by Leach, Kiki
“You weren’t attracted to me,” she said. “You barely even looked at me when I came to your apartment.”
He chuckled and darted his eyes around the room before staring back at her. “Sheila, the day you first showed up on my doorstep, I didn’t want to really admit how much you turned me on. Or how much my dick started reacting to you the moment I saw you screwing around with the elevator inside my building, because I was still so wrapped up in trying to win Vanessa back and recapture some of what we had before I skipped out. But there was something about you that started to change all of that the moment you opened your mouth you speak.”
“Something,” she repeated.
“Yeah, something, about you.”
“Most people always seem to hate what I have to say as soon as I open my mouth, no matter what it is.”
“I’m not most people,” he replied. He lay a single finger at the center of her throat and slid it down between her breasts; her skin grew warm at the simplicity of his touch and she continued moving her thighs against each other, imagining his face there this time, his flushed cheeks pressing against the center each one as the flutter of his tongue worked magic against her clit. “What I saw in you that day was so different from anything I had ever been accustomed to before,” he said. “It drove me insane, but also intrigued the hell out of me and left me eager to know more than I probably needed to about you. Admittedly, I thought you were a little bit crazy. Maybe somewhat delusional in the reason why you chose to contact me in the first place, even if I was more than prepared to go along with it. But it lured me all the way in. And I knew that once I got even the tiniest taste of what you had to offer, it’d be the end of me, like death.”
“Now you’re comparing me to death?” she asked.
“Yes, I am. The kind that’s slow and excruciatingly painful the moment that feeling hits, when the end is coming. But you can’t help in succumbing to it because you know that it will get you to where to you not only want to be, but where you need to be in record time. Because right before you close your eyes, you see that bright light to heaven and there’s no going back from it.”
Sheila didn’t exactly know what the hell he meant, though she was sure it something philosophical. But she was less than sure if it was supposed to make her feel better about herself, or question everything she had ever known.
She dropped her hands inside the pockets of her robe and exhaled, then quickly closed her mouth as she caught him staring at her lips as they quivered.
“I came to see you in the Hamptons,” he continued, “because I needed to know if you felt the same something that I did. When I got you alone in that kitchen, you didn’t even have to say a word. I knew just from the expression on your face that whatever the hell it was I had been feeling, you had been feeling it too. And I liked that. I liked it a lot.” He stopped to smile again and she did the same. “I don’t know where the hell any of this is going with us, whether it turns out to be love or nothing more than pure infatuation and sexual attraction, but I’m damn sure willing to keep it going in order to find out.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I think the only answer I’m looking for now is if you’re willing to find out too.”
She was willing. Oh, she was more than willing long before that night they spent together on the beach as he wiped away every tear she had shed.
The actual question should’ve been, was she able? The ring on her finger wasn’t just some random gift she happened to buy for herself during an impulse when she got lonely. It was a symbol for a commitment made to someone else she had longed dreamed of becoming the first and only Mrs. to.
But seeing as how she hadn’t heard a word from her soon to be groom since he skipped town, despite having finally come back the night before, she had yet to know where exactly she stood with him. And just exactly where he had planned to stand with her the moment he walked back through that door to their room.
Before she could give Adrian an answer either way, her cell phone started clattering against the glass of a two sided mirror that she kept inside her purse. It was almost like a saving grace while at the same time being a curse.
She shuffled around him to the chair in the corner near the fridge and he watched her with intent as she reached inside her purse and pulled out the phone to look at the number calling.
Studying the digits, she moved her head back and forth and looked up at Adrian with a puzzled expression. “I don’t know what number this is,” she said. “The area code is local, but the number isn’t something that I recognize at all.”
And because she didn’t recognize it, she would never know that the person waiting on the other end for her answer would be the only one with the ability to make or break her fate with the man standing directly in front of her.
She held the phone for a few more seconds as it continued to clatter, contemplating on what to do, before placing it at the far edge of the dresser where it continued to buzz against the wood.
Adrian nodded his head toward it and inhaled the warm air surrounding them. “Maybe you should answer it anyway,” he said. “Or maybe silence the damn thing so that we don’t have to listen to that awful rattling sound.”
Sheila stared down at the phone one last time before pressing her finger down hard against that red ‘Off’ button, instantly silencing the person on the other end who had been trying so desperately to reach out to her.
Then she turned back to Adrian, and with her hands sliding down the sides of her robe, she shrugged her shoulders and smiled wide. “Now what?”
His eyes traveled down to the belt holding her robe together. “Now,” he said, outstretching his hand. His fingers toyed with the belt and he tugged it hard to draw her back to him. The moment she was close enough to taste his lips against hers, she grinned even wider and giggled. “Now you show me if you’re really willing to give up everything you ever thought you wanted with Nathan, and everything you ever thought you needed from him, for everything that you deserve, mind, body and soul, with me.”
No man had ever said those words to her before. No man had ever shown her that he gave enough of a damn to stick around and learn more about who she was beneath being borderline crazy and neurotic as hell. It made something inside of her twist and churn and flinch before finally detonating like a hand grenade that had been impatiently waiting years for the right person to rip out the pin, toss it into the garbage, and allow her to explode into millions of pieces across the room.
She didn’t know how to verbally respond to it. Everything with Adrian was so unfamiliar and fresh and scary and real, but she was so willing to give it a try, so willing to give up everything she ever thought she needed and wanted and desired, for just a chance, just a single chance at being truly happy with someone so open and eager and honest enough to give her so much of what she always thought she deserved and more.
And so she slid her hands down the front of her robe and reached for that belt to show him just how much she was prepared to give up for that chance. Gradually untying it from the bow, she kept her eyes on Adrian’s face as he kept his eyes on the movement of her hands.
And when the robe fell open, everything in the room suddenly went still. His eyes traveled up from her toned stomach to the round shape of her breasts. All too perfect in the moonlight, he wasn’t sure there was much about her body that could top what he had experienced the night before. But seeing her beneath the light of the sun as it shown through the curtains behind him, while drops of water glistened and reflected off of her impeccably flawless skin, he was beyond reassured that she was in fact more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen in all of his thirty-three years on earth.
As he reached a hand up to caress her face, Sheila dropped her arms and allowed the robe to slide down to the floor behind her. Swallowing hard, she wasn’t even sure her heart was still beating as he stepped forward and bent his face down toward hers. Lightly stroking the corner of her mouth with his own, he waited until the s
econd felt right enough to finally kiss her the way he knew she wanted, desired, begged for.
As their lips came together in heat and electricity – crashing, burning, melding against one another, tasting scents and skin, she curled her fingers around the buttons of his shirt and loosened them one by one. By the time she reached the last one, he was helping her pull the edge of the shirt out from his pants and tossing it to the floor.
And then she went for his pants, but wasn’t as eager this time in getting them off.
Because this time wasn’t about desperation, it wasn’t about a need to feel wanted, it was about the wanting in and of itself; she wanted to take her time, to reflect and treasure this moment between them as if it was their first, as if it could be their last.
As the buckle loosened and the zipper fell, Adrian shoved his pants to the floor and stepped out of them, then feverishly wrapped his hands around her and started walking back toward the bed. Once he hit the edge, he dropped down and began kissing her stomach. He swirled his tongue around her skin, bit down and clawed and forced her to feel his every touch, his every lick, bite, scratch and need for her. When he looked up and noticed that her eyes had been closed and her head was tilted back, he reached up for her chin and softly pulled her face back down. Her eyes popped open and she stared down at him, confused.
“I want your eyes on me this time,” he said. “I want your entire focus on me, and us, nothing else.”
She nodded her head, obliging, then bent down to kiss him again.
His hands slid around to her back and he guided her down to his lap.
As she positioned her body on top of his rock solid dick, she eased him inside of her and started rocking back and forth, adjusting herself to his length.
But Adrian didn’t move at all. Instead he placed his hands on either side of her face, forcing her to stop. Out of breath, her cheeks felt rushed with heat and she suddenly felt terrified that he would think it was all a mistake, that what they were starting together was a lie.
“What is it?” she asked warily.
“I want to take it slow with you this time,” he said.
Feeling relieved that he seemed to want more and all that she was willing to give, she draped her arms around him and started rocking her body against him again. “That’s what we’re doing.”
A small smile crept upon his lips as he admired the exhilaration on her face. “That’s not what I meant.”
She continued rocking, though much slower this time to keep up the pace, and brought her hands down to his chest, scraping her fingers back and forth against his skin. “Then, what?”
“I don’t want to call this ‘making love’,” he told her, “because we’re not there yet. But I want to show you that I could love you. I want to show you how I can if you let me.”
Those words smacked her upside the head, tossed her body around the room like a bright red rubber ball and shoved her right back down on top of his lap. She was either losing her mind, being played, or for the first time in her life getting an actual dose of what it meant for a man to actually care about her and not just himself during sex.
Stroking her hair down to her back and lifting her body against him, he smiled with his eyes and leaned into her face. “Are you going to let me show you how I can love you, Sheila?”
“I…”
And then he pushed himself so deep inside of her that just a single inch separated the tip of his dick from her G-Spot. Sheila’s eyes rolled so far into the back of her head that her lids began to flutter.
Adrian rocked himself back and forth until he finally, with ultimate achievement, hit that perfect spot.
Sheila cried out at the unexpected feeling that exploded throughout her entire body, forcing her to shake almost uncontrollably against him, and sank her nails into his back until he bruised.
“Is this you letting me?” he asked, his voice hoarse as he began to lose his breath with every stroke.
She dipped her head back even further, crawled her fingers up the back of his neck, and nodded.
“Yes… yes… yes.”
Part Nineteen
Across town, the hours didn’t seem to pass fast enough for Vanessa as she spent most of the morning spinning back and forth in her chair and tossing darts at Melanie’s Attitude cover as it hung in a frame with no glass on her wall across the room.
Since she couldn’t exactly turn right back around and go home, crawl beneath the covers of her bed and pretend that a world outside of that fluffy thick fabric didn’t exist, it seemed as if poking tiny dots into the paper face of a woman who was quickly rising to the top of her shit list was the next best thing.
Though to be honest, she didn’t outright hate the woman. And though there had been many times as of late in which images of her face popped into her head that weren’t all that pleasant to look at, she didn’t even really dislike her as a person all that much. In fact, despite her remarks that morning, Vanessa even felt awful about her current plight with Oscar and under normal circumstances, would have been the first to scold him for leaving his wife and children in the dust, and offer her a helping hand and maybe even another cover shoot to help boost her spirits.
But leave it to Melanie’s sudden infatuation with Maurice to force Vanessa to see nothing but red whenever she was mentioned in even the slightest capacity.
Though it’s not as if Vanessa was worried that something would actually happen between them, physically speaking. After last night, and then again in front of the entire pop-up shop, she had been more than convinced that Maurice wanted no one else but her, just as he was convinced of the same.
But that wasn’t actually the problem, it never was. More or less, she didn’t feel as if she could continue to trust him, with anything – her thoughts, her emotions, or her body which was just as vulnerable as her heart.
This was a man she had given her entire life to – her entire self. This was a man who had her soul in his hands, presented to him by her when they were just children, long before the idea of romance between them even popped inside her head. She gave him small pieces of herself that Nathan never seemed to get a hold on or even see well enough to touch, even though she had been convinced by him throughout their entire relationship that he had.
But Nathan never saw her in the same way as Maurice, never looked at her beneath the same light or valued who she was as a person, as a woman outside of being with him; he never knew or understood or even cared about her in the way he always claimed to, in the way he always made her and everyone else around them believe that he had, which is what often sent her back to him time and time again when she knew that she would just come away with an even bigger amount of pain each and every single time.
Maurice was the man she was always supposed to be with, the one meant to take care of her, to show her that men like Nathan weren’t the rule or the exception to it, but instead a grossly misrepresented interpretation of what a man was supposed to be, how he was supposed to be when it came to showing that kind of affection for the woman he claimed to love.
Maurice was her heart and everything that she put inside of it.
And now that heart had been shattered, broken into pocket-sized pieces inside of her chest and left floating around amongst the fiery acid that spread throughout, waiting to be mended, to be put back together like the tiny pieces of a thousand part jigsaw puzzle by the very hammer that saw fit to blow it apart in the first place.
Too focused on various ways of learning how to fix herself, she hadn’t even noticed Felicia walking in to see her. She had to knock on the desk a few times to reach her younger sister’s attention at all and when she did, immediately started to realize that coming to see her about minor concerns regarding the magazine was probably not the best idea.
“Should I come back?” she asked.
“Must you come back at all?”
Felicia threw her hands against her hips and clucked her tongue. “Is it that time of the month already?”
“I don’t need an excuse to be annoyed with you,” said Vanessa as she sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. “You’ve known this ever since we were kids, it just comes naturally. What do you want?”
Felicia leaned over the desk to get a better look in her eyes. Noticing how dark they were, and that she must have been crying at some point before her arrival, her aggravation immediately turned to genuine concern and she stood straight. “Are you okay in here, V?”
“I’m peachy fucking keen, Fefe. Can’t you tell?”
Felicia reached out for the chair behind her and pulled it forward to take a seat. “You know that I’ve never liked that nickname--”
“Hence my point in using it. Now what do you want?”
She leaned her head and peered. “Why are you biting off my head, Vanessa?”
“Because it’s a day that ends in Y and you’re part of my daily diet for the week.”
“No,” she replied. “I mean ‘why’ as in, ‘why’ are you acting like such a bitch so early in the morning?”
“I think it sounds better in a sentence directed toward you, as in why the hell are you bothering me with bullshit so damn early in the morning? And on that note, what the hell do you want from me, Felicia?”
She stared at her sister for a long time and bit down hard on her tongue before saying something that she knew she wouldn’t be able to take back later.
Vanessa looked down at her hands and started picking at her nails as Felicia attempted to change the subject.
“You don’t want to tell me what the hell is going on with you, okay. That isn’t what I came in here for to begin with.”
“Then tell me what the hell you want and then please just get the hell out.”
“I’m only going to take so much of this shit attitude from you Vanessa before I reach across the desk and throw you around the room like a--”