by Leddy Harper
“Fuck, Donnie! I don’t think I can hold out any longer,” I grunted through clenched teeth as my head tilted back and my eyes closed tight. “Please. Please. Please!”
The tips of his fingers dug into the flesh of my ass as he gripped me tight and pulled me even closer to his mouth. Sensation after sweet sensation consumed me. From the warmth of his tongue on my sex to the exquisite pain of his fingers digging into my flesh to the gruffness of his beard on the sensitive skin of my groin, it all mingled together and attacked at once. He didn’t need to give me verbal permission to let go, the intense suction and biting on my nub was enough to let me know what he meant.
With my fingers twisted in his hair and my eyes tightly shut, I gave into the overwhelming sensations and came on his tongue, feeling wave after wave of euphoria wash over me. My body became overheated and my breathing grew harsh and erratic. I don’t think I had ever come that hard before in my life, and Donnie had given me some pretty amazing orgasms in the past. Yet nothing compared to the intensity that just rolled through me, leaving me a quaking, trembling mess, barely able to stand on my own two feet.
Donnie slowly moved from his position on the floor in front of me and slid up my body, taking his time until his lips met mine. His tongue tasted of my essence as he gradually breathed life back into me. I hooked my leg over his hip and adjusted my stance to line him up with my sex, needing to feel him inside of me, craving the fullness I’ve only ever felt with him.
But instead of pushing into me, he moved his pelvis away, out of reach of my body. His face pulled away from mine, leaving my lips cold and quivering. “What’s wrong?” I asked, full of fear and rejection once more.
“Not now. I want nothing more than to be with you, but I have to do this right. I fucked up the other night, and I can’t afford to do that again. This is about you, Edie. About worshipping you and letting you know how much I love you. It’s not about me, or even sex for that matter. I just need to wait until you’re really mine again. Until you’re back in this house. Back in my bed—our bed. Please, trust me on this.”
I smiled at his words and sighed just before he pressed his lips back to mine again. I reached down between our bodies and grabbed his erection in both hands, gripping him tight enough to make him groan and drop his head to my shoulder.
“Edie, you don’t have to…”
“I know,” I whispered and began to stroke him.
His hips pressed toward me, moving in my hand as I squeezed his shaft, and after no more than five thrusts, he came against my stomach with a groan. I couldn’t help but smile, knowing Donnie never came that fast. The fact it didn’t take long meant our highly emotionally charged situation must’ve affected him the same as it did me.
His shoulders began to shake and it took me a moment to realize it was due to his laughter. In seconds, I began laughing with him, not entirely sure what either of us found so funny.
“There,” he said as his laughter began to wane, “I just cleaned you up. Just like I promised.” His voice was light, filled with humor. I hadn’t heard him sound like that since high school. Before the pressures of college and his father’s business. Back when life was fun. It caused my own laughter to still, although it didn’t damper my mood. Instead, it gave me a reason to smile, realizing that I hadn’t lost everything.
I looked down at the mess on my stomach and rubbed my fingers through it. “I think you mean you made me dirty…which you promised me you would do as well.” I grabbed the washcloth hanging from a hook on the wall and handed it to him. “Now you can clean me off.”
I tried to hide my smile, but I knew I’d failed. I could feel the muscles in my cheeks strain as I pinched my lips together to keep the smile from taking over. I felt as if I hadn’t smiled in years, and I probably hadn’t, but it felt damn good to be able to joke around like this with Donnie. It felt amazing to be standing in our shower, skin to skin with him, touching him, feeling his hands on my body. For this one moment, I didn’t feel consumed with guilt, grief, pain, and fear. I felt light, loved, and happy.
“My pleasure.” He took the cloth from my hand and slowly, gently ran it over my sensitive skin, starting with my neck and moving lower. He washed his ejaculation off my stomach, and then continued to the apex of my thighs, carefully running it over my sex. He did all of this without ever taking his eyes off mine, causing my eyes to never leave his. It was intimate, and made me feel closer to him than I had in years, even before I left.
After drying off, he pulled a T-shirt from his drawer for me to wear. I recognized it immediately as the one I often stole from him when I was pregnant with the boys. It was big on Donnie, which meant it was huge on me, but at the end of my pregnancy with the twins, it was one of the very few things that fit around my very large stomach.
I worried that the shirt would bring up too many unresolved emotions, too many sad memories, but it didn’t. Instead, it made me smile. Wearing it didn’t cause me to look into the past and grieve what I’d lost—given up—it made me hopeful and happy about the future. About the things yet to come, the things I’d unknowingly began to believe would happen. And I couldn’t have been happier.
Donnie climbed into his side of the bed and pushed the covers down for me. A silent awkwardness hovered in the room—the infamous giant elephant—and threatened to suffocate me. I could see it had also affected Donnie with the way his chest raised and fell in slow, unsteady motions. He kept his eyes trained on me, watching my every move, sucking the elation right out of me.
For the first few years of our marriage, Donnie and I slept nearly on top of one another, our bodies practically intertwined throughout the night. That only stopped briefly at the end of my pregnancy with Livvy, when I could only fall asleep after being wrapped in four pillows. Once Livvy was born, our entangled sleeping arrangements picked right back up. And then stopped again with the twins, except a lot earlier on. After the boys were born, Donnie made a strong effort to wrap himself up in me during the night, and I gave in at first, but something about it no longer felt right. Over time, it became routine to sleep on our own sides of the bed, separated by a gap wide enough to fit another grown person. He eventually stopped reaching for me or pulling himself closer to me. By that point, it was too late. I was too far gone, too lost, too broken.
So climbing into bed with him now, I felt the apprehension of every move I made. I knew why he watched me, what he waited for as he held the covers up for me. I had no doubt in my mind where I wanted to be, how much space I wanted between our bodies, but after his admission this morning about not being able to sleep next to someone, I grew hesitant as to what I should do.
I stepped away from the bed. “I think I should go home. Let you get some sleep. You have to be up early in the morning and I don’t want to make you tired tomorrow.”
His eyes grew wide for a second before squinting, causing the creases in his forehead to become prominent on his face. “You think I’ll sleep better if you’re across the street?” he asked and then sighed, dropping the covers and wiping his hands over his face. “If distance is what you want—”
“It’s not,” I said in a panicked voice, cutting him off. I waited until his hands no longer covered his eyes before I continued. “I don’t want distance. I want to be here, next to you, but you didn’t sleep well last night. You’re tired. You said yourself that you aren’t used to sharing your bed. And the last thing I want is for you to be even more tired tomorrow at work. I don’t want to be a burden to you.”
Donnie lifted the covers once more and gave me one his heart stopping smiles, the one that revealed a line of brilliantly white teeth and had the ability to stop my world. “I’d rather get no sleep with you next to me than eight hours with you across the street. No…scratch that. If you went across the street, I would get no sleep. Get your ass in here.”
With a smile that I could feel in my cheeks, I climbed in bed next to him and pulled the covers over my body. I moved closer to his body as he watched
me with careful eyes. Every inch I shifted in his direction felt like slow motion.
“We don’t have to cuddle,” he said in a gruff voice, sounding as if it pained him to admit that. “Just sleeping next to you is enough.”
I shoved the covers over more until my body was pressed against his and then rested my head against his bare chest. His heart pounded below my ear, releasing a calmness within me. “This is where I want to be,” I whispered against his skin. “Nowhere else. I don’t want any more space between us.”
He wrapped his arm around my shoulders, taking my hand with his other, and kissed the top of my head. The room was so quiet it made the sound of his elongated exhale fill the air, swarming me with a sense of satisfaction.
I laughed into him and asked, “Who’s going to turn off the light?”
His arms squeezed me tighter. “No one. It’s going to stay on. This way if I wake up in the middle of the night, I will be able to see you. And I will know I’m not dreaming.”
I kissed his chest and then settled into him more. “I love you,” I whispered just before closing my eyes for the last time, drifting into the most peaceful sleep I’d had in years.
Warm kisses woke me the following morning. I blinked rapidly, trying to decipher where I was, and then Donnie’s face filled my line of sight. I couldn’t contain the smile as it spread across my face.
“I’m taking the kids to school and then going to work,” he whispered.
My smile quickly fell as realization dawned. I threw the covers from my body and sat up, readying myself to sneak out before the kids woke. But then Donnie placed his hand on my shoulder and eased me back onto the mattress.
“Stay. We’re getting ready to leave. I didn’t want to wake you. Get some rest,” he said as he pressed his lips to my forehead. “I’ll see you when I get home.”
Stunned by his words, I couldn’t form a question, even though I had about a hundred of them racing though my mind. All I could make myself do was nod and settle my head back into the pillow. The pillow that smelled of Donnie.
Just as he began to pull away, I grabbed his tie and forced his face closer, pressing my lips to his and humming at the feel of one of the things I’d missed the most—the first kiss of the day. He didn’t fight it, taking in a profound breath through his nose and opening his mouth to deepen the kiss.
An insecurity I hadn’t felt in years crept in. Morning breath. Donnie and I had shared so many kisses in the morning, and almost as many sexual encounters before even making it to the sink to brush our teeth, that the worry over sour breath became nonexistent. However, it had been years since that time, years filled with more insecurities than normal. And it caused me to revert back to the newlywed I was almost eight years ago. I ended the kiss abruptly and gently began to push him away.
He smiled at me, giving me a knowing look with his one raised eyebrow. “Back to that, are we? Am I going to have to make out with you every morning until you’re passed the fear of your breath?”
I rolled my eyes and covered my mouth, unable to speak.
Donnie pressed his fists into the mattress on either side of my body, hovering over me. “I happen to like your morning breath.”
“Ew, that’s gross, Donnie,” I said, my words muffled behind my hand.
“I love it because it means you’re here. It means you were next to me all night. And it means I got to wake up to you.”
I dropped my hand and gazed into his eyes, feeling the love that shone out of them. “What does this mean, Donnie? You keep making these comments about not wanting me to leave. You let me sleep in while you go to work and take the kids to school. But last night you said we can’t have sex until I’m here for good. Do you want me to be? Or are we still figuring this out?”
He licked his lower lip and dropped his eyes for a second before answering. “I want you here. I don’t ever want you to go back to that house across the street again, but we do still have a lot to figure out. We agreed to not speak of the past again, but I still have to process it all. I still feel an immense sense of guilt over it, and I need to work through that. I’m kind of stuck in this in-between space. I feel like I need to look at what happened, not in the sense of dwelling on it, but to see where I went wrong. What I did wrong, only to make sure it never happens again. I need to process the past to make sure it doesn’t repeat itself, and to make sure we fully work through it all. The last thing I want to happen is for it to come back up later. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you here while I do that. And it doesn’t mean we won’t work it out.”
I could only nod, unable to form words. I knew what he needed, it was the same thing I had needed when I left. I needed to work things out, and I got the chance to do so. Granted, it wasn’t done the right way, but regardless, I had the time to understand what happened, to grasp the concept of post-partum depression. I had help. So I could understand what he needed, and I would give it to him.
“I know,” I said and cupped his rough cheek in my hand, feeling the hairs tickle my palm. “I want all of that for you, too. And I’ll be here for anything you need. But please, stop feeling guilty over it. You shouldn’t feel guilty for any of it. Do what you need to, work it out however you have to, and I’ll be here when you’re ready to talk.”
He gave me one more kiss before backing away. Not another word was spoken before he closed the door behind him, leaving me in bed. I stood and watched from the window as he loaded the kids up in the van, and then pulled out of the driveway. I watched until he was so far down the road I could no longer see him.
Going back to sleep was not an option, but I couldn’t find the strength to leave the house. I felt like an intruder being there alone, and it made me wonder how long it would take before I felt at home again. How long would it be before I could walk to the kitchen for a drink and not feel like a guest? How long before I could pass the kids’ bedrooms without pausing at the doors and peeking inside?
Before getting dressed, I snooped in Donnie’s closet, taking note of how nothing seemed to have changed over the years. His clothes still hung neatly, organized in work clothes and regular clothes. His shoes still sat on the floor against the wall, toes touching the baseboard. I smiled at the realization that not all things had changed in my absence—some things still stayed the same.
I turned around and braced myself to open the other closet door, the one I had used before. My heart stilled in my chest as I wondered what I’d open it to find. Did he let Beth use it? Did he close the door and never look at it again, leaving all of my things still there? And if that’s the case, how would I feel about seeing it? How would I feel about touching the clothes that belonged to the old me? All the black, baggy shirts, the old maternity clothes I couldn’t bear to part with, everything I once was? I had never felt like two different people before that moment, standing in front of my old closet.
That’s when it hit me. I wasn’t two different people—I was three. There was the old me, the one before kids, the newlywed, the new mother in love with her husband and child. Then there was the depressed version. The one that suffocated in negative thoughts until she drowned. And now there’s the new me. The one that still suffered from feelings of defectiveness, still struggles to hold on to reality. This version is hopeful, remorseful, and above all, a fighter.
I slowly opened the door, keeping my eyes closed until it’s fully opened. My fingers found the light switch on the wall and flipped it on. I gasped to myself once my eyes opened and I took in the empty space before me. Nothing hung on hangers, no shoes were on the floor, the top shelf bare. My mind warred between relief and grief. Mixed between feeling the loss of the person I used to be, the happy person I once was, and content with the fresh start the empty closet granted me with. My heart hurt at the knowledge that Donnie had removed me from his life, threw away parts of me, but the pain was for him. My heart ached knowing I made him do this. I forced him to go through my belongings, and then throw them away with the trash.
&nb
sp; Taking a deep breath, I turned the light off and closed the door, going in search of my clothes from the day before. After finding them in the bathroom, I changed quickly, knowing I needed to get out of the house before my emotions became too much to handle. After the last couple of days, I knew I needed to talk to Jan. I needed her words, her wisdom, and her comfort.
I closed the front door behind me, worrying about how I would lock it without a key. But before I could spend too much time thinking about it, a car pulled into the driveway. The screeching of the tires caught my attention and caused me to turn around. The way the morning sun hit the windshield, I couldn’t see who sat behind the steering wheel, nor did I recognize the silver Toyota. I stood frozen in place by the front door and stared at the car, waiting for some kind of sign as to who it was.
And then the driver’s door opened, and the woman that stepped out caused my hands to fist at my sides and my neck to burn with unfocused anger. I hadn’t heard from her in years. Hadn’t seen her in even longer.
“I heard you were back. Had to come see for myself.” She closed her door and took a few steps in my direction. “I had to make sure you were all right. You had me worried with your disappearing act.”
I couldn’t move. I had nothing to say, even though my thoughts screamed at me to yell, fight, do something—anything. But nothing happened. I could only stare unblinkingly at her as she made her way to me.
“Are you going to just stand there? Don’t you want to give your mother a hug?” Her smug smile pissed me off, sent a burning fire of anger through me. She spread her arms wide, inviting me in, but I could only see red.
“What are you doing here?” I couldn’t find any other words to say.
“I came to check up on you.”