by Bromberg, K
“I asked him to do it. But he didn’t want to really. So, it was just me wishing I hadn’t asked.”
“I wanted to,” I said.
“I got that.”
“Stay here.”
“Yes, Lord.” She smirked.
I hesitated, enjoying the nickname but unsure of exactly what she meant, then I got aloe gel from the bathroom cabinet. Sitting on the edge of the mattress, I squeezed a pile into my palm, then flattened it between my hands to warm it.
“I used to think it was anger. You know, this urge to hit someone? What else could it be? I was in therapy for my ‘unexpressed rage.’ It was useless.”
She hummed some sort of agreement or sympathy. I spread the aloe on her bottom. It tightened in protest.
“Relax,” I whispered. “Breathe.”
She inhaled deeply. Her muscles loosened.
“After Samantha died…” My hand stopped moving for a moment. Why was I still lying? “After she took her own life, I knew what real anger was. I was a monster. I was mad at myself, at her, everything. Therapy was a bust… so I found an outlet.”
“Random women in Silver Lake,” she said with the side of her mouth not smashed against the pillow.
“Not random. Friends of friends who liked getting what I had to give.” The aloe was gone, but I kept massaging her ass anyway, appreciating the way my fingers made divots in the raised skin. I wanted to tell her things I hadn’t told anyone. Things I hadn’t even thought of in years. I didn’t know where to start, nor could I calculate where it would end. “This is going to sting tomorrow. Think of me when it does.”
“Yes, Lord Byron.”
“No one’s ever called me that.”
“Are you serious?”
“Very.”
“The lack of imagination is shocking.”
Her yawn was so relaxed I smiled with a deep satisfaction.
In the time I’d been fucking women who wanted their asses raw, I’d heard a lot about how they felt sleepy and drained after an encounter. How they needed to be cared for and tended to. But little had been said about the soreness of the dominant partner’s palms or the feelings of tenderness and appreciation. They were as overwhelming as a drug I knew would wear off.
With Olivia, I was again overcome, but the attack on my senses went deeper. The doubt at the bottom of my heart had been scraped, and the wisdom of experience washed away.
With a hand slick with aloe, I teased her pussy and worked back to her ass, teasing the place that would seal my ownership of her.
We were in that bed for a single goal that tight little hole wouldn’t achieve.
But I had to.
Like an animal with no sense, just needs, I had to plant myself everywhere inside her.
This was how a smart man turned stupid.
Chapter 30
OLIVIA
I was droopy and passive, fully awake but relaxed to the point of listlessness, letting his hands course over my raw ass and between my legs, then my ass cheeks, until he found the opening. It loosened for him, and I groaned.
For a moment, he froze, then he spread my cheeks apart, exposing a place no one had seen. Still spreading me open, he ran a finger across it, then circled, stimulating the muscle and nerves.
“How does that feel?” he asked.
I looked at him over my shoulder. He didn’t look back. His gaze was fixed on my most private place, and instead of being ashamed, I was aroused.
“Good.”
He looked up at me before bending his face toward it. His tongue, warm and wet, ran along the awakened nerves, loosening what he teased. Blood flowed between my legs, and I came alive again, ready for his dick.
He got up on his knees.
“What if I did this?” he said, pushing the tip of his finger into my ass.
I sucked air through my teeth. “Good.”
With his free hand, he squeezed a line of aloe onto me. “Or this.”
He went deeper and pulled out. The sensation was unusual, enormous, stirring. When he pushed back in, he used the tips of two fingers.
“I want to fuck you here,” he said.
That wouldn’t get me pregnant. My asshole was outside the scope of the deal.
But everything about this was outside the scope of the deal.
“It’ll hurt,” I said because fuck the deal.
“Does this hurt?” He buried two fingers in me, stretching me in the most pleasurable way. I groaned and stiffened with arousal.
“No.” I pushed my hips against his hand. “But your dick’s huge.”
“It’ll only hurt for a second if I do it right.” He bent over me to whisper in my ear, “And I will.”
Still inside me, he turned me to my back, opening my legs. His dick was a deep-red rod, and right before he dipped his face between my legs, his expression was hunger. His tongue flicked my clit as his fingers fucked and stretched me, binding two places that hadn’t been bound before.
I clutched his hair as he brought me to the edge, then he put a third finger inside. The shot of pain racked my body but was pulled back by the very beginnings of an orgasm.
“Let me take your beautiful ass,” he said. “Tell me to stop if you need to. But you won’t. You’ll come harder than you’ve ever come before.”
“Yes,” I agreed through my teeth. “Do it.”
“Good.” He gave my nub a couple of flicks of reward. “You’re so good.”
When his fingers came out, I felt an uncomfortable openness. He squeezed more aloe on it and touched the widening circle with careful attention, then he shifted me to my side and got behind me, lifting my top leg high.
“Slow. I’ll go slow. Just relax.” His head pressed against my ass, slowly stretching it as he breathed against the back of my neck.
“Ow,” I said when the pain pinched.
He touched my clit, and the pleasure joined the hurt in a coupling only he could make. “Push out like you’re fighting.”
It didn’t make sense, but I obeyed him, and when I did, my ass opened for him. Inch by inch, he worked his way in, and the pain never turned to agony. It disappeared like my inhibition.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m all the way in your ass,” he said. Every word was arousing.
“Fuck it,” I squeaked.
He pulled out only to drive in again, pushing deep against my raw bottom while tweaking and rubbing my clit.
I’d never felt so fully owned, so defiled and worshipped. So abused and cared for. So much freedom held down in a man’s arms.
The orgasm was shattering enough to break bones, stop hearts, and cause madness. My senses shut down, and my consciousness left my body. I was watching myself go rigid, hearing myself scream, feeling the pulse of his cock as he came in my ass as if I was sitting a foot away.
“Byron,” I said in a gasp after he jerked his hips for the last time.
“Thank you,” he replied, gently pulling out, leaving the muscle with a strange openness. “You’re perfect.” He kissed my shoulder.
I rolled onto my back, and he crawled on top of me to kiss my face and neck over and over. I held his face, caressing his cheeks with my thumbs, but no touch could have made me feel closer to him than I did right then.
“How was it?” he asked.
“Perfect.” I wanted to learn every crease in his face. Count his eyelashes. Memorize the crest and slope of this nose. Understand how the blue-and-amber flecks in his eyes made green.
“How do you feel?” he asked with lips too beautiful to fathom.
I was so drunk on sex, so overdosed on intimacy, that I didn’t hear the question as a mental and physical health check. I heard open interest in the state of my heart.
“Lord Byron,” I said with sincere reverence, “I think I love you.”
My mistake was immediately clear in the suddenly cold cast of his face. His reaction sobered me up like a B12 shot.
I should have just tol
d him I was a dead woman.
Chapter 31
BYRON
I was trying to understand what it meant to possess a woman whose life was independent from mine.
Because I owned her. That much was true. My bones knew it with the same certainty that they knew they had to fight gravity from below. What I’d put inside her could never be erased. My ownership was written in her cells, and yet I didn’t have—nor would I ever have—control over her. The facts weren’t in question. Only what it all meant for me to have to ask a woman I owned how she felt because I didn’t know and I needed to. What it meant to anticipate the answer. To have to sort out whether she was minimizing discomfort, then respect the fact that she wanted to for her own reasons.
Maybe in the post-orgasmic bliss, I’d assumed a permanence that wasn’t there, but I was sure that given a moment or a lifetime, I could figure out how independence was possible with someone who was physically part of me. The fact that I couldn’t read her mind or completely understand her heart seemed impossible when I felt so close to her.
Why did we pursue connection when the real miracle was the tenacity of separateness?
“Lord Byron.” My name in her mouth was a familiar and unique song. The words that followed were a shock to my nervous system. “I think I love you.”
The first time she’d said it, my first reaction had been disbelief, like seeing a cheap, plastic Halloween spider. You knew it wasn’t real before your fear centers could tell you otherwise.
But in my bed, with her nakedness under me, the spider was real, and it was poisonous.
My first reaction was to remove it, but I couldn’t.
She was the spider.
I was the spider.
Together, we were a deadly thing I couldn’t get off. It was stuck on the cold slickness of her blue-white skin. The chlorine smell that came out of her mouth when I pumped her chest. The dead bee trapped in her hair when I held her dead body.
No.
It’s nothing.
No.
“It’s nothing.” My thoughts thrust against me so strongly the words came out of my mouth.
Of all the things I would have chosen to reply with to deny or distract from what she’d said, “it’s nothing” wasn’t even on the list.
“I have to pee,” she said, shoving me off her.
“I didn’t mean that,” I said.
“I know.” Naked, proud, standing tall, she swung her hand across the space between us as if showing me how very real it was. “It’s fine. I know the rules.”
She closed the bathroom door behind her. I got into a pair of sweats and washed my hands in the hall bathroom. When I came out, she was looking down the length of the hall.
“Where are my clothes?”
“The patio.”
“Right.” She cocked her pointer finger.
“I’ll get th—”
She was already headed down the stairs.
“Wait.” My most commanding, calm, forceful voice didn’t even slow her down.
I chased, catching her outside, where she was picking up her pants. She shook them out by the waistband until the legs were right-side out.
“Olivia, listen.”
“Shut up, Byron. Don’t speak.” One leg in. Once she was dressed, she’d be gone.
“I have feelings for you,” I said.
“My problem isn’t with you. It’s with me.” She jammed her foot into the other pant leg as if she wanted to punish it. “You are who you are, and you told me straight out. There’s nothing. Period.”
“There is something.” I got her shirt from under a chair as if helping her get dressed would stop the clock from ticking. “There is. I’ve never let a woman inside this house. I’ve never—”
“Do you understand that I’ll never stay in the lines?” She snapped the shirt from me and threw it on a chair so she could retrieve her bra. “This is who I am. My mind knows the boundaries, but my heart’s hell-bent on jumping fences.”
She looked away as she unraveled her bra.
“I’m thirty-two years old,” she said as she looped her arms through it. “I know myself and what I feel. I can’t pretend otherwise. I’m in love with you, and I won’t lie about it anymore.”
She reached behind her back to fasten the hooks.
“Turn around.” I reached for her. “Let me—”
“Don’t touch me.”
I was left with empty hands while she hooked herself.
“I want you.” The words felt new on my lips because they were true in a different way.
She shoved her arms into her sleeves. “I know. That changes nothing.”
She buttoned faster than I’d thought possible. Once her shoes were on, she was gone, and that would be it. I’d lose the chance to convince her to her face. I saw the shoes by the patio rail, one sitting upright with an open mouth, the other tipped to the side. I got between her and the shoes.
“Beautywalker.”
She spotted the shoes behind me and crossed her arms. “Please, Byron.”
“Listen to me. I’ve never met anyone like you. I was dead inside. I was chasing meaningless objects and trying to force some kind of order in my life just so I’d feel something again. But I didn’t. None of it worked. I forgot why I was doing it. I forgot what it was like to feel anything. I was made of dry sticks and gunpowder. You were the spark I was waiting for. You set me on fire.”
“What does that mean?”
“I was trying to possess you, but all this time, you owned me. We walked the earth as two separate people, but I was yours and you were mine.”
“Do you love me?” she asked. “Can you? Ever? Do you need more time? Just tell me, is this a waste? Is it just about the baby, or can it… will it ever be more for you?”
“Come inside. Please. Let’s talk.”
I reached for her, but she pulled away.
“Just tell me. Yes or no?”
It was so close to what Samantha had said to me that night that I nearly choked.
And my answer had been wrong.
My answer had killed her. How could I say it again?
“Why are these words so important? Do you want me to recite it from a script? Write you a fucking note? Here. I have an idea. We’ll have a lawyer draw up a contract. We’ll outline the exact meaning of every word and why it changes anything.”
“It changes everything.”
“How? We agreed to a baby together. Period.”
“You don’t get it.” She unfurled her arms to point at me with stiff accusation. “I love you, you shithead. I need to be loved back.”
“You’re mine. That’s the end of it. It’s more than we agreed to, and it’s the end.” I slashed the air at the invisible boundary.
“It’s not enough. I want a family with someone who loves me. I’m sorry I changed my mind. I’m sorry if that breaks our agreement. But I sold myself short. I don’t want to settle anymore. I want it all, and I want it with you.”
“You can’t have it all.”
“Yes, I can.”
“Not with me.”
The finality of those three words was harder than I’d expected. Even before the last syllable left my lips, regret got in line to follow, making a little nn of denial at the end. But my fear held the rest back.
She pointed at my feet. “My shoes.”
“Olivia, listen. Don’t go.”
She picked up her bag, and with bare feet on the gravel, she walked onto the driveway. After scooping up her shoes, I ran to her, catching up as she opened the car door.
“You mean something to me,” I said, handing over her shoes.
“Get a puppy.” She tossed them in the passenger side and got behind the wheel.
“I don’t want a puppy.” I was growling, and that wasn’t going to work. I breathed. “I want you. All of you. Your fight. Your laugh. Your body. The moments in between that hold it all together. They’re mine. They’ve always been mine.”
She starte
d the car. The open-door alarm beeped. “That’s not love.”
“So what?”
She tried to close the door, but I held it open.
“Let go,” she said calmly, “before I take your fucking arm off.”
I let go.
“Don’t call me,” she said, grasping the handle. “I mean it.”
She slammed the door and clicked the locks, then drove away without looking.
Chapter 32
OLIVIA
When I got far enough away from Byron’s house, I put the top down, thinking the wind would blow the shit out of my head. But it didn’t because my mind was already as clear as the cloudless night above me.
I pulled into my driveway and sat there, looking out the windshield. When the engine clicked into silence and the headlights blinked off, I stayed under the starry sky. I was afraid to move. Afraid to tempt time into going forward, even though—with or without me—it continued its cruel march.
If I couldn’t have all of Byron, I’d break under the weight of the pieces he couldn’t give me. My body throbbed for him. I was sore, raw, tender, and hurt in places no one could see. He’d done this to me because I’d needed him to.
The wounds would heal, but who would open them again?
Only him.
I loved him.
He couldn’t love me back. He wanted to. His pleas had been strained with his desire to give me what I needed, but he couldn’t. He’d stayed honest. I respected that. Even loved it. But I couldn’t live with it.
Sitting in my car with the crickets and night birds making their mating calls, I created a new reality without Byron Crowne.
Time was a zero-sum game.
Time was heartless but consistent.
Time would never change, even if, in the course of its cruel passage, I did.
* * *
Though time is linear, life is not. It curves, and if you let it arc long enough without reversing course, it will come full circle. For me, the ends met at a place of wisdom. I wanted the same things I’d always wanted, but this time I knew that I was settling for less than everything.