Chaotic

by Jadyn Chase

  He took a step toward me. “Thank you for going to dinner with me. It’s good to talk to you again. I missed you. I didn’t realize it until I bumped into you the other night. I was missing something in my life, and I didn’t even know it. I guess that’s what I was trying to say earlier. I didn’t know I was missing anything until I met up with you again and you reminded me. I’d like to see you again, but I understand if that’s not possible.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” It wasn’t a good idea because I couldn’t trust myself not to fall for him. If I saw much more of him, I would wind up caring about him the way I did before. Even now I found it hard to walk away.

  “I understand. Take care of yourself. You have my number. You can call me anytime you need anything or even if you just want to talk.” He cocked his head, and a strange expression came into his eyes. “It’s not often we get a chance to talk to someone who knows us really well, who has known us over many years of our lives. I miss that about my parents. You’re the person I’ve known the longest of everyone in my life. I would really like to talk to you sometime—about anything. I don’t want to lose that.”

  I heard my voice saying, “I don’t want to lose it, either.”

  Did I really feel that way? Did I really value him enough to do that, even if it meant we weren’t together in the traditional sense?

  God, I needed so much from him! I needed one person in this world I could talk to about…. about everything—the past, the present, and the…..I had no future. My future presented a blank, empty highway leading nowhere. It dwindled into the far horizon in a featureless, heartless, hopeless landscape like the desert highway outside Barstow.

  I would be working my two jobs until kingdom come. I would never get a moment’s peace from the unrelenting drudgery, and no one—not one single person—would know or understand.

  Christ, I wanted to grab him with both hands. I craved talking to him and looking at him, having him sitting across from me with his undivided attention trained on me and nothing else. I flailed in a bottomless ocean drowning in my own despair and frustration. He extended a hand to save my life. If I could only grab it and let him tow me to shore, I would be saved.

  I blinked to find him right there in front of me with that intent, focused sparkle in his eyes. “Are you okay, Ruby?”

  I shook myself awake. “Yeah. I’m fine. I would like to talk to you sometimes, too. I really appreciate tonight. Thanks. You better get back to…. wherever you’re staying.”

  “Motel 6,” he told me. “I’m staying at the Motel 6.”

  “Oh, right.” I burst into nervous laughter. “You better get there then.”

  “Yeah.” He swept forward and put his arms around me. He gave me a quick hug and pulled away.

  The instant his face came level with mine, his eyes caught me with their enthralling force again. I gazed into their profound distances. I sensed only vaguely that we still had our arms around each other.

  He didn’t move. He peered into my soul with the same gravitational concentration. He searched the hidden recesses of my heart with that piercing stare.

  All at once, he glanced down at my mouth and a strange sensation tingled across me. I could kiss him right now. I knew he could kiss and I already knew where that kiss would lead. Kissing Eli Walch only ever led one place.

  His mouth quivered on the brink of something. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight.” Was that me answering him?

  Neither of us moved or spoke. Neither of us leaned in for the kiss. We just stood there for what seemed like ages.

  As suddenly as it started, he dropped his arms and stepped back. “Goodnight.”

  He swiveled around and slung his leg over his bike. His presence left a vacuum in me, and the rain bit its chill clean through my clothes. In a flash, I ducked into my car and slammed the door behind me.

  He fired up the bike, and the engine vibrated through the car’s steel frame into my seat. It filled my whole being. The headlight slashed the night. He kicked the stand up and put his boots on the footrests. Then he thundered out of the parking lot and vanished into the dark.

  6

  Eli

  I burst into my room at the Motel 6 and shook the rain off my jacket. I kicked my boots into the corner and went straight to the bathroom, where I tossed all my wet clothes into the bathtub.

  I grabbed a towel and dried off before I put on a clean t-shirt and sweat pants. I checked the clock. 7:30 PM. Two and a half hours remained before I had to meet the boys.

  I dried the water off my jacket and boots and kicked back on the bed with my phone. I scrolled through a few messages and found a notification on some bike parts I ordered. I opened the email when a pounding knock shook my door.

  “Open up, Eli!” It was her. It was Ruby. “Open this door!”

  I pulled it back. She stood on the step with rain pouring off her hair and saturating her clothes. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m not doing this, Eli!” she screeched. “I don’t know what you think, but I’m not doing this.”

  I relaxed. “Okay. You’re not doing this.”

  “You think you can just waltz into town and turn my life upside down? You think you can just snap your fingers and I’ll come running back to you?”

  “I never said anything of the kind, Ruby.” She looked so pathetic standing out in the rain that I couldn’t find it within myself to react to this display. “If you’ll recall, I said exactly the opposite.”

  “I’m not doing this, Eli!” she shrieked. “I don’t care what you say. You can’t ruin everything I’ve built over the last seven years.”

  I gazed out at her. She really looked a wreck. Her hair collapsed into sodden ropes of darkness against her sweater. She hugged her arms and shivered.

  I took a deep breath and braced myself for a long, hard job calming her down. “Do you want to come in?”

  I stood aside and held the door open wide. She glared at me with rivulets of water trickling off her eyelashes. Poor thing. She scrunched up her face in what I can only imagine was supposed to be a scowl. Then she barged in tracking puddles all over the carpet.

  I shut the door and thanked the Heavens I was warm and dry, ‘cuz she looked terrible. I didn’t offer to rectify that situation, though. This was her show, not mine, and I didn’t guess she wanted me coming anywhere near her right now.

  She paced back and forth from one end of the room to the other. Her shoes squished at every step. In the hazy vacancies of my mind, I happened to notice she still wore the same shoes that shithead dumped steak and baked potato on at the diner. She didn’t use my money to buy herself a new pair. Maybe she had to pay the power bill instead.

  She hunched her shoulders and shot daggers around the room, but not at me. “I’m not doing this, Eli. I’m not doing it. You can’t ask me to. It’s too much. I had it all figured out, you know. I got a decent degree. I had a good life in San Diego. It wasn’t easy raising Christopher on my own, but I did it. Then Mom died and Dad had his stroke, and I wound up back here. Even then, I held it together. You can’t come along and mess that up.”

  I sauntered toward the bed, but something stopped me from sitting down in the casual posture of a few minutes ago. “I’m not trying to mess it up, Ruby. If you don’t want to do this, no one is going to make you.”

  “Don’t try to trick me,” she snapped. “What did you think was going to happen when you walked into that diner? What did you think was going to happen when we started talking again?”

  “I had no idea you worked at that diner.” I said the words, but I already realized they wouldn’t penetrate her brain. This thing went way beyond the rational. She wasn’t operating on any sensible scheme of reality. She spoke from pure desperate emotion. I could see that.

  “You asked me out,” she fired back. “You just so happened to show up at the hospital when I was there. You show up at all the most convenient places. You’re trying to ruin my life, but I’m not do
ing it. I’m not going back to the way things were before.”

  I couldn’t listen to this anymore. “Nothing will ever go back to the way things were before, Ruby,” I murmured. “That’s impossible.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” she screeched. She whipped around to confront me. She took a lunging step toward me and stopped herself. “Don’t you think I know that better than anyone? Don’t you think I would go back to the way things were before if I could?”

  I dared to look up at her face. “You would?”

  “Yes!” she cried. “Of course I would! Don’t you know how happy I was when I was with you? Why did you have to go and join Los Diablos and spoil it all? You broke my heart, Eli! Don’t you know that?”

  My mouth fell open, but I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know that. How could I know? She never raised any objection to me running with Los Diablos. She never told me, in word or deed, that she had any problem with it at all.

  She hovered before my sight with her stringy wet hair hanging over her eyes. Her lip quivered on the brink of tears. God, she looked so incredibly beautiful to me in that moment. She has never looked more beautiful because she hasn’t bared her heart to me like this before, not in all the years we spent loving each other in high school.

  What I wouldn’t give to make it all better for her, but that wouldn’t happen. Nothing could repair the rent that divided us. She dwelt on the other side of a precipitous chasm. Neither of us could cross it to reach the other no matter how much we wanted to. We could want until doomsday. Nothing would bring us together.

  I wished more than anything that she would leave. Looking at her hurt too much. If I couldn’t have her, I didn’t want her tempting me, making me remember all the ways things used to be. I would rather just forget.

  She startled me out of my wits by charging at me in a mad bulrush. For a fraction of a second, I braced myself to defend my life. The next thing I knew, she was in my arms, grappling her limbs around my neck and kissing me—or trying to. I took a minute to wake up to what was going on and start kissing her back.

  Her soaking wet clothes seeped through my dry ones, but I didn’t care. I clasped her against my chest kissing her for all I was worth. This might end at any second. I had to hold her and kiss her now while I had the chance.

  At the same time, I braced myself for the end. She came over here to push me away. Any second now, she would let go and remember what a big mistake it all was. She would rush off into the night swearing never to see me again.

  That didn’t make her lips taste any less sweet. It didn’t make her body feel any less divine rubbing against me. I gripped her head and crushed my tongue into her mouth. I strapped my hand behind her back to lift her off the ground.

  She raised her breasts to smash them into my chest. Fuck, I remembered the way she did that. I remembered the way she let her thighs fall apart to straddle my knee. I remembered the intoxicating way she rippled her whole frame up and down me in luscious, exotic waves. She touched every inch of herself to me to set my soul on fire.

  Man, she must have been sitting on a mountain of buried passion. Now she let it all erupt to life as never before. She hurled herself at me in a torrent of lust and desire that brought all the old memories back to life.

  My blood boiled and rushed to my cock. She rode down on it with that sweet little box of hers. She mewed into my mouth and her fingernails clawed up my shirt behind my back.

  I ripped off her mouth only long enough to yank my shirt over my head. In a trice, I burrowed under her sweater and found the sizzling hot bare skin of her stomach. I bent my will in a headlong race against the clock. I had to get her clothes off and get inside her before she came to her senses and changed her mind.

  She stood off panting and glowing while I stripped her shirt and sweater over her head. She attacked her bra clasp while I kicked off my sweat pants. She didn’t pull away when my prick stuck straight out of at her.

  She cast a hungry, craven glance at it and dropped her bra on the floor. Her breasts looked different from what I remember, but so what? She hooked her thumbs into her pants and kicked them aside.

  I didn’t wait for a written invitation. I attacked her in raving ferocity. I had to have her if it was the last thing I ever did. I could walk away from her tomorrow morning. I could even resign myself to never seeing her again, but I had to have this. I needed it like I needed the blood in my veins.

  I scooped her up under the armpits and toppled onto the bed. I landed on my hands and knees and she bounced under me. Her eyes snapped open wide and she stared up at me. Her cheeks flushed, and her lips parted to gasp for breath. She looked so hot and irresistibly tempting like that.

  She screwed her hips to one side on the bed. She writhed under me to position herself under my pelvis. Her crevice cracked open. That was where I belonged. I never stopped belonging there since the last time I took her like this.

  I let my weight sink onto her, first her mouth, then her chest, then her belly, and finally her legs. Her lips welcomed me. Her tongue danced into my mouth and touched mine. That was when I knew this really was going to happen. She wanted it. Her kiss told me so.

  I didn’t let myself believe it until then. Once I realized I could take it slower. She wouldn’t run away. She came here wanting it. She knew she could get what she needed from me. I didn’t have to race. I didn’t have to steal it from her. She was mine to take in my own comfortable time.

  She gazed into my eyes while we kissed. She revealed herself to me as never before at that moment. We shared something in that Motel 6 that we never shared in all the time we dated. She let me touch some part of her that she never acknowledged, to herself or me, before that night.

  She was different. She was a different person, and I guess I was, too. She changed, and she let me see her for who she was now, not the girl I used to know. That girl was gone. Ruby Lewis was a woman now, the woman lying under me.

  Her voice drifted into my ear. “Eli?”

  “Yes?” I asked.

  Her hand touched my cheek, and a tear welled up in the corner of her eye. “Don’t stop, okay? Don’t stop.”

  “I won’t stop.” I never meant any words more. “I’ll never stop.”

  I knew what she needed. She needed me. She needed something from me she couldn’t get from anyone else. I couldn’t exactly explain it, but I understood.

  I angled my hips and my prick touched her burning slit. A film of slippery wetness sent a wave of relaxation over me, and I glided inside. She caught her breath at the tightness of it.

  I slid as far as I could before her inner muscles spasmed and stopped me. I hovered there, watching the reaction cross her face. Her features contorted and she sobbed. Her channel quivered around me.

  Between contractions, I glided the rest of the way down until our bones met in a cosmic unity never to be broken. Her heat exploded in my brain. I kissed her and gazed into her eyes while we swam through an unknown world of hard and soft, pain and sorrow, past and present all mixed up together.

  Her noises cycled higher, but I stayed suspended in a halo of bliss. I never felt this way with her before. I never felt this way with anyone. Was it possible I needed something from her that I couldn’t get from anyone, either?

  She pried her legs back on either side of me. Her insides caressed the innermost root of my being as never before. Her creamy juices steamed around my shaft and penetrated so much deeper.

  I couldn’t exactly locate where I felt her. Search as I might, I couldn’t make up my mind where this sensation came from. It wasn’t in my guts or my heart or my mind. It seemed to come from my very skin, but that wasn’t it, either. It occupied a part of me that existed off to one side or possibly in another dimension overlapping what I thought of as me.

  I never wanted that feeling to end. I inhaled it with all my soul even as I rocked ever deeper into her tight opening. She tensed under me, breathing heavily. Her eyes rolled back, but she never broke the seal of our kiss
, not even when she groaned and cried out in ecstasy.

  She undulated her body under me in time to my strokes. She felt so much more majestically right than I ever remembered her. I never touched her like this, never exposed that inner part of her where her fragile self lived.

  The moment of climax rushed over her in a sequence that never changed. It started as a whiff of fragrant sweat all over her. She froze, staring at something out of this world. Her eyes drilled through my skull to an apparition I could only imagine. She held her breath hovering on the brink.

  All at once, a quick outburst of breath made her nostrils flare. She pummeled her hips against me hard and stuck there. She clung to me with all her frail strength convulsing in every cell. Then she broke into high-pitched plaintive cries that shattered my brain.

  I plunged into her deep and hard and rode the breaking wave. She galloped along with me. Her juices smoothed all the rocking bumps on a never-ending surge of delirium and rapture taking over both of us.

  She moaned and whined in my ears, but none of that mattered now. She reeled in Heaven while I drove on to my own fulfillment in her. She opened wider to encourage me to sink, sink beneath the syrupy waves to paradise.

  7

  Eli

  My phone buzzed on the bedside table. 9:45 PM. Showtime. I glanced over. Ruby lay fast asleep under the bedspread. Her bouncing curly hair scattered over the pillow and trailed across her cheek.

  I eased out of bed. The streetlight outside gave enough light to reveal all the furniture in the room. I pulled on a clean pair of jeans and stuck my feet into my boots. I tucked in my t-shirt and buckled my belt. Ruby still didn’t wake up when I shrugged into my jacket.

  I took my keys and let myself out. The rain left the pavement slick and shiny. Stars peeked through the clouds overhead. So much better.