Muscle

by Lexi Whitlow

  I put my hand to her shoulder. “It’s okay, Skye. Everything is okay.” I’m quiet for a second. It occurs to me that she’s taken this crusade on as her own. And, why wouldn’t she? It’s become her life. She wakes up here each day, works here, and she falls into bed with me at night. She’s been doing it for two weeks now—and finally, Marta has granted us an extended visit with Skye. More than our outing at the park—and more time than I’ve had in years. It’s probably more for fact-gathering, probably to bring us down.

  It doesn’t matter.

  There’s no way I’m letting this opportunity escape. I want, more than anything, to have Brie here. And Skye feels like a part of that. Something tightens deep in my center when I think that she’ll decide to leave after all of this—after the documents are signed and Brie is officially in my custody.

  I won’t let it on, not now, not after all she’s done for me.

  I’ll stay silent.

  I don’t know, sitting here next to her, if I can bear another loss. But when I think of the years I invested with Tabitha, I know I’d go insane if she stayed any longer than she’s planning to. If she does—if I invest the years into the two of us, hell, the three of us as a family—it’ll be that much worse when she does leave.

  These past weeks have made me realize who I really am. With Skye, I’m sober—truly sober for the first time. It leaves me to think too much, and I’ve started to understand that I’m a fuckup of the highest order. She’s not one of the girls I bring home after the bar closes. She’s more than that, and I won’t hold her here with any stupid confessions.

  She leaps out of bed, her curvy frame illuminated against the light of the window for a second. She’s far more comfortable with her body now, like she’s become accustomed to her own skin. “I need to get the kitchen cleaned. You do the nightstand. And I’ll make sure the bathroom is how it’s supposed to be—”

  She starts pulling on clothes from the pile in the center of the floor. Without thinking, she picks up one of my t-shirts and pulls it on over her naked frame. It covers her body down to her hips, and her nipples are still stiff beneath the fabric.

  “You should get back in bed,” I say. My cock has already started to swell, and I bring my hand to it, watching her. I stroke myself, and her eyes are drawn to it. She’s come to crave my cock—like a drug. An addiction.

  She smiles, but her eyes don’t move. “We can’t. We don’t have time.”

  I look over at the clock. It’s still on the floor next to our mattress.

  There’s time. I’ll make time for this.

  She steps closer to the bed, and I catch her hand, pulling her down onto the bed with me. I cup her breasts through my shirt. Roughly, I pull her on top of me. I grab the flesh of her thighs, maybe too hard. I like to see my bruises there each morning. I grunt, pressing my cock against the hot folds of her pussy.

  “You’re wet. You want it. Give in.”

  “There’s so much to do,” she says. But she’s already brought her hand to her clit, fingers circling it. Her eyes roll back in her head, and she starts to move against me. Using me for her pleasure.

  “You want to please me, don’t you?”

  “Mm hm,” she moans. Slowly, she moves forward and lets my cock enter her. She’s just as slick and hot as the first time.

  Her legs straddle mine, knees on the mattress. My cock is buried inside of her, filling her to the hilt. She moans softly and starts moving on top of me, and I can barely stand the pressure, the feeling of fitting with her body so perfectly, so fully.

  “Lean forward, baby,” I say, my voice coming out in a low growl. When she does, I take her breasts in my hands and push the shirt up further, rolling her nipples between my thumbs and forefingers. She cries out, a little strangled sound from her throat.

  She likes it like this. Impaled on my huge cock, her clit grinding against my skin. Skye starts to ride me, finding her rhythm, and she pushes her body against mine, hitting me hard each time. I bring one hand down to her sex, my fingers finding her clit and pushing on either side of it as she slams down on my cock, riding me faster and faster.

  Her pussy swells and tightens against me, and I can see the ridges of muscle in her abdomen growing tight. As much as she doesn’t want to admit it, she’s needs this cock, and I never fail to make her come right away. All her words are mere teasing. I know how to play this woman like an instrument.

  “Oh fuck, baby, I’m going to come,” she sighs, bringing one hand to her exposed breast and gripping my arm with the other.

  “Good,” I whisper. “I’m not going to wait much longer.” I feel the familiar tightening in my balls, the feeling before release. I’ve felt it thousands of times, with plenty of other women—but nothing compares to this. Skye is the first girl since Tabitha that I’ve fucked bare, and the first in years that I’ve been with fully sober.

  “Fill me up,” she cries. “Come inside of me.” She opens her eyes and looks down at me. “Please.”

  “You want to come with me, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, baby, I do.” Her voice is raspy with need. She’s desperate for it. “I want to feel you come when I do.”

  The feeling rips through me like a tidal wave, bold and unstoppable. “Unngh,” I moan, pushing up inside of her, filling her with my hot essence.

  She’s fucking me in a frenzy now, her clit hitting my fingers with each movement. She cries out, her body tensing and releasing, shaking as she comes with my cock deep inside of her. Skye rides me through wave after wave of her orgasm. Each time another peak hits her, it seems like she’s reaching greater and greater heights.

  “Oh God. Oh God,” she moans, though the sensations in her body have nothing to do with the Lord. Her pleasure has everything to do with how I work her body, and she knows it. I release one final jet inside of her, and she falls against me, finally satisfied.

  We stay that way for a while. The seconds bleed into minutes, and our bodies are a tangled mass, like we’re one person, made whole. That’s how it has been since our wedding night. I’ve thought, again and again, that maybe this is how it should be—this feeling of wholeness.

  But that’s a dangerous thought to have.

  Even so, I kiss her on her forehead, tasting the salt of her perspiration. I run my fingers through her hair and shift in the bed so we’re eye to eye.

  “We need to get moving,” she says. She yawns. I know she hasn’t been sleeping well since Marta told us we could have Brie for a night. Like me, she knows that this could mean failure for us—for me. We’re like a green card couple, waiting for the interview, hoping we answer the questions right. “You need to put together—”

  “The night stand.” I smile. “I’ve put together a fucking hundred pieces of Ikea shit like that before. I won’t have a problem. I’m always the one that my brothers call when they need stuff like that done. I’m a master with the Allen wrench.”

  She laughs, snorting slightly and then drawing in closer to me. “And I’ll get the Moana DVD from RedBox. Has she seen it?”

  I shake my head. “Probably not. Marta doesn’t let her do much except for homework. All the cute, happy pictures she posts of Brie on Facebook—that’s all fake. It’s like Brie’s some kind of prize that she won, something she’s showing off so her friends will think she’s something more than an angry old woman.”

  “Isn’t she friends with a bunch of other angry old women?”

  I shrug, still holding Skye close. “I don’t know. I know that she’s told me she loves to post pictures of Brie because she’s so beautiful, and everyone loves her girl.”

  Skye scrunches up her nose. “That’s sick.”

  “She’s a sick person. A narcissist. She shouldn’t be allowed around any child. Not after what she did to Tabitha and her brother.” A cold weight sits in the bottom of my stomach when I mention Tabby and Michael.

  “What—what did happen?” Skye pulls the covers tight around her. “You don’t talk about it.”

>   The weight grows heavier. “She overdosed.” My voice is more clipped than it should be, but that’s how it happens when I talk about Brie’s mother. “And Michael—Tabitha’s brother—he killed himself a long time ago. Before I knew Tabby.”

  “And you think it was Marta—”

  “She wasn’t the one who killed them. They took care of that part.” My throat threatens to close. I can almost taste the tears coming, but they remain dormant for now. It’s been that way for years—the memory of Tabitha sits knotted inside my body, angry and awful. “But she put them down at every turn. She made sure they feared her, that they feared the world.”

  “You were married to her, right? Tabitha?” Her voice is quiet, but searching. A question she’s been too afraid to ask. I told her I never talk about Tabby, and I don’t. But the words spill out now.

  “We were. She was pregnant with Brie, and she’d gotten clean for the hundredth time at the beginning of her pregnancy. We thought we’d give it ago, make it happen for the kid. We both wanted her. And she was beautiful from the day she was born. Smart. Smarter than either of us.” I stop. The lump in my throat grows, but I swallow the pain. “We weren’t meant to be a pair. I doubt I was meant to be a pair with anyone.”

  I don’t meet Skye’s gaze after this. Instead, I’m silent. I roll away from her, and her arms let me go reflexively. I walk into the bathroom without a pause. I know I should stay, explain myself. But I had to take my four-year-old girl to her own mother’s funeral, and then I proceeded to fuck up my life for the next two years.

  I step into the shower and let the water run over me. I let it get as hot as I can stand, and I just stay there. The steam fills the bathroom. I barely hear her enter, but there’s a slight change in the water pressure when she goes to brush her teeth.

  “I wish it had all been different, Skye.” I say it halfheartedly, hoping she can’t hear me clearly. I hear the water turn off, and a shadow approaches the clear shower door.

  She pulls the door open and steps inside, wrapping her arms around my body. The shirt is gone, and there’s nothing between us. She doesn’t speak, and we stay together, bound by our arms, for a long time. When we get out and dry off, we don’t spend any more words on the past. My brother Finn—he might say that we should keep talking. But Skye doesn’t push. I almost wish she would.

  Instead, I hear her scrubbing in the kitchen while I put the nightstand together. In Brie’s room, we have a twin bed with some expensive sheets and a quilt my mom ordered from Pottery Barn Kids. There’s a lamp, too, that matches everything else. I get this nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach, hoping she’ll like it, hoping it’ll make the kindergarten year from Hell way better than it has been. And hoping that it’ll be in use—expensive sheets washed every week, for years to come.

  I smooth out the quilt and look around the room. It’s small, and the walls are bare, but when I turn on the light, it looks warm and pleasant, like it’s a nice room that a little girl could make her own. I sit down on the bed and sigh.

  When I look up, Skye is standing in front of me, dressed in a conservative green dress with little sleeves and a full skirt. She absolutely looks like she’s ready to go sort through books at the local library, and I give her a grin.

  “Don’t say anything. It’s for show.” She smiles back. “But it is one of my favorite dresses for work.” She’s holding something behind her back.

  “What do you have there?”

  “It’s nothing much. But she told me she liked fairy tales, like the old-fashioned kind. So, I got her some stickers for the walls in here.” She shows me the rolled-up mailing tube she has behind her back.

  “It’s like beech trees and some fairies and a castle. So, it’ll be like a little dream world in here.” She blushes. “It’s what I would have wanted when I was little. But my parents wouldn’t let me put anything on the walls. It always felt kind of bare to me. I thought she might want to put the stickers up with you. You know, something fun to do.”

  “Yeah, she’d like that,” I say. Skye is standing in front of me. I’d say it’s like I’m seeing her for the first time, but I think I’ve seen her all along. It’s just that all the pieces are fitting together now, like a puzzle I’ve only just figured out. The light from the kitchen windows filters in behind her, showing off her silhouette. But she’s more than that. Tabitha was too busy getting high for most of Brie’s life that Brie doesn’t even have a memory of her—I was the parent she knew. And Marta ain’t exactly a mother figure. It might be nice if there was someone real. “You know, Skye. I’ve been thinking—”

  “Yeah?”

  I swallow hard. “It’s nice—” Nice. That’s not the right word. “It’s good, I think, having you here—”

  She puts up a hand. “I got what I came for, right? An adventure and a good fuck. I mean, a really good one. Excellent, even. The best.”

  “That’s not what I meant—”

  “Stop. Don’t get weird about this. I really like your little girl. I know what it is to have a shitty childhood. My parents were fine—but restrictive. No boyfriends, no sleepovers, bedtime at seven. No books besides the Bible in the house. I get it.

  “I want her here with you. I’m happy to do it. It’s an adventure. And my boss likes the gossip. She might make it into a story. Says there could be an option for a movie. Who do you think would play me?” She flips her hair to one side. “Maybe Jennifer Lawrence. With dark hair.”

  “She might be able to pull it off,” I say. “But Skye—”

  There’s a knock at the door, and we both look at each other for a second, totally silent. Maybe she’s waiting for me to say something else, but I’m not entirely sure what it is that I want to say.

  We can table that talk for now, but as it is, we’ve got a little girl who needs to see both of our smiling faces at the door.

  Skye

  I walk to the door with a flustered feeling. All the shit that Liam just told me—and the shit he implied on top of what he said—is making my head spin. We'll need to talk about all of that later. It gives me a growing pit of anxiety in my stomach, but I know I need a proper, prim face for Brie. Or at least for Marta.

  My hand goes to the knob, and I freeze. Liam comes up behind me and puts his hand on mine. It calms me—and I hate that it does. It means that he’s getting to me, that he’s already in my head. He owns my body—I can’t consider giving him anything else. Not with the way things stand between us.

  I force a smile as Liam pulls open the door. Marta is standing there, her hand on Brie’s shoulder. The child’s hair is pulled tight into two dark braids—so tight that it looks like it hurts. And she’s dressed in her Catholic school attire, even though it’s Saturday.

  “Brie didn’t do her own laundry, so she got to wear her school clothes today.” Marta gives a sly smile. I admit I don’t know the woman well—but I’m guessing she’s trying to get a rise out of Liam. If I looked hard at the cars parked along the sidewalk, I’m sure I’d see someone from the law firm she’s hired or some creepy guy with a camera. Just waiting to watch Liam blow up.

  I take his hand in mine. “That’s just fine. As long as we’ve got pajamas for movie time. We do, don’t we?”

  Brie gives me a big grin, her face lighting up. “We get to watch a movie?”

  “I don’t think that’s appropriate for Brie. She’s not ahead of her grade level in reading, like she ought to be. That’s where Tabitha always excelled, you know.”

  Liam grips my hand hard. I can feel that he wants to say something. Instead, he takes a deep breath in and lets it out slowly. “We’ll make sure she reads with us tonight and tomorrow morning.” He glances over at me. “Skye got her some books from the library. Magic Treehouse and—”

  “The Princess in Black,” I say. “It’s about a little girl who fights monsters.” I let go of Liam’s hand and bend down to Brie’s level. “She’s a princess, too. What do you think about that?”

  Brie reaches her arm
s and wraps me in a hug. A tight lump forms in my throat. It might have been my sense of curiosity—or adventure, or pure lust—that drew me into all of this. But when I look up at Marta and see her nasty, hateful expression, I know it’s my sense of justice that’s making me stay.

  When we walk inside the house and close the door behind us, I wonder if that’s all it is. Brie runs to her room, tugging Liam behind her. When she’s with him, I see his entire body change. Instead of tight and aggressive, he’s open and calm. When he’s with Brie, he’s the type of man a woman might fall in love with.

  Another woman. Not me.

  I listen to them in the back bedroom—Brie’s room—as they put the vinyl decals up on the wall. When I walk back there to go check on them, the trees are up, and they’re working on the castle sticker, putting it up beside the bed. I watch as Liam smooths the pieces out, making sure there are no bubbles that might destroy the picture they’re working together to create.