by Zeia Jameson
Our cab ride home was filled with low whispers to each other and a great amount of giggling by us both. We were quite a sight for the cabbie. When the car stopped, I looked out of the window to take in our destination. Jeremy exited his side of the taxi and came over to my side to open my door. He took my hand, led me out of the cab, paid the driver and sent him on his way.
“Jeremy, why are we here?” I asked, while looking at the building that used to be Joe’s bar. My bar.
“I’m walking you home.” He smiled and took my hand again. I returned his smile and remembered how he had walked me home after our first date.
We began walking in the direction of our apartment. We strolled hand in hand for ten minutes in near silence. Not because we had nothing to say but because we were just enjoying the moment. When we arrived at our stoop, Jeremy stopped and faced me. “Livy, I just have to say I really like you.”
Having imbibed on the Porters, the wine and the cheap beer, my brain’s natural reaction is to let out a giggle. But I’m not too stymied to remember that those were the words he said to me, standing in front of my apartment stoop all of those years ago. The bad part is that I cannot remember what my response was to his proclamation, or even if I had one. So, I improvise. “I guess I kind of like you too, Jeremy.”
We smile at each other stupidly, like we’re school children, just as we had done on our first date. Then, Jeremy leans in and kissed me on the side of my face and my body instantly felt hot from head to toe. I suddenly remember the feelings I had back then after he’d kissed me like that. The feelings reemerge and I feel like I am falling in love with Jeremy all over again.
Jeremy meets my gaze again and nudged his head toward our front door. “Shall we?”
The night had helped me remember myself. I felt like the old me. And standing across from me, smiling, was the old Jeremy. My Jeremy. I hook my arm in his and we proceed into our apartment.
***
49
Jeremy
Envelope C
“When can we open envelope C?” Livy asks, with a giggle, as we walk into the apartment. The alcohol of the evening has gotten the better of us both. But we’ve laughed a lot and I have nothing to complain about in regards to that.
“The trunk said we could after we were done with our date,” I say, trying not to hiccup.
Livy spins around to face me with wide eyes. “Are we done? Let’s open it now!”
I laugh at her expression and enthusiasm. And then I hiccup. “Ok.”
I toss my keys onto the counter and then walk over to the kitchen table. Envelope C is small like the others. I open it slowly and pull out a piece of card stock.
Fuck.
It’s there plain as day. I’m holding the card with both hands because I’m trying to focus and make sure it’s saying what I think it’s saying, and I don’t want to drop it.
Four tiny letters, the first one capitalized, and one punctuation mark.
Fuck.
There is no explanation. It’s just one word and a period.
Fuck.
I try to contemplate what this means. Is there a hidden message? Is it a clue? What am I missing?
Fuck.
I hone in on the word once again and I inhale.
“What is it, Jeremy?” Livy asked, high pitched and slightly slurred. “You have a very weird look on your face? What is it?”
Her voice shakes me from my thoughts. I’m over thinking this. If this means anything other than what I originally thought it meant, then the trunk can just go take a hike. I’m not some genius philosophical code cracker. I’m just a guy with a hard on for his wife. So, I’m going to take this card at exactly face value.
I look up at Livy. Her eyes are wide and they are scanning my face to try to get a sense of what the next move from the trunk is. With both hands, I drop the card onto the floor and I’m certain before it hits the ground, my hands are on Livy’s face and my mouth is on hers, kissing her like it’s life saving for the both of us.
I half expect Livy to pull away and ask about the card, but she doesn’t. She melts into me and lets me take control of the situation. I think she instinctively knows what the trunk just told us to do.
Still kissing her, I begin to walk her backwards. I know there is a wall around here somewhere, and I just want to pin her up against it. I remember how bothered and flushed she got while reading the parts of that book where the male character would lead the foreplay with aggression. I know exactly what she wants right now. She wants me to take control and do whatever I want. She just wants to be a recipient right now and I am one-hundred-and-thirty-five percent ok with that.
Livy’s back finally reaches a wall and we bump against it a little harder than I anticipated. I don’t ask her if she’s alright though. I know if she’s hurt, she’d tell me. I don’t want to break up this connection we have going right now.
I remove my hands from her face and reach down to find the bottom of her shirt. I lift it and remove it from her body, only very briefly unlocking our kiss. I throw her shirt somewhere and reach down again to find both of her wrists. I grab them and raise them above her head, pinning them against the wall. Livy groans and gives me the go ahead to ravish her just as I had fantasized about so many times in the past twenty-four hours.
With my right hand staying in place, securing Livy’s arms above her head, I move my left hand down her arm, lightly brushing her skin as I make my way to her shoulder. My fingers continue to move down, along the side of her chest and continue past her ribs. I am finally met with the edge of her jeans and I proceed to unbutton and unzip them with one quick movement.
Still kissing her furiously, both of us already consumed with heavy breathing, I place my hand inside her jeans. Livy’s hips push away from the wall and against me. She lets out a loud moan. I remember that moan. That moan along with the pressure between us is driving me to the edge. We need to get into a more compromising position. The bed.
With one hand above and one hand below, I move my lips from her mouth to her breast. Upon contact, Livy lets a quiet whisper of my name. Hearing that has done me in so much further than the moan.
My lips continue to kiss and my fingers continue to move. Livy begins breathing even harder than before and making sounds that only I know how to decipher. She’s almost there. I shift my head to pay equal and proper respect to her other breast. It only takes a few moments until Livy screams my name and presses against me so hard that I think she might float away if I weren’t running interference.
I remove my hands from both positions and wrap my arms around her. I kiss her until her breathing slows. She places her hands in my hair and tugs. I love that sensation. I place my hand under her ass and nudge, the signal for her to wrap her legs around my waist. She complies. I walk into the bedroom, still kissing, her hands still clutched in my hair. I place a knee onto the bed and gently lower her onto it. Once settled, we disconnect. I stand to remove my shirt, but Livy kneels on the bed and comes over to me, eye level. She places her hands under my shirt and looks at me with that hungry look I’ve seen so many times. “Let me,” she says. I nod and she lifts my shirt over my head and then slowly removes my belt. Then my pants. Then boxers. She kisses my stomach and all the way up to my chest and neck, finally reaching the destination of my mouth. I place my hands in her hair and attempt to pull her as close to me as physically possible.
A thought flashes in my mind. I’m naked. She’s not. This is a problem.
I unclasp her bra and motion her back down to a lying position on the bed. Livy takes care of the bra removal while I work on the jeans scenario. I’m pulling the pants off of her legs, when I realize there is no other fabric underneath.
I look at Livy. “Livy. You aren’t wearing underwear?” I lift my arm and point beyond the walls, “The whole time we were...out there...in public...you were...”
“Commando?” she finishes my question. She shrugs and smirks that devilish grin of hers. “Mmmhmm. You said h
urry, so I hurried. Your hand was just in there five minutes ago. You didn’t notice?”
“That was hardly a time for noticing details,” I quickly respond. I briefly try to replay the moment and actually wonder if I remember noticing the absence of soft fabric. And then my mind goes back to the matter at hand. She’s not wearing underwear! Holy fuck, I don’t know why but that is so hot!
“Is that getting to you, Jeremy? No panties?” She says the word panties with a pout in her voice. I get what she’s doing now. The porn.
“Uh, yeah. Well played.” I wink. “But you had no idea we would be doing this today.”
“I decided to take my chances.” She winks back.
Goddamn, I love this woman.
I finish removing the jeans and lean down to kiss her more. Our full body skin on skin contact is fire and ice all at once. It’s like we’ve never been naked around one another before, even though we were only just naked together yesterday. This is completely different. We are both writhing and letting our hands explore each other as if it were the first time. Livy is pulling and clutching and scratching at my skin like she’s trying to rip me open and climb inside just to get closer to me. It’s a little more aggressive than she’s ever been and it is driving me absolutely insane. I can’t hold out much longer. I start positioning myself for the next act of our performance when Livy places a hand on my shoulder and pushes me back.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
She grins again. “Nothing.” She lifts herself from the bed and nudges me onto my back. “Me on top first,” she says as she straddles me and lightly scrapes her nails down my chest. Her nails give me chills. I have a feeling she’s about ride me like a mustang. I’m fearful and hopeful all at once. “Then, you can be on top.” She leans down, our chests coming together and she softly kisses my lips. “Then...” she says, as she teases her fingers in my hair, “maybe we can try some of that other stuff we watched in the porno.” She winks and then makes her eyebrows dance, teasingly, by arching them up and down asynchronously. I can’t believe this is the same Livy that was yelling at me and crying not just three days ago. It’s not the same Livy. She’s different. Different from a few days ago. And even different from when we first met. Maybe she is a phoenix, arisen from broken ashes. Whatever it is, I like it. I smile and smack her on the ass. She yelps with surprise and giggles. “I’m all in,” I respond, watching her eyes flicker with excitement and curiosity. I bring her face back down to mine and kiss her once more as we begin a night of ecstasy that neither one of us could possibly ever forget.
***
50
Livy
I feel as though Jeremy and I have taken all of the passion and emotion from that stupid book we read and all of the lust and debauchery from the porn that we watched and merged it into one super cell of love. Before Amelia was born, Jeremy and I were always adventurous and experimental in the bedroom (among other places). But even the things we’d done last night were on a level above anything we had ever contemplated doing. They were things I didn’t know until a few days ago would be pleasurable if performed. All night, Jeremy and I played a constant back and forth battle of who could pleasure whom the best. In the end, I think we both went home with the gold.
The sun began to rise and we were both still awake, lying flat on our backs, completely spent. Muscles that I didn’t even know I had ached. My lips ached. My nipples ached. I was afraid to look in the mirror to see the state of my body and what Jeremy had left me with. I felt a spattering of bruises and hickies everywhere.
Everywhere.
The thought of him marking me scared me. Not because he had hurt me. The thought scared me because I wondered if I saw what he had done to me, if I would ever let either one of us leave this bed again. We had tussled and taunted with each other for the better part of six hours and I still hadn’t had enough. I was exhausted and sore and I wanted to go again. And again. I am not sure what exactly changed or transgressed last night but what happened was far beyond any sex we had ever had. Ever.
First time we had sex together? No comparison.
The assortment of “we might get caught” sessions over the years? Not even close.
Travel sex? Nope.
Honeymoon? A fraction of last night.
We had entered a realm, a vortex, where Jeremy and I connected in a way that we are never going to be able to let go of. Jeremy had once described the feelings between us as something reaching out from his chest and grabbing onto my heart. With all of the pain we had caused each other over the past few months, that grab had let go. But now, at this very moment, that grab has my heart clutched in a vice, holding on so tight that my chest hurts with the thought of it ever letting go again. That grab is pumping my heart, keeping it beating. If it ever lets go again, I most certainly will die.
I look over at Jeremy and he turns his head to look at me. “I love you so much, Jeremy. I know we’ve said our apologies already, but I am so sorry. For everything. For being bitter. For being stubborn. For leaving. I swear that I will stop holding everything in. I will let you know how I feel, just like I used to. I will stop worrying about whatever else might be stressing you out. Because in comparison to us being ok, nothing else matters.”
Jeremy shakes his head in agreement and places his hand on my cheek. “I promise I will always be there to listen, no matter what.” My cheek smiles into his hand and a tear of relief falls from my eye. We could have really fucked everything up. We almost lost each other. We almost gave up. The trunk helped us remember what we used to have and helped us turn it into something even better.
The trunk.
“The trunk!” I say as I sit up with realization. I motion to the dresser to find one of Jeremy’s t-shirts. I throw it on. “We still have one more envelope!” Jeremy sits up with the same excitement. He slips on boxers and we head out of the bedroom, making way to the dining room table.
Both of us pause at the same time. Jeremy and I see it simultaneously. I feel like someone has kidnapped my child. I clutch my chest and run toward the table. “It’s gone! The trunk is gone! Oh my God!” I look under the table. I look in the kitchen cabinets. I run to the living room and look under furniture and behind the television that’s hung on the wall. “Where is it?”
Jeremy runs his hand through his hair, watching me look for the trunk in places that the trunk couldn’t possibly fit. “I don’t know. However, I am a little more concerned with the fact that if the trunk isn’t here, that means that someone was in our apartment last night.”
All of my moving freezes. I had not even thought of that. Someone came in and stole our trunk! “Oh, God.” A panic attack begins to bubble. “That means, someone came in here...” as the thoughts enter my brain, I find it hard to spit them out into words because then those thoughts will be out in the open, lingering and true. “...came in here,” I repeat, shaking my hands as if doing so will make the panic go away. “While we were in there.” I point toward the bedroom. “Doing...”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what it means. This is some fucked up shit, Livy. The fact that someone delivered us a trunk of mysterious instructions is weird enough. But to think that someone actually came into our apartment in the middle of the night and took it away is beyond creepy.”
“But there was one envelope left. We weren’t done. And other than that, the trunk was empty. Why would someone come in the middle of the night and take an empty trunk?”
“No. Livy. Look.” Jeremy points at the wall. “The pictures are gone.” He walks over to the coffee table. “The record player, the candles—all gone. The journals are gone too.”
Now I feel like someone has kidnapped my second child. The one that doesn’t even exist. “Oh my God!” I yell.
“Yeah.”
“No one can read what we wrote! Jeremy! Those words were for our eyes only! Just for us!” I run my fingers through my hair and try to think about what to do. “So someone gives us a mysterious box of stuff and then takes it back
? I don’t even know where to go from here. Do we call the police? Do we forget it ever happened?” I am now in full on panic mode. My voice is at a piercing decibel and the panic is putting me on the verge of tears. Jeremy quickly walks towards me and wraps his arms around me. “Shhh. Hey, calm down,” he says, as he clutches my head into his chest. “We are definitely not going to pretend it never happened.” I steady my breathing with his and begin to calm down.
Finally, I have a rational thought. I look up at Jeremy. “Maybe we should put on a few more items of clothing and go ask the neighbor across the hall if he saw or heard anything strange last night.”
“Good idea.” We make our way back into the bedroom. I put on a bra but leave Jeremy’s shirt on. I throw on some shorts, sans underwear—Jeremy notices—while Jeremy throws on some jeans and a shirt. We head to the front door, Jeremy taking lead. He reaches the door and pauses for longer than what it should take to unlock the door and turn the handle to open it.
“Jeremy, what is it?” Jeremy reaches up and I peer around him to see what he is reaching for. It’s an envelope, taped to the door. “It’s the last envelope,” Jeremy says. “How do you know?” I ask. “I remember it from last night. I glanced at it briefly before I opened the other envelope. I remember the handwriting and the fact that the ink is red.”
The ink is red.
And it’s hand written.
Very different from the hand written Post-it on the porno movie.
This handwriting is curly and antique looking. Very Charles Dickens era.
Jeremy observes the hand writing and the envelope for far too long. “Well, open it already!” Maybe it’s a ransom note for my two kidnapped children.
Jeremy runs his finger under the sealed seam of the envelope and opens the flap. He pulls out another piece of card stock, this one being larger than the one from last night, but similar in color. Still standing behind Jeremy, I peer over his shoulder to read the card.
