Decadence

by Monique Miller

  “Come back to the room with me,” he says in my ear.

  I look him. I want to slap him. I feel like I'm being played even though that's not fair to him. These feelings I have toward him are unfair and I know it. I know he can see the hurt written all over my face. Unjustifiable hurt that has no excuse to rear its ugly head.

  He puts his hand in my hand. He kisses me. An apology kiss. I want to tell him I don't want his apology, but I say nothing. I pulls me toward the bedroom and I follow him.

  He picks me up, puts me on the bed, lays me there as if I'm a precious doll. His precious doll. I hate that I like it. Hate and love are cohabitating with me, something I never wanted. Something I thought I'd grown too much, had come too far, and was too intelligent to fall victim to. And yet I'm here. I guess it's in my genes.

  His hardness is aimed at me. I want to tell him that I don't want his apology fuck. I don't want his pity fuck. I don't want to feel his pity cum inside me. Instead of saying any of what I'm thinking I close my eyes, moan and grab at his skin as he enters me.

  He fucks me. He makes me cum. He cums inside of me. He makes me just as much his as Candice is.

  I feel guilt. I feel shame. I feel like crying, but I lay there and try to catch my breath instead.

  ***

  I wake up again at six in the morning. I hear the sounds of the city coming alive outside as the world moves on all around us.

  I wake up and I see Chris gazing down at Candice's face, running his hand so gently over her, I know I've woken up to a private moment he didn't intend for either of us to witness.

  Love. Hate. Lust. It all lives in this bed with us.

  We wanted to do whatever we wanted as children, and now that we are, I feel lost. We're doing whatever we want in this den of decadence, this lair of lust, this haven of hedonism. Our sins, our secrets live here.

  I stare at Chris. He stares at me.

  He leans across Candice and kisses me. Tongues me. Tongues me with passion as if Candice isn't right beside us and we're the only two people who exist.

  The only two that matter.

  Our lust. Our game. Our repercussions.

  Coming July 20, 2013

  Also by Monique Miller

  Bed of Thorns (A novel)

  (for mature audiences)

  One annual list. Eleven girls. One annual college calendar with the power to change a girl’s life forever.

  Hawthorn University’s traditional Bed of Thorns calendar is what a lot of the senior female students look forward to being a part of, to see if Isabel “Bel” Thorn, university president, will choose one of them to be one of the few selected to be featured, out of over a thousand of their peers, to pose for one of the months of the year. A lot of them, it seems, except maybe senior Alicia Goode, who is dealing with her breakup from her boyfriend of four years.

  At twenty-two years old, there is so much Alicia hasn’t experienced, so much she doesn’t know--and she knows it. She just wants the chance to explore before she settles down with anybody. After she does a little in depth research on their school she realizes that she and Bel Thorn could have a lot more in common than she ever thought. Not only does she begin to have a new outlook on the university and her school president, but towards her future in general.

  Then there are the Thorn men, Bel’s gorgeous and successful sons who offer her some of the experiences she craves, and if she’s willing, a chance to take her down a road she hadn’t dreamed of, for a ride she won’t soon forget.

  Chapter One

  ~

  Being Human

  Breaking up in a hotel, no matter how nice the room was, felt tacky. Mine and Ryan’s on and off, but mostly on, four year relationship had its ups and downs, but it had also had more than its fair share of special moments. Very special. Too special for me to ever forget. Too special to demean by ending what we had in a room that people looked at as a reserve for a high end fuck.

  But a hotel room was the hand I’d been dealt and I had to deal with it because this was my last chance. No matter how I looked at it, this ending wasn’t going to be perfect; there was no such thing as a picture perfect breakup.

  As soon as I made my way up to the room he had spent his money on for us for an entire weekend as he’d been doing for the past six months since he moved to Charlotte to start his new job, I excused myself, made a beeline for the bathroom, told him I had to pee. It was only a half omission; I did have to pee, but I wanted to look at myself one last time in the mirror before I became my own bonafide monster, the type of girl who was about to tell her boyfriend, her fiancé, that had done nothing wrong, that she didn’t want to be with him anymore after he had just asked her to be with him forever.

  When I was younger I couldn’t believe the girls who did that, who would hurt someone like that. They weren’t women; they were girls, selfish little girls. I hated them. Now I was one of them. And I felt bad for not truly being able to say that I hated myself.

  I smoothed down my windblown hair, surprised that I didn’t look nearly as bad as I felt. I’d expected to see ashen skin, dry lips, red puffy eyes, but instead I looked fresh. Tousled at the most; it was the kind of look Ryan always said he liked. That made me feel worse. He always said it made me look beautiful when I was just off my bike, like a California girl on the wrong side of the country.

  That was just one of the things I had always liked about Ryan, he’d never made a big deal about my looks. He told me I was beautiful, gorgeous, and every other word you could imagine a guy telling the girl he loved to convince her that her looks were superior rather than average, reassuring her that she was better than most, his favorite, and all the while he had never made me feel as if I were different like the way I had always felt growing up. The way he looked at me made me feel like the only girl in the universe, the only girl in the universe that he wanted.

  The only time he had really mentioned my looks in any detail and made me at least realize that he wasn’t completely blind was when he brought up how I thought our kids would like if we had any. With my mixture of Korean and African American genetics and his Irish-Italian ancestry he wondered if the Asian gene would be dominant no matter what. At the mere mention of a future together, the possibility of children tying me to another person as long as I lived, I felt my body go rigid in his arms. I didn’t say anything. The idea of what he’d just said made me go numb, speechless.

  Ryan, on the other hand, laughed, and squeezed me tighter. “Don’t freak out, it’s just a hypothetical question. Relax.”

  But I could tell it hadn’t been just a hypothetical scenario he’d been throwing at me. He’d been feeling me out, wanting some kind of answer one way or the other. I knew he wanted an answer I couldn’t give, and he proved it by asking me to marry him two years after trying to laugh it off.

  I had to be stupid. Most girls would do anything to be with a guy like Ryan. At first, I told myself there were a jitter for everything and that was all there was to it. Engagement jitters. A little cold feet. Ryan was a great guy, husband material, honest, hard working, loyal to a fault. He forgave people when he shouldn’t have and bailed them out of trouble when they didn’t deserve it. He had a promising career in front of him and a clean past behind him--a rarity. He was any woman’s dream man.

  But not mine.

  What was wrong with me?

  The truth was, there was no excuse that I could use--not my age, or the fact that my sister I were orphaned when I was still in the single digits--all I could admit, in the end, was the truth itself. The truth was, it didn’t feel right. I didn’t want to pledge my forever to Ryan when I had doubts from the beginning. I didn’t want to be his wife. I didn’t want to be anybody’s wife. At least not now. Then again, I wasn’t sure if I ever would.

  Commitment. Long term. Marriage. The diamond on my left hand felt like a weight bearing down on that one little finger, like a rock that could take me to the bottom of the ocean. Heavy and damning.

  I looked at my
reflection in the mirror again, at the girl who’d said yes when she should have politely closed the ring box, pushed it back towards him and told him I would think about it. But there was no real etiquette when turning down a proposal. Not really. No matter what anybody said.

  I looked at myself in the mirror again, silently trying to convince myself that I was doing both of us a favor. My whole heart wasn’t in it and I was adult enough to admit that and that had to count for something. Yet, no matter what I said, that didn’t stop my heart from beating like a jackhammer in my chest, my palms from sweating, my mind giving me dual instructions--one part telling me to go back in there and get it over with, pull the band-aid off before he started talking about setting a date and sending out invitations, while the other part was trying to get me to chicken out, spare feelings, spare pain, wait and see what happened instead of breaking it off.

  But I knew I couldn’t stay in the bathroom forever.

  I opened the door and he was already laying down on the bed, his arms folded, his head resting on them as he flipped through the channels, the remote poised near his ear. He was comfortable in my presence in nearly every way. We had been together long enough that we only got excited with one another about certain things at certain times, nothing was really new anymore. We had grown together and the discovery period was over, and once the discovery was over, there was a nonchalance people tended to share.

  I was about to turn twenty-two in a couple of months and he was twenty-three and the passion was already dying. It hadn’t been completely snuffed out, but I could feel that it was on its way. I didn’t blame Ryan, or me, just our circumstances, lives, changes and the lack thereof. Besides, I was beyond blame. I just needed him to hear me.

  “Can we talk?” I asked him as I moved tentatively over to the bed, watching him as he watched me make my way over to him.

  “Lay down beside me,” he had already turned his attention back to the TV screen. “We can talk after I watch this play.”

  Something was on, some game or another. Sports had never been my thing of interest and I hadn’t even pretended for Ryan’s sake. I heard the uproar of a crowd, possibly a whistle blowing, announcers droning on and on, at least to my ears it was droning. They could have been excited for all I knew or cared. It was noise and nonsense to me, but Ryan was engrossed.

  “Now, Ryan.” I felt like the nagging girlfriend, the nagging fiancée, the nagging wife-to-be. Just thinking of all the titles that anyone could use, and had used since we’d gotten engaged, to describe me were making my head hurt.

  He sighed heavily, glanced at me, annoyance written all over on his face, as he reached over and muted the volume then made a huge show of just how much he was being inconvenienced by the way he sat up from where he’d been so comfortable.

  “What’s so important that it can’t wait about five more minutes?” his eyes were going from my face to the TV screen, darting back and forth like it was a game itself.

  Ripping it off was the best approach in spite of the fact that I dreaded it.

  Ryan saw it somehow in my face, my eyes, before I did anything at all. I knew because whatever he’d wanted to watch so badly became less of a priority and I was no longer on the backburner of his attention.

  The rehearsal of my words in my head hadn’t meant a thing when it came right down to it since an aching lump had already formed in my throat and I couldn’t talk.

  I lowered my eyes, slid the ring off my finger without looking back up at him, but I could feel him staring at me as my eyes filled with tears. I hadn’t expected myself to cry, I hadn’t wanted to either. Tears from me at this point just felt manipulative. Malevolent. I was the villain in this story, and villains didn’t deserve to shed tears.

  I tried to hand him the ring, but he didn’t take it. Still, I couldn’t look up into his eyes. I laid the ring on the bed in the space between us.

  “But why?” He asked me in a small voice. It was too small a voice for a six foot tall solidly built lacrosse player that wasn’t afraid of snakes, that came to my rescue when I saw a rat, that could lift me off the ground and carry me across the campus grounds or farther. I was reminded of the time I sprained my ankle and he’d carried me all the way to the emergency room. He never slowed down, he’d remained steady the entire way there.

  I looked down at the ring, all the excuses I could spew on the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t want to hurt him anymore than needed. There was no point in anything of the sort.

  “I’m not ready, Ry,” I told him, surprised at the pain in my own voice. I’d never heard my own feelings echo so acutely. It made me uncomfortable. “I can’t.”

  “Is that what this is about?” He sounded relieved. “Lea, baby, we haven’t even set a date yet. There’s no rush, nobody’s pressuring you.”

  Pressure. After he proposed to me in a roomful of family and friends-- both his parents, his stepparents, his sisters, my sister, my uncle and aunt, my roommate--he tells me there is no pressure when that was all that I felt the moment he got down on one knee in front of all of those familiar faces. I would have laughed at the irony of his statement, but I couldn’t even muster an ounce of sarcasm.

  “It’s not that,” I tried to explain but the words were like glue in my mouth. Calling everything off was harder than I thought. “Not how you think it is. I can’t do this.”

  “Do what?” He threw up both his arms and let out a humorless laugh. “Look, we’re the same as we’ve always been. It’s still you and me. Nothing’s changed.”

  “Maybe that’s a part of the problem.” There, I said it. But I still couldn’t look him directly in the eye. I didn’t feel brave, I felt like a coward. I never should have accepted his ring, never should have said yes. This conversation should have taken place weeks ago. Guilt and sorrow weighed on my heart, pressing down my thoughts. Any courage I’d gained in the bathroom was trying to elude me now, but I held onto it. I needed it.

  “What do you mean by that?” His tone was accusatory. I took that as my cue to look up, look him in the eye, be a woman and speak my peace, be a woman and do what I had to do. Get it over with, pull the band-aid off, rip off skin if I had to. Make both of us bleed.

  “What I mean is I shouldn’t have said yes when I said it, that’s what I mean.”

  “What the hell is this about, Lea?” He stood up, agitated, pacing in a small circle. I watched him fall apart slowly as I pulled myself together bit by bit.

  “I thought about doing this over the phone, save you the time and the money, but I didn’t want to cheapen what we had.”

  “Had.” He stopped pacing, we faced each other. He wasn’t asking a question, he heard the finality in my voice.

  “I still love you,” I told him.

  “Then what’s the problem? And don’t tell me that bullshit about you love me, but you’re not in love with me. This isn’t a movie or some stupid book. If you love me, you love me, that’s all I need to know.” He ran his hand over his auburn hair, shut his eyes, squeezed them tight. When he opened them they no longer looked their usual shade of green. It was a color I didn’t recognize at all. “You know where I stand.”

  “Do I?” I felt the frown on my face, squirmed and decided not to think too much anymore. I was over thinking the situation when I should have just been doing what I’d come to do in the first place. “Do I really know where you stand? Do you know where I stand? Not just about tomorrow, or next week, or next year even, but on what kind of life we’d have together in the long run.”

  “We’ll figure it out!” He inhaled a shaky breath, trying not to be so frustrated, trying to even his tone, bring his voice down a decibel or two. I could see his struggle on the inside rising. One of his bad qualities was surfacing; he wanted what he wanted, damn anyone else. That was just one of his selfish points. “Put the ring back on your finger, tell me this was all cold feet, and we’ll have the rest of our lives to figure out whatever it is you want to figure out in the long run.”

&n
bsp; “That would be childish.”

  “No, that’s life.”

  “Then I don’t want that kind of life,” I said. “I want to know what I’m getting into, don’t you?”

  “You know me, Lea,” his tone was pleading. “You know I love you, you’ve known me since you were seventeen years old. Your sister introduced us. Your sister trusts me with you more than she trusts anyone else.”

  “Don’t bring my sister into this, it’s not fair.”

  “You don’t want me to mention Shana because you know she won’t agree with what you’re doing,” he sounded as if he’d found the chink in my armor and he intended to use the wiggle room it allowed. “Shana knows you better than anyone on earth, you and I both know that, and she knows that you and I are meant to be together. If I bring her up, you have to face that and you know it.”

  “Shana wouldn’t be the one marrying you.” I told him.

  “Wow,” he took two steps back, away from me, as if I’d just unduly slapped him across the face and he hadn’t seen it coming. “We’ve been together four years, you’ve been wearing my ring claiming to be my fiancée for the past two months, and now you’re repulsed at the idea of being my wife.”

  “Don’t be overdramatic.”

  “You’re calling off our engagement and you’re telling me I’m being overdramatic?”

  “Do you want kids?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” I had no intention of backing down just because he seemed intent on dodging questions. “Do you want children? Eventually? In the future?”

  “Of course I do.” He said it without hesitation.

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “You’re just saying that,” he waved his hand in my direction, dismissing my declaration as if it were nothing at all. “You will one day. Everyone does.”