“I love you too”, Isabella said, smoothing her hands across Philip’s chest. They’d both got thinner. They were eating less, exercising more, trying to be more healthy. Philip had always been active and physically fit, he’d always had a muscular torso, but now it was even more defined. Just looking at him made her want to melt. She never thought she’d ever feel emotion as strong, but when Philip held her, touched her or looked at her the way he did, she felt love burning inside her so strongly she thought it would devour her completely. She wanted to tell him and knew she had to, but she wanted to wait until after they’d conceived.
“What?” Philip said, seeing something in her eyes. Isabella smiled.
“You were right”, Isabella said. “I was just thinking.”
Phillip kissed along the top of her chest, moving slowly towards her already erect nipples. She’d become so much more sensitive since she’d stopped taking her medication. ‘It’s easy’, the voice told her, ‘let the toilet swallow the pill instead of you.’
Philip took her nipple into his mouth, flicking it delicately with the tip of his tongue, careful not to be too rough.
“What was I right about?”, Philip said, when he’d satisfied his urge enough. Isabella was tense. She could feel each touch like a lightning bolt flashing through her skin. She’d never been this sensitive, not even before the diagnosis, not even their first time. It was like her body was revealing itself to her, little by little.
No-one needed to know, not even Philip. It was a secret between themselves, and she’d never felt better. Finally she could feel again. Ok, the voices had come back, but she was a big girl now and she knew she could control them. Everyone had voices inside their head anyway, it wasn’t such a big deal.
Isabella squirmed around underneath Philip’s multiple kisses. She was naked but for a cute pair of panties she should have thrown away a long time ago she’d kept because they were comfortable to sleep in. It was morning, it was a weekend, she was in bed with the man that she loved, they had the rest of their lives in front of them and Isabella was convinced that today would finally be the day they would make their baby. Everything seemed perfect.
“That I’d marry you.” Isabella said between squeals.
It was a white lie. White lies weren’t bad lies if good things happened because of them. It was better without medication anyway, if anyone knew that better than her it was Philip. Philip had seen her before all of this happened. He knew exactly what she was supposed to be like. Fuck the doctors.
“Fuck them.”
“Fuck them?” Philip repeated, pulling away from Isabella momentarily.
Isabella pulled him back to her. “Fuck anyone who says we can’t”, she improvised.
“I thought you weren’t ready for that?” Philip said, too involved in the moment to catch Isabella’s slip.
“You give me a baby”, she said, “I’ll do anything that you want.”
“You mean you won’t anyway?” Philip said playfully.
Isabella put her leg up on his shoulder. “Within reason”, she said, and then put the other leg up on his other one.
Philip cocked his head, impressed by her confidence. Impressed by what seemed like the new Isabella, or the return to the old Isabella, or the Isabella mark 2.0. “It’s like that is it?”
“Hurry up and fuck me, Philip”, Isabella demanded.
“That I can do for you, honey”, Philip said and quickly whipped off her panties.
Isabella had always been sexual, it was the medication that had numbed her desire. They’d first fucked as soon as they managed to find time alone together, both just turned eighteen and completely clueless about what to do. It was Isabella who’d initiated it, Isabella who’d taken Philip’s larger than average, already swollen cock out of his pants, sucked him until he nearly came and guided him inside her. That first time was magical, but it hurt like hell. Sex since then had only got better and better, until her illness came rudely along to ruin it. Now, lately, from the day she stopped her medication, the sex had been better than all other times put together.
“Lick me”, Isabella demanded. “Fuck, I’m so horny.”
Philip didn’t need to be told. He liked nothing more than running his tongue along Isabella’s slit, between her fat pussy lips, around the inner labia that hung a little lower than the outer, around her clitoris in circular motions that made her knees jerk involuntarily, and finally into her pussy hole. They’d experimented a lot since that first time, and Philip knew exactly what he needed to do to get her off. After he’d teased the opening to her pussy with his tongue, pushing it inside her just far enough to make her beg for more, he pulled it out completely, replacing the fat muscle with the tip of his finger and running the rough underside across her swollen clit while he began to finger her gently.
A month ago she would have complained about the pain. A month ago she would never have been as wet as she was now. Philip was astounded by the change, and he put it down to the new, protein rich diet, the long walks she was taking in the park, the sea air, the upbeat attitude.
Isabella moaned. She could feel things exploding inside her she didn’t know the origin of, nerve endings sending triggers of pleasure rapidly to her brain and pulses of pins and needles spreading out across her skin like wild fire. If this was what love physically felt like, she never wanted it to stop. Isabella pushed her pussy hard into Philip’s face and demanded he tongue her more fiercely, finger her more deeply.
She’d go back when the baby was born, that was the agreement. Only when the baby was born. After that everything would be fine.
Philip could see Isabella’s body tensing and relaxing as though she was having involuntary contractions. Every so often she would moan deeply and her pussy would clench tightly against his fingers while she grabbed for a fistful of sheets, only for the sensation to pass again just as quickly. He was pushing her close to the edge and they both knew it.
Before it was too late, and Isabella had no chance of coming down from the peak he was pushing her to, Philip withdrew his fingers slowly, gave her clit one final flick from the tip of his tongue and pulled himself away from her.
“Are you ready to make a baby?” he asked her.
Isabella nodded. She had her eyes closed and one forearm rested against them to block out the light. Her breath was short, and her chest rose in quick, frenetic beats.
“I can’t hear you”, Philip said, his cock throbbing against his pajama bottoms, a patch of pre-cum seeping into the fabric. While he waited for a vocalized answer, he prepared himself, pulling his pants down and releasing his sizeable cock.
“Yes”, Isabella said lightly. Any louder and she thought she might crack.
Philip edged towards her. Her pussy looked so inviting. They were each other’s first, and Philip knew every part of the anatomy of his lover intimately. Even with his eyes closed he could picture her perfectly. Isabella still hadn’t opened her eyes. She only did so when Philip teased the opening to her pussy with his swollen crown.
“Fuck”, Isabella said.
“Uh-huh”, Philip agreed. “I think so.”
Now she sat up on her elbows to look down at what he was doing. She had her legs wide, slightly raised so her feet were off the ground and kind of hanging in the air beside him, while Philip knelt between, his hand on the base of his cock, the tip riding up around her clit and back down to her pussy hole.
“If you don’t put that inside me-”
Isabella began, her sentence dissolving into moans as Philip, one hand on her knee to steady himself, slowly guided himself inside her.
Isabella felt a rush of sensation firstly to her pussy, next to her brain and then finally everywhere across her whole body, that was so strong she nearly pushed him out of her again. Instead, she held her breath until she almost passed out, and then finally let herself breath as Philip began to fuck her hard and deep.
She’d never felt anything like it. For a long time, Isabella thought that she’d ne
ver feel anything again. She’d stick needles into her thighs just to see if it hurt. She’d hold her hand under hot water until her brain thought it was cold. She’d hold a pillow against her face and scream as loud as she could to make them go away, and then if it was meant to be a good day, she’d smile when Philip came home, or if it was a bad day she’d curl up in bed and cry herself to sleep. There was none of that now. Now it felt like the hot tap was running hotter than she could bear, and there were so many needles in her legs they looked like a pair of pin cushions.
The pleasure was indescribable. It was like scratching the world’s biggest itch, sneezing a thousand times in a row, laughing until your belly hurt, being in love. Being loved. Philip pulled her hands away from her face and held them against the bed.
“Look at me”, he ordered.
“I can’t”, Isabella complained, but she was laughing too. She wanted to, but she couldn’t.
“I love you Isabella.”
“Fuck.”
Now it was Philip’s turn to laugh. “Look at me”, he demanded again.
Finally Isabella opened her eyes. It was so beautiful, she wanted to cry. It was so intense, she never thought she would be the same again. Each thrust, a push closer. Each magnificent movement of his cock against her G-spot an exercise in divinity.
“Come with me”, Philip said.
Isabella nodded. She bit her lip and held his gaze. Her clit was absolutely buzzing.
“Let’s make our baby.”
It was as if he got even bigger, pushed himself even deeper, lifted her to somewhere she thought never possible to go. There was nothing more perfect than that moment. It was the crux and pinnacle and pivot point to both their lives. It was the moment that united them and separated them forever. It was their fulcrum.
Philip’s balls swelled and she felt them press insistently against the confluence of her pussy lips. His crown widened and nuzzled deep into her vagina, ready to explode the future up towards her womb. She couldn’t hold herself back any longer. Neither of them could. When Philip came, Isabella did too, more intensely than she ever thought possible. She opened up to him, gave him everything that she was and let him take her, let him plant his seed within her. Philip was done long before Isabella came down, but he never pulled away, and he never took his eyes off her. Not when she was moaning so loudly the neighbors could hear. Not when she was holding him so tightly her hands left bruises on his ribs, and not when she could do nothing but cry, emptying out her emotions in a constant stream of tears that seemed like they would never stop.
Philip gently rocked her to the bed and let himself go soft. For a long time, neither of them said anything. There was nothing to say. Without even knowing, they knew. They’d just changed the world forever. They’d just changed the future, the present and the past, and from that point on, nothing would ever be the same.
***
Almost exactly eight months later, Isabella’s waters broke. She was in a taxi on the way to the hospital on the longest and hottest day of the year. The baby was a month early, but it was a miracle it was being born at all.
The taxi driver freaked out, pulled over inexplicably for five minutes to try and decide what to do, and then finally got his head together and high-tailed it to the maternity ward when he realized that none of the three people present knew how the hell to deliver a baby. The labor was just as difficult as the pregnancy, which after close to forty eight hours, ended in an emergency caesarian section. Isabella lost a lot of blood, and it was touch and go whether she and the baby would survive at all. Somehow, however, they both did.
The baby was expected to be underweight, but at little over 4.5 pounds, he was dangerously small. The doctors had no idea why it had taken so long for the thing to come out, and figured that it was either to do with Isabella’s age, the fact it was her first, because of the large quantities of medication she was on, or just that Leighton hadn’t wanted to be born at all.
Philip was absolutely delighted Isabella had given him a boy. He was over the moon that finally, after such a turbulent period in their lives, things were finally on the up. He was named after Isabella’s father, and nicknamed Tempest by the doctors because of the trouble he had caused in being born. It was a moniker that would stick all the way to adulthood, mostly because for a long time in his life, he was known by little else.
It had been an incredible difficult time, but Philip was confident that now the baby had been born, they’d finally see some light at the end of what seemed for a long time like a never ending tunnel.
Not long after the conception, Philip began to notice changes in Isabella’s behaviour, the return to past traits, and the reemergence of what was believed to be long since dealt with mood swings. When Philip found her in a bath full of cold water and warm blood, he knew something was seriously wrong beyond the typical malaise of a pregnancy. Isabella’s haphazard slashing of the skin along her arms couldn’t really be considered a suicide attempt more than a desperate call for help, but it was enough for Philip to worry seriously about what he thought could only be a return to diminishing health.
She denied not taking her medication, and even denied anything was wrong at all, but it was clear something serious was going on. It took a great effort to get her to talk to the doctors, and even more heartache to get her to finally admit, after several sessions with psychologists and psychiatrists what had really been going on. It had been three months and she was more distant than Philip had ever seen. She was breaking up and she couldn’t admit it. After a week in the hospital, for which Philip had to have her committed, a further week of observation, and a reissue of medication, Isabella was allowed back home. For a while she seemed fine, but it only lasted two more months. The next call for help was even more serious. This time Isabella did try to kill herself. The pregnancy wasn’t the solution she had hoped for, and the darkness was closing in. It was easy to get the tablets and even easier to gobble them down. Her stomach was pumped, her life was saved, albeit only just, and her medication was increased again. Somehow, through all of the stress she put on him, through everything that she did to destroy herself, the baby refused to go away. It kept on growing inside her, or as Isabella saw it, sucking her energy and pulling her down. She grew to hate it, resented it being there inside her, and even in some of the darkness times, wished that it were dead.
After that, in the final third of her pregnancy, after mood swings and arguments and money issues and family problems and days upon days of crying, after finding her on Coney Island beach confused and not knowing how she got there, after yet another failed suicide attempt and days in which she told Philip she didn’t love him just to see him hurt so she could remember what it was like, when he found her holding a pair of scissors against her bump and begged Philip to let her do it, or tell him she would if he dared to get any closer, when she was at the lowest point she had ever been in her life, too low even to take it away, she finally gave in and stopped fighting. She finally accepted there was no way back, no matter what anybody did to try and help. She let it destroy her.
The doctors put her on so much medication she barely knew her name. There was nothing else they felt like they could do, and there was nothing else that Isabella wanted.
“Help me”, she confessed one night to Philip. “This is killing me. Help me make it go away.”
Neither of them really knew whether she was talking about her baby or her illness. She told the doctors to put her on whatever medication she would need to not feel anything. It was a game to them and a game they wanted to win. Isabella gave them free rein to turn her into a zombie. The less she felt, the better. The illness had won. They killed the darkness, but in doing so, they killed the light as well. From that point on, Isabella just saw unending shades of grey.
“She’ll get better”, Philip would tell the doctors, or his family, or his friends, or anyone who would listen, even though deep down inside he felt like he had already lost her. When he smiled at her, she would sm
ile back, but it was as if there was nothing at all behind her face, nothing going on inside her head.
“Just wait”, he said. “She’ll pull through. She always has done before”, but this wasn’t like before. Isabella had never been this bad. She had never accepted what was happening to her, never thought her illness was permanent, prone to worsen, life, relationship and world destroying.
When she had her baby, when Leighton was finally pulled out of her womb, through thin layers of muscle and fat, and then placed after a week in intensive care against her chest, she looked down at the child with a mix of confusion and sadness. It was the first time since the doctors had put her on the medication she was on now that Philip had seen any flicker of deepened emotion within her. It was not the reaction he was hoping for, and one that made his heart sink lower than it had ever been.
Isabella looked over to him, and in that look he knew she was finally gone to him forever. The day his son was born.
“Get this fucking thing away from me”, she said, barely a flicker of recognition in her eyes.
That was the day Philip’s world broke in half.
Chapter 20
Isabella was permanently committed less than six weeks later. Philip, in consultation with his father, Isabella’s parents and the medical team they were struggling to continue to afford, decided Isabella had a much better chance of survival, and a greater possibility of a comfortable, stress-free existence, within a professional medical facility. Deciding to do it, making a decision behind Isabella’s back for her own good felt like the worst kind of treachery possible. Taking her there, where she held Philip’s arm tightly out of fear to plead with him not to leave, and he saw within her a flicker of the Isabella he used to know, and for a fleeting moment it was that summer in 1971, when he first laid eyes on her, broke his heart. She was confused because of the medication, but she knew exactly what they were doing to her. This was the beginning of the end, and no matter how much she wailed or pleaded for them to change their minds, the decision had already been made.
DONKEY: A Stepbrother Sports Romance (With FREE Bonus Novel Charged!) Page 35