Seven Minutes 'til Midnight

by Sunniva Dee

  Why is she like this?

  Am I so lucky?

  I want to be so lucky.

  I reach for the lamp on the nightstand, needing to read her expression, but she plucks my hand off the switch, kissing my fingertips before she brings me under the duvet.

  The alarm clock blares out its numbers. Eleven forty-eight. A sensation of wrongness rustles around me. I feel like I’m at the top of a summit, abrupt ridges leading into the abyss on both sides. Wrongness hovers in the air, but I can’t grasp the shape of it.

  Maybe I’ve acquired a sixth sense—maybe it’s my caveman breaking out with his feral instincts—but if I hit midnight without unraveling this premonition, I’ll lose something irreplaceable.

  I pull strands of her hair between my fingers, rake through them as if examining it. Thick, lush, wavy, a little coarser than usual.

  I throw the comforter to the floor, needing my hands all over her. I need this wrong to be righted, I need to understand that all she wanted was for me to come back and prove to her firsthand who I love.

  I sink over her. She skips to the side.

  “Lay down,” she whispers. I reach for her, that foreboding in my stomach again, but when she adds, “Let me take care of you,” I lower my head to the pillow.

  Believe.

  I make out the silhouette of her as she leans over me. She settles her mouth against my temple. Her hair smells different. She must be trying out the hotel shampoo. I reach for her, try to fill my hands with her perfect boobs, but she doesn’t let me.

  “I decide tonight,” she whispers. “Just lay back and enjoy.”

  I smile at that; my bossy girl. Relaxing, I leave my arms under my head. And then I kick to the curb my caveman instinct of wrongness.

  AISHE

  I never snagged a taxi. The lobby mirror at the Bastien on Eighth throws back my disheveled reflection. On impulse, I wipe away a smudge under an eye and approach the front desk.

  Troy wouldn’t be back yet—the FNL afterparty is mandatory schmoozing for the guys—but I need to be sure. If he somehow made it here before me, I’ll be hightailing it out immediately. In the morning, I’ll call Waris for help to get my stuff back without having to see him.

  “Hi there,” I say, aiming for relaxed and professional with the hotel clerks. “Has Joe Decker returned for the night?”

  The closest receptionist is young and blond, eyes lighting him up further at the mention of Troy’s hotel name. “Yes, Ma’am, he sure has. He came a little bit after you— Wait.” His face slackens, and his older colleague jumps in.

  “Ma’am,” she says, sending a subtly disgusted glance down my clothing. “How can I help you?”

  “He came after me?” I snap to the talkative young desk clerk.

  “No, I got that wrong. It was his girlfriend. I’m sorry. You just look like her.”

  “Kyle.” His colleague sends him a glare before returning to me. “I’m sorry about that, Ma’am. Are you here to check in?”

  “I’m already checked in,” I say. “I’m in twelve fourteen.”

  “Ma’am, the patrons in twelve hundred and fourteen are already here. The Bastien on Eighth affords the ultimate privacy to our customers, and if you’d be kind enough to respect that, I won’t have to call security.”

  No. This can’t be happening. I glance at the clock above the front desk as my heart speeds up. It’s ticking toward midnight. While I’m trapped here, who knows what Hailey’s cooking up, upstairs?

  The power of bruxiante simmers to life in me. In this moment, she holds the power to extinguish us. God, I hope Troy sees that.

  I can’t leave now. I won’t be licking my hurt heart somewhere else anymore. Not when the young front-desk clerk tells me, “And his girlfriend asked us to be on the lookout for a lookalike impostor.”

  Heart pounding, I eye the elevator.

  Troy, don’t let her destroy us forever.

  “Whatever. Never mind,” I say. I show my palms to them and stomp out of the lobby. I do it loudly, madly, and wave down the first cab in the rotunda. Once it makes the turn, I walk around it, open the door, and hunch as if I’m about to climb in.

  Instead, I take off. In my too-high heels, I prowl the side of the hotel until I’m at the back entrance.

  Please, Troy, don’t.

  I pray to God that my key card still works. I want to cry with relief when it does. The service stairway is white and utilitarian, and on the third floor, I take my shoes off so I can run faster.

  My lungs burn when I reach the twelfth floor. I stumble into the main hallway, and from there, the corridor stretches out, long and carpeted.

  Time is ticking; a hundred percent certainty mouths it to me. Tonight! Tonight, the minutes mean everything. Clarity rushes in my blood and in my heart. The love fire roars to me, screaming for my survival.

  Moixcho. I can’t if you do this.

  “Twelve thousand and fourteen” gleams at me, a golden promise of elegance and sophistication. If she’s in there, those numbers lie.

  I’m made of turmoil and bad omens when I swipe the door open and barge in.

  TROY

  I’m hard beneath her as she rubs herself on me. Her moves are jerky, and it makes me wonder if my girl got tipsy while she waited.

  She doesn’t smell like alcohol. Then again, I smell nothing on her besides that new perfume. It overpowers her natural fragrance, the one I’d pick her out of a lineup by. This girl. I love her so much.

  She’s stressed out, working rapidly, pulling my briefs off between us and plopping back on top. I want to pull her against me and soothe her from her hurry.

  “Shh, take it easy, baby mine,” I whisper. “We have all the time in the world.”

  “Yes, but I want you to sleep with me first,” she whispers back.

  Wrongness. The alarm clock blaring new numbers, closer and closer to some inevitability I can’t quite grasp.

  Eleven fifty-two.

  I extract my hands from behind my head. Thrust my hips up to meet her as my arms go around her body. One lift, and I’ll slip inside of her just like she wants in this strange mood she’s in. I can’t blame her for anything; I put my moixcha through too much tonight.

  “I want to play, darling,” she whispers. Pries my hands off her while I think how slim she is, how small her boobs are, how wrong her skin is, and—

  “Hailey!” I shout. “What the fuck?”

  Click. Cold metal around my wrist, then the other. Fucking hand cuffs? The center wrought-iron pole of the headboard is wedged between my hands. I buck against the mattress. She turns the light on. Now, now she wants the light on!

  Desperately, she wiggles to get in position on top of me. I buck, roar—jerk against the headboard. I can’t sit up. I need to get some kind of footing!

  Hailey squirms on me, puffing, hissing my name against my lips. She finds my cock with her hand, and for a stunned second, I see what she’s doing—she’s steering my rock-hard boner against her, I feel her opening, slick and wanting over the crown of me—

  Until the ceiling light floods the room.

  “Get the hell off him!” Aishe roars.

  I twist my body around, and in one shove, Hailey’s off me and tumbling to the floor with a grunt. I rattle the headboard. “Open the fucking handcuffs!”

  Aishe’s stare goes to the alarm clock. In seven minutes it’s midnight. Another minute, and I’d have cheated on her. My infidelity would have joined the rest of our past, and—love be damned—that baggage would’ve been too heavy for us to bear.

  “What are you doing here?” Hailey screams. “You can’t just barge in when people are having sex!” She jumps to her feet, fake-bronzed and naked.

  “Where’s the key, Hailey?” I roar. “Get. Me. The fuck. Out of the handcuffs!”

  Aishe charges toward h
er, eyes blazing with anger. She tackles her to the ground. Hailey whines, she squirms, but she has nothing on a Gypsy woman who’s on fire.

  “This is not happening,” Aishe grinds out. Her hands close around Hailey’s throat, her skirts rushing wildly around her as she straddles her. “I promise you, Hailey, if you don’t tell me where the key to those handcuffs are, you’ll never take another breath.”

  “Aishe, let go!” I shout. “Don’t let her turn you into a criminal.”

  “I. Promise. You.” Aishe’s dark eyes suddenly gleam yellow.

  It must be the lighting. I squint. Shake my head and study her again. I must be seeing things, because in this moment—in the moment Hailey gives up and squeaks out her answer—I see flames lick around my baby’s pupils.

  Hailey fought hard. It took us ten minutes to dress her between the two of us. Now, her whole body is shivering. Like a child who can’t sleep, it’s as if she’s trying to lull herself calm. With her arms locked around her knees, she’s rocking on the bed. I’m not sure it’s working.

  “Call nine-one-one,” I murmur to Aishe. “We can’t handle this.”

  “No. No, no, no, please don’t do that,” Hailey hiccoughs. “I can’t go back there.”

  “Back where?”

  “Why did you come back, Aishe?” Hailey’s voice is broken. “You were supposed to give up on him! Didn’t you see how he kissed me? It’s me he loves. He just had to see that for himself—all I did was help him along a little. He would’ve seen it too, you know. I’d have made him feel better than you ever did.”

  The anger has dissipated from Aishe’s gaze. There’s only sadness and compassion in my woman’s eyes now. “We’ll get you somewhere safe, Hailey,” she says. “Somewhere where they’ll take care of you until you feel better.”

  “No! I don’t want to go there,” Hailey whispers. “I haven’t been there in years. I’m not sick. I’m— I’m fine. Troy, all I wanted was to make you happy.”

  AISHE

  The thing about trust is that it goes two ways. You give it. You receive it. You have it. You own it. If there’s no trust, the absence of it creates a void, and for me, just when I’d stopped thinking of it as an agent in my life, it came sifting back in on the breeze from stage left.

  I didn’t have it when the video scandal forced me on tour with Clown Irruption. I’d forgiven Emil for what he did a long time ago, and there was no need for trust between him and me. But with Troy, things were different. If I forgave him, I’d have to trust him too.

  Slowly, I became braver. See, trust walks hand in hand with love. I wanted to trust him, and I began working on it when my feelings became impossible to suppress.

  For each day in Japan, we both became a little braver. Troy was fighting his own demons—guilt over how he had treated me, and horror over the person he’d become thanks to his actions. The only problem was that his pace didn’t keep up with mine.

  Troy took longer than I wanted to make love to me. He didn’t trust me to wake up in the morning with the same sated smile I went to sleep with.

  Then, there was the mirror sex. It had been our first twisted time together, and I hated that Emil had been present to tarnish it. It was a memory I couldn’t let stick, and I needed Troy to understand that. I wanted to suffocate it, throw dirt over it, bury it six feet under the love I saw in Troy’s eyes.

  “You still don’t trust me,” I whisper to him, now, on a hotel balcony in Miami. It’s a week after Hailey’s hospitalization, and I’m holding his hand. He finds my eyes, squinting as he tries to guess my thoughts.

  “Of course, I trust you. What’s not to trust about you?”

  “On the night after the FNL disaster, you said you thought Hailey was me, that it was why you were going to sleep with her.”

  “It was, but we never got that far.”

  I nod. “You said you didn’t get inside of her.”

  “Because it was true.” His gaze brightens the way it does when he’s worried. He already pictures it, the fight I’m instigating. Only I’m not.

  “You were both naked,” I say, stringing out his concern.

  “Yes, but I told you how it went down.”

  “She was on top of you. I saw her. She was moving on you, and there was no way for me to tell if you were going along with it or trying to get her off.”

  “Aishe, please. Why are you doing this? I thought you trusted me!”

  “Exactly.” I breathe out, feeling the stillness of my belief in this man setting in. “I did, and I do. All I needed was your word for it.”

  “Good, because it was obvious, wasn’t it? Why would I sleep with someone I detest, especially when I went there to find you?”

  I feel a grimace running over my face. “Have you adored every groupie you’ve slept with, for instance?”

  “Aishe.” He thumps back against the backrest of his chair. “Okay. So you’re right, but that was before you. I’d never do anything to jeopardize what we have. Ever. Where are you going with this?”

  “I trusted you. Why don’t you do me the same honor?”

  “I told you I do. What do you mean?”

  “Make love to me in front of the mirror.”

  He groans. Raises a hand and strokes it down his face.

  “Trust, Troy. Trust me to not break down over it. Trust that it’s exactly what I need to vanquish Emil’s grin while he ‘was right.’”

  Slowly, Troy’s hand reveals his face again. It lowers to his lap as his gaze stills, flashing defiance at me. “Except Emil was right.”

  “How was he right, baby?” I’m not going to get upset and lose track of my goal.

  “You were made for me, and I was made for you. He knew it.” Troy arches a brow, daring me to disagree.

  I give him a hint of a smile. “He was. Emil just had a fucked-up way of getting his point across.”

  Troy’s safari-greens shine as they fall to my lap. Restless, I fiddle with nothing there, a piece of thread, maybe. Goodness knows.

  “So… you need the mirror, then, to separate him from us?”

  The way he says it is brutal. It’s truer than anything I’ve allowed myself to think. “If you trust me.”

  “I do.”

  The way Troy trusts me is beautiful. Without words, he comes to me in the slow blue of the Miami afternoon, raises me in his arms, and carries me inside. On the bed, he lowers me like I am precious, like he’s known no one like me and needs to savor the meaning of us.

  Slow and tender, his kisses explore, his tongue sucking in the flavor of my skin. I am exposed to him, unafraid and ready when he spreads my dress open and leaves it beneath me like a sheet.

  He whispers heat to me while he removes my bra, while he teases my nipples with expert lips. He whispers love to me as he runs his nose down my stomach and removes my panties for his hand to explore.

  “I love you.” My words are a hiss, and though I shouldn’t block out the view of him, I can’t keep my eyes open. Heavy-lidded, they fall, my skin puckering with pleasure. Troy’s caresses are everywhere, making me arch against his hand, thighs spreading with a plea for more.

  You’re my life. In silence, he presses his lips to my ear. It’s how I hear him. It’s why I bridge for him, moaning ecstasy when he unleashes my desire with one slow, slippery stroke inside of me.

  “Never mind the mirror.” My breath is shallow with longing. “All I need is you.” I fold my legs around him, keeping him close as he moves with me.

  Together we breathe. Together we rock. In sync, we find each other’s lips. Our rhythm is smooth limbs sliding, leaving no inch between us alone. Together we climb, our breaths growing ragged, and when he pulls out of me, it’s so unexpected, I gasp.

  “This is for you, my moixcha.” Troy’s eyes shimmer as he leans down to take my hand. With trembling knees, I stand and let him lead me
toward the desk. Cautious, he moves behind me, keeping my eyes with his own in the mirror.

  “Do you see what I see?” His gaze rolls down the reflection of me, from the curve of my shoulder, to my quivering breasts, to my stomach. Starting beneath my chin, his hands find me as he presses himself against my back, the length of him velvety between my butt cheeks.

  “I see us,” I whispers.

  “Just us.”

  A hiccough escapes me. A slight softening of his expression as he hugs me closer, eyes shutting with emotion before he opens them again. Troy gathers my boobs in his hands, lifting them upward, squeezing for the two of us to see. I sense his hunger. It shoots lust straight to my womb while I wait for his next move.

  “Lean your elbows on the desk, baby mine.”

  It’s easy to obey with his touch at the base of my spine, nudging me forward with the insistence of someone who loves.

  “Look at us.”

  I open my eyes and gaze at him, high cheekbones, a pink mouth and eyes arched with tenderness. His hands glide over my body until they lock around my boobs.

  “There… we are.” I sound breathless. Green eyes darken with desire at the sound of my weakness.

  “Look at yourself.” He spreads me open, and in one stab, he reaches the depths of me. I gasp, bowing my butt against him as he works me. His hand finds my pussy, caressing folds that are hyper-sensual, and I spread my legs, getting up on my toes for better access.

  “God,” I sob. It is him—all of him, I see—the tick of his pecs, the play of a string of muscles at the edge of his shoulder.

  I hike to my toes, arching my back with the need to have him as deep as possible. “More,” I whimper. “Please.”

  I jolt as he catches my clit between two fingers and starts rolling it. He puffs heated kisses to my temple. “Are you ready to let go? Are you ready to explode?” He grows inside of me, becoming impossibly large.

  “I’m so. Full,” I stutter.

  “Come for me.” The fervor of his plea is all I need to fall apart in his hands. My knees buckling, he holds me up, lets me ride out my climax with toe-curling intensity.