Imagine Us

by Jaxson Kidman

  Then again, sometimes the wait was really worth it.

  I hated that cliché kind of thinking though.

  I put Adam’s soap back where I found it and finished my shower.

  After wrapping a dark red towel around my body, I wiped the mirror and saw my reflection again. My hair soaked, dripping down to the towel. I kind of loved the fact that he didn’t have matching towels. Different sizes and colors. All these little things about Adam made my heart flutter and my toes curl.

  When I went back to the bedroom, I was surprised to find Adam spreading his hands across the bed with a fresh, light gray sheet.

  “Look at this,” I said.

  He was shirtless, wearing nothing but jeans. When he turned, and my eyes saw all that beautifully cut, hard earned muscle, I felt the towel ready to slip off with a whoops, I don’t know what happened there…

  His strong shoulders cut into his wide chest. I was good at math but lost count of his stomach muscles because they cut down into his jeans. It was the same reaction as when I saw him shirtless when we were younger. Always hiding a body that anyone would kill to see, touch, and taste.

  I licked my lips, remembering where they had been just a short while ago, and a fresh round of heat and color rushed to my cheeks.

  “What’s wrong?” Adam asked. “Fresh sheets for the night, sugar.”

  “It’s all so grown up, Adam.”

  He laughed. “Grown up?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m… what a night.”

  My cheeks were raging with heat. I felt so stupid as I stood there like that.

  Adam moved toward me, a grin on his face. It was obvious how flustered I was and he reveled in it.

  He cupped my face with his hands and leaned in for a kiss.

  It was a long kiss. A really long kiss.

  “Anything else you want to get off your bucket list tonight, Elena?” he whispered.

  “Funny,” I said. “I think that’s enough for one night.”

  “You’re staying, right?”

  “Here?”

  “Here,” Adam said. He turned and pointed to the bed. “With me. Tonight.”

  My heart jumped and pounded against my chest.

  “You know what I just realized?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “My clothes are outside still. All of them.”

  “So, what?”

  “What if someone finds them?”

  “You’re worried about someone finding your bra and panties?”

  “It’s kind of weird, right? What if they think I drowned?”

  “Oh well,” he said. “Are you trying to find a way to avoid staying the night, sugar?”

  “No,” I said. “I want to stay.”

  Adam grinned.

  “What’s that for?” I asked.

  “Your clothes are outside, Elena.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “Did you bring anything else to wear?”

  My face dropped.

  Adam laughed. He walked to the closet and turned with a shirt in his hand. “This will do for tonight.”

  The shirt was big enough to be a nightgown on me.

  “That will be one hell of a walk of shame if I go to Marjorie’s wearing nothing but that.”

  “Shame, huh?”

  “Well, no. You know what I mean.”

  He touched my face again as he walked by me. “You get dressed for some sleep. I’ll take care of your clothes. And the sheets we messed up.”

  “So, wait a second,” I said. “You made the bed. And now you’re going to do laundry?”

  “That a problem?”

  “I think I want to marry you, Adam,” I said playfully.

  His eyes suddenly went serious. He kissed my cheek and put his lips to my ear. “I’ve wanted to marry you for years, sugar.”

  * * *

  That was just a joke, right?

  The words were clinging to my lips, even after Adam kissed me goodnight. Okay, to be fair, we kissed goodnight about a hundred times. With the lights on. With the lights off. With me facing him. With me turning the other way so he held me. It almost felt like we were kissing for each night we never got to kiss goodnight.

  But that one question just hung there.

  His words floating in my head just like my heart was floating in my chest.

  I’ve wanted to marry you for years, sugar.

  That was just flirty talk, right? There was no way in hell Adam was serious with that statement.

  Yet it kept me up longer than it should have.

  I felt Adam’s body against mine. Him breathing. His arm around me, holding me tight. I felt protected. He always made me feel protected. Even during the worse times of my life, he understood and was there. When my mother went through the flames of hell with gasoline in her arms, Adam was the one who stood by my side. He never judged me when I cried. He never told me to calm down when I got angry. And he never once made me feel any less beautiful than he always said I was.

  Even still, I let what could have been slip away. I let him slip away. I let myself slip away. I let time slip away.

  And in some way, I also let Chad slip away.

  I swallowed hard, an ache in my chest.

  “You know how hard it was the night you slept at my house to not do this? When you were sick, puking everywhere.”

  “Shut up,” I said, smiling.

  I didn’t realize Adam was still awake.

  “It was so cute, Elena. You’d just lean over and cry, saying you hated to throw up. I had to grab your hair so you didn’t become a complete hot mess.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Hold your hair?”

  “Everything, Adam. You did so much, and I did so little.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, sugar.”

  I rolled to my back and turned my head to look at him. “How so?”

  He traced a line along my chin. “You gave me everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Your smile.”

  My body gushed, and I attacked him with kisses.

  I eased my body over his, his hands reaching for the bottom of his shirt that I wore. His fingertips cut under the shirt and moved up my skin. From the backs of my legs to my ass and up my back. I shivered the entire time, kissing him faster and deeper. Before I knew it, the shirt was off my body and thrown to the floor. I forced my right hand between us and eased down into his jeans. It wasn’t difficult to find him. He was as hard as before.

  Touching him made me tingle in spots that made me blush.

  I broke the kiss to exhale a much-needed breath.

  Adam lifted his hips with force to slide his jeans off.

  I started to move away from him, but he shook his head and pulled me back on top of him. I felt the hard thickness of his body settling between my legs, pressing against me. I took another breath and came forward, lifting my body for him to have. When he touched between my legs, I groaned and jumped.

  He grinned. “Still so fucking cute, Elena.”

  “Be quiet,” I said. “And have me.”

  Adam placed one hand to the small of my back and the other hand slid up my body, touching everywhere until he finally settled at my face. He thrust up as I lowered down. Our bodies meeting in the most intimate way possible. The sudden rush of pressure and explosion of pleasure. My body demanding more with each thrust and grind of my hips. In the course of one night, Adam broke me open and made me greedy.

  But he didn’t seem to mind. And I certainly didn’t.

  I looked down at him as I pumped my body in a way I never knew I could.

  He kept his hand against my face, holding me where he wanted me. Leaving my lips begging for a kiss, but never getting one.

  Our eyes locked tighter than I could ever remember.

  The pleasure between my legs, but something else happening in my heart.

  I’m in love with Adam.

  * * *

  His body looked to be made fro
m cut stone, not with purpose or design, but just to be hardened. Proof that he was real and had his own scars. His own past. His own present. A present that I hoped to be a part of. Only if he’d have me though.

  My fingers twitched as I touched the top of my bra, tracing a line that I prayed looked seductive to him. My lips were ready to shiver, even though the room burned at about two hundred degrees. I slowly reached back to the clasp of my bra with both hands, wondering if I had waited long enough to do this. If it was sexy enough. But, I didn’t want to make it seem like I was as desperate as I really was…

  I stared at the screen and shook my head. I hurried to highlight everything I had just typed and deleted it. Of course I regretted doing that, because the words were real for me.

  The urge to write had come to me but all I wanted to do was describe what Adam looked like naked. Which wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but I needed an actual story to tell. Rewriting our history had been the initial start to the book that Lucy loved and wanted more of.

  After that first night with Adam, I wrote for a few hours the next morning. Sitting at my desk in the loft of his house, my eyes looking to the water when I needed a break. Knowing what I had done in the water and what it had led to. Truthfully, I didn’t want to actually skinny dip. But if it got me naked in front of Adam and led to what we did in his bed, then that dirty lake water was worth it.

  I wrote in a fury, going back in time and capturing the love that should have happened. What I ended up with was five pages of sloppy writing, but I took a chance and sent it over to Lucy without reading it over.

  It took Lucy all of twelve hours to call me and say she had been waiting for that for a long time. She wanted more. And fast. She wanted to know what happens to the two lost souls in the story. Because it was obvious that their environment was going to do everything in its power to rip them apart. And that she was eager to see if their young love could be strong enough to face that environment and win.

  To me, I played it off as though I had written it that way, when in reality I was just thinking about all those stolen moments between Adam and I where we both foolishly hesitated. Basically, writing everything that was meant to happen, but never did.

  But if it worked for Lucy, it worked for me.

  So, I sat at the desk with messy hair, in the same clothes that I slept in, a cup of cold coffee next to me. Adam had long since gone to the diner, leaving me with a lingering goodbye that I could still taste on my lips.

  When I got stuck in the story a little, I stopped and changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and went for a walk down to the lake. It was almost like a dream for me. Actually revolving my day around writing. Taking a break when I needed one and being lost in this cliché world of being a real writer.

  I walked the shore into a thicker part of the woods. My mind racing with the story and what I could do with it. How I could challenge the two people. In a way, it was almost too easy, just thinking about what Adam and I each went through. I thought about the time he slept in my basement for two nights because his mother didn’t pay the rent and the landlord got so mad, he changed the locks as a way to prove a point. Locked inside the apartment was all of Adam’s stuff. Including his school stuff. So not only was he homeless, he took crap from teachers at school for not having his books and homework. Adam took the hits without fighting back, which I never fully understood.

  Those two nights we kept secret from everyone.

  My mother and Chad.

  He slept in a sleeping bag in the musty basement. I sat on the basement steps and watched him, hurting for him, wondering about him, trying to convince myself that what I felt was just my heart being sorry. Definitely nothing more than that.

  After the second night, my mother caught him sneaking out of the basement. She could have freaked out, but she knew what was happening. For every ten dumb and bad things my mother did to me, there was one thing that was amazing. That morning she gave Adam twenty dollars to make sure he had food. She called him off school, pretending to be his mother. He begged me to ditch school and spend the day with him. I didn’t. I hated myself for it. He spent the twenty dollars on weed and got high to dull his real pain.

  Later that day his mother showed up with the owed rent money and they were let back into their apartment.

  That night I cleaned up the sleeping bag from my basement and hugged it tightly, actually crying… because I missed him not being there.

  I stopped walking and let the story replay over and over.

  The walk was refreshing but I needed to get back to my keyboard.

  “Is that you, Elena?” a voice said from in the woods.

  I let out a small cry and turned, my mind thinking about all the stupid ghost stories we told on the other side of the lake.

  It wasn’t some ghostly killer hellbent on revenge though.

  It was Charles.

  Wearing the same tattered clothes as when I first met him. Today he had a tan fedora on his head with a red stripe around the hat. It was old, dirty, with a hole in it, but he wasted no time in taking it off, nodding to me. His hair was matted with thick grease, in dire need of a shower.

  “Charles,” I said. “What a pleasure.”

  “I heard from a bird that you were living with Marjorie. Is that true?”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “I’m renting a room from her.”

  “How lovely,” Charles said. He half smiled. “What a great place to have a writer’s retreat.”

  “I agree.”

  I thought about how far I was from Adam’s house. If I should offer for Charles to come to the house. Get him a drink. Or a meal. Or let him take a shower.

  Almost sensing my thoughts, Charles reached out. “I’m not troubling you, am I?”

  “No,” I said. “I was going for a walk. I was writing this morning and-”

  “That’s what I like to hear,” he bellowed in a voice that echoed.

  Half his teeth were missing, and the rest were jagged and yellow, but he had an addictive smile that made me smile. His excitement was contagious. There were a million questions in my head swirling about him.

  “The writing is going well, yeah?” he asked.

  I sidestepped and leaned against the tree that was near the edge of the lake. There were gentle waves smacking the edge of the water. It was soothing. And Charles was the perfect company.

  “It’s going,” I said. “I’m very happy. How about you?”

  “The words are always working for me,” he said. “Always.”

  “Charles, have you ever had anything published?”

  He shook his head. “No. I write for the soul. My soul.”

  “What if your soul could connect to other souls?”

  Charles clicked his tongue. “That makes you a writer.”

  I laughed. “You know, I have an agent. Maybe if you have something finished, I can show it to her.”

  “Ah, the quest for more.”

  “More?”

  “That’s what everyone seems to want. But we forget what we have. Which is everything already. The ground to walk on. The air to breathe. The trees for shade, and for the homes of the birds that give us the music. The sight of the water. Everything we need.”

  “That’s a special way of looking at life, Charles.”

  “It’s the only way, Elena. But for you, you get more.”

  “I do? Why?”

  Charles smiled big. “Because of your beauty. And because of the way Adam loves you. That’s special too.”

  “Well, I write for a good reason, Charles.”

  “What’s that?”

  “To give people the feeling I wish I could feel,” I said.

  Charles looked beyond me to the water. He slowly nodded. Then he said, “The whispers crawl like a baby learning that life is more than it’ll ever know. Yet that baby will explore until someone says not to. Now that whisper fades, touching the top of the water, leaving fingerprints of ripples, that nobody will ever see…”


  “That’s beautiful,” I said. “Did you write that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re going for a walk, pretty Elena, but don’t forget to look. And hear. It’s all important.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I’m going to keep moving. You’re very busy today. I can feel the muse jumping off your skin. Keep writing.”

  Charles reached for me but pulled back. I hurried to grab his hand. It was honestly a little slimy, but I didn’t care. I held his hand with both my hands.

  “You keep writing,” I said. “And while you may have everything you need, Charles, someone out there may not know that yet about themselves. And instead of chasing demons and darkness, your words can make them see… and hear…”

  “From the lips of a poet and the eyes of an angel,” he said.

  He slowly walked back into the woods.

  I stood there, taking in the quick conversation which had more meaning than any professional conversation I’d had in years.

  I walked back to Adam’s house to find ten missed calls from Lacy.

  “Oh, fuck,” I whispered.

  I hurried to call her back.

  “I took care of it,” she said without a hello.

  “I’m so sorry. I forgot today…”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I said you weren’t feeling well. I showed the condos and it went great. You did a great job getting them interested.”

  “Lacy, I really am sorry. I got caught up here…”

  I was supposed to meet Lacy for three showings. And it had completely slipped my mind. I left her hanging in the worst way.

  “Just tell me you got caught up in bed with Adam.”

  “Actually… that’s sort of true.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “I feel foolish. I was writing. I went for a walk. I’m just…”

  “You’re making that place your home, Elena. If you’re going to give this up, do it soon before you burn any real bridges. That’s my advice.”

  “Right,” I said. “Of course. I really am sorry. If you close those deals, they’re all yours. I want nothing from them.”

  “Don’t worry, I wasn’t planning on sharing.”