Fuck, I knew it was her voice. I should have listened to the little voice telling me not to find the owner of it, but, instead I listened to the stupid part of me that couldn’t help but do exactly that.
Now that I knew, I couldn’t push it all away again. There Sadie was, facing the cheerleaders. A dream. A nightmare.
Her raven hair was pulled back against her head into a ponytail. I couldn’t see her eyes from here, but they were burned into my memory. Gray, like a stormy sky. Slate when she was angry. Her body was taut and muscular. Sexy as fuck. She’d always been a cheerleader with raw talent for anything athletic.
It was interesting to see that after everything, she still ended up being part of that world. It’s funny how some things you could forget as if it never happened, and other things were ingrained into your very being forever.
Sadie was the one who got away. She was the woman who I had thought I would spend the rest of my life with. She’d been my high school sweetheart. We had taken each other’s virginity. She had been everything to me.
And then she had forgotten about me. Literally.
I took a deep breath and tried to forget about her all over again. But I was the unlucky son of a bitch that remembered everything, no matter how much I wanted to forget.
I always told myself— and I tried very hard to convince myself while staring at Sadie standing there— that maybe I could forget her, the way she had forgotten me. But no, I wouldn’t want that. If I forgot, I would be in danger of repeating the same heartache again. And I wasn’t sure I would be able to survive that. I’d barely survived it the first time, all those years ago.
I sometimes didn’t know if I held myself back from being with other women because I could never love anyone the way I had loved Sadie, and, admittedly, still fucking do, or whether it was because if I was able to find someone like Sadie, I felt sure that something would inevitably happen to take her away from me, just like what happened with Sadie. I really hadn’t ever wanted to find out the answer. But now, looking at her, I realize that my heart is still dying to know.
The memory of what happened on Prom night was so vivid, I felt the horror, the agony, all over again. I watched Sadie now as she walked back and forth, correcting the cheerleaders’ stances. This was torture. Dammit, I should just have turned around and left.
As if she could feel my eyes on her, she slowly turned. Her eyes were gray, the color of the sky when it was overcast. I didn’t let her eyes meet mine before I looked away.
Chapter 2
Brian
High School
“Let’s go to High Rock,” Sadie said to me.
We had just left prom. All our friends had already gone, and only the nerds were left, slow dancing at arm’s length like they were going to catch cooties.
Sadie and I were comfortable around each other. I knew her body almost as well as I knew my own. We hadn’t done it yet, but I wanted to. Tonight, if I could.
“Sure,” I said, jumping at the chance. Everyone went to High Rock. It was close to South Pointe Pier, and it was the local hangout for all us teenagers. “We just have to go home and get dressed first.”
Sadie shook her head. “If I go home, my dad won’t let me go out again.”
“So? Come to my place. You can borrow some of my sister’s clothes. I know she won’t mind.”
Sadie smiled and nodded, leaning in so I could kiss her full, perfect lips. Kissing Sadie was like a dream. Every time her lips touched mine, I forgot about everyone and everything around me. She was my whole world. At that point we’d been dating for two years, and all I wanted was to be with her in every way possible.
“And tonight, at High Rock, I want you to make me yours, Brian McMurray,” she said.
I swallowed, and my body reacted to what she said. My stomach turned with nerves. I’d never done it before. So, I was hard immediately. I knew what to do in theory. God knew I got hard often enough just thinking about her. It was just the actual step that I needed to take.
And tonight, we would take it together.
We got changed at my place. In jeans, I felt much more comfortable than in my prom tuxedo. Sadie looked like sex on a stick. She wore a short skirt that showed off her curvy ass— I couldn’t help but think “easy access”— and a tank top that traced her ample breasts perfectly.
“You’re beautiful,” I said.
And I meant it. She was the most gorgeous girl I’d ever seen. I was so happy we were together, and that we were about to christen our relationship.
She stood on her toes and kissed me. Her makeup and hair were still the way she’d had then done for prom. So she looked all dolled up, but not in an obnoxious way. I loved that the soft pastels she’d chosen for her makeup were rather subtle but sparkly at the same time.
And the ringlets in her hair made me weak in my knees. All night they had made me think of the variation of the saying “she has me wrapped around her little finger,” but it was more like, “I want to wrap that curl around my little finger.” And then I wanted to pull her head close to me and kiss her, and do a lot more after that, too.
We made our way to High Rock, and everyone else was already there. Someone gave us alcohol, and we drank it from red plastic cups. We were only eighteen and we hadn’t had much to drink in the past, but we figured, what the hell, it’s prom night. You only live once, right?
After chit chatting with some friends, I climbed onto the rocks with Sadie and helped her up higher, to where some different friends of ours were. She was already wobbly from the alcohol in her system, and she clutched onto my hand. The night was warm, and the air humid, pressing down on us like a hand. I breathed in deeply, my stomach tight with nerves.
“Hey guys,” Sadie said to our friends.
“We all know what you guys came here to do,” said Matt, one of the guys on my football team. “So there’s no need to pretend it was to socialize.”
Sadie blushed and I traced my finger across her reddened cheek. I couldn’t help but adore how embarrassed she was about the fact that we were going to have sex. I could tell she was also just as excited as I was, though, because she smiled and turned her face towards me.
I bent down to kiss her, and she eagerly returned it.
“Get a room!” her friend Shelly said.
“Or at least a ledge of your own,” Matt chimed in.
“Very funny, asshole,” I told him. “But maybe we will.”
Everyone laughed again and Sadie nodded at me. She thought it was a great idea.
We moved farther away from the others, finding a spot that was semi-private. This was where most of our memories had been made. Here, we were going to make another one.
We started with making out, caressing and touching. I pulled the strap of her tank top to the side and then my hand made its way down to caress her familiar but still exciting breasts. We’d done everything but “all the way” sex before, and I knew her. I knew her body and what to do.
She climbed on top of me and my lips made their way to her nipple. Her left breast was hanging out of her tank top as I sucked on it. Every now and then I took my mouth away so I could marvel at her pink nipple standing erect for me. Then I went back for another delicious taste. I grinded my hips against her, and she gasped.
I was hard, and she could feel it. I pulled her panties down from underneath her skirt and fingered her, pushing my fingers into her pussy. She gasped and pressed her mouth against my neck to muffle the sound.
“It feels so good when you touch me,” she said.
I breathed in the scent of her hair— a mix of shampoo and hair spray— while my fingers rubbed her clit. I pulled up her skirt a bit more so I could see her naked pussy. She was dripping wet for me, while my fingers lightly squeezed her clit.
“I’m gonna come,” she whispered, and I said, “Good.”
She leaned back and let herself go for me, grinding her pussy into my hand while her juices poured out into it. As I rubbed her clit with one hand, I s
pread her pussy lips open wide so I could see all the way inside her, where I would soon get to put my cock, for the first time ever.
After a while, she was moaning and nearly screaming, so I put my hand over her mouth and drew her in closer to me as I continued to play with her pussy.
“Mmmm,” she moaned into my hand, bouncing up and down on me as I made her come again. “Oh my God, Brian.”
When she was done, she sat back down on my lap, while my finger was still plunged deep inside her tight little pussy hole. I could have gone on like that, playing with her sweet pussy and making her come over and over. But finally she put her hand on mine, asking me to stop.
“I want you, Brian,” she whispered.
This was it. The moment of truth. My cock strained against my pants, and I fumbled with my belt, struggling to get out of my jeans. I only pushed them down to my knees so we could recover easily.
I rolled onto her, and her thighs fell open for me, her legs on either side of my body. I was struggling to breathe.
“You’re trembling,” she said, and she was out of breath.
“I’ll be okay,” I said, as I quickly removed the condom from my pants pocket and put it on.
I had paid close attention in sex ed and I had even practiced at home— hoping and waiting for this chance to arrive— but I was still really bad at it. I fumbled a bit and then she helped me get it all the way on, both of us laughing and kissing until the job was finished.
Once the condom was finally on, I pressed the head of my cock against the entrance of her pussy, and she held her breath. Her gray eyes were so dark, they looked like the night sky above us. Her eyes bore into mine, and I pushed into her.
She whimpered, and I stopped. I knew from everything I’d read that it might hurt her. She shook her head.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered. “There was pain but now it feels good.”
“Okay,” I said, “if you’re sure.”
It was such a dilemma to want to keep going for my own pleasure but also not to cause her more pain. She’d said it felt good though. And she felt so wet inside from the way I had been playing with her pussy that my cock was nearly slippery.
I pushed further into her. She was so tight, it took everything I had to hold back and not come immediately. But I wanted this to last. We had spoken about having sex for months now, and it was finally happening. Under the stars, with the sound of the waves crashing onto the shore again and again, I took a part of her and gave her a part of me.
My cock felt so hard and big inside her tight pussy. I grabbed onto her ass as I thrust in and out of her. Her arms were around my neck and she came again, before I did.
“Oh my God, Brian,” she said. “I love your huge cock. It feels so good inside me. It fills me all the way up.”
I looked down at my cock plunging in and out of her, and I could see that she was right. It was going all the way inside her and then I would bring it out to watch her pussy hole contract, before sliding it back in. In and out, up and down. Both the rhythm and the view were amazing. I couldn’t believe I was capable of making her feel this good.
But, looking at how my cock was ravaging her pussy made my own feelings of pleasure too strong to be able to hold back. It was over too soon. I came in no time at all, and when I reached down to play with her so she could come again, she shook her head and playfully bit my neck.
“I’m too sore to keep going,” she said, shivering as the orgasm she had just been experiencing dissipated.
It would get better the more we did it. I’d read that, too.
“I want to kiss you, one more time,” I tell her, leaning towards her.
She brought her lips forward to meet mine and I sucked on them like I had just been sucking on her nipple. I couldn’t wait until she was feeling less sensitive, as I planned to suck on her clit like that too, making her come with my mouth like I just made her come with my cock.
“I love you, Sadie,” I told her, and she wrapped her arms around me and said it back.
“I love you too, Brian. Always and forever.”
I stood up, realizing I’d better get my pants back on before other guys came over and laughed at us. There was the issue of what to do with the used condom, though. My friends often threw theirs— along with the wrappers— off the cliff.
I knew this because they would joke about all that evidence down there, of all the girls they had fucked. They claimed it must be thousands by now, between all of them, but I felt they were exaggerating quite a bit.
I felt too bad about littering, though, to do what they did. And I didn’t want to think of the condom I’d used with Sadie joining the pile of evidence of a thousand different conquests. What I had with her was special. Mine and hers, only. So, as I got dressed, I put the used condom back in its wrapper, folded it over itself, and put it in the back pocket of my jeans, from where I had originally taken it.
Sadie was still relaxing on the rock. She didn’t have to get dressed since her clothes had such easy access.
“Let’s join the others,” she said, once my belt was back on. “I could use another drink, to celebrate our very first time. That was amazing.”
“It sure was,” I told her.
She stood up and almost lost her balance.
“Careful!” I cried out.
The rocks were high and jagged, with the ledge of the cliff looming just behind them. She pressed her hand to her mouth and giggled. We’d both had alcohol, and she didn’t handle hers very well.
“Let me come to you,” I said.
I walked toward her, hand outstretched. Sadie lifted her arms and tipped back her head.
“Tonight, I feel like a princess,” she said, and closed her eyes.
Throwing her head back threw her off balance. She stumbled, trying to steady herself by putting one of her feet behind her, but there was nothing for her to land on: only the great expanse of air and sky that started where the cliff ledge ended.
“Sadie!” I called out.
I watched as she toppled backwards. It all happened so slowly, I should have been able to get to her in time, but I couldn’t. I watched the shock on her face as she tried to right herself, and the horror when he realized she couldn’t.
Then, she was gone from my view. I heard the sickening crunch of bone on rock before I got to the edge.
“Sadie!”
The night that had been the best of my life turned into the worst. Right before my very eyes.
Chapter 3
Sadie
Present Day
When I woke up, his face was pinned to my frontal lobe. I didn’t know if I’d been dreaming about him. I hardly dreamed anymore. For that, you needed memories, or so they said.
But it was him. I would know that face anywhere. He was famous. Brian McMurray played for the Florida Sharks and he was on the news all the time.
That wasn’t the only reason why I knew his face. Once upon a time, just after the accident, he had spent time with me. He had tried to convince me that I knew him and I loved him.
I didn’t. Then again, I didn’t know much anymore. There was a time when my life had been full of memories and achievements. Now, they were just words on paper, evidence of a life I couldn’t remember.
I had to get out of bed and get ready to cheer at a football game, but I couldn’t stop thinking about this Brian guy. As a general rule, I tried not to think of things that remind me that I can’t remember my past, but right now, he was stuck in my head. And thinking about him made me think of all the things I couldn’t remember.
The accident had robbed me of my past, and in the process, I had lost my identity. We are the sum of our experiences, and all I had left was what everyone told me about mine. Therefore, even though I wished I could have remembered his handsome, caring looking face, I couldn’t. I didn’t have enough identity of my own to know what someone else had been like in what I started to refer to as my “past life.”
The accident had happened the night o
f our senior prom, or so they told me. I had fallen off the cliff at High Rock and hit my head on a rock. I had lost so much. I was still alive, and the doctors said it was a miracle.
I was in a coma for weeks and they weren’t sure I was going to wake up. When I finally did, it was as if I was starting with a blank page when I should have had a whole book filled with memories of my life. At first, I wasn’t as grateful as everyone else seemed that I was alive. To have no memories, no identity, no sense of who I even was, often felt just the same as being dead, anyway.
I couldn’t remember important milestones. Some facts were just missing. I knew some people well, and others got upset because they had been there just as long, and I didn’t know who they were at all.
Brian had been one of those people. Apparently, he’d been my boyfriend of two years. The one who had taken my virginity just before the accident.
That didn’t count. If I couldn’t remember it, it hadn’t happened.
When I saw Brian on the field last night, I had felt something. A jolt of some kind. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know why I would feel that way. Except for the three months he’d tried to bring me back, and I had tried so hard to push him away because I was frustrated with not being able to remember him, he was a stranger to me. But strangers didn’t elicit that kind of response.
I pressed my hand against my temple, feeling the scar. Only the tip was visible. The rest of it disappeared into my hair which had grown again, thank God. But the scar was there as a constant reminder of everything I’d lost.
It wasn’t just my past, either. I struggled to plan for the future. No one knows how much we build on our past until we don’t have it anymore.
Seeing Brian had made me feel different this time. Before, when he’d insisted I was his girlfriend, I had wanted desperately to get away from him. He’d been a stranger, comfortable with touching me when I didn’t know who the hell he was. All I’d wanted was for him to leave me alone.
This time, when I’d seen him, I’d had to fight the urge to go to him. Something about him had been magnetic.
Their Protector: An MC Outlaw Halloween Romance Page 121
