us.”
Fear cemented in my throat, solid, tight and unwavering. My lungs were denied even one deep breath.
Blinking from sleep to wide-awake, I found her there, pinned to my body. Ava’s smell, her gentle breaths and the slow, soft murmur of her heart calmed me. We were sweaty again, wet and stuck together, unwilling to peel apart for the slightest bit of crisper air. My arms, wrapped around her, tightened and I hugged her even closer to me.
“Baby?” I squeezed her and her eyelashes fluttered on my chest. She looked up at me with sleepy, loving eyes, her fingers caressed my stomach, leaving a trail of tingling flesh in her wake.
“Mmm.” She gave a weak, tired smile and then pressed her lips to my hot skin for a kiss.
“Ava, I am having nightmares.”
A curvy rumple knitted her brow. “Nightmares? Like what?”
“I don’t know exactly but they’re so real. There are two of them, two nightmares, and they both keep coming back to me.” I smoothed her forehead with the soft pad on my thumb.
“Tell me about them.” Her green eyes stared into mine. Sea green, so deep I could swim in them.
“I need you first. I need to feel you.” My nose burrowed a path to her ear and my tongue slipped around the seashell curve of her lobe. Ava’s smile pushed up against my cheek and the corner of her mouth pecked a kiss onto my jaw. Her teeth grazed me.
I tugged at her nightie, a silk, sleeveless top with a narrow row of pearl buttons that dotted all the way up her tummy to the dip of her collarbone, encasing her. “What the heck is this thing?” I murmured in her ear, struggling with my one-handed effort to strip her. “This will take all morning.”
“You’re not up for it?”
“Oh, I’m up for it.” I adjusted Ava beneath me, pinning her hips to the mattress with my knees, and looked down at her glowing skin and smooth hair. Waves of dark tendrils splayed out across the white pillowcases. As each button was undone, I kissed her. My lips followed her neckline down to the tops of her breasts. Undressing her is grand exploration, a pursuit that never fails to excite me. Ava’s body entices me. The sway of her hips is a mouth-watering seduction. Each press of my lips, each biting kiss, the nips and sucks against her skin ignite a flame and her body temperature rises from warm and then to hot and then to fire.
A quarter of the way down the buttons, my mouth on her chest, she moaned. The sound of her pleasure shredded my composure and my need for her went wild. I wrapped my fists around the delicate, silk fabric and ripped her shirt open. Dozens of pearly, beady buttons popped with a snap of the thread and rolled along the bed around her.
“Sweet Jesus.” Always astounded, I murmured a prayer, a litany.
Ava is a goddess and I had her naked and I marveled at her. I ogled her. Ava blushed all over and I reveled in the knowledge that I am the only man in the world who will ever see her loveliness and splendor. She is mine. The rose gold glow of her breasts belongs to me and the color of sweet coral on her inner thighs will always be mine, only mine. Her scarlet bottom is mine. Every curve of her skin flushed its own healthy shade of pretty pink, cherry, ruby, garnet, and fuchsia. It was our secret – a map of color meant for my eyes only and forever. I would kill for her. I would die for her.
“I want you.” I choked in a throaty, needy husk. “Please.”
Her smile was still shy after nearly one year and I kissed Ava’s mouth and we melted together in a slow, carnal rhythm. More kissing and heavy breathing, my name on her lips, her teeth on my mouth, nails on my back, moans and melting eyes, Ava is always my undoing.
“I love you.” We always say I love you.
“Love you.” I nuzzled her neck, pressing one last morning kiss to the dip of her shoulder.
After everything, warm, nude bodies pushed together in passion, sweat, groans, and lust, Ava gripped the sheet around her chest and wrapped it around her, covering her exposed skin from my sight and pushed off the bed. The sheet slowly pulled away from in-between the blankets and the mattress and trailed after her as a long train trails a wedding gown. Round buttons danced along the bed to the edge where they bounced off the rug and then scattered to the hard floor and rolled under furniture and to the corners of the bedroom. White linen covered her scarlet bottom, the small of her crimson back and her rose-gold chest as she firmly shut the bathroom door behind her.
Ava is modest and it is such a turn on. I strip her down, ogle her, make love to her, and kiss her everywhere, yet she denies me her naked walk to the bathroom.
Undressing her is exciting. I’m like a kid on Christmas morning. I never tire of her bare body. Her wild side is fun, it’s unexpected and thrilling. I love her noises, her moves and those freaking teeth on my flesh. Her commands to my body are so hot that I can just barely keep hold of my self-control. She gives herself to me, only me, and there is nothing hotter in the world than to know that she is my girl and I am the only man who will ever have her. Her modesty is seductive and she keeps sex exciting by not always allowing me in. She denies me her private moments and her inner-most thoughts. She keeps her secrets, no matter how trivial they may be, and I understand that even though I myself have no reserve. I like to sleep naked and my nakedness, somehow embarrasses her. I pee with the door open and she hates it. She catches me, slams the bathroom door and stomps away. “You’ve seen it before,” I always yell to her and she hollers back, “that’s not the point!” and she is right.
Once, carelessly, because she is, after all, my wife, I barged in on her in the bathroom and she blew up at me as if I were some sort of pervert trying to catch a peek. I only wanted to let her know her Cubs had scored – I thought she would be happy. I could only smile at her blush. I even giggled when I walked away and forgot to shut the door behind me. No one will ever penetrate Ava’s mind the way that I have and yet I still am plagued with questions. Intimacy with her is like nothing else in the world; it is a drug, shared on her terms only, and I am dangerously addicted.
I lay there in bed, cold now without her, and frowned at the closed door. “Join us.”” The man’s words echoed in my mind. The fear I had felt in my nightmare, far from forgotten, was nearby; I could still taste the liquid metal adrenaline. I could feel the heavy salt in the air. I knew this scene as intimately as I knew my own thoughts, but the man himself remained unrecognizable. This time Julia had been there too. I didn't see her but I could feel her, sense her somehow. She had been in this dream before.
Incessant meowing carried up through the open bedroom window. “Welp, we have a cat,” I mumbled and pushed myself from the bed.
It was the morning of the fashion show and I had to be on site until the late afternoon. I ventured to the closet, pulled on jeans and an oxford shirt and then slipped from the bedroom, into the hall and down the steps to the kitchen.
“Mew.” Tiny paw and nose smudges covered the lower half of our glass door. Max’s stray fluffy kitty looked up at me with golden yellow eyes, then stretched its way up the glass to leave more paw prints behind.
“Forget about it. Go away.” I poured myself a cup of coffee and walked away from the door.
“Mew.”
“Aahhhh!” I hollered as quietly as I could manage.
“Mew.”
“Fine. You stupid, ugly, fluffy, piece of…” I grumbled into the refrigerator door and removed a few more slices of fresh deli meat from the package, blocked the bottom half of the doorway and tossed the food way out on to the deck. The kitten flew after its breakfast.
At the kitchen counter, I watched it play with its food and then scarf it all down. Finished with the meat, the cat began to lap up water from the pool.
“No, no, no…No pool water.” I grumbled again, filling a dish with fresh, cool, filtered water. I grabbed a second dish, added one more slice of turkey and left both offerings by the outside back stairwell. “Stupid cat.”
“Hey,
you.”
My heart shot up into my throat at the startling, disembodied sound of Julia’s voice.
“You’re up early on a Saturday.” She climbed up the stairway from the misty beach. The early morning foggy moonlight marked her path.
“I have to work today. What’s your excuse?”
She shook her head slowly side to side and shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Mmm hmm.”
Julia came up to me under the glow of the porch light and gave me a disbelieving shake of her head.
“What? What’d I do?”
“It looks like you’ve already had an eventful morning.” The pad of Julia’s thumb wiped at a smudge of dry blood on the corner of my lip. Ava had re-opened my scar with her sharp, white teeth. I licked at the skin and could taste her there, a mix of midnight and warm rain. “Where’s Ava?”
After a quick glance down at my watch, I pointed up at the open bedroom window, “Probably back in bed.”
“You ok?”
“Mmm hmm.”
“No you’re not. Come on … you know you tell me everything. What’s bothering you, Ari?”
“Julia, I do not even come close to telling you everything.”
“Okay, fine, you used to tell me everything. I know something is bothering you. I can see it in your eyes. Spill it, Alexander.” She found a place on the lounge next to the table and curled her bare, sandy feet under her goose-pimpled legs.
“Why are you in my nightmares, Julia?”
“For the same reason that you’re in mine.” She fiddled with Max’s flipped open coloring book and crayon and refused to look back up at me. “Ari, remember when the two of us used to talk all the time? Like all night long? About anything and everything?”
“Of course I do.”
“Do you do that with Ava?”
“Sure. All the time.”
“Those talks, that’s what made me fall in love with you. Do you remember the very last night we spent together?”
“Jules, that was years ago. Come on, we can’t talk about that stuff anymore. We're with other people now. It’s not right.”
“Remember, though? We stayed up all night in my room and we talked about everything.”
“Jules, I think you should stop … It’s time for you to go now.”
“Remember, Ari? And…” her cheeks turned a rare hint of pink that came nowhere close to being as pretty as Ava’s pink. “... and we made love and you told me that story about Persephone.”
“Yes.” I suppressed a chill. “What is this about?”
“It’s nothing … I just remember it, that’s all. Your parents came home a day early and they caught us together and then your sister found out and told Rory and you broke up with me. You said it would never work out for us anyway because you already belonged to someone else.”
“I know what I said.”
“Was it true?”
“I belong to Ava.”
“You didn’t know Ava then.”
“There is no Persephone.”
Her gazed burned into me.
“I belong to Ava. I love only Ava. This crap isn’t about me. Tell me what is going on with you, Julia. Tell me now.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry.” She continued to mark the colored pages of Max’s book. “I have a friend that needs me right now and tending to him is getting me in a bit of trouble at home. Rory knows I am lying and I’m breaking his heart.”
“What are you lying about to him?”
She shook her head from side to side and a strand of hair fell down to her eyes. I looped the strand around my finger and tucked it neatly back behind her ear where it belonged. Julia’s lips lifted at the corners and she eased her head into my touch.
“You need to stop whatever it is you're doing -- just stop, Jules. Whoever it is you're helping cannot possibly be worth the damage you're doing to your relationship with Rory.” Even as I said the words, my inner self reminded me that love is a kind of silly thing. Rarely rational, often coming at the wrong time and often directed at the wrong person -- but a feeling so undeniable and so powerful that bending to the other’s needs and giving yourself to that person is the only option.
“You love this person?”
“Yes.”
“More than you love Rory?”
“Sometimes, yes … it’s a different kind of love.”
“Does Rory know you love someone else?”
“In his heart, I think he knows.” She set down the crayon and tore out the corner of the scribbled-on coloring book page.
“Listen to me, Jules. Rory will do anything for you. He’s the best guy I know… he loves you more than anyone else can love you.”
Her lip quivered and she gasped with the onslaught of emotion.
“You can’t do this to him,” I went on, blithely ignoring her obvious struggle. “You can’t do this to yourself. Look at yourself! You're always crying. You’re so upset. You're sad all the time. Nobody can be worth these tears and your pain. Rory has never made you cry, and this person -- whoever he may be -- he makes you cry, Julie. How come every time I see you, you cry?”
“Ari!” She sobbed and threw her arms around me.
I froze and she held me tighter until I hugged her back, squeezing her to my chest and folding her body into mine. I held her closer than I had in years and she felt just as she used to in my arms - tiny and warm. She smelled the same -- orange blossoms and water lilies. Her fingers clutched the fabric on the back of my shirt and she buried her face into the nook of my arm and cried.
“Shh… I’m here.” I whispered soothing words in her ear. “I am here for you. I am always here for you.”
“What am I going to do?” Her words were muffled by my tear-soaked shirt.
“Just stop. Stop what you're doing. It’s not worth it. Whoever he is, he isn't worth this anguish.”
“You don’t understand.” Her body stopped its tremble, her fingers loosened their grip, she shoved a hand into one of my back pockets and then pulled back from my arms.
“I’m sorry, Ari,” She looked up into my eyes, “but it is worth it. It's worth everything to me. I would risk everything for it.”
“Julie…”
“I have to go. Love ya.” She patted her dewy cheeks with her palms and slipped out of my arms and off the deck without a glance back.
I took a crumbled piece of paper from my back pocket and read her note scribbled in Max’s red crayon. “Xo.”
“Julia!” I screamed down the beach. “Julia!”
She was gone.