What's Left Of Me (The Firebird Trilogy Book 2)

by Jennifer Loring

  “Steph.” Alex shifted onto his side, facing her. “Does this mean the cancer is gone?”

  “They got all of it, and if in five years I’m still cancer-free, they’ll consider me cured.”

  He pressed his lips to her forehead, one hand on her hip. The dark prevented him from seeing it, but he’d be able to feel the scar’s tactile horror if she buckled under her body’s demands for him. More difficult to keep him at arm’s length, but necessary. She was not yet sure anything other than pity motivated him.

  “Good night, milaya.” His breath whispered across her lips. He kissed her tenderly, testing with the tip of his tongue, seeking her approval. Goosebumps erupted on her arms and legs. There was no harm in kissing, as long as he remained flaccid.

  But he was stirring beneath the cotton against her thigh, as he plunged his tongue deeper, more insistently. He rubbed back and forth against her. She swayed in time with him, in spite of herself, imagining the silken pink head grazing her clit.

  A harsh exhale. He caressed her cheeks, her hair, and pressed against her. His wet, willing tongue engaged hers in another frolic.

  “Alex…” She squirmed out from under him, though he had galvanized her body. “Not yet. Okay?”

  “I know you’re afraid you won’t be able to breathe, but it’s been weeks. I’ll go slow, I promise. You’ll be fine—”

  “No. Please. Try to understand.”

  “I am trying, Stephanie, but the last time we had sex was during Matt’s party.”

  “I want to, I do, but—”

  “But what? You know the best way to treat ED? Having sex when I can get it up.”

  “So it’s all about you?”

  “Of course not! But I don’t understand.”

  “I just can’t right now.” She rolled over. She’d worn the least sexy outfit she owned, a baggy T-shirt and sweatpants. It hadn’t worked. It had never worked, and she should’ve been happy about it, that he desired her no matter how unattractive she looked.

  The sheets rustled. He climbed out of bed, his footsteps heavy as he crossed the room.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the guest room. Then I don’t have to wonder why you want me to sleep next to you but not to touch you. I’m your husband, Stephanie, not a fucking security blanket. I have needs too. I know you’ve been through a lot, but fuck. Try letting me in. Stop being—”

  “Like you?”

  “Cheap shot,” he muttered. “But you are doing what I did. Pushing away the person who wants to be there for you. And you know how that ended.”

  Is that a threat?

  “Good night.”

  “Alex—”

  “I said good night.”

  Anya cried out. Alex vanished from the doorway and entered the nursery, his soothing words quieting her. A diaper crinkled. Then the rocking chair creaked, and he sang in Russian in his low, rich voice. There might always be some sort of barrier between them, some part of them the other could never understand. But she’d become as foreign to herself as his words were to her, and maybe she had been the obstacle all along.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Two months. Two months of Alex waiting on her when he wasn’t preparing for training camp. He’d put everything else on hold. So few actions she performed for herself didn’t leave her panting or violate her activity restrictions. Still, he kept his distance, and she could hardly fault him for that. She’d reduced herself to the thing she had feared becoming. An obligation.

  Her shirt tumbled from her hands when the sensation of being watched slithered over her. Alex’s side of the bed had been empty when she woke; she had stupidly not closed the door, her signal for him to keep out, before her five-minute shower.

  He was standing in the doorway, silent. The guilt scored into his expression conveyed that he hadn’t intended to sneak up on her. She began to cry anyway.

  “That’s why you won’t let me see you naked? Why you’ve barely let me touch you since you’ve been home?”

  If she cried too hard, she’d need oxygen. Which made her sob.

  “Look at me. Look at my face. Scars on both sides. Look at my arm. My ankle. My cocked-up fingers and toes.”

  “You’re beautiful, Alex. You’re a fucking model.”

  “No. I’m not. I’m an ex-hockey player who does some modeling because I look good in underwear.”

  “Oh please. You know goddamned well that everyone is attracted to you. Everyone.”

  “And I don’t care. Honestly, after everything, do you think I care about a fucking scar? You’re still alive. Anya has her mother. And I have my wife. Don’t I?”

  Her chest ached. She had lost the capability for speech.

  “Maybe you should come with me to my next appointment. My therapist could help you. Us. Because I don’t know what else to do.” Alex pushed his hair back, then rubbed his jaw, his features downcast. Though he’d stopped looking at her, it brought no relief. They had been engaging in another, silent, conversation all this time, which broke her heart more than the scar could. “Anyway, I’m going for a swim before I make breakfast. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.”

  They’d finally reached it, that mythical point at which Alex admitted defeat. The point she hadn’t believed existed, because she had taken him for granted.

  When her tears had dried, she wandered down to the great room and stood at the patio doors, watching Alex’s graceful undulations as he cut through the pristine water. An acre of land afforded privacy, and it was not unusual for him to swim naked. There was no act not immediately improved by his doing it nude.

  Stephanie slipped out onto the deck with the baby monitor, while Anya rocked happily within view just inside the doors, and into an Adirondack chaise. Alex completed a few more laps and climbed out at the opposite end, muscles glistening beneath the azure sky. It reminded her of spying on him in the shower so excruciatingly long ago, and what had followed.

  He did not bother with a towel as he strolled the pool’s length to where she reclined, and without an ounce of modesty spanned the chaise so he was facing her. Her gaze floated downward. Her body hungered.

  “Are you going to talk to me now?”

  “You’re a little distracting when you’re naked.”

  He clasped her hands. “Look at me.”

  She studied the body inscribed with stories of his career, his love, his pain. He forced her chin up. Enchanting green eyes assured her he hadn’t yet lost all faith in her.

  “Please tell me what is so horrible and ugly about your scar. Because all I see is my beautiful wife. You will always be beautiful to me. And compared to your mess of a husband, that scar is nothing at all.”

  She blinked. The tears fell, one by one, unstoppable.

  “I know when you hurt so much, it’s hard to know what to do with someone who loves you just the way you are. You push people away. Been there, done that, wrote a bunch of songs about it.” He inched forward and drew a line along her jaw with his strong fingers. “‘I seem to have loved you in numberless forms,’” he said, his voice velvet, “‘numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever.’”

  “Alex,” she whispered.

  “Always you. Only you.” Alex threaded his fingers in her hair and closed his eyes. “And in loving you, I became something greater than myself.”

  His breath warmed her lips. After all this time, all they’d been through, he transformed her into the teenaged girl smitten with him at first sight.

  Alex traced his tongue over her lips. Her veins, her nerves, her cells enkindled with yearning. The reality of love, unhurried and unremitting, when all the rest had long ago burned away. Like that tenacious flame within the grotto, its source mysterious and invisible yet indisputable. Eternal.

  “I love you,” she sighed, and parted her lips.

  With delicate, subtle strokes, Alex licked the edges and underside of her tongue, sucked on it with gentle tugs. His kisses left her lightheaded and breathless
even at full lung capacity, and she yielded. His hands strayed to her waist, her back, her arms. Up her neck then re-tangling his fingers in her hair. She knew he was erect before she looked or touched. The air around them effervesced. She almost tasted the pheromones.

  His eyes were half-open, drowsy with desire. “I need to be inside you,” he whispered.

  “If I can’t catch my breath…”

  “I’ll be flattered.” His lips twitched into a smile.

  Stephanie trailed her fingertips over the angles of his body as he devoured her again. She closed her fist around him and scrubbed his hot, rigid shaft. He thrust his tongue in time with the sway of his hips, pulling back only to edge her running shorts and her panties down her legs. He ran his palms back up them, and she opened her thighs, commanded by some innate magic in those powerful, graceful hands. He fondled her, then slid a finger inside her in tender preparation. She made an inchoate sound, her slick lower lips puffed up and aching, her belly tapping out little vibrations of pleasure in the arcane language of bodies making love. The thought of his cock inside her after more than two months was itself close to shoving her over the brink.

  Alex gathered her to his chest, and she buried her face in his light pelage, his skin damp and smelling of chlorine. He pushed; she was so wet that he had buried his full length in her before her next breath. He held her there, motionless, his arms under her back and his hand on the scar, both of them savoring their union as he blossomed inside her. He gazed into her eyes, mouth agape with wordless bliss before he began pumping. He licked his lips and bit the bottom one. Beneath her hands, the muscles of his back, buttocks, and thighs coiled and surged with slow, deep lunges. He wouldn’t want to come too quickly after so long.

  What he’d want even less was what she felt happening within. The distinct tickling sensation of a deflating erection.

  He stared down as his limp cock slid out, then at her. His cheeks flamed. She closed her eyes against the heartrending expression on his face.

  “Alex, it’s—”

  He gulped a breath and shook his head, then sprang up and snatched a towel. And ran—limping, but ran—into the house.

  Stephanie wriggled into her underwear and shorts. The kitchen and great room were empty. She scooped up Anya from the swing and ascended the stairs to find the guest room door closed. Locked.

  “Alex.” She beat her fist on the door. “Alex, please let me in. What about all the things you said earlier?”

  “I should be able to make love to my wife,” came the muted reply. “What good am I if I can’t? Twenty-seven fucking years old and impotent. Fucking serves me right, da?”

  “You’re more than how good you are in bed. And no, it’s not some karmic payback.”

  “I can’t have sex because I’m on medication that causes ED. I’m on medication because I’m a fucking nutcase who might kill himself.”

  “You’re not. Alex, stop.”

  No response.

  “It’s seriously time to consider taking something for this. Please open the door.”

  He did not answer. Stephanie sank to the carpet with Anya in her arms and laid her head against the door. She heard sniffling. Fists assaulting the wall. Then a sinister quiet.

  ***

  Alex

  He had locked himself away out of shame, and shame prevented him from facing her. Mortification that, able to be with her again after two months, he couldn’t stay hard. What if she started thinking it was her fault? That he didn’t find her attractive anymore—that the scar turned him off? And humiliation that he’d responded by barricading himself in the guest room like an angsty teenager instead of talking as he’d exhorted her to do.

  Had someone hexed him? A personal August curse, only it had been running for two years straight with no foreseeable conclusion. The cracks in his mental support structure were expanding day by day, and Anya was far too tiny to hold him up herself.

  He could not go on, but he must.

  Now the doorbell was ringing. He stuck his head into the hallway. The master suite door was closed, but Stephanie might be in the nursery. Alex hobbled through the hall and down the stairs. To his instant regret, he did not first look out the window to see who it was.

  Brandon stared at him as though he’d caught a stray dog pissing on his leg. He pasted on a smile that didn’t extend to his eyes. “Oh. Aleksandr. Hey.”

  Alex glared back. Heat crept up his neck and into his ears; he crossed his arms, hands balled. Brandon was clutching a bouquet of deep pink peonies.

  “I didn’t know…We haven’t spoken in a while, and…”

  “We’re back together,” Alex growled. If you can call my complete inability to fuck “back together.” “By the way, I know you kissed her.”

  “That explains why you look like you want to murder me. Look, I wasn’t trying to move in on your wife. She’s just always so upset—”

  “What are you trying to say? You have the balls to come to my house and—give me these goddamned flowers.”

  “Hi, Brandon.”

  Alex whirled around. Stephanie, with dark circles smearing her eyes, watched him with quiet consternation. Her face was a map of all the easy routes he’d chosen that had caused her pain, forsaking the challenging ones that might have spared her.

  “It’s fine, Alex. Let him in. Please.”

  Allowing him over the threshold of the house Alex had bought as her dream home was the kind of Judas kiss he didn’t have it in him to forgive anymore. He shot Stephanie a scowl that said as much and stalked upstairs to the nursery.

  Anya soothed him as often as he did her, though he didn’t want to saddle his baby girl with such a millstone. She waved her little arms and smiled her toothless, dimpled smile as he peered over the crib, and everything else melted away. All life is sorrow, said the Buddhists, but not this. Not her. She was his light, and he the shadow that shaped her. If life was love, then fatherhood was the essence of immortality.

  No matter what Stephanie said, no matter how habituated to it she had become, love should never hurt.

  ***

  Stephanie

  “I’m sorry. My timing is apparently terrible.”

  “You didn’t know.” Stephanie arrayed the peonies in a vase she set on the kitchen table, a flagrant signal to Alex that jealousy was not going to dictate her friendships. “Coffee?”

  “I shouldn’t stay too long.” Brandon was poised in the kitchen doorway, his body canted toward the great room and the front door. His eyes kept flashing in that direction, as if Alex was going to leap out at him from the shadows. He was still holding his car keys. Jingling them. “Sorry for the silence too. I left it kind of awkward that day, and I didn’t really know how to follow up. Then I heard you were in the hospital, and…How are things?”

  “Difficult.” She poured a cup for herself and leaned against the counter. “What came so easily to us a few months ago is like pulling teeth now.”

  “A lot has happened, eh? You two have been through a hell of a storm, and you’ve survived it, but you’ll never be the same. We’re constantly evolving. All we can do is embrace who we’ve become.”

  “You’d think we would be experts by now. But we can’t seem to communicate at all. One of us always seems to be in a bad mood, and I don’t know if it’s adjusting to marriage and parenthood, or if all the other stuff is dragging us down.”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard this, but the first year really is the hardest. It’s when most people get divorced, and it’s not even always for financial reasons like everyone thinks. You have to adapt to all the quirks and patterns of sharing a life with someone. The things about them that you thought were cute when you were dating are usually the first things to get on your nerves.”

  Wasn’t that the truth. Stephanie gulped coffee down her parched throat. It didn’t alleviate the gnawing in her stomach, and now heartburn sputtered in her chest.

  “How are you physically?”

  “Carrying around an oxygen
concentrator like a decrepit old woman.” She smirked and patted the canister.

  “I hear the network is pleading with you to come back.”

  “I know. I haven’t decided yet.” Stephanie rifled through the mail on the counter. She tossed most of it into the recycling bin. “Alex and I have talked about writing a book, which will either exorcise some demons for good, or make me realize that everyone was right and I really am crazy for marrying him.”

  “If you believed that, you never would’ve. You’re too smart for that. You make your own choices. You’re here because this guy—and I’ll say it again, lucky bastard—has something no one else does, and whatever it is, it’s what you want.”

  “Anya deserves a better life than I had. I know Alex will go to the ends of the Earth to make that happen, but we have to be able to do it together.”

  “You will. It can only get better from here, eh?” Brandon inclined his head toward the great room. “I should get going. I’m sure I’ve outstayed my welcome as it is. It was good to see you, and I’m glad the surgery went well.”

  “Thank you for the flowers. We’ll talk soon.” They shared an awkward hug, leaving a generous amount of space between them and separating quickly, like a couple at a Catholic-school dance.

  She knew Alex was watching. His stare scorched her from the mezzanine.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Stephanie hoisted her bag over one shoulder and the oxygen concentrator over the other. “I shouldn’t be long.”

  “Why won’t you tell me where you’re going? Is it to see Brandon?” Alex was squinting at her, his pupils constricted, his jaw tight and ticking.

  “No, and that is not a lie. I need you to trust me, Alex.”

  “Is it for a story?” He trailed her to the door with Anya in his arms. She was grabbing and swatting his nose, and giggling each time he wriggled it. Four and a half months old already, her resemblance to Alex growing by the day.