It’s lewd and crude. Not anything like the romantic wedding night sex I imagined when I was online shopping for rings.
And I don’t care. His cock feels so good inside of me. I don’t want poetry. I don’t want flowers. All I want is this. This rough fucking. My back arches as I let him take whatever he wants from me.
Stone and I are, I think it’s been established, the absolute worst, when it comes to communication. But that night…
That miracle of a Christmas night, we correspond better than we ever have before with only a few words exchange.
“Wanna feel you,” he grunts, his hands fall away from by butt.
It’s just three words, but I know exactly what he means. He rises and I fall. Colliding in the middle, he takes my mouth again and I gladly surrender, pressing my large soft breasts into his wide hard chest as we begin to move together. Holding me close, his strokes deepen inside of me, his grunts become more and more guttural. A bitten back moan, as I meet him stroke for stroke. I never want this to end, but not sure how much longer I can hold on.
We explode together. Two bodies, two people, two souls in total agreement.
Stone falls out of the kiss again with his climax. His back caves and he shudders as he empties inside of me. His cumload is…I’m not going to lie. A lot. Like enough to make me wonder if his ED wasn’t something he’d been dealing with for years, not months as I’d previously assumed.
“You’re back,” I say when he’s finally done.
Breathing hard, he lets his entire body fall back against the settee. Then he looks up at me.
The smile on his face is in no way cold this time. No, it’s large. Large, wide, and totally sincere.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Last night, I’d had some thought of making a big deal of Boxing Day, too. Anything to distract me from the husband who’d rejected me that morning.
But on December 26th, I wake up to the ding of a text from Aunt Mari: “Are you ever going to get up? I made monkey bread.”
I’m picking up the phone to shoot her a quick sorry and ETA when a new text comes through. “That’s okay. Your husband’s bringing your plate upstairs.”
That’s all the warning I get before Stone comes through the door with a tray. It’s kitted out with coffee, monkey bread and a scramble of eggs and a bunch of vegetables and meats from last night’s party. There’s also a vase with a flower in it.
“Wow, breakfast in bed,” I say, completely unable to hide my surprise.
This is…well, pretty darn romantic. Too romantic. Looking at the tray gives me a warm and shaky feeling. Like I’m skating on ice underneath a blazing hot sun.
“I just brought it up. Tia Mari made it,” he tells me, as if sensing my conflicted response to his thoughtful gesture. “And Talia’s the one who decided you just had to have a flower in a vase. Said she saw it on TV, and I was like, what the hell you watching?”
“You’re concerned about her watching inappropriate TV, but not about cursing?” I ask, taking the tray from him. “I’m introducing a swear jar tomorrow. You are going to end up paying for that little girl’s college.”
Stone pulls a bill out of his wallet and tosses it on the tray. “Here’s a hundy to start it off. That should hold me through lunch.”
I laugh, not just because of the joke, but because Stone actually made it.
However, the amusement fades from his eyes when I laugh.
“What?” I ask, not sure what happened to our moment.
,“Nothing,” he answers. “I’m just definitely seeing why Rock liked you.”
A compliment. I do believe Stone Ferraro just gave me, Naima Almonte an actual compliment. My heart thrills, only to roller coaster drop when I remember the secret I kept from him. The secret I kept from everybody.
“Um, Stone…there’s something you should know,” I say, setting the tray aside. “I think maybe you should know …Rock dumped me.”
Stone blinks. Then blinks again. “What? No, he didn’t.”
“Um, actually, yeah, yeah, he did.”
Stone stills, sways, then sits down on the bed’s edge like he’s trying not to fall. “When?” he asks, his expression unreadable.
“A few days before he died,” I answer. “But he was a little weird for months before that. After I moved out of Luca’s penthouse, he started calling less and less. We went from going out every day, to once a week, then barely once a month, because he was so busy.”
I lower my eyes, remembering how confused I’d been. Confused but not surprised. Amber had warned me that she didn’t think our relationship was much more than Stockholm Syndrome in disguise. And she’d been right.
“I think he probably would have ghosted me if the circumstances had been different. But since I was his boss’s wife’s best friend, he had to do me at least the courtesy of breaking up. He…said…um….it was because of you. Because you said I was a lesbian…and that I was probably thinking of Amber when I was fooling around with him. It was super offensive. Our first argument. First and last.”
Stone, the man I’ve already had so many fight with, I’ve lost count, looks over his shoulder at me. I’m not expecting an apology for his part in our breakup, and I don’t get one. He just sits there, visibly stunned that Rock and I weren’t the love story he thought we were.
I clear my throat into the new super tense silence, “I understand if this changes your feelings about…” I shake my head, not sure what to call what happened yesterday. It was too passionate and intense to merely be called a meeting of needs. So I settle for, “what happened last night.”
When Stone still doesn’t answer, I continue one with, “Rock told me he wasn’t looking for anything complicated when he broke up with me. After the way he grew up, he wanted a normal life. A normal wife, without any shades of gray. He probably wouldn’t have married me, even if he knew I was pregnant.”
“No, he wouldn’t have,” Stone agrees with a somber nod of his head. “Rock never double-dipped. Once a girl was gone, she was gone. You lasted a little longer than most of the other ones, though.”
Stone’s words hit me like a bowling ball to the chest. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. But I’m telling you now.”
“Yeah…now…” he says, before going quiet again. After a few moments he looks over his shoulder to ask me, “So is it true?”
“Did Rock dump me?” I nod. “Yeah, yeah he did. I wouldn’t lie about that.”
“No, the part about Amber. Luca doesn’t see shit but Amber when she’s in the room, but I noticed the way you used to look at her. Like she hung the moon. Plus, there’s nice, then there’s what you did. Offering to help her take care of her baby, then letting yourself get kidnapped right along with her when Luca came a calling.”
“I didn’t let myself get kidnapped,” I remind him, my voice going from soft to snappish in an instant. “That was all you. And your gun.”
“Yeah, maybe at first that was an excuse you could use.” Stone answers. His words are confrontational, but his voice is not. His tone stays a matter-of-fact, Maury reading DNA results to the jerk who refuses to claim his kid, as he says, “Rock told me what happened when Amber convinced Luca to let you go. He said you cried when he told you the good news. And then there’s all this stuff with you refusing to tell Amber you’ve had a baby and married me…”
My chest constricts at the unspoken, but he continues to look me in the eye as he asks “So what’s going on with you? You still hung up on Amber or what?”
I squirm under his questions, and I think about the day our friendship fell apart again. How hurt I felt that Amber was basically kicking me out of her life, how betrayed, even though I couldn’t quite explain why.
Stone forced me into this marriage. I don’t owe him anything. For a moment that feels like a good enough excuse to say nothing. To clamp my lips and fold my arms, like I used to when my mom accused me of filching her bonbon amidon starch cookies at Christmas time.
But I
guess in the end, Too Nice Naima, just can’t stand to be that much of a hypocrite. How many times had I accused Stone of not properly communicating with me?
No, I don’t owe him anything, but I find myself confessing. “I don’t know what my relationship with Amber was. Friendship. Just friendship. I never expected it to be more. At least at first. I didn’t think I had feelings for Amber or any other girl. When my parents were still living with me in New York, I barely had time to go out to dinner, much less any kind of relationship. But then they moved away, and I was all alone, except for Amber, who never seemed to need to spend more than a few days a week with her then boyfriend. So when she got pregnant after breaking up with him, it all felt so logical. Like, yeah, of course we would be a family. We could always be there for each other. I loved that idea. Loved Amber and her unborn child. But then Luca happened, and all those plans went, poof! I guess it really is a spectrum like they teach us. Normally, I like guys, but for Amber…I would’ve changed my mind. I can’t say if I was in love with her. But I also can’t say I wasn’t. That’s the truth. The whole truth, as much as I can tell of it.”
“Yeah, well…” More quiet. Then Stone says, “You triggered Rock.”
I crook my head, surprised by his three-word conclusion. “What do you mean, I…”
“Triggering—isn’t that what they call it when you make people relive shit they don’t want to relive?”
Once again Stone’s definition of a textbook word is crude but not entirely inaccurate. “I’m not talking about your word usage. I’m saying I didn’t know Rock had a girlfriend who left him for another woman.”
“It wasn’t a girlfriend; it was our mom.”
“Your mom had a girlfriend?”
“Yeah, and she still does,” Stone says. “Her and Luca’s mom are both still married. Technically. But when it comes to boning, that’s what’s up.”
I blink, my entire mind shifting to accommodate the idea of the two women, I’d only ever seen in pictures having a torrid affair. “How do you know? Are you sure?”
“Rock and me walked in on them when we came home from college after deciding we didn’t need to be there. They’d pretty much set up house. Rock’s no fan of our dad’s, but he loved Luca’s dad. And you know how loyal both of us used to be to Luca…”
Used to be. I wonder if he’s putting that fealty in the past tense because of what he discovered about his mother, or the wedding I’d asked him to keep secret. “Did you ever tell Luca?” I ask. “Luca or his dad?”
“We thought about it, but why rock the boat? Luca’s dad has got a mistress, too. He just doesn’t know so does his wife. So in the end we stayed quiet about it. But Rock never forgave her. Barely managed a card and flowers for Mother’s Day after that. And you know how he liked to keep his shit black and white. If he thought there was even a chance of you fucking around with Amber behind his back, yeah, of I’m not surprised he took that relationship of yours behind the barn to shoot it.”
I can’t believe it, so many puzzle pieces were finally falling into place about the last doomed month of Rock’s and my relationship. But I have to ask , “And how about you? How did you take finding out about your mom and your aunt…by marriage at least.”
Stone shrugs. “Popped a couple of blue-labels and kept it moving.”
A logical answer, at least for Stone. And it feels like a natural conclusion to our conversation.
But instead of leaving it there, I ask, “And how about now? With me, now that you’re off the drugs?”
This time he doesn’t just look at me over his shoulder, he full on turns around to face me and sets the tray on the floor.
“Fuck Amber,” he answers, his dark eyes blazing inside a face as hard as New York concrete. “Don’t matter what or who you were feeling before, I’m your husband now.”
Then he captures my lips and covers my body with his.
It’s an answer to my question, but not really. Our past…his psychology… Amber, who still doesn’t know—all those factors feel like shadows surrounding our relationship. Blocking the light.
Anxiety pings like an engine light in the back of my head, even as Stone creates just enough space between our bodies to raise my sleep shirt and rid me of my panties. His workout pants get shoved down after that, and then he’s in. “My fucking wife,” he growls low in my ear, right before he begins to slowly stroke inside of me, his movements deep, deliberate, and demanding.
With a needy groan, I twine my legs around his waist, my nails scraping down the back of his workout shirt. God, he makes me ache. Not just for sex, either. And that emotional fact sends another wave of anxiety through me.
He abruptly stops moving on top of me and grabs me by the chin. “Where you at?”
“I’m right here,” I answer, telling him what feels like both the obvious truth and a terrible lie.
The hard glint in his eyes lets me know he doesn’t believe my truth lie. “Whose wife are you?”
“Yours,” I answer, my heart quickening with the word.
“Where you at?” he asks again.
“Here. With you.”
And this time it doesn’t feel like a lie.
The anxiety, Amber, all the secrets we’ve revealed in less than twelve hours, they all fade away as I look into his dark eyes.
“Stone, I’m right here with you. Please. Please don’t stop—”
My plea breaks off, when he drops down on one arm and starts driving into me, his hips thrusting powerfully to the beat of my desperate cries. Desperate and grateful.
Stone heard my truth, and he still wants me. Even more than his brother did.
It feels too good to be true.
I can’t believe it. But I can enjoy it, I decide as he pounds into me. I can enjoy it until the wheels come off this relationship, too.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I wait and wait. But things just keep going okay. Stone gets a therapist as promised. Also, a new psychiatrist, who refuses to prescribe anything, since his behemoth patient might look like a monster, but doesn’t in fact have any documented psychiatric history. At least not on paper.
“I can’t talk about the killing and shit,” he tells me after his third therapy appointment.
We’re at a toy store during my lunch hour. We’re having a special dinner for Talia’s birthday tonight, and Stone demanded that I come with him to pick out her present this time. “So I don’t fuck it up again.”
I didn’t really think he fucked it up the first time, but Too Nice Naima stays humming in my background, no matter how hard I try to switch her off. So here we are in a downtown store full of twee toys, trying to find a present for the girl who really doesn’t want any presents from men, and something for Stone to talk with his new therapist about.
“Maybe you can talk to her about losing your brother, and some of your childhood stuff. You know, with your Dad.”
Stone snorts. “How I’m looking, still whining about my dad hitting me a few times when I was a kid?”
“It’s not about how you appear,” I point out. “It’s more about processing the emotions.”
Stone just grunts. And I continue to scan the shelves, wondering how far to push him. It had been a lot more than a few times, according to Rock. I remember the stories he told me, about how Stone was the first to get in front of their father, whenever he tried to come after Rock or their mother.
Rock had said, “My dad would have to knock him unconscious if he wanted to lay a hand on either of us. He was our hero.”
I had sensed back then that Rock was only telling me this story to get me to like the twin brother I despised back then. It was important to him to have us get along, and he wanted me to be impressed. But at the time, all I’d been able to think was, “So that’s how that monster was created.”
But now I’m standing next to the monster. Trying to help him find an appropriate toy, while listening to his play-by-play of what sounds like another mostly silent therapy appointment. �
��She can’t help you if you don’t let her in.”
Stone grunts again, and then picks up a baseball mitt, hanging out on an end cap.
“Mmm, I don’t know if Talia’s going to be into baseball,” I tell him.
“I wasn’t going to get it for Talia, I was going to get it for us,” he says. “You know, for the next kid, since it’s going to be a boy.”
My heart freezes in my chest. “Another kid?”
He rolls his eyes at me. “C’mon don’t act like we ain’t talked about this before.”
Technically, he’d done most of the talking during that ridiculous conversation. Also… “That was before.”
“Before what?” He turns to face me. “You mean before we started fucking for real?”
I swallow. “Yes, before… that.” How did I go from waiting for the inevitable shoe to drop on our relationship to talking about kids?
He lowers the mitt. “Yeah, I’d think us fucking every night without protection would make another kid in our future obvious.”
I’m not sure what to say, and when I finally do answer it feels like I’m carefully picking each word before it comes out of my mouth. “We’ve only been having sex for a few months. Maybe we should put conversations like this on hold until we’re both surer about the next steps.”
He looks down at me for a long, tense moment. Then he says, “I’m buying the fucking glove.”
I watch him walk away, feeling helpless. And making wishes in my chest that I know better than to utter out loud.
We never do find a present for Talia. And instead of walking in the door with a beautifully wrapped gift that evening, Stone sticks his head into the kitchen where Aunt Mari, Talia, and me are frosting the cupcakes we’ll be having after dinner tonight.
“Hey, Tal, come out here, I need your help with something,” he says, not even a hint of happy birthday in his tone, even though the kitchen smells of freshly baked cupcakes and all of Talia’s favorite Dominican dishes, bubbling on the stove.
STONE: Her Ruthless Enforcer: 50 Loving States, North Carolina Page 12
