by Kiki Leach
“Maybe just like Nathan, this is who he really is and has always been,” said Adrian, sticking his key inside the lock. “Sometimes you just never know some people like you think you do or hope to.”
As he pushed the door back and flicked on the light, Sheila’s eyes turned to the couch and she jumped back, frightened, when she saw a large man wearing nothing but grey sweatpants and a black tank top sitting in the middle of it and holding what looked like a picture frame in his hands.
She quickly moved behind Adrian, but never took her eyes off the man, peeking at him over Adrian’s shoulder.
“Who the hell is that?” she whispered in Adrian’s ear.
“My roommate.” He nervously wiped his hand down his mouth and spun around to her. “Why don’t we get out of here? He can get cranky at times like this and I don’t want to have to subject you to that.”
“No,” said his roommate as he jumped up from the couch. He placed the frame in his hand on the bookcase and sauntered toward them. His hazel eyes burned down into Sheila’s in particular. His light brown skin suddenly turned red hot. “Come in. Sit. Let’s all have a nice chat about what’s really been going on around here.”
Adrian turned his eyes up to the man and locked his jaw as Sheila’s eyes turned to the picture the man had just placed upon the bookcase. Easing past Nathan, she moved further inside to get a better look at that picture.
“Sheila,” Adrian called out.
But she ignored him completely and stared at the picture of a man who looked like a much younger version of the one standing in front of her, as he was holding hands with a child who looked around five or six. They were in Central Park and there was snow on the ground. The girl in the picture looked just like Vanessa at that exact same age.
And then things began to click inside her head that she wished hadn’t.
“Oh God.” She turned to the man and peered. “Terrence Brown?”
As Adrian moved toward her, she backed into the bookcase.
“Sheila,” he said again.
When neither man refuted her claims, she reached a hand out and smacked Adrian hard across the face, then ran from the room as quickly as she could.
Adrian turned back to Terrence and glowered before chasing after her.
“Sheila!”
She continued barreling down the hall, but he grabbed onto her shoulders and stopped her before she could exit the building.
“Let me go!” she hollered.
Instead he spun her around.
“This is a long and complicated story. It’s not something that I can just explain to you in a matter of--”
She shrugged his hands from her shoulders and stood back. “What is so complicated about the fact that your roommate is Vanessa’s absentee father?! Did you two meet in the Congo?”
“Like I said, the story behind all of that is long and complicated.”
“I can’t believe that you would keep something like this from her! And all this time, I was so afraid of how you would feel in knowing that I kept the truth about her baby from you--”
Adrian’s head snapped up and his brows puckered. “What baby?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I have to go.”
She turned away, but he wrapped his entire hand around her arm and pulled her back hard.
“The hell you do.”
Part Thirty-Nine
As soon as Vanessa walked through her front door, she tossed her keys on the table and chucked her purse in the chair. Maurice closed the door behind the both of them as she moved into the foyer, then dived left and headed into the kitchen.
She began rummaging through the fridge, but after finding absolutely nothing, she slammed the door shut and moved over the counter and folded her arms.
“I feel like I should call Nikki or something,” she said. “I feel bad about not being out there with her right before she left.”
“She knows you meant well, V, and that you were taking care of things inside.”
“I know, but…” She dropped her face in her hands. “I just feel so bad that this happened to her. I knew that something was up with William from the very beginning. I could just never seem to put my finger on it.”
“Guess you were right about him after all.”
“I didn’t want to be. At least not right like this. I mean, who does that? Who does what he did tonight and thinks it’s okay? And why the hell can’t anyone in this group have a decent party or get together without shit going down in the middle of it? We were all having a good time and then WHAM! BOOM! Shit goes flying from one room to the other before eventually hitting up that damn fan.”
Maurice took a seat in front of the stove and lifted his sleeves. “Modern day ‘Brat Pack’ is what one of those papers called us once.”
“If only life were as simple as a John Hughes film,” she said. “I’d forgive people forgetting my birthday any day of the damn week if it would keep shit like this from happening to us on a regular basis.”
“It’s just who we are, V,” he said. “It’s just this life, we can’t escape it.”
“I know that. I’ve tried. I’ve tried like hell to escape it and every time, I manage to get sucked right back into it. Much like my feelings for you.”
Maurice lifted his head.
“I tried like hell to stop giving a shit. I tried to tell myself that it was better this way, no matter how much it hurt. And I tried to pretend, all while saying I didn’t care, that I was confident enough to believe that you wouldn’t even think of giving yourself to another woman, let alone someone like Melanie. And then when I finally realized that the battle I was trying to fight had long been lost along the trail of ‘I don’t give a shit’, I tried like hell to believe that even if it wasn’t tomorrow, that we would somehow find our way back to each other again.”
“I’ve never stopped wanting to be with you, V,” he said. “Ever. And no matter what you thought on the night of our fight, I never left because I wanted to go. I left because I respected you enough to give you your space. I knew what I had done, how much it hurt you. And I knew that you weren’t going to forgive and forget overnight. I was determined to stay before that. But when you left, it gave me time to think about what you really needed from me, and it wasn’t me being here breathing down your neck, begging for you to take me back. I knew that you needed space, even if you didn’t want it. If I stayed, you would’ve grown to resent me for never giving you that – I know that you would’ve. But I was never, ever giving up on you, or us.”
Her heart started to sing in various tunes inside her chest. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or do both while kissing him until her face and hands went numb.
“You said you missed me like hell?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t know just how much I need you to show me the depth of that.”
The moment she said those words, he was on his feet.
And before she knew it, he was in front of her and taking her face in his hands.
As his fingers crawled into her hair, her head dipped back and she shut her eyes tight when she felt him massaging her scalp.
He bent forward and pressed his lips against the center of her throat. And as she swallowed, and exhaled, his mouth opened even wider and his teeth sank deep into her skin.
Her legs rattled against him as his mouth moved from one side to the other; her pelvis swiveled allowing her to feel the size of his erection as it grew.
She moaned as he dropped his hands around the bottom of her dress and began lifting it around her waist and eventually over her head. He tossed it to the floor and stared at her in awe as she donned a pair of red panties with a matching red bra.
She slinked her body against his and wrapped her hands around him. Lifting to her toes, she wrapped her teeth around his bottom lip and smiled. “Take me to bed,” she told him.
And without a single drop of hesitancy on his part, he lifted her from the floor and carried her to his bedro
om this time.
Once he placed her at the center of the bed, he quickly began removing his shirt, dumping it to the floor alongside his pants. When he was in nothing but briefs, Vanessa sat up and trailed her finger around the rim. Maurice bent down to kiss her as she tucked her fingers beneath and pulled them straight down his legs and to the floor.
She pulled back from him only briefly to look up into his eyes. He removed her bra and panties and fell on top of her on the bed.
“Love me,” she said.
And as he pushed himself inside of her, remembering his home; as he licked and bit and nipped her skin; as he dug his fingers deep into every available part on her body; as he rocked her slow and steady, held her long and tight; as he called out her name, drowning out the soft noises she made while calling out his in unison; as the sweat dripped from his forehead and landed on her breasts; as their tongues meshed and molded, twisted and turned, caressed…
It’s exactly what he did.
After collapsing onto the bed, exhausted, Vanessa rolled over to the other side of the bed with the intention to wrap her arms around Maurice, but he was already out of bed again and moving across the room as if he was in a hurry to get the hell out of dodge.
Vanessa was suddenly nervous.
She wrapped the sheet around her body and jumped up quick.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He rested against his dresser, then turned to look her in the face and smiled. Her heart skipped a few beats, knowing that he had only ever smiled like that just for her. She brought her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.
“The night you had me arrested--”
She cringed and turned away. “Why do you have to ruin such a damn good moment by bringing up that awful night?”
“It wasn’t all so awful until then, was it?”
She rolled her tongue across her bottom lip and tried like hell to hide her smile. “It would’ve been better without Nathan here, but that goes without saying.”
“That’s what I thought too,” he said. “But if he hadn’t have been here, then we wouldn’t have this…” He gestured between them and grinned again.
“We could’ve still had this,” she told him.
“Maybe. But I’m not sure how quickly or easily it would’ve led to…” He opened the top drawer of his dresser and pulled out a small, black velvet box. “This.”
He rested the box in the palm of his hand and lowered it to Vanessa’s eye level. She almost choked on air and grabbed on tight to her chest. Her eyes immediately filled with tears as she looked up at Maurice, who was beaming. She moved one hand up to her throat, and then another, wrapping them both around. It wasn’t until that very moment that she realized she had stopped breathing. But her heart was beating so fast and her pulse was racing beneath her skin. It was by those sensations alone that she knew she was at least still alive, and not dreaming.
Maurice took his time walking back over to the bed and sat down directly beside her, keeping that box in the palm of his hand. “I bought this a few weeks ago. Before the Hamptons… before you even told Alexis about us being official.”
“Why? I mean…” She stopped to laugh and eagerly waved her hands back and forth in front of her face in an attempt to gain control over her rattling nerves. “I mean, why did you go looking for a ring so soon? What if this didn’t work?”
“I’d always been confident that it would work between us, V, if we really decided to ever give what I knew we had a chance. But when everything happened, I sort of took a step back to look and see if this was what I really deserved from you, a promise of forever. When I came here that night, I was coming back for the ring.”
“What were you planning to do with it?”
“Hold onto it until I knew you were ready. Until we were ready.”
Her stomach flip flopped. Her lips quivered.
“And now?”
“And now I need you to know that what I did was never meant to hurt you.”
“I know. What you did was about Nathan and Sheila. You went about it stupidly, but I know that you would ever go out of your way to hurt me or violate the trust that I have in you, and with you and for you.”
“Never. And I won’t ever drop a bomb on you like that again, V. I promise.”
“You mean after…” She pointed down to the box.
“This isn’t a bomb,” he said, raising the between them, “it’s a diamond.”
She laughed and fiddled with her hands as she watched him slowly lift the lid.
She gasped. The tears started coming before she could even blink and rushed down to her cheeks when she leaned closer and noticed that at the center of a cluster of diamonds, with others embedded around the neck of a conjoined ring, was a garnet stone.
She pulled back and looked into Maurice’s eyes, which had reddened. He was already staring at her and still beaming at her reaction. “It’s my birthstone,” she said. “How the hell did you even manage to get something like that made?”
“I called in a few favors,” he said. “The owner of the shop in SoHo is friends with my parents.” He pulled the ring from the pillow and sat the box down beside them on the bed. He looked straight into her eyes while lifting up her hand and resting her palm against his. “I’ve never seen myself as the marrying kind,” he told her. “At least not with anyone who wasn’t you. And I know that we’re young and that this might be impulsive, but it’s always felt right--”
“Yes,” she said.
“And I’ve always felt that--”
“No, I mean, you don’t have to keep going, because I’ll marry you.” She took a moment and shook her head. “I don’t even need to hear anything else that you have to say to know how right this is. Especially if it’ll just make me cry even more or make my heart swell up inside my chest like a balloon. Or have me wanting to make love to you all over again, which I’ll happily do anyway.”
He lowered his eyes and arched his brows. Then he lifted his arm around her shoulder and bent forward, pulling her close. “Let’s get to it, then.”
She laughed and placed a hand on his chest. “Stop.” She slid her fingers back into his palm and stared down at their hands. As he enclosed his hand around hers, she looked up into his eyes and smiled wider than she had since she was a child receiving her first piece of candy on Halloween. “You are the one for me, Maurice Livingston,” she said. “You’re the one. It took too damn long for me to see it, but now that I have, there’s no way in hell that I‘m letting it go again.”
He raised her hand and instantly slid the ring on her finger. She held it up and watched as the diamonds glistened and sparkled against the moonlight that shone through every window.
“We are getting married,” she said. Then she looked at him and opened her arms wide. “AHHHHHHHHHH!” She leapt from the bed and wrapped her arms around his neck. He laughed and turned his mouth to hers, kissing her deep. Then he pulled back, his hands on her face, inching up into her hair and holding tight.
He stared into her eyes, which seemed to shine all the more in her complete happiness, and said the five words she had always longed to hear. “Soon to be Mrs. Livingston.”
She smiled even wider. “Hyphenated.”
“V.”
“I’m kidding.”
They fell back to the bed in a fit of laughter and made love more times than they could count for the remainder of the night and into the next day.
Miss Independent: A Naughty vs. Nice Novella
Synopsis:
It's Christmastime in New York City! A very special time of year to spend with family and friends! And this year marks the first year for Vanessa and Maurice as an official couple. To christen this very special occasion, they've decided to have their first Christmas dinner in their home, inviting everyone they know who means the most (and even the least) to them to make the very special announcement of their engagement. But as always with this group, things never go as officially planned. Someone
ends up in the hospital. Someone ends up with a few slaps across the face. And someone else just might reveal a certain truth about themselves at a very unexpected and inopportune time.
Various Spanish Translations:
What we have is worth fighting for ~ Lo que tenemos es vale la pena luchar
Let's go ~ Vamanos
********************
Part One
Vanessa peered out the window near her front door and watched in complete silence as a mixture of large and tiny snowflakes fell to the steps leading up to her beautiful Upper West Side townhome. Sliding her fingers around her brand new Christmas mug, which had been filled with nothing but the best rum and a splash of hot cocoa only minutes before, and taking a long sip to ease her growing nerves, she mentally counted back to the very second when Maurice first told her that he would be back home with her stepfather Alexander, tree in hand.
It had been over three hours, twenty-six minutes and seventeen seconds since they last spoke over the phone. These days, she had barely even gone thirty minutes without either hearing his voice or seeing his face in some capacity, and despite their upcoming holiday plans, that night in particular wasn't going to be much of an exception for either of them in that regard.
A little over a month had passed since they mutually agreed to have everyone they knew and loved (and in some cases, didn't like all too well) over to their place for a special dinner leading up to Christmas. But neither had had enough time between work, other social activities and numerous outside obligations to actually get things together in order to make it all happen in the way they both had originally planned. So as usual, much of what they wanted to do and have done was rushed and put together at the last possible minute.
She took another sip of her cocoa and sucked in a deep breath after swallowing. The snow was coming down harder and faster by the minute, covering the sidewalk and a multitude of cars that sat next to the curb. She knew subconsciously that Mo would be fine with Alexander's help, but it didn't keep her from fearing the worst in knowing that they had to travel all the way to Queens for a tree, since every local lot in Manhattan was either sold out or had a tree equivalent to those used by Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang.
