by Eden Bradley
He was quiet for several long moments, trying to get his thoughts together.
“My father was in the Marines. We lived all over the place when I was growing up. We didn’t have anyone but each other, my brother and me. I was older and he looked up to me. And I’ll tell you, I loved it. Loved being the big brother, loved the blind admiration.
“My father always wanted me to follow in his footsteps. He didn’t even want to hear me talk about being an artist. Art was pansy shit to him. And Phillipe was into music, which my father blamed me for. I was a huge disappointment.”
“I’m a disappointment to my family too,” Sophie said, her voice soft. “But I’m beginning to realize that I can’t take responsibility for that. They can accept me as I am, take it or leave it.”
“Yes. But in my case, that’s not the part that matters.” He stopped, looked down at the empty glass in his hand, wished for more vodka. “I was in Europe, studying art. My father was still holding out this dream that I’d do the military career, like he had. That I’d be a good influence on my brother. But I wasn’t about to give up my life. Certainly not for him. I was doing what I’d always wanted. Learning to paint, fucking too many women, drinking, doing some drugs. Living the bohemian life. And I have to tell you, it was a blast. And Phillipe, he was a teenager and he was a brilliant guitarist. I always told him how good he was, how he could be a rock star. And he…he sort of worshipped me, in the way younger siblings do sometimes. I played it up, sent him postcards from all over Europe, telling him what a wild time I was having over there. He came to visit me in London once he turned eighteen. I took him everywhere for about a month. We went to Berlin. We went to fucking Amsterdam, and I bought him a whore in the Red Light District. We smoked hash. It was insane.
“Dad was pissed. And he was devastated that neither of us was willing to go to war for our country. He blamed me for Phillipe, for him being into music. Said he always followed me blindly. That he could have made a good military man out of him if it wasn’t for my influence. Maybe it was true. I don’t fucking know anymore.”
His gaze was on the window again, but he wasn’t really seeing it. In his head, like a movie playing, was his apartment in Paris, the old-fashioned black telephone buzzing, the glass of French table wine in his hand dropping to the floor, shattering, staining the rug like a pool of blood. The girl he’d just fucked staring at him, openmouthed. He still couldn’t remember her name.
He went tight all over, cold. He didn’t want to talk about this.
“Tristan?” Sophie’s voice was soft, urging him on.
“I didn’t know that after he came back to the States things got so out of control. I didn’t know until after he’d OD’d that he’d been using coke, speed. Heroin.” He stopped, ran a hand over the stubble of his hair, grinding his fingers into his scalp. His head felt like it was going to explode. “If I hadn’t been so fucking selfish, so self-indulgent, such an asshole, Phillipe would still be here. Would have a life.”
“God, Tristan, surely you don’t believe it’s your fault?”
“Damn right I do.”
“But he chose to do what he did, to use drugs. To take it too far. He followed his own destiny, regardless of whatever bad example you may have set. Do you believe that? That we each have a certain destiny?”
He shook his head. He was absolutely twisted up inside. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I believe. All I know is that I led him down that path. That my father was right; I was a bad influence.”
Sophie was quiet, chewing on her lower lip. “I’m sorry about your brother.”
“Don’t pity me. I can’t fucking take it.”
“It’s not pity, Tristan. I’m just sad. Tell me what happened to your parents.”
“My father died a few months after Phillipe did. Heart failure. The doctor said he had a heart defect no one had found before. But I think it was the stress. My mother died four years ago. Just went to sleep and didn’t wake up. An aneurysm. It was sudden. But at least it was peaceful. Being the last one in our family left on this earth, it made me wake up, finally, and realize that what I was doing was not a life. Not one that meant anything. Even after my self-indulgence ended Phillipe’s life, I was still traveling, partying, refusing to come home and face up to what I’d done. It was time for me to grow up.”
Not that he was really facing anything. How long had it been since he’d visited his brother’s grave?
“You didn’t do anything, Tristan!”
“I did.”
“Well, I’m still not getting it. What has all this got to do with…us?”
He really wanted more of the vodka now. Wanted to make the anger and the shame blur around the edges. But it was sharp and clean inside. He said carefully, “I’m not a good person, Sophie. I am not the kind of person who is capable of caring for another person in the way they deserve.”
“Why not? Because you think you failed once? God, Tristan, you don’t have to give up your life because of what happened to your brother. You don’t have to give up loving people!”
Love? Was that what this was? This sensation of being punched in the gut every moment he’d been apart from her? How was that even possible? “I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Oh, I understand better than you might think. I live with my own guilt every day. With shame.”
He glanced at her then. Her eyes were glittering. Was it anger he saw there?
“Shame and guilt for what?”
“For being…who I am. For not being the good girl my family needs me to be. For fighting against the mold they want to fit me into. And for knowing I will never, ever fit.”
“Jesus, we are one fucked-up pair.”
She nodded. “That’s part of why we understand each other. I always wanted to be a little bad, but I couldn’t really do it. Couldn’t let the guilt go long enough to be…to be myself, really. It’s only those tapes playing in my head, from my parents, from the church, that tell me what I want is bad. And you…you just want to be good, and you feel like you can’t. But it all comes down to the same thing. We both pay and pay for this twisted sense of who we are. A lifetime of penance.”
He had to admit it made a sick sort of sense. And she did seem to understand him, in a way no one had before. Maybe because he’d never let anyone close enough to try. So why now? Why her?
“There is some weird thing happening between us. I can’t stay away from you, Sophie. I don’t know what it is. And it’s not just the sex. Not just the tattoos. Although, that’s really…Fuck, I don’t understand that part of it, either. You get the tattoo thing on some very deep level, in a way other people just don’t. It’s more than art to me. It’s sex. It’s the primal permanence of it. It’s…more. And you feel it too. I don’t want to let you in. But you’re getting in anyway.”
“Maybe that’s not a bad thing.”
“Maybe.”
He’d told her about Phillipe, and she was still there. She hadn’t condemned him for it. Maybe it was time for him to stop condemning himself?
“I want you, Sophie. I don’t know what else I want right now. I don’t know what I’m capable of.”
“Neither do I. But it all feels so right, being with you. Being tattooed by you. As though no one else could have done it. Yet at the same time, I can’t quite seem to justify it to myself. I still have to work that out. All that old Catholic guilt.”
“Is that what this is about?” He reached out and took in his fingers the big silver cross that hung between her breasts.
“No. That’s my own thing, my own beliefs. It has nothing to do with my family. Really nothing to do with the Church, even.”
He dropped the cross, stroked the back of his fingers over her heated cheek. “I like that about you. Your independence. Your strength. Even your anger. You look so fragile. But you’re not.”
She was quiet, watching him. “I think we’re both angry.”
“Yes. But it’s just one more thing we understand abo
ut each other.”
“Tristan…”
Her gaze on him was intense, gold and green and silver all at the same time, those dragonfly eyes. Her brows were drawn together, her lush little mouth set. There was so much in her face, in her eyes. Yet all he could focus on suddenly was her mouth. Had a flash of her on her knees in front of him, sucking him deep into her throat. He shivered.
Fuck. Not the time for this.
No, this was a serious moment. He’d just bared his soul to her, for God’s sake! It was insane, how he bounced back and forth between wanting to virtually open a vein for her and then in the next moment fuck her. The real beauty of it was that he knew she’d let him do it. Talk to her. Tattoo her. Fuck her. She seemed to be willing to do whatever he wanted. Seemed to want it too.
He drew her to him, quickly stripped her little T-shirt off. The cross swung between her breasts. Her nipples were dark, swollen. Like overripe fruit waiting to be picked.
He leaned in and took one nipple in his mouth, sucked hard. She moaned, just a soft sigh of air, and his cock hardened. Too good. But he wanted to kiss her, wanted to feel her mouth. He raised his head and pressed his lips to hers. Almost romantic, how soft she was, how yielding, if he was a romantic kind of guy.
And then he stopped thinking as she opened his lips with her wet little tongue. She drew his tongue into her mouth, sucked on it. And he remembered again that hot mouth of hers on his cock.
He pulled back. “Sophie.”
“What is it, Tristan?”
“Suck me.”
She slipped down to her knees in front of the old sofa while he slid his briefs off. So gorgeous, all that dark hair falling over her shoulders, over his thighs. Her skin was so pale, delicate next to his. But there was nothing delicate about her mouth as she slid it over his cock. He groaned at the heat of her, her swirling tongue. And then as she drew the sharp edges of her teeth over his swollen flesh.
“Christ, Sophie…yes, bite it, bite it hard.”
He buried his hands in her hair, all that dark silk sliding between his fingers as her teeth sank into him, the pain and the pleasure shooting from his groin deep into his belly. He pumped into her mouth, and she took him in, sucking, sucking, until he thought he’d explode. She paused, bit into the tender flesh at the head of his cock. It fucking hurt. He deserved it. Needed it. Needed her. He pulled back.
When she looked up at him her mouth was soft and red, bruised almost. Her eyes were enormous. He pulled her to her feet, stood with her tight in his arms. Her breasts were crushed against his chest; he could feel the hard peaks of her nipples on his skin.
Have to fuck her…just fuck her…
He tore her little G-string down her legs, cradled her ass in his hands and lifted her, took a few steps until he had her up against the wall, right next to the window overlooking the courtyard below. The curtains were sheer, filmy. He didn’t give a shit if anyone could see them. He had to be inside her.
“Spread, Sophie. Just do it.”
Her legs went around his waist and he pushed into her. Hot and wet and milking his cock right away as he drove into her body. She was panting, gasping. He bent and bit into the tender flesh of her shoulder, his teeth sinking in. What was it about the pain for them? Didn’t matter. Just taste her flesh. Just fuck her.
“Harder, Tristan!”
He rammed into her, using the wall behind her for leverage. And still, he couldn’t seem to get deep enough. Pleasure rippled through him: his cock, his belly, his arms and legs.
“I’m gonna hurt you, Sophie.”
“Yes. Do it.”
“Christ…”
Harder and harder, his hips slamming her up against the wall. And when he felt the first tremors of her orgasm gripping his cock, she caught his gaze, held him there, biting her lip and whimpering as she came. His orgasm stabbed through him, pleasure shafting deep into his body. And her eyes were like two glittering jewels, searching his face, seeing inside him as though his skin were invisible, a needless barrier. They didn’t need it anymore.
He almost fell, staggering back to the sofa with her warm body still coiled around him. He collapsed there, his legs shaking, his mind whirling.
Something had just happened. It was more of what had happened between them before. But more important this time.
Jesus. He had to stop this. Before…What? He didn’t know anymore. Every argument for staying away from her had suddenly disappeared. He wanted this. To be with her. To talk with her. Fuck her. Tattoo her.
Yes, he wanted to tattoo her. There was something about that, about marking her, he’d never felt before.
Mine.
He didn’t understand what was happening to him. But it felt too good to fight it. She felt too good. For now.
Sophie watched him, emotion shifting across his features. His eyes were dark, distant. And just as she was beginning to worry, he focused on her. She felt it, knew he was really seeing her, no longer lost in his own head. And it warmed her all over, in a way the heat of sex couldn’t quite do.
“What are you smiling about, Sophie?” Tristan stroked her cheek, the edge of her lips.
“I’m just…happy. Strange, that this feels so…alien to me, being happy.”
“I understand what you mean. It’s unfamiliar. As though I don’t deserve it.”
“Yes, that’s it exactly.”
She thought for a moment about how everything between them was all tied together: their guilt, their need to be redeemed. And how these things connected them every bit as much as their mutual love for tattoos and rough sex.
“Tristan, I need to tell you about the tattoos.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s more than that I love them. That I think they’re beautiful.” She ran a finger down his arms, over the dragon inked into his smooth skin. “I didn’t really understand until the first time you touched me with that needle.” One long, lovely shiver at the thought. “I understand now that it’s a true fetish for me. That I need it. I have for a long time. And finally having that is such a…relief. But my need for it is also endless.”
“I’ll tattoo you again.”
“Yes. I need you to. It can only be you.”
“Good.” He squeezed her tight, and she loved that he felt proprietary about her. That he understood exactly what she was saying.
It came to her once more how they could just be together, at any moment, with his body still joined to hers, and talk, really talk. Amazing.
They lay together on the scratchy old velvet of the sofa for a long time, every bit as content to be silent and still together, while the muffled sounds of traffic, other tenants in the building, came up from the street, the courtyard.
She had never felt contentment with anyone else. It was a strange and wondrous thing, something she didn’t want to question right now. They’d had some pretty heavy conversation today. There would be more to come, she was sure. But this was enough for now. Far more than she’d ever hoped to have.
“Tristan, let’s not talk about anything else right now. Nothing of consequence. Alright?”
“Yes, alright.”
His arms tightened around her. She inhaled, breathing in the scent of him, dark, earthy, sexy. Yes, this was all she needed, right now, right here. They would figure out the rest later.
They spent nearly a month together, every moment that Tristan wasn’t working. They went back to Café du Monde, their favorite haunt, eating the steaming hot, sweet beignets, watching the people on the street, in Jackson Square across the way. They loved to sit there in the warm Louisiana rain, protected beneath the green-and-white-striped awnings, while the tourists ran for cover in the shops. They often went late at night, at midnight, at three o’clock in the morning, after their rumbling stomachs forced them out of bed.
On Tristan’s days off they explored the city. Sophie loved the funky little shops, selling everything from Mardi Gras beads and Caribbean handcrafts to leather goods and vintage clothes. They went to th
e Museum of Art, spent hours wandering the long halls, the sculpture gardens, debating the purity of abstract art, of the Surrealist painters. They went to the funny little Musée Conti, the wax museum with scenarios depicting the history of New Orleans.
In the evenings they sometimes went to a small, smoky bar close to Tristan’s shop, where they served Spanish wine and hearty food, listened to the Flamenco guitarists, watched the dancers with their colorful costumes, their sensual, flashing hands and dark eyes.
He tattooed her. First a string of tiny black stars around her right ankle, then a Sanskrit “om,” the symbol of the essence of the universe, on the inside of her left wrist. And each time he took the needle to her skin, it was an intense erotic experience for them both.
And they talked, about everything, anything, except for those dark secrets each of them had and neither wanted to explore any further just yet. This was their Neverland time. Sophie knew it would end eventually, that they would have to really open up to each other, figure out their individual issues before they could have anything more than the dream time they currently shared. But she could wait.
For now, they talked, ate, fucked, in a sort of exquisite dream state. They had sex on Tristan’s chair again, on the tables in his shop. They had sex with her bent over the seat of his motorcycle after a long ride out to the bayous. Sophie had loved it, that thrill at the possibility of being caught. She loved the sense of danger just being with Tristan brought.
She sat now at her kitchen table. Tristan had just left for work. She’d hardly been able to let him go. He’d been sleepy still, his hair wet from the shower, the clean scent of soap all over him. He’d kissed her good-bye in a way that told her she would have more of him later, after he was done with work tonight. Or maybe on his break he’d sneak back to her apartment, strip her down and fuck her on her bed, on the sofa, on the floor, as he often did when the shop was slow.
She shivered just thinking about it.
She felt them moving closer and closer all the time. Physically, mentally. Emotionally. She knew they still had issues to work out. But right now it was hard to care about anything but being with him.
