by A. L. Woods
“Beautiful,” he murmured in my ear, his teeth sinking into my lobe till the pain sprung, then nursing the sting with the tip of his tongue like a balm.
There was something beautiful in the way we looked. Something beautiful about his hard and unyielding movements and my vulnerability, with my neck exposed. I watched him as he worked at me, as the world shattered at my feet and the orgasm ripped through me, my cry of release echoing throughout the darkened house.
“You’re mine, Raquel-whatever-your-middle-name-is-Flannigan. All mine.”
“Marie,” I panted as my orgasm edged away, and I lost myself in the fevered thrusts of his cock inside of me as he chased his own climax. “It’s Marie.”
He smiled at me in the mirror, and then fucked me until he lost his load with a bark of a cry and melted his body on top of mine, leaving hot, searing kisses against the column of my neck and jawline until his breathing relaxed into a soft snore in my ear.
The last thought I had before I fell asleep flush against him in a combination of our own sweat, was that he was right about one thing.
I was beautiful.
But I was beautiful because I loved him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The trouble with landlords from the Dot was that more times than not, they forgot about your existence until the first of the month.
Or at least, that was the case with my apartment. I called Tony with the same frequency that moms call deadbeat dads, but that motherfucker just screened my calls with an alacrity that almost had me considering sorting out my daddy issues. Almost.
It had been three weeks since Cash had broken into my apartment, and three weeks since Sean and I’s argu-fuck-ment. At least, that’s how I referred to it to Penelope. Who, after giving me shit for keeping my phone off after the incident with Ma, had screamed with the exaltation of a cheerleader on E at a pep rally over my budding relationship with her fiancé’s best friend.
That’s right, fiancé.
It would appear that after the clusterfuck that was Thanksgiving dinner with the Cullimores, they had advised Dougie in no uncertain terms that their grandchild would not be born out of wedlock and that he was expected to amend the situation as soon as possible.
They hadn’t given a damn about Penelope’s protests that it was 2008 and that she didn’t care about perpetuating their idea of respecting her womanly virtue—a ship that had sailed sometime in 1998.
Dougie hadn’t cared to argue with them, because he gave them the show of their lives and proposed to their daughter on bended knee with a round opal in a thin gold setting right there in their dining room. The ring was simple enough to induce Penelope’s mother to let out a derisive snort of disappointment that earned her daughter’s ire.
It hadn’t been the romantic setting amongst the orchard that the Cullimore’s Connecticut home abutted like Dougie had initially planned, but it had certainly shut up both her parents and their society. Their engagement announcement had ended up in the Boston Globe, and Sean and I made a joke of it by clipping the headline out, pinning it on his refrigerator, and laughing about it every morning when we convened in the kitchen.
Admittedly, I had allowed myself to fall into a sort of domestic bliss with him that at times clouded my judgement. I was equal parts relieved and disappointed when he never brought up the L word or my moving in again after that night. It was what I had wanted, so I didn’t have the right to be disappointed. That night he said he wouldn’t bring it up anymore, and I had thanked him and then promptly slid his still semi-hard dick out of me before skulking to the bathroom to breathe with my head between my legs.
He had done me the solid of not coming to find me, and by the time I returned to his bedroom, he was snoring lightly, and I knew the conversation was really over.
The trouble was, on mornings like these when he was traipsing around his house half dressed with Trina yelling at him to put his shirt on, that my heart squeezed in my chest and my mind berated me for being so quick to say no to him. Not because of how good he looked freshly showered and half dressed—which I can assure you was a crime in itself—but because of how effortless it was to love him. He didn’t have to do anything; he just seemed to exist. Every morning brought an inward battle to not bark those three words out to him. I swallowed them back with hot coffee, watching as his eyes all but bulged when I swallowed the searing hot liquid down my throat.
This morning was similar, the only addition being the burden of my guilt for what was to come.
“Honestly, what’s it going to take me to convince you to put a shirt on?” Trina whined in the threshold of the kitchen entry point behind me, waving one of Sean’s shirts in her outstretched arm like it was a lifeline.
“Don’t body shame me,” he jested, sliding past her in the kitchen, ignoring her proffered gift. It was ten minutes after seven, and he was moving at a speed that would have given the Energizer Bunny a hard-on.
I was seated on one of the barstools at the kitchen counter with one foot propped up on the chair rung, the other lazily hanging. I had my head bent over yesterday’s copy of The Herald News, the local newspaper that covered parts of Bristol County and two towns within Rhode Island that kissed the state line, a pen pinched between my fingers. I’d been scraping the classifieds over the last couple of days for apartments. I didn’t want to admit it to Sean, but he had a point about looking for a place closer to my job. There was no point of insisting I lived in Boston when so much of my life and what was important to me existed beyond the confines of the city.
I smelled Sean before I saw him, the clean spicy notes of his body wash filling my sinuses, making my body hum and the synapses in my brain misfire. I blinked at the classifieds, willing my eyes to refocus after they momentarily went offline. Sean’s form appearing in my line of vision on the other side of the counter had me lifting my eyes to him.
“I’ll do it for ten bucks,” he offered.
“That is a specific number,” Trina admonished.
“Ten bucks and I’ll put the shirt on,” Sean said with a shrug of his shoulders.
Trina gasped. “That’s extortion.”
“You sure you don’t want to be a lawyer, mini-Maria?” I swallowed the laugh that crawled up my throat, busying myself by circling a posting about a one-bedroom unit in a duplex that was cheaper than my rent in Dorchester. This was life in the ’burbs.
“I resent that,” she shot back. Still, she was quiet for a moment, making me think she was getting ready to negotiate. “Two bucks.”
“What the hell am I going to do with two bucks?” He drew two thermoses toward him on the counter and then reached for the coffee carafe, topping off my cup and then filling the two thermoses, one his and the other Trina’s.
“You can get Raquel something.”
“Like what?” He snorted derisively.
“I haven’t thought that far.”
“And that,” he began, turning his back to us to rinse the carafe in the sink, “is part of the problem. You don’t think far enough into the future before you start trying to deal.”
There was something almost artistic about the sculpted muscles of his back, the way his shoulder blades knitted together and his spine flexed as he moved. His eyes met mine in the reflection of the window, and the salacious smirk he shot me had me choking on my coffee.
“You guys are doing it again.” Trina sighed.
“Doing what?” I said, coughing into the crook of my elbow as I glanced at her from over my shoulder.
She sent me a withering look. “The eyes in the window thing. Just fuck already and get it over with.” She rolled her eyes before shooting her brother a final sideways glance, tossing the shirt onto the barstool next to me. “And then put a shirt on.” She turned and left the room, her footsteps fading off until the loud crooning of music came from her bedroom.
Sean cut off the faucet, then turned, pressing the small of his back against the apron sink. I swallowed, training my eyes on his.
He glanced down at his body before dragging his eyes back to mine. “You can look.”
“I don’t want to.”
He clutched his chest, looking wounded. “Ouch.”
My blush scorched my skin. “If I look, then I touch,” I amended. And it was true. If I didn’t keep a two-foot distance between us, I was liable to do something unsavory…and Trina had been exposed to enough of our shit in the last couple of weeks.
“That’s the point.”
I swear to God, he did something to compress the muscles in his abs, and that had me salivating like a bitch in heat. His body alone would have given Adonis a complex. I shook my head, unhooking the thoughts in my head that screamed at me to let him bend me over the kitchen countertop. That shit would have hit better than Folgers ever could.
Nope, nope, nope.
“Your sister’s home,” I reminded him. The rest of that weekend three weeks ago, we had spent our time eating and fucking our way into exhaustion on top of every surface in this house, and Sunday had come before we even realized it. It had taken the sound of Trina’s key in the door for us to get with the program, and we had all but just made it back to his bedroom in the nick of time before the door swung open. When Sean and I were both suitably dressed, I made him ask her permission for me to stay with them—an action he thought pointless, saying it was his house—but one for which she expressed appreciation when he was out of earshot. I was the houseguest here, and I wasn’t about to make her feel like she was the one who needed to be uncomfortable.
“She’s always home,” he stressed, appearing next to me. He propped his elbows on the counter, leaning forward until I met him halfway. His kiss was tender and gentle, a far cry from the man who last night had plowed me into next week and this morning had made walking cumbersome. He tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear with his forefinger, his eyes holding my gaze. “You got out of bed early this morning.”
Uncertainty flanked me as he searched my face for a reason. And there was one, I just wasn’t going to tell him—not yet, anyway.
“I’ve got an early meeting,” I said instead.
I thought I saw his eyes narrow for a millisecond, but he didn’t say anything, simply offered me a short head nod. If he was peeved with my answer, he kept his opinion to himself and spared us from getting into an argument. Since that argu-fuck-ment, we had managed to avoid getting into any kind of lover’s quarrels, and it seemed like we were both committed to keeping it that way. Although I knew that after I told him where I’d gone today, that would plunge us out of the honeymoon stage and into reality.
He kept the strand of my hair he had tucked behind my ear pinched between his forefinger and thumb, “How are things going with your apartment?” The pitch of his voice was so soft, I almost didn’t hear him over Trina’s music.
“I think I might need to concede defeat and just find a new one. Tony isn’t really helping move things along, so I’m trying to be proactive…and besides, you might have a point about leaving the city.”
Silence blanketed us. Sean’s jaw ticked, his lips rolling between his teeth. “I’ve been here much longer than we initially planned, so if it’s getting to be too much, I can stay with Penelope for a bit.”
His hold on my hair slipped. “No,” he offered simply with a shrug of his shoulders. “You’re good.”
“I’ll talk to Trina, then, just to make sure she’s still okay with my being here.”
“Don’t bother; she’s fine.” He waved the idea off like the conversation alone was a waste of our breath, but the guilt that spread through me had me wanting to clarify with his kid sister.
“Sean, this is her home, and I—”
He waylaid me before I could finish my sentence, “It’s my home, and I want you to stay.” He moved away from me, returning to the thermoses. Confirming he screwed the lids on tight enough, then fumbled inside of the refrigerator for sandwich fixings, setting off on lunch preparation.
I slid off the barstool, coffee mug in tow. I downed the cup and then washed it, setting it on the drying rack, disappearing from the kitchen before he could say anything else on the matter. Returning to his bedroom, I collected my phone, car keys, and a small crossbody bag from his dresser. My legs carried me back down the hall, but my feet unexpectedly came to a stop in front of Trina’s bedroom. Sean may not have felt the conversation was warranted, but we had a dissent in our respective opinions, and I wasn’t about to let his cloud my own. I drew a fortifying breath before I let my knuckles rap on her door.
Seconds passed before Trina peeled it open, giving me a curious look. Her face was partially made up, face heavily powdered, matte nude and tawny eyeshadow blended, liner thick and winged. Since leaving the kitchen, she had done something with the wild nest of pink hair affixed to the top of her head. The ends were smooth and straight, curling inward to frame her heart-shaped face, a black bowtie headband slightly off center on the top of her head.
“Hey, everything okay?”
“Can I talk to you for a second?” I asked.
Trina’s brow rose, but she pulled the door open for me, revealing chaos. Clothes littered the floor in strewn piles, her bed was unmade, a collection of used glasses that never made it back to the kitchen on her desk. The air smelled of hairstyling products and candy-scented perfume. She returned to where she must have been seated, on the floor in front of a floor length mirror, the innards of her makeup bag spilled out in front of her.
She hit the pause button on an iPod, and the music ceased.
“What’s up?” she asked, glancing up at me.
“Right,” I said nervously, “It’s about my staying here.”
She looked like her brother in that moment, her brows bending inward like she had just stubbed her toe or something. “It’s taking much longer than I would have liked for my place to be repaired, and at this point, it’s looking like it might just make more sense for me to move out and find a new place a little more locally.”
“Okay,” she replied casually, picking up a tube of mascara. She leaned toward the mirror, tilting her chin back as she worked the bristles of the mascara wand into her lashes.
“So, I wanted to confirm with you that it was okay if I stay here a little while longer. I know that this has been less than ideal, but your comfort is important to me, and I just wanted—”
“It’s cool that you’re here,” Trina chirped, lowering the wand.
“What?” I wheezed.
“It’s cool that you’re here,” she repeated, closing the mascara tube. “You make him less grouchy, and it’ll be easier for me to tell him I’m moving out.”
My jaw slackened, my eyes all but distending. “What?” I must have sounded like a broken record, because she tossed me a look of pity. I’d done my undergrad in creative writing and was certainly capable of producing a sentence more eloquent than what I was spouting now.
“Lainey and I put in an application for an apartment three weeks ago and it was accepted.” She gnawed on the corner of her lip. “I haven’t told my family yet.”
“Trina, that’s…” I trailed off. Panic ignited inside of me; I feared I had influenced her decision. In the brief time that I’d known her, I’d never heard her mention one word to Sean about wanting to move out. I selfishly couldn’t help but feel like this was a decision motivated by my presence and invasion of her space.
“It’s what I wanted,” she volunteered, as if reading my mind. “My ma wanted me to move back home after Thanksgiving. She didn’t want me getting underfoot with you and my brother.” She snorted, but there was a look of hurt in her eyes that made my insides churn.
“I’m not trying to interfere in your relationship with your brother.”
“Oh, no, no.” She shook her head wildly, the smooth ends of her hair catching air. “My brother’s annoying, but trust me, you’re not interfering. It’s more like…” She hesitated, tossing the closed mascara tube on the floor next to the rest of her makeup. She lifted her Bambi eyes to me,
her teeth grazing across her bottom lip. “It’s frustrating as hell that my ma acknowledges in her own way that you guys are obviously fucking, but for me…”
Ah, it was this kind of talk. I stepped further into the room, avoiding the hazards that were like landmines on the floor. Lowering to my haunches, I let my ass meet the hardwood. Resting my hands on my biceps, I draped my stacked forearms on my knees, summoning her attention without speaking. She met my eyes with apprehension, though the cool front she was trying to maintain vanished when she took one look at me.
“You were tossed out on your ass,” I offered.
Trina nodded stiffly, her chin dropping. “So I don’t want to go back. I want to be out on my own.”
I don’t know what possessed me in that moment, but I leaned forward, touching the underside of her chin. Her big honey-brown eyes were so familiar to me that I felt my heartstrings pull as she searched my face. She shared a resemblance with her family, but in this moment, where her vulnerability was a map on her face, she reminded me of Holly Jane.
Utterly lost.
Her throat worked, her eyes shifting to the floor again before she spoke in a whisper. “It wasn’t fair for her to do that to me.”
“It wasn’t,” I agreed with a shake of my head. “And that shouldn’t have happened to you.”
“Raquel…” She drew in a sharp breath, her eyes flooding with unshed tears. “Am I really that bad of a person…for what I did? Did I…did I deserve that from her?”
“Fuck, no,” I whispered. “You’re not a bad person, and you didn’t deserve to be treated that way.”
She sniffled, jerking her head away from my hold.
“Great; my eyeliner is smudging.” She swiped her fingers under her eyes, leaving a black streak on the pads of her digits that she wiped on an errant shirt next to her. She fanned her eyes with her hands, blinking. “Sometimes I think about what would have happened if I didn’t do it,” she confessed. “If I had had that baby.”
