Never Have I Ever

by Clearwing, August

  “One more, pet,” he growled, “I want you to keep coming. You radiate and glow when you climax.”

  I was so sensitive that I could not tell where the agony ended and the elation began. Wetness from cum and sweat greased the saddle of the Sybian. Its angry roar made me screech and beg. Every muscle in me twitched, rocking me into one continuous, rolling orgasm for nearly a minute straight. Ever so slowly, the intensity of the machine was calmed. My chest heaved. Sweat dripped out of every pore on my body.

  A furious tremble raced through me as the Sybian went silent. The only sound in the room came from my attempts to control my breathing and the residual whimpers and groans I was not willingly allowing to escape but did anyway. My head lolled forward, spent in totality.

  Noah ran his hands over my shoulders several times, calming me down from the journey.

  “Holy fucking hell,” I gasped.

  “Breathe sweetness.” He encouraged me to slow down by placing the palm of his hand between my breasts and taking deep, gentle breaths with me. When he was sure I was not going to hyperventilate, he added, “I’m so proud of you.”

  I gave a breathy laugh and the ghost of a smile—the only thing I could manage.

  He pulled the blindfold off my eyes and used it to dab away the sweat on my face and neck while he smoothed over my hair. “Stay still a moment. I’ll be right back.”

  I almost toppled over when Noah left the bed. My vision adjusted slowly to the dim light of the room just in time for him to return with a tall glass of water. He sat on the bed in front of me, still fully clothed, and placed the glass to my lips so I could take a drink.

  After I swallowed, I asked, “Don’t you want to come tonight too, Sir?”

  He smiled with warmth and compassion, his free hand stroking my shivering shoulder and arm gently. “It’s not always about me, my sweet. Tonight was for you. Drink.”

  “Yes, Sir,” I relented.

  With his help, I drank half the glass of water. He took a swig from himself and set the glass on the nightstand, then helped me off the Sybian. Once I was off my knees and sitting on the bed, my shaking subsided somewhat. Noah untied my arms and massaged the life back into them with soft circles into the depths of my muscles. The machine was packed up, along with the rope and the flogger, and placed in the living room for easy retrieval in the morning.

  I collapsed against the cool comforters of my bed and closed my eyes, awash in amazement and exhaustion. Noah returned to the room. The mattress gave way once more as he climbed on. He hovered over me, placing delicate kisses on the red stripes the flogger left. The feel of his breath against my skin made me shiver once again. He kissed my stomach, my navel, and moved up my torso until his face was right above mine.

  “Thank you, Sir,” I said.

  “You’re very welcome, my dear. Good girls get rewarded. Ask anything of me.”

  I gazed up at him, wanting nothing more than to just feel his skin. “I can’t think of anything else I desire right now, Sir.”

  Noah leaned in and brushed his lips against mine. “Nothing at all?”

  Apart from working up the nerve to tell him that Selene was alive, which was a courage I now knew I was required to locate on my own, everything I wanted in life existed in this small space between us. Still, if I was going to find the nerve, I needed to know more about my topic of discussion.

  “Information maybe,” I told him.

  “About what, sweetness?”

  “Would you tell me… about Selene?”

  “All right,” he said with reluctance. I watched the fact that he did say ‘anything’ register on his face. “What would you like to know?”

  “How did she die?”

  Noah adjusted his position to lie on his side next to me. He thought for a long beat, looking past me and towards the window as if he could see the night through closed shades. “About a week after she left me Selene took her own life.”

  I turned over to face him, drawing my hands up to my chest in the most comfortable position I could manage to listen intently.

  “How did you find out?”

  “Ethan told me the morning after it happened,” he explained. He reached out and moved his fingers through my hair as he continued, “Poor bastard. He found her. She filled the tub… and took a straight razor to her wrists. He said there wasn’t a corner of the room not touched by her blood.”

  “And was it?” I interjected.

  Noah gave a little shrug. “I don’t know. I never saw for myself; I could picture it just fine. Never saw her body afterwards, either. Ethan took care of the cleanup and the cremation. I fought him on it. I wanted the proof for my own peace of mind. I wouldn’t have believed she could do something so selfish had it not been for the note she left. The handwriting was unmistakably Selene’s.”

  So, not only did she fake her own death, she had help. It all became much clearer to me after his explanation. If Ethan was the one who did the cleanup then perhaps he orchestrated the grand falsehood altogether. Maybe she was not good enough for Noah just as I was not in Ethan’s eyes. He was the only common denominator between the two of us, and his blatant disdain—or my insignificance, according to him—of the women in Noah’s life might have something to do with it. He got to Selene, I figured, the same way he was trying to get to me.

  Noah’s statement earlier in the night about how much Ethan hated him may have had something to do with that. If, in Noah’s words, he inadvertently screwed Ethan out of his happiness, then perhaps there was a falling out over Selene. The only thing I was unable to piece together was why; if Ethan found a way to convince her to leave Noah a week prior, why would such lie need to be enacted in the end? Why would Ethan whisk her away to Australia in secret instead of taking her for himself if he wanted her as well? I was also really damned curious as to how the cover-up managed to fly with her family and friends.

  “Did her family come to town for the funeral?”

  Selene’s alive! I all but shouted in my mind, yet couldn’t get my mouth to say it.

  “Selene was an orphan. Her parents died when she was little. She ran away from her foster family at sixteen; came out to Los Angeles to get discovered and all that.” Noah paused to smile and shake his head at the all too common direction people go when they move to this city. “But she never did. The competition’s so heavy. Not only was she a talent on stage, she could draw the pants off anyone too. She was amazing with a paintbrush.”

  “Is that why she did it? Not being able to follow her dream?”

  “No,” he said somberly. “Other demons, demons not entirely her own, were responsible for that.”

  “I’m sorry, Sir,” I whispered.

  He leaned over and kissed my forehead. “Stop apologizing for things that aren’t your fault.”

  I pinned my lips together; he did not understand. I was not sorry because I thought it was my fault. I was sorry that I had not told him the truth. Selene was alive and well and living an ocean away. I was sorry I had to lie to protect her, to protect him, even though I did not know why that protection was required. It was a stain on my heart I wanted to rub out.

  Someday, I would tell him.

  Someday, but not this day.

  ***

  I lay awake in bed for nearly an hour while Noah slept. He had almost fallen asleep completely clothed he was so tired. It was not until I talked him out of his shirt and pants that I felt a little more confident he would be comfortable.

  As for me, I was completely exhausted. For the life of me, my brain just would not shut the fuck off. It kept reeling with What Ifs and How Comes. Around eleven thirty, I realized my tossing and turning would eventually wake Noah. I slipped from bed, threw on a thin robe and made my way into the kitchen to brew some Chamomile tea in the hopes of sedating my overactive mind.

  I tried not to think of anything in particular. I knew that even if I succeeded in casting out the thoughts in my head, the moment I lay down again they would emerge even louder th
an before. Still, I had to try. I took the kettle off the stove before it could whistle and let the tea steep for several minutes.

  Cocoa made her presence known by hopping up onto the kitchen counter close to the dining room. I gave her the attention she requested, reassuring myself life might not be quite as bad as it could be while I scratched under her chin and let her rub up against me.

  Everything would be okay in the end, I tried to convince myself. Everything would slide back into normalcy. With any luck, Ethan would leave me alone to my victory over his hatred and cynicism.

  The minute I began to believe I could fight this fight against Ethan while simultaneously keeping the biggest secret in the history of ever from Noah, the silence in the apartment broke.

  With the flip of an unseen switch, Noah woke up screaming.

  {CHAPTER EIGHTEEN}

  Luckily, I wasn’t in bed. Hell, I wasn’t even in the bedroom when Noah’s night terror started. It was unavoidable, inevitable even. As many nights as we spent sleeping together in the same bed, one was bound to rear its ugly head sooner or later.

  It began with a groan heard from across the expanse of the living room. The bedroom door was cracked, allowing a soft strip of light to spill over the bed in perfect view from the kitchen. I raised my attention from the Chamomile tea and my cat in front of me to see the blankets shift as Noah turned over. At first, I thought he might just be searching for a more comfortable position. But then another, sharper groan snapped into a higher calling out.

  A chill of dread ran rampant through me. I hurried across the living room to the door. It was all shadows and darkness inside with my body blocking the light from the kitchen. He was speaking incoherently, his movements quickly becoming violent, thrashing in the dark. Pillows fell from their place, sheets ripped away from a secure position while he begged for whatever thoughts were flashing through his head to end.

  Clenching my hand against the door frame, I forced myself to stop mid-stride into the bedroom. Noah warned me, Declan warned me, and Anya warned me that the best thing to do was stay the fuck away while this happened. But how could I let something like this simply run its course when it looked like the unseen demons of Hell itself were clawing at him, trying with all their might, to drag him back down to the Pit with them?

  I whipped around the other way and plastered myself against the wall beside the bedroom. If I couldn’t go to him, I couldn’t bear to stand there and watch it. Seconds ticked on the clock in my line of sight like hours as I stared at the opposite side of the apartment, wondering how long the episode would last.

  A full agonizing minute went by. He cursed in his sleep, his breathing rushed and ragged and full of desperation. I heard the glass of water we left on the nightstand clatter over and crack when it hit the corner before rolling off.

  After seeing and hearing it all, I would never wish the experience on anybody in the world. Even the darkest soul on the planet shouldn’t have to endure what Noah did in the night.

  With one final cry of, “STOP!” at the top of his lungs, all movement in the bedroom ceased.

  All I heard was a series of gasps and heavy breathing. When I peeked around the door, Noah was sitting up, looking around like he didn’t recognize where he was. I came into full view of the room. His attention shot over to me immediately. I held my hands out, palms down, the way one does when trying to calm a frightened dog—how stupid an instinctual that was.

  “It’s okay,” I eased, slowly taking a few steps into the room. “It’s just me.”

  He stared at me in silence while I flicked on the lamp beside the bed. Water covered the bedside table, dribbling off the edge. As I expected, the glass was cracked in half, the two large pieces and several smaller ones scattered across the floor.

  “Piper.” He said my name as if he’d forgotten it. The reality of what happened came flying back to him all at once the moment it left his mouth. He rubbed the sweat from his face with both hands. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Just sit tight a sec. There’s broken glass on the carpet.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “It’s okay.” I snatched a towel from my bathroom and mopped up the water as best I could while simultaneously collecting the pieces of glass into a centralized location.

  “Were you…” Noah swallowed hard, still trying to catch his breath. “Were you in here?”

  “No,” I said as I gathered up the last of the glass. “I couldn’t sleep. I got up to make some tea.”

  His head dropped with an exasperated sigh. “Thank fuck.”

  “Probably a stupid question, but are you all right?”

  He snorted and looked the other way. “I’m fine. Except maybe my pride.”

  “Hey, don’t talk like that.” I set the glass in the towel and placed it off to the side, then sat next to him on the bed swiftly to give him a reassuring touch on his arm. “Nothing happened. We’re both still in one piece, see? We survived.”

  “Don’t. Don’t do that,” he said as he shrugged away.

  I retracted my hand. “I’m sorry, I just thought—”

  “Coddling doesn’t make it any better.”

  Noah whipped the blankets from around him and left the bed. He seized his pants from the chair in the corner, dug his cigarettes from a pocket and slipped into the jeans, followed by his shoes. Without a word, he exited the room. I started to follow, but stopped at the door when I saw he was headed for the pack porch.

  “You want to be left alone?”

  “I think that’s a good idea, yes. Try to get some sleep for yourself.”

  He pulled open the back door and shut it firmly behind him.

  For a while I just stood there, propped against the door frame of my bedroom, watching the blinds on the back door sway to an eventual stop. Though he probably didn’t think I did, I understood. It was one thing to live with the night terrors all alone; it was another entirely to suddenly have a witness to them. If it were me, I’d see it as a personal weakness, especially if my personality was as put-together and assured as Noah’s was normally. It must have been an embarrassment for him.

  Because I was peering in from the outside, though, it was easier to look at it objectively. In the end, it didn’t make him a weaker person. There was certainly nothing to be embarrassed about considering the terrors weren’t anything he controlled. Brain chemistry is funny that way. If anything, they enhanced his caution. They made him stop and think about consequences of his day-to-day life, as messed up as it sounded. Anybody could see that if they got to know him. And it was just part of who he was: strong, beautiful, and deeper than I ever imagined.

  Eventually, I pushed off the wall to busy myself before my brain ran too far away. I trashed the second broken glass of the night, vacuumed both the kitchen from my explosion as well as the bedroom from Noah’s, and re-heated my tea in the microwave.

  By then, he still hadn’t returned. I wasn’t at all going back to bed without him, so I ran a warm shower and washed the day away in the hopes of calming my nerves. The shower served the dual purpose of preventing me from joining him on the patio against his wishes. All I wanted to do was let him know the world wasn’t ending. I wanted to hold him and kiss him and tell him everything would be all right. Even if that was a lie, I’d rather live with the lie than watch him chastise himself for something that wasn’t his fault. I also kind of hoped he might join me in the shower since the opportunity presented itself. After a good twenty minutes, though, it became clear he wouldn’t.

  I took some extra time to thoroughly dry my hair before donning my robe once more and emerging from the bathroom. The bed was still empty, so I checked the living room, praying he hadn’t run away in my absence.

  To my relief, Noah was sitting on the couch with a wine glass in his hand. He was also fully clothed, which worried me. The remainder of the white wine from dinner was gone, the bottle set off to the side of the table, and it looked like he managed to down most of the blush already. I walked into
the kitchen and took a fresh wine glass from the cupboard, then returned to the living room to sit on the sofa a couple of feet from him.

  “I thought you were going to try to sleep,” Noah groused.

  The remaining wine bottle was still about a third full, so I filled my glass and drained the rest into his. When I finished, I picked my glass up and made a subtle toasting motion towards him.

  “You shouldn’t drink alone,” I advised, then tossed in a, “Sir,” for his benefit.

  He threw me a wan smile. “I had to step out earlier because I’m a bear in a piss-poor mood when I wake up from those. Sometimes it takes longer to come back to Earth.”

  “I get like that too, only it happens every month for about five days straight. No night terrors required.”

  He almost laughed at that.

  After I took a sip of wine I asked, “How can I help?”

  “There’s nothing anyone can do really.”

  “Can I try?”

  He set his own glass on the table. “I don’t quite know how to put it in the right words to make any sense.”

  “Maybe I don’t have to understand. I can just listen.”

  “They aren’t dreams. There are never dreams to accompany the feelings. It’s just the unadulterated, overwhelming bombardment of fear and panic out of the black.”

  “At least I’ve seen it first-hand now. I knew what to do. Or not to do as the case may be. Next time I’ll be even more prepared.”

  “Next time,” he echoed.

  “Right,” I encouraged.

  Noah took a deep breath and said, “There are these images in my head. Images I can’t get out because they block access to something worse. The unspeakable things that I saw myself doing in those images—” he stopped short and stared at nothing in particular. I sat perfectly still, holding my breath for him to continue. “I control them, for the most part. I don’t let them become me. But there’s still this—this thing inside me, this regret and anger that pushes out from way down deep, because Selene was my fault.