by Belle, Jove
“Oh, you’re going back?” Abby sounded more disappointed than she wanted. Simone was clearly done here. Her interest in Abby had disappeared the second she finished taking what she wanted. Abby wasn’t going to humiliate herself by begging for more.
“I’d rather not, but I forgot my keys and purse.” Simone took a couple of steps, then turned back toward Abby. “Are you ready?”
Abby wasn’t ready at all. She’d just had not one, but two amazing orgasms, and she didn’t trust that her legs wouldn’t collapse beneath her. “So this is it? Will I see you again?”
Simone looked away, her gaze landing on Gavin’s car. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She walked toward the house without waiting for Abby.
*
Abby didn’t follow immediately. She’d have to face Simone, and everyone else, soon enough. The trip back to real life didn’t appeal to her. She’d rather enjoy the solitude and moonlight alone, and imagine that Simone hadn’t bolted immediately after sex. Simone had been a staple in Abby’s sexual fantasies since high school. She’d rather not admit that the real Simone didn’t live up to her imagination. The sex had been amazing, life-changing, better than her dreams. But her fantasy Simone always held her afterward. They drifted to sleep together, woke up in each other’s arms the next morning. She’d never once run away at the first opportunity. Abby didn’t like the prospect of reconciling her hot fantasy with the cold reality that had played out.
The chill in the night air finally pressed at her more than her wish to hold on to her fantasies for a while longer. Abby smoothed her hands over her skirt. It was a wrinkled mess with no hope of fixing it, and her underwear was nowhere to be found. Oh well. She straightened her hair, concentrated on not looking freshly fucked, and went in search of Gavin. She wanted to go home.
When she entered the house, she found Gavin just inside the door talking to Simone. “Abby tells me the two of you were friends in high school.”
Simone looked calm and in control, her eyes completely shuttered. Abby wanted to see fire in them again. Now.
“Friends isn’t exactly the right word,” Simone replied smoothly. “We ran in the same circle.”
Simone was together enough to be charming, which Abby found utterly annoying.
Gavin spotted Abby and held out his hand. He drew her to his side and slipped his arm around her waist. No wonder Simone refused to believe her. She and Gavin were too good, too accustomed, to the pantomime of lovers. Abby had to find a way to convince Simone it was all a charade.
“Abby, look. I found your friend, Simone.” Gavin had apparently decided to ignore Simone’s denial of friendship.
Abby regarded Simone. For a brief moment, her eyes were filled with tortured anguish, then instantly changed to calm, placid stone. No hint of approval or disapproval. She was a blank canvas as she smiled expectantly at Abby. Abby returned the smile and hoped it didn’t betray her wish to tear down Simone’s walls. This wasn’t the place, after all. “Hello, Simone.”
“Abby.” Simone nodded tersely, then turned back to Gavin. “I really must be going. It was nice getting to know you better.”
Simone shook Gavin’s hand and retracted her hand with a grimace. She rubbed her fingers against her thumb. It was the exact movement she’d made just a few moments ago right before her tongue darted out to taste Abby on her fingers. Abby imagined that perhaps she hadn’t found a sink after all, and the idea was completely mortifying, yet deliciously scandalous.
“Good night, Abby.” Simone pulled Abby into a brief hug and whispered in her ear. “I wish…” She left the rest unsaid and pulled away.
“It was nice seeing you again, Simone.” Abby held firm. She wouldn’t allow herself to chase Simone a second time in one night, no matter how much her instincts yelled for her to do so.
Simone left without another word, and as the door closed behind her, Gavin asked, “What was that all about?”
“Mmm, miscommunication.” It was a continuation of every other experience she’d had with Simone. They circled one another, crashed into one another, but never quite connected. “I’ll call her later, see if I can straighten it out.” If she could find Simone’s phone number. Somebody had to have it.
Abby had been waiting since she was sixteen. She could wait a few more days to convince Simone there was more between them than just angry memories.
Chapter Three
Beige. Simone loathed the color, and everything in Dr. Donovan’s office was covered in it. The walls, the shades, the couch, the chairs, even his suit. Every last bit of it was calm, soothing beige. Simone didn’t find it calming in the slightest, but after years in therapy with more psychologists than she could count, she was willing to overlook the beige for Dr. Donovan. He was the first therapist she’d seen who didn’t make her want to punch a wall. That was invaluable.
“You realize you’ve been glaring at that lamp for the past twenty minutes?” Dr. Donovan tapped his pen against his yellow legal pad restlessly.
The lamp was beige, too. Simone redirected her gaze from the furniture to the good doctor. “Better?”
“Simone,” he leaned forward slightly, “this is your time. You can do whatever you want. It’s just been a long time since you spent the entire fifty minutes silent and angry. Do you want to talk about what triggered this?”
“Not really.” She was being petulant and it was annoying, even to herself. She’d called and scheduled the impromptu visit rather than waiting for her regular appointment. She’d graduated to seeing Dr. Donovan once a month. One evening spent with Abigail, and she was thrown backward to the time in her life when she needed nearly constant hand-holding.
Dr. Donovan made a note on his tablet, then relaxed back into his chair. “Okay.”
And that was why she liked him. He didn’t try to convince her how she should spend the time she was paying for. It was her money. She could spend it however she wanted. He also didn’t see a lot of value in dragging up shit she wanted to leave buried. He believed she would deal with things as she needed. If a memory wasn’t keeping her from functioning, why pick the scab?
“She was at Gavin’s promotion party.” Simone stared at the wall to the left of Dr. Donovan’s shoulder. She knew she needed to talk, but that didn’t make her happy or willing.
“She?” Dr. Donovan scribbled a few more notes. He used a yellow, no. 2 pencil, and she debated snapping it in two. The one big downside of therapy was all the damn note-taking. It unnerved her.
“She.” Simone gripped the arms of her chair until her knuckles hurt. “Abigail Nelson.”
“Oh. And what did you do?”
Simone remembered the feel of Abby clenching around her fingers, her body drawn tight on the verge of orgasm. “I fucked her against the trunk of my car.”
For once, Dr. Donovan didn’t write down her response. He stared at her patiently, then asked the patented therapist question. “And how did that make you feel?”
She smirked at him. “Really fucking horny.”
He rested the tablet and the pencil across his lap and waited.
Simone stared at him, but he didn’t blink or look away. He’d heard all about her kinky sexual trysts. Fucking against a car didn’t faze him. She should have known better. So much for shocking him out of demanding the real answer.
When she was in high school, her parents had sent her to a string of different therapists, all of them female. They thought talking to a woman would help her to open up. As soon as she turned eighteen, she demanded to be allowed to choose her own therapist. She wasn’t foolish enough to think she could get away with not going at all. Her parents would have cut off their funding for school if she’d tried that.
She’d selected Dr. Donovan on a whim, not because she thought he’d actually help, but at the time she thought it would be fun to screw with a middle-age guy. Turned out, he was unflappable. It didn’t matter how many salacious details she threw at him, he never so much as adjusted his collar. For a while
she thought he must be gay, but now she didn’t care either way. He’d earned her respect and she trusted him enough to try.
Finally, she took a deep breath and slumped slightly in her seat. “I don’t know.”
He nodded. “So let’s talk about that. Did she want you to fuck her?”
He said the words so matter-of-factly, Simone was jealous. No matter how much training she received, she’d never be that placid when asking a question like that.
She started to answer and he held up his hand. “And let’s focus on emotions for now. I don’t need a play-by-play of her bodily reactions.”
Simone nodded. “She wanted me to. I left the party and she followed me outside. She kissed me and…” She was going to say “begged me to fuck her,” but she wasn’t sure if that was an emotional reaction. She let the answer hang.
“How did you feel when you first saw her?”
“Overwhelmed. Excited. Confused. And like I’d do anything to make her happy.” Anger and disappointment had quickly replaced those feelings when she’d spotted Gavin.
“So very similar to the way you felt for her in the past.”
She’d spent too many hours to count dissecting her need for Abby, her deep-seated emotional attachment to her.
“Exactly like that.”
“Then what?”
“Then I saw her boyfriend.” Simone forced her voice to remain flat. The memory of Gavin’s fingers playing through Abby’s hair, his arm around her waist, his possessive, loving smile, all of it was too sharply close to the surface for her to properly evaluate the emotions it evoked.
“Boyfriend? How did that make you feel?” Dr. Donovan arched his eyebrow but gave no other indication of surprise. Simone was impressed. She was pretty sure they’d worked through her need to fuck straight girls, too, but apparently she’d been wrong.
“She told me he’s not her boyfriend, but I’m not sure she told him.”
“What do you mean?”
“He touched her constantly, very much like a boyfriend would do.”
“And how did that make you feel?” Dr. Donovan asked yet again. Simone wondered if he ever grew tired of asking the same question over and over.
“Jealous. Disappointed. Angry.” That was the nutshell version of her emotions, but it didn’t come close to describing the swamp of emotion she’d felt when she’d realized Abby wasn’t available.
“Is that when you decided to, ahem, pursue her?”
“You mean fuck her? No. That’s when I decided to walk away. She followed me.”
“And what did you do then?”
“I kissed her.” Simone had tried, really tried, to just leave, but the open pleading on Abby’s face had been too much to ignore. She’d immediately regretted her decision, but the regret didn’t stop her from wanting more.
“And then?”
“Her boyfriend walked up on us.”
“The boyfriend she says isn’t a boyfriend?”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
“And what did you do?”
This teeth-pulling approach to extracting information from her was painful, but Simone didn’t know any other way. It wasn’t in her nature to spill everything at once. She couldn’t manage anything but bits of information.
“I walked away. Again.”
“And she?”
“Followed me. Again.” If she’d remembered to grab her purse and keys, she’d have been long gone by the time Abby reached the driveway. The scent of Abby had lingered on her fingers long after their encounter. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
“And that’s when…” Dr. Donovan gestured vaguely with his hands.
“Yes.”
“Did you, at any point, stop and actually talk to her?”
“Not really, no.”
“Yet you fucked her.”
“Right.” Simone gritted her teeth. She knew where this was going, and she didn’t like it.
“Do you think that’s a healthy alternative to communication?”
“I think it’s a form of communication.” She looked directly at Dr. Donovan as she spoke. They disagreed on this one point, and that wasn’t likely to change.
“What did you communicate?”
Simone clenched her jaw but didn’t respond.
Dr. Donovan waited a few moments, then reviewed his notes. “Let’s go back to the boyfriend. She said he’s not, but you believe he is.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It seems to.”
Simone nodded. “No matter what, she’s lying to someone.”
“Explain.”
“If he is, she’s lying to me about him. And to him about me.” Simone paused. She hadn’t considered the second half. She’d cast herself as the other woman, a role she’d tried to avoid in recent years.
“And if he’s not?”
“Then she’s lying to everyone else, because they definitely act like a couple.”
The timer on Dr. Donovan’s desk went off and he stood with a smile. “That’s it for today, Simone. Why don’t you think about what all this means and we can discuss it again…next week?”
Great, he’d decided she needed more-frequent visits again. Just…great. She nodded and extended her hand as she stood. It was reflex to shake hands at the conclusion of any meeting. “I’ll schedule something on my way out.”
Simone made an appointment for the next week as suggested. Her conversation with Dr. Donovan hadn’t clarified anything for her, but her emotions were no longer running close to the surface. She felt better in control.
She refused to let Abigail Nelson unravel her like she had in the past.
Chapter Four
Simone sipped her drink and checked her watch. The ice had long since melted, leaving her with the watered-down remnants of her martini. Top-shelf wasn’t enough to save it. She’d been here too long, and the piped-in instrumental covers of top-40 crap were giving her a headache. She’d like a few minutes alone with whoever had conceptualized this bastard-child of the music industry. That person needed to feel her pain.
Simone dropped her drink on the closest shelf and admitted defeat. As she turned to excuse herself, the only reason Simone had wanted to stay walked in the door.
Abigail Nelson. Blond, aloof, statuesque, bitch. In a word, perfect. Except she wasn’t really all that bitchy any more. She was still blond and looked like she was carved to perfection rather than born and grown into adulthood like the rest of the planet. And the aloof thing wasn’t really happening anymore either. In high school, she wore it like a protective layer, like she was afraid of the unwashed masses getting too close and rubbing off on her. Now she smiled, greeting people warmly.
Simone hadn’t seen Abby since Gavin’s promotion party over a month ago and had been both hopeful and afraid Abby would escort Gavin to the Christmas party. She desperately wanted to see Abby, but knowing that her relationship with Gavin hadn’t changed left her deflated. The anticipation she’d felt sagged into defeat.
Abby had called more than once. Simone answered the first time because she didn’t recognize the number. As soon as she realized who it was, she hung up. She hadn’t answered again. Abby was toxic for Simone. Regardless of how she looked, how much Simone wanted to believe the change she saw was real, she knew it wasn’t true. Either Abby had a boyfriend, who also happened to be her boss, or she was lying to everyone about it. Neither option appealed to Simone.
“Jesus, Simone, just fuck the girl already so you can stop glaring at her.” That bit of advice came from Simone’s not-quite-sober best work friend, Marco.
Simone swirled the gin-soaked olive through her fresh martini, then snatched it off with a snap of her teeth. “If only it were that simple.” Simone left out the part where she’d already fucked Abby and it hadn’t stopped the glaring.
Abby met Simone’s gaze from across the room and gave her a half smile. Abby’s hand rested in the crook of her boyfriend’s arm. Gavin was gallant like that. Rather t
han holding her hand, he offered his arm like he was living in a Leave It To Beaver era movie. As much as Simone hated Abby with him, she had to admit he was good to her, boyfriend or not. They shared a comfortable intimacy and Simone was jealous. She wanted that for herself.
Simone saluted Abby with the oliveless pick and turned her body, if not her attention, back to Marco. “Why are you slobbering your drunk ass all over me rather than rescuing your wife from Stevens?” Simone inclined her head toward the corner where Marco’s wife was boxed in by the ever-persistent Stevens. Unlike his partners, who tried to pretend to have some socially redeeming qualities, Stevens had no indication of humanity. In his opinion, the milk of human kindness was an obscure concept best left to folk musicians and Buddhists. He wanted money and all manner of shiny things. The shiny thing that had caught his attention at the moment was Belinda Lewis. That she was married to an associate was irrelevant to a motivated and highly intoxicated Stevens.
Belinda’s smile strained at the edges as she tried once again to navigate around Stevens’s arm. She was unsuccessful.
“Son of a bitch.” Marco was off on his white horse to rescue his fair maiden. Belinda’s smile when he arrived was real. And Simone’s requisite good deed for the day was done. Another ten minutes and she would be clear to leave.
Abby materialized beside her, an ethereal dream come to life. “Hi, Simone.” Gavin was nowhere in sight.
“Hey.” Simone sipped her martini thoroughly enough to border on gulping. This woman unraveled her. Always had.
“What’d you do with Gavin?” Not that Simone wasn’t happy Abby was alone, but it seemed the obvious conversation starter. Besides, it was dangerous for Simone to be alone with Abby at company parties. Abby belonged to Simone, whether Abby and Gavin knew about it or not. And that feeling of ownership made it unsafe for Simone to spend time with Abby. She was likely to do something rash. Still, she lingered.
“Why won’t you answer my calls?” Abby tipped her drink to her lips and evaluated Simone over the rim, her eyes dark and curious. “I can’t stop thinking about you,” she murmured between sips.
