by KC Falls
"Are you sure you aren't getting overly paranoid about this?"
"Raina, I'm going to have Kwan looking out for you. Don't be concerned if you see him hovering around. If you do see him, don’t' acknowledge him."
"Really, Tristan, this is ridiculous."
"It is not ridiculous. Bad men harm innocent people all the time. Bad men take lives simply because they're connected with the real object of their evil. It's called collateral damage and it's part of the game of war." It sounded like he choked. "Sometimes the best way to hurt someone is to target someone they care about. That's the easiest way to get what you want."
I had the eerie feeling we weren't just talking about my father and me. I hadn't thought about Elsa for nearly a whole day. Until I found out what had happened with her, she was going to be a shadow over us. But, yet again, this wasn't the time.
"Well, right now, no one is going to see any connections between you and me or me and anyone else. I'm down for the count. I feel like shit."
"I'm sorry. I didn't want to worry you. Get some rest and we'll talk later."
"Tell Tom and the guys I'm sorry."
"They'll understand."
***
I could hardly lift my head from my pillow for four days. Tristan kept up a steady supply of deliveries of provisions and other treats. It was far more than I could consume, but Jenn was very impressed.
"It sure is a shame you haven't got any appetite. I haven't eaten this well in years," she told me.
Tristan called twice a day, at least. He kept me posted on Artie's slow-moving process of discovery and how the play was progressing.
After Thursday night's rehearsal he told me that everyone was completely off book and the blocking was starting to move like a ballet. "Tom really is a master choreographer," he said. "There's not a static moment on stage."
He also told me that Suze had come in that night to 'pinch hit' for me in my absence. That certainly didn't make me feel any better, but it gave me a damn good reason to recover. By Sunday afternoon I felt human again. I decided to take my flu-weakened legs for a walk in the late summer sun.
I walked a short few blocks before I had to turn around, exhausted. There'd be no marathons for me any time soon. The streets were pretty empty. Kwan was reading his paper on a bench in front of the dry cleaners at the intersection near the duplex. I smiled when I saw him and he completely ignored me. A woman jogged past me toward the park and a couple of cars went by.
As soon as I got into the duplex, Tristan called. "Kwan thinks it's possible you've been marked."
"Marked?"
"He's not sure. But he wanted me to tell you to stay alert."
A very creepy feeling came over me.
"Don't worry. Kwan's the best. He won't let anyone get near you. But right now, we have to watch and wait."
"I was hoping we could have dinner tonight. I feel much better and I could really use your company."
"Out of the question."
"I had hoped you would be missing me like I'm missing you…"
"If you only knew."
"Why don't you tell me?"
"I'll make a deal with you," he said in the throaty way he had when he was about to say something sexy. The purr was music to my ears after all the serious talk. "I'm going to call you at eight. Have dinner, relax in the tub, have a glass of wine or two. When I call, I want you snuggled in bed, waiting for me."
Eight o'clock seemed to take years to arrive. I followed his instructions and had a nice big glass of wine that I had nearly finished by the time he called.
"I'm going to tell you some of the things I'm going to do with your heavenly body. While I do, I'm going to imagine you touching yourself and I'm going to do the same."
"Phone sex?" I giggled.
"Prepare to be pleasantly surprised just how hot a phone can be…Right now I am laying here on my bed, completely nude. Are you picturing that?"
"I can picture you nude, but not your bed. I haven't seen your bed, remember?"
Tristan cleared his throat. "Never mind the bed. Think about my cock that's just asking to be stroked. Just half awake, waiting for you to tell me what you're going to do to it."
"The first thing I would do is take you in my hand and hold you while I felt the blood pumping into your shaft. I'd feel you grow right there in my grasp."
"Very nice. While you hold me I can feel your soft fingers play with my cock and reach down and cup my balls and roll them gently."
"I would start to move my hand up and down your shaft, playing at the cockhead when I reached the end and twisting, ever so slightly."
"You're good at this, Raina. My dick is getting harder and harder."
"Are you touching yourself?"
"Oh yeah."
The thought of Tristan, on the other end of the line, pulling on his erection sent my own body into action. "My hand is between my legs and I can feel that I'm already wet just knowing…"
"Knowing that I'm going to jack off listening to you tell me how you masturbate? Knowing that there's already a glistening drop seeping out of the end of my cock?"
"If I was there, I'd lick it away. I'd taste your salty sweet essence and twirl my tongue around the soft sensitive ridge…"
"I'd pump my cock into your mouth but I wouldn't come there, this time. Because I want to fuck you."
"Oh god, Tristan, I really do want to fuck you."
"You will, sweet. Now just imagine it. Take me into your pussy. How do you want to do it?"
"On top of you. I want to ride on you."
"Impale yourself on me and buck away."
"I want to press my clit against you hard."
"Your breasts in my hands. Your knees around my waist."
His breath was coming faster. He was talking to me and he was stroking his magnificent cock as we played with our words. It was hard to believe I could say the things I said. Before Tristan, my sexual vocabulary was limited to unngghh and oh god. Now I was asking him to fuck me, come in me, eat me, finger me, take my pussy, take my ass. He told me that I felt like a tight tunnel of wet silk when he entered me. He described feeling the ridges and folds inside me and how they caressed him when he thrust. He described my orgasms in such detail, I was amazed.
All the while we touched ourselves, miles apart. He came first. He stopped talking. All I could hear were the guttural sounds of his release. I encouraged him to come for me. I told him I would drink him with my mouth, my pussy and my ass. I told him to watch his semen splash on my face, my breasts, my stomach. I could hear him going crazy as all the words and all the ways tumbled through his ears. His desire and his satisfaction were the biggest turn on of all. The ecstasy I heard him release released me. I rocked against my fingers and told him.
"You've got it. Now. Yours…your body, it's coming for you." Then I closed my eyes and let the pleasure take over.
We laughed at ourselves afterwards, and why not? I was learning that there were so many different ways to touch, to find satisfaction. There was gentle, rough, passionate, lusty, needy, and even something as almost comical as phone sex. Tristan was a voyage of sensual discovery in so many ways. I found myself hoping the journey would never end.
Twelve
The next several weeks were a combination of torture and triumph. He stayed true to his conviction that our relationship should remain a secret. He had serious fears about the thugs connecting him to me and consequently to my parents at his home in Maine.
My father was recuperating nicely thanks to Mom's ministrations and the beautiful, carefree setting Tristan had provided for them. Mom even hinted, as the time went by, that she was seeing something in my father that she hadn't seen in a very long time. I didn't ask. I didn't want to embarrass her. But I read between the lines and was happy for her.
It disturbed, but didn't surprise me, that no one in the theater group seemed to question that the 'couple' they had seen on that one night of Brian's party vanished as quickly as it had formed. Tristan and I
were amiable enough to one another and I suppose everyone assumed it was just another instance of 'adult playtime' in the world of the Mahkeenac Little Theater. Apparently every one of them had been with each other at one point or another and I was now just one of the bunch.
Having been initiated, so to speak, I was getting a lot more attention from the other actors. I suppose they thought I was fair game. I played along a bit, flirting here and there. Tristan was not amused.
"I realize you're frustrated with our arrangement, Raina," he told me one night. "But I find it deeply disturbing to watch you behave like some cheap tramp at the theater."
"Tramp?" I had responded, incredulous. "Aren't you overreacting a little? I'm just trying to fit in. Suze and Nicky certainly do their share of innocent flirtation."
"There's nothing innocent about their flirtations. And they are sluts, pure and simple."
"You don't seem to mind sluts." I was frustrated. And pissed off. "You've certainly been seen with plenty of them."
"Seen by whom?" he asked coldly. I couldn't admit to snooping around on the internet and studying his pictures.
"Never mind."
"I'll have you know that I have not had any kind of sexual relationship with anyone at that theater."
"But everyone…" I was shocked. He was either lying or the prevailing assumption was dead wrong.
"Everyone should mind their own business and stay out of mine."
I intended to spend some serious time rethinking how much stock to put into anything someone else told me they 'knew' about Tristan King.
It wasn't all frustration. Tristan took me in his arms more than once in the dark corners of the theater. He told me he missed me, needed the comfort of my touch, wanted the completion of our desire. I lived on those words.
As much as I wanted to secure my parents' safety, I came perilously close to throwing caution to the wind. Only Tristan's conviction and control made it possible for me to keep from pushing him into something that could have blown up in my face.
I had to believe in him. He had brought considerable resources to bear on my father's predicament and he was convinced that the people harassing him were anything but amateurs. Tristan seemed to have personal knowledge of how this sort of thing worked and I was completely naïve. Trusting him was my only choice. In the end, if we kept our distance from each other it would only make the reunion sweeter, or so I told myself.
There was another bonus. Every night, after the rehearsal was over and we were both tucked into our beds, Tristan would call me and we would talk. We became experts at phone sex, but that can only go so far. Maybe it was because we weren't face to face, but laying in our separate beds in the dark that allowed him to let down his guard. He began to let me inside.
I learned that he was the only child of Maryann and Bradley King of Oak Park, Illinois. He grew up in the upscale suburb of Chicago, adored by his stay at home mother and well provided for by his father who worked at the Chicago Board of Trade. His father was distant, but Tristan said he hardly noticed because his mother was his world and he was hers.
His mother made a rare trip into the Loop to do some Christmas shopping on a cold winter's day. Snow was expected in the evening and Maryann assured her then eleven-year-old son that she'd be back well before the storm hit. She dropped him off at his best friend's house and kissed him good-bye as she ruffled his hair and told him to be good. Tristan never again saw his mother alive.
Her car hit an ice patch on the Eisenhower Expressway and was flattened by the semi it skidded into. He told me the next few days were a blur of shock and grief so deep and powerful that he was sure it was going to kill him, too. I wanted to crawl through the phone and take the little-boy Tristan in my arms when he said that his father never once held him after Maryann died. He had wept his grief out into his pillow until there weren't any tears left to cry.
By the turn of the New Year, he had left behind the big comfortable home, still decorated for Christmas, and moved into a high rise on Lake Shore Drive. It was expensive, modern and absolutely nothing like what he had spent his entire life around. His friends, of course, were lost to him. His father installed him in the best private school money could buy and hired a professional housekeeper to run his life. At almost twelve he didn't really need a nanny and he certainly didn't get one. He remembered Mrs. Humbolt as being nearly as cold as his father, only present.
Even when his father was home, he wasn't. He'd lock himself away in his office and pretend to work until he was tired enough and had enough scotch in him to put him to sleep. Young Tristan learned how to live alone.
"When high school finally and mercifully ended, I had my pick of any university. I had had the finest education and all the time in the world to devote to being a good student," he said one night. "I chose Wharton. In a rare conversation about my life, my father had said that he would like to see me go to Harvard or Princeton. Wharton wasn't mentioned."
I hated the tone that Tristan's voice took on when he talked about his father. There was a brittle edge to it that did little to conceal how painful the relationship must have been.
"Is you father still alive?" I asked one night.
"I talk to him once or twice a year. He calls me on my birthday. Sometimes I call him on his."
I couldn't imagine such a thing. My family life was so different. My father was the warmest, most comforting human being I could imagine. To talk to him just once or twice a year would be unthinkable.
Tristan's narrative went on for many nights and I began to be able to piece together the complex puzzle of the man I was falling harder and faster for every day.
He said he had thrived in college. The academic world was comfortable and comforting to him. Studying was all he really knew.
"So, after I graduated, I came to New York. The rest, as they say, is history." This was the wrap up he gave one night just before he told me good night. The following evening, when he picked up the thread again he was speaking in the present tense, telling me about what his firm did and how it worked.
Wait! I wanted to say. What about Elsa? What about the girl you were going to marry? The one who was killed? Something stopped me. I knew if he wanted to tell me, he would. I knew if I asked, he'd stonewall. Satisfying my curiosity had to wait. I couldn't risk spooking him.
***
Dress rehearsal was finally upon us. I got to see Tristan in the painstaking make-up that our resident genius had applied to a handsome young face to make it old, washed out and tired. The make-up guy had done an amazing job. Even though the audience would never see some of the details--like the tiny spider veins on Tristan's nose and cheeks--it had its value for the guys on stage.
Tom and a few of the set construction crew were the only people in the audience. I was backstage checking and rechecking props, curtain cues, light cues and every small detail I could think of. If the worst happened and someone dropped a line, I had my script in hand to prompt him.
The men did a brilliant job. It was going to be a helluva play. Tristan was on stage for almost the entire action. There were only three instances that he stepped out of the limelight and behind the curtain where I stood. When he came to stand beside me the first time he reached around and patted my ass. The second time he slid his hand between my legs from behind and caressed me. The last time he whispered in my ear "when this play is over next weekend, it's going to be our time. I can't wait any longer." Then he was back on stage for the final scene.
"Great job everyone," Tom announced when dress was over. "Opening tomorrow night should be a winner. Break a leg and I'll see you tomorrow at seven sharp. Don't any of you give me a heart attack and come late."
The theater was packed for Thursday's opening night. The play was a big hit. I suddenly understood why Tom had rehearsed the play backwards. It was a brilliant move on his part. Because the actors knew how dark and horrifying the ending was, they failed to recognize the humor that infused the opening half of the play. But the audience d
idn't know. The audience thought the first act was hilarious. So, the actors on stage never knew to 'play for laughs' as they might have. The result was a completely natural delivery.
When Tristan came backstage for the first intermission, he and the guys were all flabbergasted at the uproarious response they were getting.
"Tom's a real cagey one. I would never have imagined we'd be so funny," Brian chuckled.
"It was a stroke of genius that's for sure," Tristan agreed. "Did you realize how funny the first act is, Raina?"
"I was as in the dark as the rest of you."
After the bows had all been taken, it was off to Suze's house for the first of the nightly cast parties that Jenn told me were the real highlight of the Little Theater's productions. Every party giver tried to have the most lavish feast, the best liquor and the liveliest music.
Suze had a gorgeous house just outside of town. The entire lawn had been transformed into a fairy-lit park and a jazz trio played discreetly on a small stage.
Tristan pulled me into the shadows at the first opportunity.
"I don't know how much more of this I can take. I need to have you, Raina."
"And I you."
"My cock is aching for you. My mouth waters every time you're near me."
His words made my clit do a little happy dance. "Mom and Dad are going to come back to New York next weekend, Tristan. So what's the point of hiding our relationship? If the thugs want to find them in New York that's easy enough. The connection to your house in Maine becomes moot."
"I still worry about your safety, though."
"Being with you doesn't make me any less safe. It may make me more so."
He pulled me against him and held me in a fierce embrace. "When the play closes, let's go away. Let's have a week or two just for ourselves."
"Tristan, I told you the other night I have three interviews scheduled for the week after the play closes. I have to get a job."
"You were serious about that?"
"Why would I kid about job interviews? I haven't exactly built up a vast fortune this summer."
