The Stories We Whisper at Night

by Sky Corgan

  “And you stayed here? I mean, you never lived anywhere but this city?”

  “I spent a year in London when I was still in college. It was a study abroad thing.”

  “That’s fantastic! I love that city. One of my favorite cities. It’s the perfect kind of place for people to get to know each other. Pity we aren’t there. Maybe we should go.”

  “Right.” I laughed uneasily. “Let’s just hop on a plane and go, right?”

  “Don’t tempt me. I might do it.” He smiled a heartbreakingly beautiful smile that made me want to melt. “And what about your parents? Do they live in Austin? Are they still together?”

  “These questions are getting a bit personal. I don’t even understand what you’re trying to do.” I took another deep sip of my drink, welcoming the burn this time. My eyes watered, and suddenly, I was furious that he was clearly trying to play a game with my heart like every guy before him.

  “I’m not trying to do anything but get to know you, Bella,” he answered softly, the vaguely hurt tone of his voice only pissing me off more. “That’s all I want to do. Why is that such a bad thing? What is it you’re afraid of? You seemed like you were having a pretty good time last night. I don’t get it.”

  “This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come here.” I was up and off of my stool before I knew it, stumbling a little in my heels from the rapidity of my movement.

  I could hear Matt’s stool scraping, knew he was getting up as well, and righted myself in a hurry. I had no idea why I was so pissed, why I was completely losing my cool in front of this uber swanky bar full of people. All I knew was that I needed to get out. I needed to get the hell out of here and away from Matt, back to the safety of my apartment. I could figure out why I had once again failed at what I had set out to do once I got home.

  I pushed the door open wide, hardly noticing when it banged into the brick wall and got me an admonishing comment from the snob of a bartender. I whipped around the building’s corner, grateful for how dark it was outside and the fact that everyone was inside of the bars instead of on the street. I ducked into the alleyway and leaned against the wall, my head tilted back and eyes shut tight.

  I felt a hot hand on my shoulder, drawing my attention back to Matt.

  “What the hell was that, Bella? Why’d you leave?”

  “I told you,” I snapped into his angry, handsome face, “this was a mistake.”

  "Because I want to get to know you? Are you fucking serious?"

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Matt. Can’t you understand that? Do you just not get it?”

  “No, I get it. I get it really well. It’s not that you don’t want to answer my questions, is it? It’s that you don’t want to talk at all. So fine, let’s not talk. Let’s do what you want to do.”

  He took my hand and marched me further down the alley, far enough that it felt like we were in a different place than the rest of the world at large. I wanted to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing, but before I got the chance, his mouth was on mine. Gone was any trace of the tenderness from the previous night. His tongue pushed past my lips, plunging inside of me. With one hand, he unsnapped my jeans and began to pull them down while his other hand roamed over my breasts, tweaking my rock-hard nipples.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I half asked, half moaned.

  I had never been much of a public display of affection kind of person, and this was taking that concept to a whole new level. I should have been mortified, but instead, I was more turned on than I had ever been in my life. When he pulled back from me and got down on his knees, I almost came right then and there.

  “Don’t ask stupid questions, Bella,” he growled, all evidence of the guy from inside of the bar completely gone, “don’t ask things you already know the answer to.”

  “But—”

  I never got my weak excuse for a protest out. Before I could even try, Matt had my jeans and my thong down around my knees, his face buried in the part of me that burned for him the most. I’d been sure that his fingers were pure magic, but his tongue was on a level all its own. The feeling of it against my skin made me instantly wet, and my hands flew down to the top of his head, my fingers plunging into his hair and pulling. I kept telling myself I had to stop him, that I needed to be pulling him back up on his feet, but instead, I was pushing him closer. His tongue lapped against my clit, moving in sure circles that drove me beyond crazy.

  The moans I heard didn’t sound like me. Nothing about this sounded like me, and I briefly considered that this must be a dream, but then his tongue moved inside me, and the pleasure I felt brought me back to reality in a hurry.

  My eyes opened, still turned up to the sky, and all I could see was stars. There were so many of them, so beautiful, and I wanted to tell Matt to take a look, but I couldn’t even speak. His tongue was still working against me, those perfect circles, and the heat inside of me built up fast and with a ferocity I never had any chance of controlling.

  My eyes snapped shut again, and my insides exploded, my head rocking back and forth and the moan strangled but still there. I still saw the stars, only now they were in my head, painted on the inside of my closed lids as I rode the orgasm dealt to me helplessly.

  Then it was over, just as quickly as it had begun. My eyes remained closed, but now it was because I didn’t want to see. I heard Matt’s knees pop as he got back to his feet, even imagined that I could hear the sound of my jeans sliding against my skin as he pulled them back up and snapped them shut again. He cleared his throat, and I couldn’t help it. My eyes opened seemingly of their own volition, and when I looked at Matt’s face, my insides lurched uncomfortably.

  “Matt—”

  “You’re sexy as hell, Bella, you know that? You’re under my skin.”

  “Matt, I don’t—”

  “I’m going to go. I need to go now. I hope I see you again, Bella. I hope to Christ I do, but I can’t say I’m sure. Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  Hot and heavy one minute, gone the next. It was exactly what I had been going for. Nothing of substance. No real meaning. Wham, bam, and all of that was exactly what I had come here for, so why did I feel so awful watching him go? I felt so horrible that I couldn’t force myself to utter one single sound to make him stay.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MATT

  Another night spent tossing and turning. I’d only known Bella for a couple of days, and I had hardly gotten any sleep during any of them.

  When I closed my eyes, I could see her face looking at me in that dim alley. I was pretty sure I could still taste her. I didn’t want to be able to taste her. I didn’t want that to have happened at all. I was trying to have better control over myself than that.

  “Shit. Shit!”

  I had told Bella last night that she was under my skin. The bitch of it was that I wasn’t messing with her. She believed I was—was doing a truly terrible job of hiding it—but I wasn’t. I was telling her the truth about wanting to get to know her. But wanting to get to know her the way I did came from wanting her, and I didn’t know how to want somebody without taking them to bed. I wanted to fuck her and for the two of us not to leave my bed for a minimum of a week. I wanted her, and being a good boy was getting pretty damn hard.

  “Shit.”

  Shit was just about all I had said this Sunday morning, but this was the first one that didn’t come from my feelings about Bella. The phone sitting on my table next to my third cup of coffee was ringing, and like an idiot, I’d looked at it with the hope that it would be Bella calling. She had me feeling like a teenager, for Christ’s sake.

  Of course, it wasn’t her, just like I knew it wouldn’t be. It was my mom, the last person on God’s green Earth I felt like talking to at the moment. There was always the option of not answering, but Mom wasn’t the type to give up easily. She wouldn’t just call once. She would call repeatedly until I picked up the phone, and when I did, she would make me feel like a prick
for not answering sooner.

  My mom hadn’t had a job in her life, not one, so she had made getting what she wanted a full-time thing. She was relentless, and I knew enough not to try to resist that fact.

  I sighed heavily, grimaced, and put the phone up to my ear. “Hey, Mom.”

  “Hey yourself,” she snapped, her voice raw and ragged, never a good sign. “What took you so long, for God’s sake?”

  “I was in the other room working on some stuff.”

  “Working on ‘stuff’? You can’t even try to make it sound important, can you? Jesus, Matt, what’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing, Mom. Sorry. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, you don’t have to make it sound like it’s a business call. Are you trying to make me feel bad? Do you just want me to feel unwanted by you?”

  “Of course, I don’t. Not at all. I’m just tired, okay? I haven’t been sleeping. What’s up, Mom? You sound upset.”

  “Well, of course, I’m upset. You would be too if you’d had to put up with your father for all of these years!”

  This is the kind of comment that left me with no idea of what to say next.

  The conversation about Dad wasn’t a new one, and it wasn’t a short one, either. We’d been having this same talk for a fucking lifetime, and it never seemed to find its end. My mother and father weren’t together. They had gotten divorced when I was still young, and although it had gutted me, there had been a part of me that was happy about it, too.

  Even that young, I could see they were truly terrible for each other, like fire and gasoline. The only real memories I currently had of them being together involved them yelling the foulest things a man and woman could come up with. And it didn’t stop with the yelling matches, either. There were slammed doors, demolished Porsches, and more than one visit from sheepish-looking cops sent to warn my parents that at some point, they were going to have to start behaving themselves or there would be real consequences. In my seven-year-old mind, I’d believed that divorce would put an end to all of that. Instead, it had opened up twenty-something years of this sort of shit.

  Dad had moved on with his life a couple of times over, now married to wife number three. Mom, though? She’d hung on with grim determination, calling me to bitch about a man she’s spent more time divorced from than married to at this point in her life. I was so tired, way too fucking tired to deal with round four hundred and eighty-five of this shit, but she was going to talk whether I wanted her to or not.

  “Do you know he’s still doing it? He’s still doing it!”

  “Doing what, Mom? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you do! The womanizing! The messing around! He’s sixty-years old, and he’s still galavanting around town with women who we all know are not his wife.”

  “Yeah, I knew that. Sucks for Maddison, I guess.”

  “Don’t do that, Matty. Don’t you dare.”

  “Don’t do what, Mom? You’re kind of hard to follow this morning.”

  “Don’t you say her name to me. You know I don’t want to hear it. And don’t condescend to me, either. I swear to God, I don’t know why I bother talking to you about this sort of thing at all, why I even bother calling. Would you like to know something? Would you like to know what I consider to be the real, unfortunate truth?”

  “Honestly? When you put it that way, no, I don’t. Maybe we just shouldn’t be talking right now. You sound particularly upset, and like I told you, I haven’t gotten any sleep in days.”

  “Don’t try and push me aside. You need to hear this, Matty. I really think you do. The shameful truth is, there’s too much of your father in you.”

  When people hang up on people in the movies, it’s always a dramatic thing, angry music to accompany the act of defiance. For me, there was none of that. I hung up on my mom without really being aware that I was doing it, just to get away from the sound of her voice. There would be hell to pay for it later, and I knew it. Right now, I didn’t give a shit.

  I’d already heard the whispers in the gossip columns about the rather twisted similarities between my old man and me. It wasn’t something I liked, and it wasn’t who I wanted to be moving forward.

  When the phone rang again, I glanced down at it, sure that it would be my mom. The name that popped up was one I hadn’t seen since before my decision to clean up my act and get my shit together. Everything inside of me screamed not to pick up, just to dunk the fucking phone in a pool and be done with it. I had no idea why I answered.

  “Hey. I gotta say, I never expected to hear from you again,” I said into the receiver.

  “Hey, Matty. We need to talk. I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re going to have to come up with a better answer than that, my friend. I’m pregnant, and the baby is most definitely yours.”

  For the second time in about thirty seconds, I hung up the phone. This time, I didn’t give myself a chance to pick it back up again. Leaving it on the table where it couldn’t hurt anyone, at least for a while, I grabbed my keys and hauled ass away from my house. There was only one place that made me feel better when the shit started to really hit the fan, and I couldn’t think of a better place to go at a time like this.

  The last person I expected to see there was Bella.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BELLA

  The museum was the place I went to feel sane again. Something about all of that art, born from the minds of countless people over more years than I could adequately wrap my brain around, made me feel centered. There was a certain amount of comfort to be found in how little I really mattered in the grand scheme of things. It was an idea that undoubtedly made many people afraid, the contemplation of their own relative insignificance, but not me. I liked it.

  On this rainy afternoon, an afternoon when I felt I needed the soothing effects of the museum more than ever, it wasn't working. I breathed in deeply and caught phantom whiffs of Matt's cologne, spicy and terribly enticing, even though it wasn't really there. I shut my eyes and saw his face, saw the way he had looked up at me while giving me the most intense orgasm of my life. His eyes were burned into my brain, and they called to me like a siren's song. Nothing seemed to be working to get him out of my head, probably because getting him out was the thing I most wanted in the world, at least at that moment.

  I was so consumed by the space Matt currently occupied in my mind that when I opened my eyes, I was convinced that who I saw standing in the quiet room's doorway was some kind of mirage. “You’re not real.”

  “What a strange thing to say to somebody.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Also not the kindest greeting I’ve ever gotten, but I guess it’s better than not existing. Last time I checked, this was a public place open to anyone who has the ten bucks entry fee.”

  The more he talked, the more flustered I got. Pissed off, too. He knew what I meant. He knew I was surprised, and as far as I was concerned, I had every right to be. There were plenty of places in the city, and out of all of them, Matt had walked into the one I liked to think of as my own. All I had wanted to do was get some time to myself and maybe figure out a way to clear my head some, and here he was, making it more impossible to do that than it already had been.

  He looked tired, but there was something else there, too. I couldn’t put my finger on it, had never been good at being able to read that kind of a thing in a guy, but it seemed to me like some kind of a challenge.

  Suddenly, I was furious. I kept thinking about the way he had gotten up and left me, just left me shaking in that alley without looking back.

  “You know what?” I said in a harsh whisper, the fact that we were in a museum the only thing keeping me from shouting in his face. “You can have it. This place doesn’t seem so great now.”

  I sprang to my feet so quickly it made me momentarily dizzy. It was a good thing that the benches in the place were bolted down because the abrupt
ness of my motion would almost certainly have sent the thing crashing had it not been. I gave him one last look, one I desperately hoped could be described as withering, and started my retreat. In all my mishaps with men, I had never before used the tone I had just used with Matt, and my heart was beating crazily, so much so that I was almost afraid that something was wrong. To make matters worse, my eyes were welling with tears. I couldn’t turn back towards him now if I wanted to which, of course, I didn’t, I reminded myself angrily. I wasn’t supposed to care about him at all--didn’t care about him at all.

  “Bella! Where are you going?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I called over my shoulder, hoping my voice didn’t sound as shaky as it felt. “It’s not like there’s any point of sticking around. You don’t have a clue what to do with me. I don’t need to waste my time on somebody who’s too afraid to seal the deal.”

  On the verge of panic now, I blundered forward, no idea where I was going. I only knew that I needed to get away from Matt and all of the paintings that had lost their luster and now seemed to be mocking me mercilessly. The problem was, my blurred vision made it hard to navigate. When Matt caught up to me and grabbed me from behind in a bear hug, I let out a shocked gasp.

  “Is that what you think?” he hissed, enough emotion in his voice to make me surprised. “That I don’t know what to do with you?”

  “Well, what the hell should I think?”

  “Fine. If that’s the way you want it, come on then.”

  “No way! I’m not going anywhere with you. I told you, I don’t want to—”

  “Waste your time. I got it. Don’t worry, sugar, you’ll get your money’s worth this time.” He took me by the arm, and although I kept up my show of being widely opposed to whatever he was leading me to, truth be told, I was so excited I could hardly breathe. His hold on my arm was firm, firm enough that it would probably have been difficult for me to get free. It didn’t matter. I didn’t want to get free.