by Kiki Leach
“Really.”
She bobbed her head and he fell back against the dresser.
“And we…” She inhaled a deep breath. “We did talk. We got enough straightened out but not much. Because in the middle of all that talking is when she told me about a fight that Nathan was involved in, with Maurice.” She placed the water down on the table next to the fridge and strolled over to him. “You said you had no idea why Nathan brought you out to the Hamptons, right? But that you wanted to go there to see me, so you didn’t really care about the reason?”
He dropped his head and smiled to himself before turning his eyes back to hers and pinching his lips to the side. “It went something like that.”
Sheila tried to hide her own grin but was unsuccessful.
“Well V told me that the reason Nathan wanted you there was to not only get under her skin, but to bust up her relationship with Maurice.”
“That seemed pretty clear to me after listening to that awful speech beforehand,” he said.
“Me too. But the reason he was so determined to make it happen was because according to her, he caught them having sex.”
He pulled his head back and opened his eyes wide in absolute shock before lowering his brows and shaking his head. “Where they in public?”
“No. No, they were inside her house. Nathan somehow made his way in and found them in her bedroom. And I didn’t tell her this last night, mostly because I didn’t become conscious of it until later, but the night he and I had dinner at TAO Uptown, he was so impatient and wanting to get the hell out of there before we had even been served. I didn’t know the reason behind his madness until after the Hamptons, when I got those random text messages from Joan that I told you about. He couldn’t get me off in a cab and out of his sight fast enough, which means he went to her house the minute I was gone. It also explained why he had been acting so neurotic every day leading up to that weekend. One minute, he was all over me and couldn’t get enough and the next minute, just looking in my direction seemed to turn his stomach. Every time he does something stupid and crazy or becomes hateful to me at the drop of a hat, I can always trace it back to his ongoing feelings for her.”
“What you’re telling me makes sense, but his reactions to you or anyone else because of how he feels about her isn’t exactly her fault, is it?” he asked.
Her eyes flew up to meet his. And the moment she got a glimpse of his sincerity in each one while speaking about Vanessa, her heart sank to an open black hole deep inside the pit of her stomach.
“No,” she replied, though somewhat sarcastically. Her lids fell shut as she tried to maintain control over her emotions. “Of course it’s not her fault that every man she’s ever known seems to drop at her feet the minute she walks into a room. And when they don’t get what they want from her, they treat everyone else around them who would ACTUALLY give them exactly what they wanted and more, like shit. Or…” She waited for an extensive beat to pass and continued. “Or they use the closest thing next to them for a few good hours before tossing them aside until ‘The Anointed One’ chooses to come around again. So no, it’s definitely not her fault. She just can’t seem to help the apparent fact that her pussy is made from gold, or that she’s so fucking clever even Elbert Einstein would be impressed--”
“Sheila--”
“And she sure as hell can’t help the fact that her body is what lollipops and gummy bears are made of. The bitch is sugar, spice and ev-er-y-thing nice. Everything not made of me.”
She skated over to the window and tucked her hands beneath her arms so tightly that her palms turned red and her fingers became numb.
Adrian stopped for a few seconds to fully take in what she had said, then he turned to her and grimaced. “Your insecurities about Vanessa, and these abnormally long and redundant speeches about how she has everything while you were stuck with shit are starting to wear thin on me. Especially now.”
She whirled around on the balls of her feet, flinching in fury at his words, and locked her jaw. “What?”
“I didn’t say much about it last night because you were so upset and I didn’t want to make an already bad situation between you two even worse. But after what happened between us and why? I don’t think I should have to listen to any more of this shit from you.”
She couldn’t believe that he was talking to her like this. Who the hell was he? Where the hell did he get off?
At the same time, what he said was the kick in the ass she knew she always needed, but on the surface dreaded the pain of hearing when she finally received it.
And from someone like him.
“Now you could ask me to go, or tell me to get the hell out,” he said calmly, recognizing the need she had to immediately bolt from the room if he didn’t leave first. “But I’m not going to. Not until we settle this battle you keep fighting within yourself that prevents you from recognizing when you’ve finally got something outside of yourself that’s actually worth fighting for.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You want to philosize me?” she asked. “Is that it?”
He bellowed, then tightened his lips and wrapped his fingers around the tip of his nose to stop himself from laughing any louder. “Philosophize,” he corrected. “And no.” He drew his fingers around his mouth and looked into her eyes as she glowered with embarrassment. “The only thing I want is for you to be honest with me about this,” he told her. “Alright?”
She nodded a few times and sighed. “Okay.”
“Now do you really think that what happened between us last night was just about me using you for sex? That you were just a body for me because Vanessa never came back around?”
She lifted her shoulders then threw her arms high up in the air. “I don’t know!”
“You should,” he told her. “You should because I had been hard up for a while now.”
She scoffed. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Maybe it would if you’d actually let me finish what I’m trying to say,” he snapped. “Listen Sheila, I hadn’t seen a naked woman that I wanted to touch with more than just my hands since the night before I left for the Congo. And I’m being honest as hell here when I tell you that it’s not all that hard to find willing pussy in Queens or anywhere else in New York as long as you look half decent and don’t have a needle sticking out of your arm. But random pussy during all that time, and even when I finally got back to the city, isn’t what I wanted.”
“Does that mean you specifically wanted mine, even though I was probably more than willing to fuck you, embarrassingly so, than any other woman you’ve ever met?”
“Yes,” he answered matter-of-factly. “It means that I specifically wanted yours very badly; in a way that made me almost question every small bit of my own sanity.”
She gulped, unsure of how to take his straightforward response.
He walked over and stood as close to her as he could without touching. As she felt the heat from his body fill up the space between them and inflame her from the outside in, she fell back into the window and gasped for air.
He moved even closer and rested one hand on his waist while lifting the other above her head and pressing it down hard against the glass. She descended beneath him and sucked her bottom lip into her mouth.
“Since I’ve been back,” he started, his voice dropping second by second as he watched her tongue anxiously swipe back and forth across her lip. “Since the night you first invited me into this room, your pussy made from gold” – he snickered – “is the only one I’ve been aching to put my dick inside.” He shifted his body forward; she sank down even further. “I wanted to taste you that night, to see if you were just as sweet as I imagined you to be the minute you first opened that door. And now I know without a doubt that you are the sweetest I’ve ever tasted.”
He watched her thighs rub back and forth against each other as she swallowed hard, and pulled up the corner of his lips into a sly grin.
“We-wer-wer--”
She had to stop herself as she began stuttering like crazy due to the nerves he brought upon her with his less than sugary sweet but or so sensual words. She bowed her head as if to pray for every sin ever committed before God, and took a few deep breaths.
Then she turned her eyes back up to his and realized that no sin ever committed before anyone was comparable to the way he made her feel right then, right there against that window, inside that room, enclosed in that small space.
His smile grew as he watched her struggle with what to say, how to say it; her heart bounced as she thought of his reaction; her legs ached with anticipation when she remembered his hands between them the night before, shoving them apart. And she watched with keen eyes as those same hands slowly shifted down the glass and forcefully wrapped around her waist.
She held her breath as the spiced scent from the cologne on his neck landed on her tongue. It scorched her taste buds, blistered her throat, and sent a shockwave of sensations straight down to her groin.
Adrian bent forward and rubbed the tip of his nose against hers when he noticed the soft reaction in her eyes and smiled again.
“You were trying to ask me something,” he said.
She took her time and swallowed back her fears, then opened her mouth to breathe out.
“I wanted to know…” She gulped again. “I wanted to know if those were the only reasons you had in wanting to be with me that night, or last night.”
“No,” he replied quickly. There was no chance to think, no need; he knew the answer before she even formed her lips to ask the question. “I know that you have wondered about this and even though I wanted it, last night wasn’t just about those things. And it wasn’t just about two people coming together who needed each other. It wasn’t just about you clinging to me because you were left feeling unwanted in your relationship with Nathan or about me just needing to get laid because I hadn’t been with a woman since…” He refused to continue when he saw her becoming uncomfortable, knowing the next word that was about to come out of his mouth would be the end of whatever it was they were trying to begin. He dropped his hands from her waist and glided back. “Let’s just face the facts as they are and stop dancing around the bullshit, because we’ve been attracted to each other since the moment we met.”
“You weren’t attracted to me,” she said. “You barely even looked at me when I came to your apartment.”
He chuckled and darted his eyes around the room before staring back at her. “Sheila, the day you first showed up on my doorstep, I didn’t want to really admit how much you turned me on. Or how much my dick started reacting to you the moment I saw you screwing around with the elevator inside my building, because I was still so wrapped up in trying to win Vanessa back and recapture some of what we had before I skipped out. But there was something about you that started to change all of that the moment you opened your mouth you speak.”
“Something,” she repeated.
“Yeah, something, about you.”
“Most people always seem to hate what I have to say as soon as I open my mouth, no matter what it is.”
“I’m not most people,” he replied. He lay a single finger at the center of her throat and slid it down between her breasts; her skin grew warm at the simplicity of his touch and she continued moving her thighs against each other, imagining his face there this time, his flushed cheeks pressing against the center each one as the flutter of his tongue worked magic against her clit. “What I saw in you that day was so different from anything I had ever been accustomed to before,” he said. “It drove me insane, but also intrigued the hell out of me and left me eager to know more than I probably needed to about you. Admittedly, I thought you were a little bit crazy. Maybe somewhat delusional in the reason why you chose to contact me in the first place, even if I was more than prepared to go along with it. But it lured me all the way in. And I knew that once I got even the tiniest taste of what you had to offer, it’d be the end of me, like death.”
“Now you’re comparing me to death?” she asked.
“Yes, I am. The kind that’s slow and excruciatingly painful the moment that feeling hits, when the end is coming. But you can’t help in succumbing to it because you know that it will get you to where to you not only want to be, but where you need to be in record time. Because right before you close your eyes, you see that bright light to heaven and there’s no going back from it.”
Sheila didn’t exactly know what the hell he meant, though she was sure it something philosophical. But she was less than sure if it was supposed to make her feel better about herself, or question everything she had ever known.
She dropped her hands inside the pockets of her robe and exhaled, then quickly closed her mouth as she caught him staring at her lips as they quivered.
“I came to see you in the Hamptons,” he continued, “because I needed to know if you felt the same something that I did. When I got you alone in that kitchen, you didn’t even have to say a word. I knew just from the expression on your face that whatever the hell it was I had been feeling, you had been feeling it too. And I liked that. I liked it a lot.” He stopped to smile again and she did the same. “I don’t know where the hell any of this is going with us, whether it turns out to be love or nothing more than pure infatuation and sexual attraction, but I’m damn sure willing to keep it going in order to find out.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I think the only answer I’m looking for now is if you’re willing to find out too.”
She was willing. Oh, she was more than willing long before that night they spent together on the beach as he wiped away every tear she had shed.
The actual question should’ve been, was she able? The ring on her finger wasn’t just some random gift she happened to buy for herself during an impulse when she got lonely. It was a symbol for a commitment made to someone else she had longed dreamed of becoming the first and only Mrs. to.
But seeing as how she hadn’t heard a word from her soon to be groom since he skipped town, despite having finally come back the night before, she had yet to know where exactly she stood with him. And just exactly where he had planned to stand with her the moment he walked back through that door to their room.
Before she could give Adrian an answer either way, her cell phone started clattering against the glass of a two sided mirror that she kept inside her purse. It was almost like a saving grace while at the same time being a curse.
She shuffled around him to the chair in the corner near the fridge and he watched her with intent as she reached inside her purse and pulled out the phone to look at the number calling.
Studying the digits, she moved her head back and forth and looked up at Adrian with a puzzled expression. “I don’t know what number this is,” she said. “The area code is local, but the number isn’t something that I recognize at all.”
And because she didn’t recognize it, she would never know that the person waiting on the other end for her answer would be the only one with the ability to make or break her fate with the man standing directly in front of her.
She held the phone for a few more seconds as it continued to clatter, contemplating on what to do, before placing it at the far edge of the dresser where it continued to buzz against the wood.
Adrian nodded his head toward it and inhaled the warm air surrounding them. “Maybe you should answer it anyway,” he said. “Or maybe silence the damn thing so that we don’t have to listen to that awful rattling sound.”
Sheila stared down at the phone one last time before pressing her finger down hard against that red ‘Off’ button, instantly silencing the person on the other end who had been trying so desperately to reach out to her.
Then she turned back to Adrian, and with her hands sliding down the sides of her robe, she shrugged her shoulders and smiled wide. “Now what?”
His eyes traveled down to the belt holding her robe together. “Now,” he said, outstretching his hand. His fingers toyed with the belt and he tugge
d it hard to draw her back to him. The moment she was close enough to taste his lips against hers, she grinned even wider and giggled. “Now you show me if you’re really willing to give up everything you ever thought you wanted with Nathan, and everything you ever thought you needed from him, for everything that you deserve, mind, body and soul, with me.”
No man had ever said those words to her before. No man had ever shown her that he gave enough of a damn to stick around and learn more about who she was beneath being borderline crazy and neurotic as hell. It made something inside of her twist and churn and flinch before finally detonating like a hand grenade that had been impatiently waiting years for the right person to rip out the pin, toss it into the garbage, and allow her to explode into millions of pieces across the room.
She didn’t know how to verbally respond to it. Everything with Adrian was so unfamiliar and fresh and scary and real, but she was so willing to give it a try, so willing to give up everything she ever thought she needed and wanted and desired, for just a chance, just a single chance at being truly happy with someone so open and eager and honest enough to give her so much of what she always thought she deserved and more.
And so she slid her hands down the front of her robe and reached for that belt to show him just how much she was prepared to give up for that chance. Gradually untying it from the bow, she kept her eyes on Adrian’s face as he kept his eyes on the movement of her hands.
And when the robe fell open, everything in the room suddenly went still. His eyes traveled up from her toned stomach to the round shape of her breasts. All too perfect in the moonlight, he wasn’t sure there was much about her body that could top what he had experienced the night before. But seeing her beneath the light of the sun as it shown through the curtains behind him, while drops of water glistened and reflected off of her impeccably flawless skin, he was beyond reassured that she was in fact more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen in all of his thirty-three years on earth.
