She was quiet. She had heard me; she just didn’t want to tell me. Obviously, that answered the question for me even though she wouldn’t tell me anything.
“Is he your boyfriend?”
More silence. Either he was, or it was something worse.
“Veronica.”
She stopped and looked down.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Her voice was shaking, and she sniffed a little. Christ, was she crying? I dropped the bag of beans; my face felt numb and cold. I stroked her hair. Why was she so sad? Why was it making me sad? Who was that guy and what wasn’t she telling me?
“Who is he?”
“His name is Michael Mansfield. He’s my husband.”
Her what?
“You mean your ex-husband, right?”
She shook her head.
“We’re still married.”
I had checked for a ring. I had checked for a fucking ring, and there was none on her finger. There still wasn’t. What the hell was she talking about? Women talked crazy sometimes when they had a reason to. Maybe getting rid of me was a reason to, but I wanted to believe her. She wanted me to believe her too, apparently.
“I should have told you earlier. You should leave.”
“You don’t want me to leave,” I challenged her. The reasons I had to stay there even after she had asked me to leave were all selfish. I wanted her, and I was making no bones about it. A husband was a good reason—likely the best reason—for me to get out of there but I wasn’t swayed by her conviction.
She looked up at me, and the tears were trailing down her face.
“It isn’t right. I’m sorry.”
I held her face. I brushed her tears from her cheeks. Her cheeks and nose were red, and she didn’t want to look at me. She was upset. I couldn’t leave when she was like that.
“Fuck right or wrong, Ronnie. What do you want? If you want me to stay, I’ll stay. If you want me to leave, I’ll go.”
She leaned in and kissed me. It was hardly that. It was chaste and innocent. She kissed me the way she would kiss one of the kids.
“I need to check on the kids. You should go.”
I walked to the door. She followed behind me. She was asking me to leave, but I didn’t want to do it when she was crying like that. She was really upset, and I wanted to fix it.
“Tell me what I can do,” I offered. She shook her head.
“Ice.”
“What?”
“For your cheek.”
She shut the door.
I left when the ground floor lights turned off.
10
Veronica
It was official. I was a cheater. I was one of those people who swore before God, a bunch of dearly beloved and the state of California that I would be faithful to one man and one man only, and I hadn’t been.
The more I thought about it, the more the guilt ate me up and the more I wanted there to be some sort of gray area. Michael and I had been together for years; we had talked about this. Kissing another guy was definitely cheating and a lot of the time if a man was single, he didn’t even like me hugging them. When we got together, I didn’t look left, and I didn’t look right. He was my entire world and less than a month in Monterey and I had already had another man’s tongue down my throat.
Ben had told me that this was normal, but I still felt like I was wearing a damn scarlet letter. It was possible to break up and still be married. That was what Michael and I were. All love was completely gone. I had moved out. I was trying to drop his name, and I wasn’t wearing the ring anymore. Why was I still claiming him though? Was he doing the same for me?
That wasn’t important. Thinking about him would just get in the way of things. Things like thinking about Thad, which was also not important and was getting in the way of things. It had been a few days. I had to snap out of it. It was not happening again. I had kids to take care of. Kids for whom I had lovingly made popsicles the night before to help beat the heat.
I had covered them in sunscreen, and they were in the yard outside. Every time I went to check on them, they were dramatically laid out on the grass under a tree. It was blisteringly hot today.
“Everything okay out here?” I asked them. They sat up to pluck popsicles from the mold but generally just lay there, sweating and complaining.
The doorbell rang.
I hurried inside to open the door, replacing the popsicles before they melted into nothing in the heat.
It was him. He saw me and smiled broadly.
“Hey, Ronnie! How are you?” he said, walking into the house past me. I swung around wondering what the fuck was going on. We had just… it was only a few nights ago. I had cried and told him I was married.
“Thaddeus,” I squeaked. “What brings you here?”
“Where are the kids?”
“Outside. Under the tree.”
He walked out into the yard yelling his greetings to the kids. I stood on the patio, dumbfounded. What had gotten into him? He wanted to see the kids? Yes, I was a little miffed that he had come over and apparently didn’t want to see me but still. Why was he here and why was he acting like a maniac?
“Hi Thad,” Chris said from the ground.
“The two of you look dead, what’s going on?”
“It’s too hot,” Nikki complained.
I walked a little closer to listen to their conversation. For a guy who seemed so repellant to children initially, he and the kids seemed to get along great.
“What if I told you I could fix that?”
“How?” Chris asked, sitting up.
“Both of you go inside the house and get your bathing suits on,” he said. The kids hopped up and followed his instructions.
“What are you going to do?” Nikki asked.
“Hurry back down, and you’ll see,” he said to her.
The backyard wasn’t huge, but it was enough space for the kids to run around. There was a single orange tree that stood at the far end where the children had been languishing.
“Do you guys have a sprinkler system?” he asked me suddenly.
“Uh, the sprinklers turn themselves on every morning,” I supplied. He walked around the yard looking down at the ground like he had dropped something.
“Can you tell me how many zones there are?” he said. I watched him go, wondering whether it was worth following him. Maybe it was just me who thought something was wrong, and the man had just come over to have a good time. With the kids, not with me.
“Nope. They’re on for fifteen every morning, and then they turn off,” I said uselessly. He crouched down to the ground and pulled something up, a round plate-like covering to a hole that was obviously there.
“What are you doing?” I asked him. His hand was down the hole, and I worried slightly that he was doing something I wouldn’t be able to repair. I walked towards him and peered down the hole.
“Watch out,” he said.
“What?”
A sprinkler directly behind me turned on hitting me right in the back with freezing cold water. I screamed and jumped out of the way. He laughed, shielding himself from the spray. I scurried to the patio where it was dry. He was getting soaked turning on the sprinklers manually which I didn’t even realize was something you could do.
“Cool!” Christopher screamed suddenly. The kids had reappeared and ran joyfully through the water in their bathing suits.
I didn’t know whether to be mad or to be impressed. I ran a hand through my hair and shook my head. He jogged through the spray up to me on the patio.
“Absolutely genius, why didn’t I think of that,” I said, smiling. His hair was slicked down and shiny from the water.
“What can I say? I love making you wet,” he said, smirking. He pulled his t-shirt off, and I had to look away to continue making intelligent words and sounds. His chest was tattooed, but his rippling abs were virgin skin, until the sloping lines that made a ‘v’ that disappeared into his waistband. There, he had the word ‘hellish’ tattooed in s
haded black and gray letters.
“You want to see the rest?” he asked suggestively. His hands went to the button of his jeans, and he deftly undid it. My eyes grew wide.
“Do you need a towel? Let me get you a towel.”
If I had run away any faster, it would have been a full sprint. I felt my cheeks burn. Holy shit. He looked like he had chipped the grooves and lines in his body with a hammer and chisel. He glistened from the water and rendered me completely speechless for a full five seconds. I needed to calm down. I was married. Yes. To a man I hated and was divorcing, but still, I was married.
I walked back into the kitchen with three towels and saw him at the open refrigerator. His shirt and jeans were in his hand. He would be naked if not for the tight boxer briefs he had on. The man was in incredible shape. His back tapered from wide across the shoulders to a narrow waist in a perfect ‘v’ like geese in flight. His ass looked like two loaves of bread, and his legs were thick and muscular. There were more tattoos, mostly below the knee but one poked up from underneath his underwear. Most of his back was covered as well.
“Y-you can’t stand there naked; what if one of the kids comes in?” I protested, throwing the towel at him. He caught it easily. “Give me those,” I said, taking the wet clothes from him.
“Your top looks a little wet, you might wanna lose that too,” he said, wrapping the towel low around his waist. I looked down at my top. It was white, so it clung to my skin and had become translucent. I was wearing a bra, but I self-consciously covered my chest.
“Just… just don’t take the towel off,” I stammered, fleeing for the laundry room. I angrily put on another t-shirt. I hadn’t gotten as wet as he had so my shorts were still okay to wear. Who did he think he was disrobing like this was his damn house? Yes, all the important bits were covered but still. I returned to the kitchen where he had stood against the counter, apparently waiting for me.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but traditionally, married women wear rings,” he said. He didn’t sound mad. He sounded the way a teacher would sound when they challenged a student to tell them a good reason why an assignment wasn’t completed.
“Yeah. That’s usually the case,” I said sheepishly.
“Hm. You want to tell me why Michael was so upset to see me the other day?”
“I’m so sorry, Thaddeus. He’s...” I faltered because I really didn’t want to ever have to have this conversation with Thad.
“Your husband?” he said. I nodded and swallowed. “Yeah… a little heads up would have been nice,” he said sarcastically.
“We’re going through a divorce at the moment, but it hasn’t been finalized. He wanted to talk. I think he was trying to talk me into staying with him or something, but we got a little sidetracked.”
“By me?”
“We used to live in San Jose, and the reason he knew I had come here was because he had had me followed. He picked me up from the house, and at the bar, he started asking about you. He thought maybe the two of us had been seeing each other and he wasn’t happy about it.”
“Well, he wouldn’t be wrong.”
I let the presumption of his statement slide because he had walked up to me. He wrapped a hand around the back of my neck and kissed me. My body stiffened, and I pushed against his chest.
“What are you doing?” I asked, pushing him away. “Michael and I. We’re still married.”
“That’s his fault, Ronnie. Not yours,” he said. He kissed me again. I couldn’t argue with that. The man had a point. Michael was the one who was stalling on getting our divorce finalized. Thaddeus with his tongue in my mouth and his nearly naked body pressed to mine was very persuasive.
It did not help that he was bare-chested and wet. I rested a hand gently on his chest and let it trail down his body. Michael was big too, but he wasn’t this hard or this solid. My hands went all the way down to the waistband of his underwear peeking out from under the towel where I hooked my fingers. He plowed the inside of my mouth with his tongue. I hadn’t been kissed like that in so long… too long.
I heard a giggle and broke the kiss. Nikki had come into the kitchen and was watching us with a huge, shy smile on her face.
“Is something wrong, honey?” I asked her. I hastily took my hands off Thad’s body and moved away from him. She was sopping wet, covered in grass, mud and water. Her cheeks were pink, and her hair would take forever to wash that night.
“Can I have another ice pop?” she asked. I opened the freezer and let her pull a popsicle out of the mold. Nikki thanked me and skipped back out to the yard.
“What are you afraid of, Ronnie?” he asked me. I put the popsicles back in the freezer and looked at him.
“I’m not afraid, Thaddeus, I’m married.”
“If that was a good enough reason you wouldn’t have let it get this far,” he said.
“It’s not fair,” I said.
“To who? To him? I don’t know the guy, but there’s got to be a pretty good reason why you don’t want to be with him anymore.”
“I can’t give you what you want. Not when I’m married to someone else.”
“Do you think he’s also waiting for the marriage to be legally over before he goes after someone else?” he asked me.
Good question.
I wanted to think that he was, but I didn’t have much faith that Michael was especially observant of the vows we had made to each other. There was a chance that he had maybe cheated, but I was definitely cheating. Whether we loved each other or not, it still counted.
“It doesn’t matter what he does. I have to live with what I do, and I can’t do this... not when I still have his last name.”
Thad sighed, obviously frustrated and obviously not under the same amount of moral turmoil that I was.
“I’m not a patient guy, Ronnie,” he said to me. “You say you don’t want to act like you’re not married but you could have fooled me.”
He was standing over me, so I had no choice but to look at him. Either his hard, beautiful body directly in front of me or his gorgeous face looking down at me. My hand, possessed, driven by the part of me that didn’t care I was still married reached out to touch him again. His body was like solid rock under warm skin. I heard him sigh as I ran my hand up his abdomen and over his chest. He flinched a little when my fingers ran over his nipple.
“I’ll go get your clothes,” I said, hoarsely moving away from him to the laundry room. The clothes weren’t dry. They weren’t ready, and I knew they weren’t, I just needed to put some space between us before I did something reckless. There was still something like ten minutes left on the dryer. I instantly regretted entering the room because it put him between me and the exit. I was cornered basically, and the scariest part was I didn’t know if I wanted to be or not.
I felt his lips on my neck, below my ear, kissing and nipping the skin. I wasn’t a virgin, but Michael had been the only man that I had slept with in my whole life. He had sort of got in early and made sure of that. I tilted my head back giving him easier access to my neck. His teeth bit into my skin, making it sting in a way that I didn’t want to stop.
His hands ran down my waist to my hips which he held and pressed backward into him. He undid the button of my shorts and slid a hand inside.
“Tell me, right now if you don’t want me to touch you,” he said. “If you don’t say anything I won’t stop.”
I bit my lip and shut my eyes. His fingers brushed my clitoris, and I moaned softly.
“There, just like that,” I whispered. He used his free arm to hold me against him while he manipulated my sensitive clit. I sighed and spread my legs further apart. His fingers slid over my clit and delved between my lips, fingering my wet entrance. I moaned as he ran up and down the slick length before pushing one of his fingers gently inside of me.
“Do you like that?” he whispered.
“More,” I said breathily. I grabbed his hard forearm as he gently pushed me forward. I braced myself against the run
ning dryer feeling it vibrate under my hands. He pushed deeper into me, adding a second finger. The stretch felt euphoric.
“Aunt Ron?”
My eyes flew open. The voice was coming from the kitchen. Thad had stopped, but his hand was still down my shorts. I gently moved it, so I could button my shorts.
“Where are you?” Christopher asked from the kitchen. His voice was coming closer, meaning he was on his way here.
“I’m in the laundry room, honey. Wait for me in the kitchen.”
I turned and finally looked up at Thad.
“Just like that? Another excuse?” he asked. His face was calm as he said it, but I heard his annoyance.
“Maybe it’s a sign,” I said quietly. I walked towards the door. I didn’t want to keep walking away from him, but I had to. I was still married.
That was the reason, but even I was starting to feel less and less convinced.
11
Thaddeus
I didn’t know what the big fucking deal was. The girl wanted me. Old boy probably wasn’t giving it to her, and if she hadn’t been with anyone since getting here, she was horny. I understood that. The question was; why didn’t she seem to understand that?
We could have fucked right in that laundry room. She could have let me lay her out on the table and maybe she wouldn’t be so uptight now. I wouldn’t be so uptight right now. She was a good girl, and she didn’t want to commit adultery or whatever. Maybe she was good, but she wasn’t that good. She had let me kiss her, and she had let me finger her. Her fucking marriage was over; why could I see that better than her? If you were at the point where you are filing for divorce from the guy, you weren’t together anymore.
I hated jerking off. I only did it in case of emergencies. It was like being a fourteen-year-old kid again with no other way to get off than your own hand. It was like being deployed; it could be months before you got a girl to bang. I thought of it this way; sure, it was probably easier and quicker for me to take care of things myself, but it just wasn’t worth it. When my fist was around my dick, I was already thinking about it being something else, or rather someone else.
Thaddeus (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 2) Page 8
