The Tempest

by Brit Constantine

  But I am not OK. And the very heavy lead weight that sits in my gut grows bigger and bigger.

  I lied to him.

  Why did I lie to him? Lenic is sweet, honest, and loyal, the kind of man I wasn’t aware I longed to meet or fall in love with.

  Is this my future? Am I destined to celebrate birthdays, Christmas, and other holidays without West? Without Lenic? Without someone I love?

  I am torn between loyalties. Torn between the bond I have with my brother and the man I have fallen in love with. I suddenly feel sick to my stomach. In my heart, I know. I just know. And the realisation brings a painful truth. That one day I will have to make a choice and it will be the death of me.

  But I can’t. I can’t choose one or the other. There is only one way this can be resolved, I realise. There is only one way I get to keep them both.

  But I fear, I am asking for the impossible.

  25

  “I’M GONNA DRILL MY BIG TOOL INTO YOU.”

  LENIC

  “IT’S HUGE, LENIC.” I let him into my house, and watch him lift the aged metal box and place it on the desk in front of me. “Your tool belt.”

  “That sounded like an opening line to a bad porn movie.”

  “I thought you didn't watch porn.” I walk up to him slowly. “But who needs porn when you're around. This…” I tug on his belt buckle. “…is a walking porn movie waiting to happen.”

  His laughter is hearty and fills the room. “You gonna let me rebuild you a new banister?” He leans down to kiss me, his soft lips brushing mine briefly.

  “I promised, didn’t I? Just as long as you fix my leaky pipe later. And I don’t mean the one in the kitchen.”

  I slide my hand up underneath the hem of his grey T-shirt and run my fingertips over his hard stomach. I can’t help myself. Lenic had been away for two weeks in London recently, and after being apart for so long, we’ve engaged in an intoxicating week of non-stop touch. Yes, screwing around in every way imaginable, but also in tenderness. Hands held, arms wrapped around torsos, lips kissing lips and fingertips.

  We ordered Thai and Chinese, and Lenic made us dinner with me wrapped around him in his kitchen, kissing his neck and shoulders and back. We ate in his bed, with me lying back on him, resting between his legs and laughing.

  I rest my cheek against his chest for a moment, and feel the reverberation of his happiness echo through my own body, like a ripple across a pond, and my heart beats back a harmony of my own contentment.

  It is too good to be true. All of this. Us. It’s all too good.

  I glide my hands down into his boxer briefs. "You keep that up, Hazelnut," he says, pitching his voice low and leaning in so that his peppermint breath blows cool across my cheek, "and I'll be bending you over that banister and making damn sure your neighbours feel every single bang.”

  I shiver as he brushes a strand of hair back from my neck and dips his head down to place a tormenting soft kiss on the nape of my neck. I close my eyes and let out a ragged breath, at which he chuckles, his hand cupping my chin as his laughing eyes gaze affectionately down into mine. "I'll be working on that banister and when I take a break … I’m gonna drill my big tool into you.”

  I let him get on with his work while I edit my latest video, every so often stealing a glance. There is something about that man using a hammer and a drill that turns me on.

  Half an hour later, I walk over to him and lean up against the wall. “I’m guessing you’ve always been into construction since you were a kid. Playing with plastic hammers and the like.”

  He stops hammering for a second to look at me. “Pretty much.”

  “Tell me a story about you as a child.”

  He pauses to think. “Back at this summer camp thing my parents sent me on once, I was caught sleepwalking into the girls’ dormitory.”

  “Sleepwalking?” I say doubtfully. “Yeah, sure, Lenic … I believe you weren’t peeping at all the girls sleeping in their nighties…”

  He raises his eyebrow. “I was ten years old.” He goes back to hammering.

  I laugh. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” He puts the hammer down and starts kicking through the wooden beam. “One of the teachers found me, turned me around, guided me back to where I belonged. Don’t think she thought I was asleep either.” I laugh again as he throws me a wicked smile. “The next morning it was all over camp and I was marked as the bad boy, the one all the girls should watch out for.”

  I pretend to be one of the gossips back at his camp. “Did you hear about Lenic Reevus sneaking into the girls’ dorms for a peek?” I wiggle my eyebrow.

  “That’s where my reputation got started.” I am unable to stop myself from smiling back at that playful, sexy little grin of his. “Been living it down ever since.”

  I sashay over to him and fist both of my hands into his shirt. “Is that right?”

  He wraps his arms around my waist, drawing me in. “They got me all wrong.”

  “Really?”

  “Take last night. Was I out on the town seducing a woman? Did I lure her back to my bed?” He circles my hair around his finger. “No. I was sweating it up with Cross at the gym.”

  He kisses me before I can make any insinuation on his motives for being sweaty with another man. I forget everything after the kiss.

  Two hours later, he stops drilling and says, “Stop staring at my arse.”

  “You’re my boyfriend. I’ve earned all rights to do with your body as I desire.” He shakes his head, continuing to drill away. I watch him, drilling, and damn if it doesn’t turn me on and get me wet.

  The banister can wait.

  I grab his arm and lead him up the stairs. “Come with me. I’ve got something else that needs drilling.”

  “WHAT IS YOUR best feature?”

  After Lenic finished rebuilding my banister, and fixed the leaky pipe in the kitchen, we ordered in food from the local steak house, and then had sex up against the new banister. He wanted to test its stability, apparently. No complaints, on both accounts. Now I’m lying on top of Lenic on the sofa, holding my magazine in my hand. We are doing a ‘What Supermodel Are You?’ quiz.

  “A) Your legs. B) Your eyes. Or C) Your height.”

  “D. For…” His voice is low, insinuating something else on his body beginning with D.

  “I agree, but sorry, you have to answer either a, b, or c, otherwise it doesn’t work properly.”

  “OK, sorry.” He lifts his hands up in supplication. “C.”

  “OK.” With my pencil, I circle his answer.

  “Can I take this gloopy stuff off my face, now?” Somehow, I persuaded the manly Tempest to try out a facial mask.

  “No.”

  “I look ridiculous.”

  “Yes you do, but my followers think it’s cute.”

  He shoots me a look. “You didn’t?”

  A slow smile tugs at my features. “The mask is covering your face. No one will know it’s you.” Before he has time to blow his fuse, I add, “Trust me, everyone will compliment you. You’ll be voted the fighter with the best complexion.”

  “Great. I can finally retire.”

  “You’ll be begging me to give you a facial regularly. Just you wait.”

  “When you’re as good-looking as me, you don’t need to do things like this.”

  I look at him, brow raised. “Oh my god. I didn’t realise how vain you could be.” He starts to chuckle, kissing me lightly on top of my head. “Well, now we know you’ve got the qualities of being a supermodel.” I turn my attention back to the quiz. “OK, question number two.” I let out a small chortle. “Other than modelling, your dream job is to: A) Launch a fragrance. B) Launch a handbag line—”

  “You really read this crap?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry — how’s getting to know your penis working out for you?”

  He grunts. “Bloke magazine is serious about fitness.”

  “Hey. If you want to know which supermodel you are, you ne
ed to take this seriously and answer all of the questions.”

  He starts to tickle my sides and I smack him playfully when his phone rings. He picks it up and raises it to his ear. “Yeah … I’m with my girlfriend … I know which face I wanna be looking at all night ... Delphine’s on the date I set up for her with Blake … Yeah, you heard right, I set that date up personally … Wanted to put a smile on his poor face, what with his little brother and all...” He starts to grin. “No, mate, I’m not gonna tell you where they are … Because you’ll try and sabotage it, that’s why…”

  “She’s not on a date with Blake,” I whisper. Lenic puts a finger to his mouth to keep me quiet.

  “I’m going now, you ugly mug,” he grunts, then hangs up. “Cross.”

  “I figured as much. But Delphine’s not on a date, Lenic. She’s gone to the cinema with Brooke.”

  “I know. But it’s fun to piss him off.”

  I love seeing him joke around with his friends. I know it’s been a long time for him. “You’re so bad. I love it.” I toss the magazine onto the table. “What did he want?”

  “Wanted me to head down to the White Lily. The lads are having a pool tournament.”

  “You don’t want to go?” He pulls me tighter against him, sliding his hand up my skirt. I feel his cock swell against the small of my back as he spreads my legs wide … and lets me see why he is the man I want and need.

  “Got a better offer, beautiful.”

  26

  “I AM LIVING … WITH YOU.”

  LENIC

  “YOU LIED,” LENIC says. His voice is quiet, but loud and heavy with things unsaid.

  How he knows I am awake or how long he has known, I can't guess. Waking up in the middle of the night at his place, I found him silhouetted against the window, leaning against the wall, staring out at the night sky. For a while now I’ve been watching him in silence.

  I give up the pretence of sleep and push the sheet aside, swinging my feet over the side of the bed. Lenic glances over at me, briefly, and then returns his gaze back to the window. Rain drips down the windowpane, leaving rivers of silver behind. His arms are crossed, his expression carefully blank. I want to go to him, put my arms around him, but his words stop me, and I stay where I am.

  “You’re not OK. West not turning up to your birthday upset you more than you let on.” He turns to face me. “Didn’t it?” My gaze points downwards, unable to look him in the eye. His simple, straightforward, and evidently raw question steals my voice. I stare at him, unsure what, if anything, to say to that. “It was because of me he didn’t come … I never wanted to hurt you ... I did.” He scrubs his hands over his face. “I never wanted this for us.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To go back to the way things were.”

  Sometimes he is easy to read, like when he smiles, or when he looks at me when I wake up in his arms. Now though, as he stares out over the black inky darkness, I have no idea what he is thinking, except that it isn’t about me, or not specifically.

  “With your sister?” I barely catch the faint nod of his head in the dark of the night. “You can’t. You can’t turn back the clock.” Getting out of bed, I go over to him and lace my fingers with his. “She’s gone, Lenic. I am so sorry.”

  I feel his whole arm tremble and when I squeeze his hand to tell him I’m here for him, that I am not going anywhere, he squeezes back to let me know he understands.

  The room goes quiet. We both stare out of the window, thinking our thoughts, the stars in the distance seeming to flicker.

  “It should have been better than this,” he says, breaking the silence.

  I look at him. “We need to talk about things.”

  He lowers his eyes. “Yeah…”

  “Lenic,” I say hesitantly. “It’s up to you what you do. It’s your life. I’m not trying to get you to do anything you don’t want to do.” I sigh, wishing I could just say what I mean instead of talking around things all the time. He glances up at the stars again. “I can’t do this on my own. You have to help me to help you. What happened to your sister—”

  “It is what it is.”

  “No. It’s what you make of it.”

  He gives me a long look. “What do you want from me?”

  “Just … tell me things. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I don’t know how you feel about what happened. I don’t know where you are.”

  “Neither do I.” He sniffs. “I’ve never had to think about this before. I’ve never talked to anyone about it. Not even my parents. They’ve tried … but I always shut them down.”

  I look at him for a beat, his eyes dimmed with sadness, and then I reach out and brush his cheek with my fingers. I suddenly realise he is hurting too much, and all I am doing is prolonging the pain.

  It is time to ask for the impossible.

  “I need to ask something of you.” I hold his gaze, my heart pounding in my chest. “Forgive West for what he did.”

  He glowers at me, and I feel his hand loosen in my grip. “That’s never gonna happen,” he breathes through tight lips.

  I am walking on eggshells. “You’re living a half life. It’s no way to live.” Letting go of my grasp, he shakes his head, then takes a deep breath and straightens his back. “I don’t want you to bury yourself into a hole you can never climb out from.”

  The truth is, in this moment, my feelings mean nothing. They are irrelevant. This is nothing to do with me. I am just a bystander. A spectator. Someone who just happened to be here when it all came out. This is all about Lenic, his life, his sister’s death, and his choice. It is up to you, I think, staring into his tired eyes. It is down to you, Lenic.

  “I don't want that for you. Not somebody like you. God, Lenic — the world needs more men like you so don't shut yourself away and let hate eat you up inside and turn you into something you’re not … You are worth so much more.”

  When he closes his eyes, I watch his chest rise and fall with a heavy burden. “It was an accident,” I continue, softening my voice. “A tragic accident. No one is to blame … West … We all make mistakes. You, West … there is always something we could have done to prevent the bad things from happening.”

  “An accident?” he spits, his eyes going cold. “Is that what he told you?”

  “He said…” I begin, releasing an uneasy breath. “The police investigation said it was an accident.”

  He laughs hollowly, rage fires in his eyes. “Did he fail to mention when Beth was fourteen — she took an overdose? That she nearly died? That she suffered from bipolar, was on medication her whole life…? Did he forget to tell you that?” His hands tighten into fists. “The day she found out he’d been cheating on her she was dead—”

  He chokes on his words, his jaw clenching back the pain. Frozen like a monument, he stares out into the dark, and the coldness in his eyes is terrifying. A minute passes by. “What am I supposed to think…? I’ll never know what really happened … It’s the not knowing that’s killing me. Killing my family.” He stares emptily at the floor. “It's my fault she's gone.”

  His face is tight. He looks terrible. Everything about him is pained. “How is it your fault, Lenic?”

  When he speaks, his voice is still frail, but not so breathless as before. “She'd be alive if I'd been here. I could have helped her through it ... How...?” He takes a ragged breath in, glances over in my direction, but he still won’t look at me. “How can I make that alright?” He finally finds the courage to look me in the eye. “It kills me that I wasn’t there for her. I was fighting in a war, not fighting for what really mattered. Not protecting my little sister … I didn’t protect her.”

  “Sometimes bad things just happen. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t on you.”

  “No. It was on him.” His eyes are spiked with hatred.

  “You and West — you are one and the same.”

  “We're nothing alike,” he hisses, his neck muscles stiff, anger written in every tensed musc
le in his body.

  I shake my head from side to side. “You're both hiding in denial and guilt, and it is stopping you from living. You've got me, but West — whatever punishment you deal him, it's got nothing on what he's doing to himself.”

  He twists his head to me, fury igniting in his eyes. It only spurs me on. “You both need to stop punishing yourselves for something you both had no control over. You need this as much as he does, otherwise this will haunt you for the rest of your lives. There was nothing you could have done.”

  I remember feeling once like I was trapped in a glass bell jar, peering out but not able to hear or feel anything outside. I would be having a great day. All was well. The very next day I would get up and this tidal wave would hit me so fast that I acted out on it.

  I consider — as horrifying as it is — that some of us have a bad day. One solitary day when all hope is vanquished. Simply a bad day, that in an instant, turns horrific. Trapped inside this glass bell jar. Yet it should be nothing to define a person’s life by.

  “Your sister loved you. No matter what, you have to hold on to the happy memories. Remember her when she was laughing and smiling — just that. Let go of everything else. Let go of the hate. Let go of your guilt.”

  “I can’t…”

  “You can’t just give in to it—”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…”

  “Because what?” he spits, turning to face me. I watch his vein pulse in his neck. “Because it makes me feel better punishing him? Because it makes me feel better to blame myself for not being there for her when she needed me the most?” His voice is icy and cruel.

  “Because I know my grandpa died with guilt for not protecting me earlier and it kills me to have put that on him.” I shake my head, my gut clenching. My aunt was clever, cunning. Even the cruelest of people can wear the face of an angel. There was nothing Grandpa Joe could have done more to help me. He did his best. No, he did more than his best. “Your sister wouldn’t have wanted this life for you. She wouldn’t have wanted you to stop living.”