Come To Me (Owned Book 3)

by Gebhard, Mary Catherine

  She laughed when I lifted her up and spun her around. We’d never had laughter in our bedroom. Screams and pleading and scratching, sure, but never laughter. I smiled as I set her down on the bed.

  I gently grabbed her ankle and placed light kisses from the inside up to the curve of her knee. She arched her back and fisted the sheets. I slowly climbed up the bed until I was on top of her, placing all of my weight on my arms.

  “How are you doing?” I asked. Her cheeks were flushed red.

  “I love you, Vic,” she said.

  I smiled, loving the way that sounded. “I love you too, Lenny.”

  Now we lay in bed, holding each other. With my hand across her rounded belly, I stared out the open window at the ocean. It was…nice. It was warm. It was decidedly intimate. It was something we rarely did, but it was something I hoped we would continue to do.

  “This is a beautiful ring,” Lenny said. “How much did it cost?”

  “You really want to know?” I smiled as she tensed at my answer.

  “I don’t know…” Lenny spun her wrist so the ring caught fragments of light. “If it was more than few hundred I don’t think so.”

  I thought back to New York. “A bit more.”

  “Maybe you can sugarcoat it.”

  “It involves a secret message and the mafia.”

  She shot up in bed, hair falling down her back. I waited, wondering if she was going to get mad. When she turned around her eyes were framed with wonder—and maybe a little indignation.

  “Why couldn’t you just buy a ring like a normal person?”

  I grinned. “That never crossed my mind.”

  She laughed. “I trust you.” Gently, she leaned back into me. I watched Lenny play with the ring on her finger, looking at all the different ways it could catch light. In that moment I was never more sure I’d made the right decision. Even if it had meant going into league with the Pavonis for a time, with each shadow or glimpse of light it caught, I saw Lenny.

  “You know what?” Lenny asked, burrowing deeper into the nook between my arm and pectoral.

  “What?”

  “We never did what the doc told us to do.”

  “What?” My mind went through everything that Dr. Roth had been telling us to do… We’d been taking folic acid. We’d signed Lenny up for a prenatal yoga class. What had I missed?

  “We never had dinner together…just us.” When she said those words, it clicked. My mind rewound the past months, to the beginning, to our couple’s counselor.

  “Without the past as an uninvited guest,” I said.

  “Without my illness barging in and demanding dessert,” Lenny continued.

  We never just had dinner.

  Peering at Lenny over my menu I asked, “Want french fries?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “What?”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s the healthiest thing to eat.”

  “My god, is Lennox Moore refusing french fries? I think hell has frozen over.”

  Lenny scrunched up her face. “Shut up, I’m trying to eat healthy. The doctor gave me a list of things I can’t eat.”

  “Are fries on there?” I knew the answer already, because I’d memorized the list as well: soft cheeses, certain meats, eggs, fish, caffeine, and, of course, alcohol. When she didn’t respond, I pressed. “Lenny, you’ve got a shit ton of things you really can’t eat, so eat a few fries.”

  “All right then. I’ll get french fries, but a salad to even it out.”

  When the waitress came I ordered french fries and two salads.

  “You’re not getting steak? My god, I think hell has frozen over,” she mocked.

  I grinned. “Whatever you’re not eating, I’m not eating.”

  “Oh well…” She trailed off. “That’s actually pretty sweet.”

  “I’m known for my sweetness.”

  “Ha, okay, well you can think that.” A breeze came, blowing away our napkins. Lenny stood and bent over to grab hers. At the same time, another gust of wind came and blew up her skirt. I got a nice, very brief view of her pink slit. I shifted, once again graced with a massive hard on in public.

  I didn’t even have a fucking napkin to hide it, either.

  Lenny sat back down, napkin in her lap. She smiled at me, taking a sip of her water. A second later her smile fell.

  “What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I have to pee.” She pushed away from the table. At my expression she added, “What? I’m pregnant.” I watched her walk away, then threw my napkin on the table and followed after. On the way I requested a bowl of bread. I waited for her outside the bathroom, leaning against the opposite wall, arms folded.

  “Oh, fuck!” She jumped back. “You scared me.”

  I kicked off the wall. “I know you’re not wearing anything under that skirt.”

  “Why do you—oh.” Lenny shook her head and tried to brush past me. “No way, I’m not doing this here.” Gently, I caught her by the elbow.

  “Are you wet?” Lenny shivered at the question I whispered in her ear. Her brow was determined, yet she licked her lips and her chest rose and fell. I’d won. Still, she asked,

  “Can we have one restaurant? Just one where I can show my face?” She was, of course, alluding to the restaurant where we’d gone on our first date. And maybe a few others we’d ruined along the years as well.

  “Come here.” I tugged her out and around back. The spot was halfway secluded, no patrons would find us. Only the ocean could see, and perhaps a busboy on a break.

  “What are you doing?” Lenny asked, though she didn’t stop my next move. I grabbed her by the waist and set her atop my leg.

  “I’m feeling you, Lenny.” I took her ear between my teeth and shifted my thigh slightly. Seeing her pussy at the table had made me crave it. I needed it on me somehow. So I put her on my leg. The hot, wet thing was resting on my thigh, lips spread around me, juices soaking into my jeans.

  I hadn’t planned to do anything when I brought Lenny behind the restaurant—anything more than what I’d done already—but Lenny and me were like gunpowder and fire. If you kept that stuff around each other, eventually something was going to explode.

  “I want you Vic,” Lenny moaned, and started riding against me. “So badly I’d let you take me anywhere, anytime.” I threw my head back at her words. If Lenny thought she wanted me badly, then I was a slave to her. I would get on my knees in the middle of a church if she asked me to fuck her.

  I slid my finger between her folds, so that she was also riding my digit. Her eyes popped.

  “Vic!” Lenny moaned. If there was a better feeling in the world than having Lenny’s cunt dueling with my finger and thigh, I hadn’t found it. Maybe wrapped around my cock. Possibly a three way tie with my tongue.

  “Shh…” I hushed her, but damn if I didn’t grin.

  “Oh god…” Her eyes rolled back and she lolled her head.

  “Babe, you gotta be quiet.” I punctuated how serious I was by thrusting the finger inside her. She bore down against my thigh, fucking me hard.

  “I… You…Jerk.” Lenny bit her lip and I leaned forward, catching it with a kiss. She sighed into my mouth. When I made a come hither motion with my finger, her sighs turned into moans. As she moved faster against my thigh, her moans transformed into wails. Hot breaths against my lips as she unraveled against my mouth. Still, she was too loud.

  “Should I stop?” I started to slide my finger out.

  “Don’t you dare.” She bit my lip, tugging it out with her teeth.

  I thrust my finger back inside her and at the same time growled, “Fucking ride me, Lenny. Come all over me.” She upped her pace. I gripped her lower back, pulling her closer.

  “Oh,” Lenny squeaked. “Oh!” It was a high pitched, surprised noise that she occasionally made. The sound always drove me fucking mad with lust. It was as if she couldn’t believe her orgasm was about to hit her.

  “Are you going to come?” I w
hispered in her ear. She nodded frantically. I wiped the hair from her forehead and said, “You’re so beautiful when you come.” Lenny bit my shoulder and, by the way she dug into me, I had to imagine she would’ve been wailing. I could tell when she finished by the way her body loosened. Oh, and by the way she eventually stopped tearing into my shoulder. I kept holding her waist, but slowly slid my finger out. She shivered and clasped my shoulder.

  “Round two?” I joked.

  “Don’t even,” Lenny laughed against my pectoral. “You know I would.” My entire hand was wet with her cunt, having dripped down from my finger.

  “God you’re fucking delicious,” I said as I licked myself clean. When I’d had my fill of her, I lifted Lenny off my leg and put her back down. She swayed. “Careful,” I said against her lips. I held her up, putting her skirt back down in the process. My hand may have brushed her round ass.

  It took a few seconds, a few blinks, and a few well placed kisses until she was back on Earth.

  “Are you okay?” She looked at the spot on my shirt where her teeth marks were punctuated by dark saliva. I shrugged at the question, instead asking my own.

  “Are you okay? Is the baby? Was that too rough?”

  She leaned into my chest, smiling. “It was perfect.”

  We walked back to our table but dinner still hadn’t arrived. The bread basket I’d requested was there, though. Something about Lenny only eating salad and fries hadn’t sat right with me.

  “Do you think it will ever go away?” Lenny asked.

  “We can ask the waitress to take the bowl away. I wasn’t sure a salad would be enough.”

  Lenny waved me off. “No this need between us. I mean, even now I’m crossing my legs and we just fucked minutes ago.”

  “Maybe.” I grinned, thinking about her throbbing beneath the table. It was no secret I was always ready to go when Lenny was around. Still, the gravity of her question pressed. I reached across the table and clasped her hand. “If it does, you’ll still be here. My perfect, off-kilter, brilliant Lenny.”

  Lenny cocked her head, a wry smile on her lips. “You’re kind of sweet.”

  “That’s what they tell me.” I released her hand.

  When dinner came we continued like that, talking about nothing and yet everything. There wasn’t the weight of the world on our shoulders. There wasn’t a hidden meaning behind everything we said. We didn’t sip our drinks, staring off into the distance because our minds were elsewhere.

  That night we looked at each other. That night we were present.

  “What are you smiling about?” Lenny asked. I hadn’t even realized I was, but the answer came without hesitation: “You.” Lenny smiled at my answer and went back to her salad. I watched her poke around the lettuce, only eating the tomatoes, chicken, and cucumbers. Her displeasure was obvious, but she ate it anyway, for the baby.

  “What are you thinking about now?” she asked when she caught me spying her.

  “The future.” Because for the first time in forever, I could actually see one.

  Whose stupid fucking idea was it to write our own vows?

  Oh right, mine.

  Fuck.

  I paced back and forth in the little bed and breakfast room, looking over my vows, and feeling like a complete goddamn idiot. Just as the urge to rip up months of work came over me, someone knocked on the door.

  “What?” I yelled.

  “It’s Zoe.” If Lenny and I had done the best man thing, Zoe would have been mine. Then again, if we were doing that sort of thing, Lenny might have made her her maid of honor. The door creaked open and Zoe pushed her head in.

  “Hey there, beautiful.”

  “Really, Vic, I’m taken. And a lesbian. It’s time for you to move on.” I rolled my eyes at Zoe and reached a finger out to Ophelia, who immediately grasped it with her tiny hand. She reached over her entire body, nearly tumbling out of Zoe’s arms, but I caught her.

  Lenny and I’d been grasping at perfection our entire lives, and there it finally was. I wouldn’t even begin to say I did something right, because it wasn’t me. It was all Ophelia Mei. After over twenty hours in labor, Ophelia Mei tore into the world. Now, nearly eleven months later with a full head of dark, silky hair and wide, Atlantic blue eyes, she was still the same stubborn girl as she’d been then.

  I said she got it from her mother.

  But then, Lenny said she got it from me.

  Neither of us had budged on that.

  Ophelia Mei—or Mei as Lenny called her—sat quietly in my arms (a rarity). I could stare at her forever, but Zoe had come for a reason. I looked away from Ophelia’s wide smile and to Zoe’s pursed lips.

  “She has cold feet.”

  I wasn’t sure why they called them bridal and groom suites when Lenny’s room was nearly identical to my own. The only difference was a large, antique looking vanity. Oh, and Lenny—Lenny pacing the worn, wooden floors.

  “I hear you have cold feet.”

  “Cold feet?” Lenny scoffed. “More like frozen feet.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked as Lenny passed me on her thirtieth lap.

  “What’s wrong?” she exclaimed. “It’s everything. It’s the fact that I don’t think you should tie yourself to a woman like me. It’s that some days I forget who I am and what I’m feeling. It’s that Mei is almost one and it’s getting to the point where if I leave, she’ll remember. I think she would be better off without me.”

  “Listen Lenny—” I attempted.

  “No listen to me!” She turned, finger raised.

  “Okay.” I raised my hands, stepping back.

  “Oh.” She paused, finger frozen mid-wag. “I wasn’t prepared for you to just listen like that.”

  “Do you have something to say?” I asked.

  “No…maybe. I don’t know.” She shook her head, red hair falling in tendrils. It looked like she’d had it done up fancy, but it was better messy. Realer. “Okay, listen to me Vic.”

  I chuckled. “I am listening.”

  Running up to me, she grabbed me by the lapels. “No really listen to me. I’m a mess. I’m no good. I’m the worst. It goes Hitler, Stalin, then me.” She counted the names off on her fingers.

  I nodded, as if really accepting what she said. “I think you have that list a bit out of order. Doesn’t it go Hitler, you, Stalin?” I counted the names back to her.

  She punched me in the chest, laughing despite her cries. “You’re not listening…” Lenny relaxed her head into my chest, fingers still gripping my lapels. Slowly I peeled her hands from my jacket and put them into my own. Her sobs disintegrated into broken sighs and I held her until an uneven calm washed over us. When she started to speak she kept her face pressed into my chest, mumbling into my jacket so quietly I almost didn’t hear her.

  “I don’t feel like I have a right to your feelings when I don’t even know mine.”

  “On the days you forget your feelings.” I gently tugged at her shoulders, pushing her off my chest to command her eyes. “I will love enough for the both of us.” Her eyebrows relaxed and her lip softened. It was so easy to get lost, looking into her face. Lenny never just looked at you; she devoured you. She consumed you. Her eyes were equal parts beauty and crystal ball. I bent down, pulling her into a kiss.

  “Ophelia deserves more than me,” she sighed as we broke apart.

  “You are a wonderful mother to Ophelia Mei.” I tilted her chin so she had to look into my eyes. “Who got up every two hours to tilt her head and make sure her skull formed properly?”

  Lenny shrugged out of my grasp and walked away. “That doesn’t make me a good mother.”

  “Who enrolled Mei in dual immersion so she could learn Japanese?” I demanded of her retreating figure.

  “It helps promote early development.” She waved dismissively over her shoulder. “Still doesn’t make me a good mother.” That was absolute bullshit. The day Lenny had learned my real name, a fire started to brew inside her. She had many
questions, but she kept them to herself. I knew she thought I’d been robbed of something—my culture, maybe, my childhood, definitely. When Mei was born, she slowly started introducing more Japanese elements into our life, as if I wouldn’t notice that we suddenly spoke Japanese in the house.

  Or maybe she knew I would, and that was the point.

  “Where is Mei right now?”

  “With Lissie and Zoe.”

  “When was the last time she ate?”

  Lenny huffed a sigh. “What are you trying to do?”

  “Is Mei starving?” I pressed.

  “Of course not!” Lenny snapped her head over her shoulder. “She had formula two hours ago and a snack an hour ago.”

  “What was she doing between then?”

  “Playing…” Lenny paused, smiling. “You know, she’s like crazy into blocks and stuff. She can’t build for shit obviously, but she loves to knock them over.” I did know.

  “What makes a good mother?”

  Lenny’s smile dropped. “I know what you’re doing.”

  “Tell me what you think makes a good mother.”

  “I don’t know, but not me!” Lenny threw up her arms and fell into a chair. With her eyes in a glare, she challenged me to defy the statement. I knew nothing I could say would meet the challenge though; she was convinced.

  “All right, then.” I shrugged. “Let’s give her up.”

  “What.” It wasn’t a question; the word came out gritted to match her now furious eyes. Gripping the shoulders of the chair, Lenny sat forward.

  “Come on, let’s go give her away.” I gestured behind me at the door. “Maybe a nice Kiwi family will adopt her.” The fury in her dissipated like smoke sucked up through an air vent. She released the chair, slinking back.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Lenny grumbled.

  “Did it work?”

  “Yeah.” She looked away, defeated. I wished I could have said Lenny suddenly smiled up at me, ran into my arms, and declared herself over it, but that wasn’t reality. All I’d done was remind her that her love for Mei overwhelmed her self-hate. I’d probably have to do that a lot over the years.