by L. D. Davis
“What are you doing here?” I asked stupidly. Of course, I knew why he was there, but I couldn’t help asking the dumb question.
“I called you every day for fourteen and a half days,” Leo launched into what was sure to be an epic fight. “I called you several times a day and sent you countless text messages and you didn’t answer me, not even once. Not one fucking time.”
I dropped my bags on the floor near the door and pushed my sunglasses up into my hair. I put a hand on my hip and one weary hand to my forehead. His tightly wound stance loosened some. His brow came down as he looked at me with a mixture of anger and concern. I knew I looked like shit. I had spent days crying and had hardly eaten anything since I left Miami, hardly slept. I knew there were dark bags under my swollen eyes, and that my skin was pale, and I knew I had lost a few pounds, too. The jeans I purchased in Orlando during my escape from Florida were loose around my waist.
“You don’t look too good,” Leo said, running a hand through his hair.
“You either,” I said, my voice hoarse and sad.
He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping, either, and he had several days’ worth of hair on his face.
“I can’t sleep at night,” he confessed, his voice stressed and cracking as he stepped toward me. “I can’t sleep during the day, either. I can’t do shit, except to pace a hole in the floor worrying about and thinking about you. Why did you leave like that, Tabitha? Fuck,” he said, pushing a hand through his already disheveled hair. “Why didn’t you at least let me know you were okay? You could have answered just once and told me to fuck off and leave you alone.”
“Would you have stopped calling?” I asked coldly.
“No, but at least I would have known you weren’t fucking dead on the side of the road somewhere!” He shouted so loudly that I took an involuntary step backward. “Did you think about that? For four days, I thought something terrible had happened to you! Sandy finally told me you answered her once, just once, but at least we knew you were still breathing.”
“I needed to be alone,” I said defensively.
“I can understand that, I can really understand that,” Leo said quickly, anger still lacing his words. “But you don’t just disappear off of the face of Earth! Not to mention that you promised you wouldn’t do that shit, but there are people who actually give a fuck about you!”
“People who give a fuck about me don’t lie to me!” I shouted back at him. The effort it took to yell made me dizzy, but I didn’t want to appear any weaker than I already did in front of Leo. I fought off the dizziness and just barely kept myself from swaying.
“I didn’t lie to you!”
“You omitted a very vital truth, it’s the same thing!”
“If I would have told you the truth, would you have stayed? Would you have given us a chance?” he asked accusingly.
“That’s not the point!” I yelled.
“That is the point, Tabitha! You wouldn’t have stayed with me if you knew. You wouldn’t have let yourself love me if you knew. I didn’t want what I have with you ruined because of something I don’t have with Leslie.”
“What do you have with Leslie exactly?” I asked, crossing my arms across my chest.
“Finally ready to hear the details, are you?” he asked sarcastically.
I gestured impatiently for him to get on with it.
“Can we at least sit down?” he asked, exasperated.
I shook my head and leaned back against the door. “Tell me. Tell me what you should have told me the night of the party.”
He blew out a long breath.
“We’ve always kept in touch,” he started. “Not often, but she’d send me a Christmas card every year and I’d send her a birthday card or birthday text. Maybe two or three times a year we’d talk on the phone. There were some budget cuts at the school she was teaching at. I offered to help her out with her bills, her rent, whatever she needed, but she had been very careful with her money and she was fine, but what she did ask was if she could stay with me for a couple of weeks. She wanted a vacation, and at the same time, she wanted to check out some of the schools in the area because one of her teacher friends got hired at a school in Boca Raton.” Leo held up his hands and let them drop. “I said okay.”
“So, just like that? She went down there and just like that you guys hooked up?” I asked, not bothering to hide my irritation.
“No, not just like that,” he said calmly. “She only stayed with me for a couple of weeks like she said she would before she went to stay with her girlfriend in Boca Raton. Nothing happened between us then. She found a temporary position in Hollywood, filling in for a teacher on leave, so after about six weeks with her friend in Boca, she came back to my place. We were cool, hanging out, she met my friends, sometimes she’d help me out at the restaurant, and we spent a lot of time at the beach surfing or jet skiing.”
Great, all of the things I didn’t like to do.
My irritation was growing with every word he said, though. It’s not that anything they did was worth being irritated about, not really, but I remembered texting Leslie during those months and when she did bother to answer, she never mentioned Leo, or even the fact that she was in Florida.
“So, what happened? What changed?” I asked impatiently.
Leo sighed heavily. “I tried to set her up with one of my buddies, and she kindly declined.” He sighed again and rubbed his forehead like I had done earlier, wearily. “She said that she didn’t want anyone else, that she only wanted me, and if I didn’t want her back she’d understand.”
A lump the size of a basketball formed in my throat. I stroked my neck, trying to push it down before it choked me, before it suffocated me.
“But you did want her back,” I croaked.
“Wanted…” he shrugged. “Not the way she wanted me, I guess, but…she was…familiar. I was looking for something a little more…settled, and Leslie was there and ready to try to settle down with me, but my heart…”
“Did she get pregnant before or after you proposed to her?” I cut him off, asking the question with an undercurrent of venom.
“I didn’t propose,” he objected. “We—”
“Before or after?” I shouted.
He stared at me hard for a long moment. “She got pregnant before we talked about getting married,” he said quickly. “But I didn’t propose. It was a conversation. We—”
“How far along was she when she lost the baby? And how long after that before you two broke up?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said in a whisper, shaking his head.
“If it doesn’t matter, get the fuck out,” I said, pulling open the door.
“Tabitha, close the damn door,” Leo said in a tone only a little louder than his whisper.
“How far along was she when she lost the baby and how long after that before you two broke up?” I demanded, saying each word clearly.
Leo walked across the room and slammed the door shut. When I tried to move away from him, he grabbed a hold of my arms and pushed me up against the door. He caged me in, putting an arm on either side of my head.
“She was five months pregnant,” he said, his voice sharp, but low. “She was five months pregnant when she gave birth to a little girl, a tiny little girl that could fit in the palm of my hand.” He held his hand in my face, demonstrating how small she must have been. “She lived for an hour; she struggled through her life—if you want to call an hour life—for an hour. Her name is—was—Nicola Leslie Pesciano. Three months after our daughter died, I knew I couldn’t stay with Leslie. I love her, but she didn’t then nor now have my heart. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with her. Every fucking day that I was with her, I thought about you. When Nicola died, I did the best I could to comfort Leslie, but I wanted you so damn bad, Tabitha. I wanted you to comfort me. It wasn’t fair to hold on to Leslie when I really didn’t want her, so I let her go.”
My arms hung limply at my sides as I was slammed wit
h conflicting feelings. I was sorry, very sorry for what Leo and Leslie lost. I was angry and hurt, so damn angry and hurt because this was how I had to find out. Leslie and I hadn’t been close in a long time, but this, she should have told me about. I felt so rejected by her and it hurt me more than I expected it could. I felt guilty, god did I feel guilty, because she went through the worst event of her life with Leo. They shared something precious, personal, and tragic and then I, the very person who promised her I would never, ever do such a thing, swept in and took the man she loved while she was still reeling from her loss.
It didn’t matter that I didn’t know about what happened, I knew about the code, the pact. I knew about that, and I broke it.
“I. Need. You,” Leo said, his voice tremoring. “I need you. It still hurts, and you are the only person in the whole damn world that eases the pain, Tabitha. Please.”
Tears blurred my vision, but I could see the pain in his eyes from anywhere in the universe. It was that acute.
What was I supposed to do? I was wrong, I should have never been in that position in the first place, but I couldn’t just push him away, not at that moment.
I wrapped my arms around his waist and held him close. His whole body sighed with relief as he put his arms around me and nuzzled against my cheek.
“I love you so much,” he whispered. “Please don’t run away from me again.”
He kissed across my face until his lips met mine. The kiss was tentative, like he was afraid to kiss me, afraid I would reject him, and I should have, but I couldn’t. I dragged my tongue across his bottom lip as an invitation. Breathing heavily, his lips brushing against mine, his words skated softly across my open mouth.
“Ti amo . Tu sei tutto il mio mondo , tutta la mia vita.”
I love you. You are my whole world, my whole life.
“There will never be anyone else,” he concluded.
“Ti amo,” I whispered back, and then he kissed me.
My lips grazed along the shell of Leo’s ear and skimmed across his jaw. Tiny hairs on his unshaven face prickled at the skin around my mouth. I nipped at his lips before kissing his chin, his Adam’s apple, and down his perfectly carved chest. I followed the outline of his abdominal muscles with my tongue and nibbled my way down the line of hair that lead from his navel down to the patch of dark, wavy hair surrounding his erection. I squeezed it with my hand, eliciting a moan from him.
I dipped my head and sucked one heavy testicle into my mouth as I slowly stroked the rock hard shaft. Leo cursed and bit his bottom lip as he watched me release one ball and suck on the other. I leisurely licked the underside of his cock, but when my tongue got close to the bulbous head, I teasingly started at the base of his cock again and licked my way almost to the top. Leo groaned as a small smile pulled at one side of his mouth.
“You’re a fucking tease,” he murmured.
I bit him for that, right at the center of his cock, making him gasp and then groan. I teased him a little more, barely touching the head of his cock with my tongue and then pulling away. When I thought he couldn’t take it anymore, I slipped my lips over the tip smeared with the sticky clear fluid, and sucked. Leo groaned loudly and attempted to thrust into my mouth, but I was in control of it, of him. I held onto his thick cock with both hands and kept it from slipping any deeper into my mouth.
I sucked him hard as I stroked him with my hands, swirling my tongue over him, flicking my tongue, and pressing into the tiny slit at the top. Leo’s hands were in my hair, holding it back off of my face so he could watch me.
“You look so pretty with my cock between your succulent lips,” he growled.
Languorously, my mouth slid down his shaft, widening with his girth. He hissed and cursed, and when he hit the back of my throat, I knew he was trying hard not to thrust deeper, down my throat, but I tried. I took him deeper until I was gagging and barely able to breathe through my nose.
“Cazzo…” Leo cursed, curling his fingers so tightly in my hair that I could feel it pulling away from my scalp.
I loved his reaction, and it spurred me on to suck him harder, faster, and deeper. Every time my mouth moved down his shaft, I took him to the back of my throat. When he pressed gently on my head to hold me there for long moments, I allowed it until I needed to breathe. I would release his dick with a wet noise, with strings of my own saliva and his pre-cum stretching from his cock to my mouth. I’d groan and take him in again, sucking him, licking him, stroking him aggressively as he moaned and writhed on the bed, lost in the pleasure.
“I’m so close,” Leo announced breathlessly as he thrust into my mouth.
I sealed my mouth tightly over his cock and took him deeply and massaged his balls.
“I’m going to…Tabitha, I’m…”
I didn’t pull away, even when I felt his cock jerking and twitching. Seconds later, he came, spurting hot semen into my mouth and shouting obscenities as he held my head down and thrust madly. I tried to swallow, but couldn’t. It dribbled out of the corners of my mouth until Leo released me and I was able to take a few quick swallows.
Leo was speechless, trying to speak in complete sentences, but his words came out disjoined and confused as he pulled me up to him. He put a hand on the back of my neck and kissed me passionately, as if he had not just come in my mouth.
“I love you,” he said moments later, still trying to catch his breath. “I love you so much.”
“I love you, too,” I responded, draping my naked body over his.
I did love him, and because I loved him, I made sure that I gave him a perfect, unforgettable moment, because there would be no more perfect moments between us. Leo was unaware that it was the end.
I was letting him go.
Chapter Nineteen
“I know what you’re thinking,” Leo said as he kissed his way down my spine.
I tried not to squirm, but feeling his bare chest touching my skin as his lips blazed a path down my back made it difficult not to move. My fingers flexed and wiggled against the mattress and my toes stretched and curled, stretched and curled.
“You think that I don’t know you,” he continued as his tongue dipped into the small curve of my back just before my ass. I did squirm that time. “You think after nine years of separation that I don’t know who you are deep down inside, that I don’t know the core of you, but I do, and I know what you are thinking.”
I remained silent. He would tell me whether I asked him to or not, and I didn’t think he really knew what I was thinking. I’d done my best over the past three days to hide my true intentions. I smiled, I laughed, I kissed him, and made love with him. We went out together, in our hometown, as a couple. We visited both of our parents, my brother, and had dinner with Sandy and Rob at a popular diner where we saw a few familiar faces. I didn’t pretend that everything was perfect, that I was over the silence he had kept about Leslie, but I seemed to be trying to move forward, when in reality, I was falling behind.
I couldn’t get past it. I couldn’t get past all of the things that I had done to betray my friend. I couldn’t get past the fact that she had dropped me like I was nothing. I couldn’t get past what had recently happened between Leslie and Leo, and admittedly, I had a hard time believing that it was completely over, that he didn’t still harbor some strong feelings for the mother of his child. The best thing for everyone would be for Leo and me to part ways. He never really belonged to me anyway.
“You want to run,” Leo said just before his teeth nipped at the sensitive curved muscle of my ass. “You have been playing the role as the pissed off, but devoted girlfriend for the past three days, and you have been playing that role so damn well. I was almost convinced. Hell, you maybe almost convinced yourself.”
My entire body had stiffened. I held my breaths for too long before expelling them in short bursts and sucking in more air to hold for too long again. My heart punched into the mattress and I felt tears stinging my eyes. Despite those physical reactions to Leo’s ins
ights, my body still reacted to his touch, his teeth, and his tongue heatedly. His finger traced down my back, between my fleshy cheeks, and lingered over the virginal tight ring. I gasped and instinctively tried to move away, but Leo moved on quickly and pushed his finger inside of my pussy, making me moan softly.
“You know when I get back to Florida that I’ll be busy getting the new business off the ground,” he continued as his finger moved leisurely inside of me. “You think that I’ll blame the lack of communication on our differing schedules since you’ll be flying all over the place. You think that I won’t notice right away that you’re gone from my life entirely. You think that by the time I realize it, that I will have reconsidered and I won’t come after you.”
His finger pulled out of me and Leo settled the weight of his nude body over mine. He gently nudged my legs apart, wide and open for him. His warm breath on my cheek was even, his heartbeat steady against my back, the very opposite of my own breathing and heartbeat. I felt his heavy erection pressing gently at my entrance and I realized that he was about to enter me without a condom. I opened my mouth to object, but he spoke right over me.
“You are going to feel the soft skin of my cock inside of you tonight, dolcezza,” he whispered harshly in my ear. “You are going to feel me throb inside of you just before I fill you with my come. You are going to feel the liquid heat shooting inside of you, splashing against your womb and making you quiver and come. Then you’ll feel it, feel part of me, dripping out of your pussy and sliding down your inner thigh.
“I’ve proven to you that I’m clean, and I know you’re clean without you showing me shit, and even if you’re not, I don’t care. I’ll share whatever you have, because you are mine and I am yours, and we are one.”
On his last three words, he thrust inside of me and my eyes rolled to the back of my head as his arm snaked possessively around my neck and his other pinned my right arm to the bed. I did not protest. I did not try to wriggle away. A carnal, inhuman grunt-groan-growl-shout was ripped from my throat. Leo let out a similar sound. He didn’t wait to acclimate me with his size in that position. He didn’t start off slow. Immediately, he began to crash into me with a venereal force, growling and grunting as his arm tightened and his fingers squeezed mine.
