by Paige North
I’m marrying Nixon Blake.
Chapter 3
We spend the rest of the reception dancing and drinking and pretending there isn’t anyone else in the room, though of course there is. We get interrupted constantly by people who want to congratulate us or see the ring. And I’m surprised to find that as long as Nixon is holding onto my hand, or has his arm around my waist, gripping my hip, he manages ok with the crowd. Still, when I finally rise up on my tiptoes and whisper into ear, “Wanna get out of here?” I feel him physically unwind.
“Yes please,” he practically purrs back to me.
Nixon takes me by the hand and leads me out to the parking lot and to his black Tesla.
“Oh shit,” I mutter.
“What is it?” he asks.
I sigh. “I’m sharing a hotel room with two of the other bridesmaids,” I say, thinking about how Diana and Audrey are probably already back there, potentially passed out, but definitely not enough to sleep through what I know I want to do with Nixon tonight.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says, opening the passenger door for me. I slide in and onto the softest leather seats I’ve ever felt. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a keycard. He flashes me a devilish grin. “I got a suite.”
“Of course you did,” I say, barely able to hide the giddy feeling bubbling up inside me.
We drive at a breakneck pace on roads that border the ocean. Seeing him command the speeding car with authority and ease, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on my thigh (and slowly creeping up). It’s seriously turning me on.
By the time we make it to his room, I can’t even be bothered to take in the luxury, which includes a wide balcony that overlooks the ocean and an enormous claw foot tub in the bathroom. All I can think about is getting out of this dress and getting him inside me.
As soon as the door closes behind us, I reach for the hem of his sweater, tugging it over his head until I see his bare chest. I run my hands down his abs, clenching my fingers until my nails leave red streaks in his tan skin. He hisses, his eyes locked on mine, and he grins.
I step back from him and turn, gazing over my shoulder as I sweep my hair to the size. “Get this fucking dress off me,” I say with a devious wink, and he practically lunges for the zipper. Soon my dress is in a puddle at my feet, and while he’s at it, he snaps his fingers on the hooks of my strapless bra.
“Goddamn you have the most gorgeous ass,” he says, gazing down at the black lace thong I’m wearing.
“Well you can follow this gorgeous ass right this way,” I tell him as I tuck a finger into the waistband of his pants, pulling him across the floor to the bed. As soon as we get there, I turn and push him down onto it, so that he’s perched right on the edge. I drop to my knees and unbutton his jeans, tugging at them until they’re off. Then I go for his boxers too. All nine inches of him are hard and ready for me, and as I lower his boxer briefs I let my tongue trail along the underside of his cock.
“Goddammit, Delaney, you’re killing me,” he moans.
“Oh, I’m not done yet,” I tell him.
And then I rise and step back and turn around, so once again he has a perfect view of my ass. Then I slowly bend over, my thumbs hooked in the waistband of lace, as I peel it slowly down my legs for him.
“Holy fuck,” he groans.
I stand up and turn slowly, one hand caressing my breast, the other migrating south until my fingers brush lightly against my clit.
“And to think, all this is yours,” I say, dipping a finger inside and then reaching up to offer it to him. He parts his lips and sucks it inside, moaning as his tongue works across it. “Forever.”
Those ice blue eyes are locked in on mine again, and I search him quickly to see if there’s any hesitation, any regret. But all I see is desire.
And something else.
Love.
I grin and bend down, my lips brushing his ear as I whisper, “I love you, Nixon Blake. You’re mine.”
A deep growl rolls in his chest, working its way up. He grabs my hips and lifts me into his lap and straight down onto his rock hard cock.
“And now you’re mine,” he says, as he begins thrusting hard up into me. Our little striptease had me soaking wet and ready for him, and I throw my head back, mouth agape, as I enjoy the feeling of his warmth and hardness. It’ like I can feel everything, every ridge and curve of him along the slickness of my pussy. I feel myself stretch around his shaft as he pounds deeper and deeper inside of me, sending me into fits of ecstasy I never thought possible. I come quickly, and then feel my orgasm start to rise again.
“I’m going to come,” he groans, and when I open my eyes and look at him, I see that he’s let go in a way I’ve never seen before. Every other time we’ve been together, he’s been in control. But this time, he’s relinquished that to me. It threads a connection between us that goes deeper than his cock driving into my pussy.
“Yes,” I moan, now riding him, hard and deep. I reach back and grab a fistful of his hair, bringing him back to me, his eyes locked in on mine. “I want you to let go. I want it to feel so good, you can’t hold back.”
And then I press my lips into his, parting his lips with my tongue until we’re connected everywhere, at every space. We move together, me rising and falling on top of him, as I feel him start to tense. And just before he truly lets go, he reaches down and presses his thumb onto my clit, and we come together, connected and crying out. I feel him fill me up with the warmth of his orgasm, his breath shuddering beneath me.
We ride our shared orgasm all the way to the end, each clutching the other like we’re going to save each other from drowning. And as we began to come down, our breaths heaving in tandem, we rest our foreheads against each other as we revel in our shared pleasure.
“Delaney Masterson, you’re my everything,” he whispers.
I plant soft kisses along the line of his jaw, relishing the brush of stubble against my lips.
“That’s the future Mrs. Blake, to you,” I reply.
“So I guess this means I should meet your family,” I tell him, after we’ve had sex twice more and are now collapsed in a heap in the bed, surrounded by pillows. I fiddle with the ring on my finger, admiring the way it catches the light from the candles on the bedside table, sending it refracting across the ceiling in the beautiful hotel room. “Or, you know, at least hear something about your family.”
He instinctively tenses beside me, and I reach over to lay my hand firmly on his chest. “Hey,” I say in a soothing voice. “It’s ok. It can wait. We don’t have to do this right now.”
He clenches his lips, his jaw twitching, as he sucks in a quick breath through his nose. Then he lets it out, long and slow. By the time he’s done, I can feel the tension start to melt away.
“It’s no secret, at least to you, that I don’t really like crowds,” he says. His voice sounds raw, ragged, and wrung-out. It’s like he’s reached up and opened a vein for me, ready to pour out all the pain he’s been holding inside. I curl into him, resting my head on his warm chest, where I can feel and hear the sound of his beating heart. It’s like I need reassurance that it’s still beating while he tells me what he’s about to tell me.
And then it all comes pouring out.
Nixon is the only child of two very smart people. In another life, they could have been college professors, likely well-known academics and intellectuals. They’d met at New England College as undergraduates, his father studying philosophy, his mother studying physics. They had promising futures.
Until they didn’t.
His father’s family lost everything in a bad stock deal, and he was forced to withdraw from NEC in the middle of his junior year. His mother, who Mr. Blake was already dating at the time, discovered she was pregnant soon after. Life became hard, and their dreams were put on the back burner. They ended up finishing their degrees at a community college and both became public school teachers. It should have been a triumph, that two struggling youn
g parents were able to make something of themselves.
Unfortunately, all they felt was bitterness.
Their lives had spun out of control, or so they thought, and they zeroed in on Nixon as the moment that all started.
“And for all the control they felt they’d lost, I think they decided to regain some of it through me,” Nixon says. He delivers the words like he’s reading aloud from a book with a not very exciting plot. But hearing him tell it, I can barely breathe. “I know now that they were clearly very sick,” he muses. “But back then, it just seemed like what parents did.”
Children don’t always cooperate, you see. Sometimes they don’t follow directions, or fall in line with your plans. That infuriated the Blakes, and so every time Nixon would defy them, they would shut him off.
“What does that mean?” I ask, imagining Nixon as a child, under the thumb of these people who are already coalescing into an image in my mind that scares me.
“It means that any time I did something they didn’t like, they’d simply ignore me. Only, they’d ignore me for days, treating me like a ghost in my own house. They never hit me or spanked me. They simply pretended I didn’t exist.”
“Nixon, that’s terrible,” I whisper into the warmth of his chest.
“Well, of course it only made me desperate for attention, which I’d try to get any way I could,” he explains. “And that’s when the punishment changed.”
I’m practically holding my breath.
By the time he was in grade school, Nixon’s parents had constructed a “quiet room” in the basement or their small, New England cracker box house in Worcester. It was essentially solitary confinement where Nixon would be placed on time out any time he did anything that they deemed “bad behavior.” Only to them, being alive and a child was all it took. Soon, everything was considered bad behavior. Drop a pencil? To the quiet room. Sneeze at the dinner table? To the quiet room. Drop something in a trash can too loudly? To the quiet room.
Soon he was spending more time in the quiet room than out, until eventually he came home from school and reported directly there. He’d sleep there at night, wake up in the morning, and go to school. And when he got home, the cycle began again.
“The quiet room was empty,” he says, and he doesn’t have to describe it further. I know exactly what he means. No furniture. Nothing to amuse himself. No color or life.
Like his apartment.
Like Scour’s headquarters.
“I know it sounds awful, but it just became reality for me. To the point where I needed that kind of quiet, non-sensory environment just to think. Just to be.”
“And so you made your world into a quiet room,” I whisper, the tears starting to roll down my cheeks. I prop myself up on my elbows and look up at him. He looks stoic, but when he sees the tears falling, he reaches up with his thumb to wipe them from my cheek.
“Until you,” he says. “Suddenly I didn’t need a quiet room. You became the place I needed to go to unwind, to relax, to calm down. You became my comfort. I needed you.”
As soon as he says the words out loud, it’s like a weight has been lifted off his shoulders. He’s poured out his pain, and I’ve collected it all. I’m probably the first person to ever pick up this burden and carry it for him. I know that this doesn’t make it all better. I know that he’s going to have more work to do. But knowing that I can be that comfort to him makes me fall even more in love with him. And I know that no matter what, I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to protect him from the demons that have been chasing him his whole life.
Chapter 4
It’s strange being on the other side of it. We spent so long hiding, it was like we didn’t know how to be together outside of his apartment, not at first.
As soon as we got back to Boston, Nixon had his PR person at Scour release the statement about our impending nuptials. What with the very public proposal, we figured it wouldn’t be long before it got out, so we wanted to get ahead of the story.
Once it hit, we were officially free. There was nothing keeping us from going out to dinner or seeing a movie. We could travel, or just go for a walk. And we did it all. We ate out at all the restaurants where Nixon usually ordered in from. We went to the theater. I joined him on his runs along the Esplanade. He even had Chinese takeout at my old apartment, where Elise finally got the chance to interrogate him.
It was great, except for one small detail. There was one place we hadn’t been. One place we’d been avoiding.
But now, as we speed down the Mass Pike, Nixon clutching my hand as he steered the Tesla, I wondered if maybe this was one we should have left undone.
“Are you sure about this?” I ask.
He flips the turn signal and steers us off the Pike onto the exit ramp for Worcester.
“I need to do it,” he says. “I think I also need you to see it. To really understand.”
Nixon’s childhood home is nothing like the world he inhabits now. Where his apartment is spacious and grand (if sparsely furnished), gazing out over the wide expanse of the city, this house is small and inconsequential, like it’s trying to hide itself from view. The little yellow house, one story with a pitched roof, practically disappears behind overgrown bushes that flank the front door. When we get out of the car and approach, I see that the paint is faded and peeling.
We stand there on the crumbling front stoop for a moment, both of us just staring at the door.
“Really, we can go,” I tell him. I worry that he’s doing this just for me, and I want him to know I don’t need it. From what he’s told me, his parents have no place in his life, nor should they. So it really doesn’t matter to me if I ever meet them. But he’s adamant.
He reaches out and grabs my hand, squeezing tightly.
“No,” he says. “We’re doing this.” And then he uses his free hand to knock firmly, loudly on the door.
It feels like an eternity before I hear the slide of a deadbolt. The door creaks open. A tall, gray-haired man stands there, his shoulders hunched like the world has beaten down upon his head for far too long. He looks first at Nixon, then at me. Then he sighs.
“Come in,” he says, like he’s resigned to this fate. Then he turns and walks back into the house, not even waiting or beckoning us inside.
“How long has it been since they’ve seen you?” I whisper to him.
“Thirteen years,” Nixon replies.
Inside, the house is dark and dusty, the beige carpet taking on a sort of grayish hue where decades of steps have worn it down. The walls are covered in a fading striped wallpaper, but like Nixon’s apartment, there are no photos on the wall. Nothing to prove that an entire generation of life happened here. No baby Nixon, no Nixon playing tee ball or graduating from high school.
I follow Nixon into the living room, where his father is now sitting on the couch beside a gray-haired woman who I know is Nixon’s mother. Though hers are faded and dull, she has the same blue eyes. His mother has a cannula in her nose, the long plastic tubing snaking down to a wheezing oxygen tank placed at her feet.
For a long time, no one says anything. Nixon and I are standing in the middle of their living room. They haven’t seen their son in over a decade, and he’s here to introduce his fiancé. But they have nothing to say. They just glare at him, like they’re affronted that he’s bothering them by taking up space in their house. And in that instant, I can perfectly picture what it was like for Nixon to grow up in this house, one where he was loathed for daring to take up space. To exist.
Beside me, I can feel Nixon starting to tense, so I squeeze his hand. I can be what he needs right now. I can try to make this ok.
“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. And Mrs. Blake,” I tell them, trying to put an approximation of a smile on my face.
“And you are?” His mother croaks.
“I’m Delaney Masterson,” I tell them. I reach out a hand to shake, but Mrs. Blake just stares at it like I’ve offered her a bag of dog shit.
“She’s my fiancé, Mom,” he says, the word sounding foreign on his lips.
“Oh,” his mother says. And that’s it. That’s all she has for the news that her only child is engaged to be married.
“We already had lunch,” his dad says, as if we asked for them to feed us.
“It’s ok, we ate on the way,” I tell them. At this point, I just want to smooth this over and get the out of here. I don’t know what Nixon was hoping to get out of this experience, but I hope he’s gotten it. Because I’m ready to leave here forever.
“Actually, I was just here to show Delaney where I grew up,” Nixon says, his voice full of anger and resentment. It strikes me as odd, the way he makes it seem like the house was the important thing, not the parents who raised him. “I’ll just show her around, if you don’t mind.”
He’s already pulling me from the living room as I hear his mother struggle to her feet behind us.
“What are you doing? You don’t have permission to just traipse around this house like you own the place,” she says, indignant.
But Nixon ignores her, taking me through the dining room and into the kitchen, where he stops in front of a closed door.
“Don’t you go down there,” his mother snaps, shuffling into the kitchen behind us. “You have no right. No right!”
“Like hell I don’t,” he mutters, reaching for the knob. It sticks at first, the wood swollen, the dingy white paint sticking. But Nixon gives it a quick tug, and it shrieks open. There are steps down, but it’s dark below.
The basement. The quiet room.
Oh my god.
“Nixon, maybe this isn’t—“ I say, pulling him close to me.
“You’re not going down there!” His mother cries, growing hysterical.
Nixon wheels around on her, until he’s towering over her, his fists clenched. “Yes. I. Am.” He seethes, and then he takes me by the hand and pulls me down into the darkness.
