Truth & Consequences: A Miss Independent Novel

by Leach, Kiki

  Smooth, suave and almost too well put together for that time of day and with presumably nowhere else to be, he looked even more handsome than he had beneath all of the dim lighting inside his apartment the night before. Feeling flustered before even uttering a single word to him, Sheila pressed her hand against either cheek and felt her unwavering smile expand into a full on beam. Adrian was leaning against the frame of the door, the cuffs of his sleeves rolled up past each naturally flexing bicep and his collar wide open, revealing a few marks of his own. Sheila noticed them circling around his neck the minute he turned his head and remembered his fingers digging hard into her waist and ass as she rode his dick into the sunset and sucked on his skin until her lips swelled and his skin bruised.

  When she started pulling at her robe to cover herself and saw drops of water leaking from the tips of her hair down onto her skin, Adrian realized she had just gotten out of the shower and stood up straight. Seeing her standing there, wet and seemingly embarrassed to be seen in such an apparent disarray, was like an electric jolt to his system.

  And his pants.

  “Hi,” she finally said, her voice slightly shaking as her eyes floated down to the bulge forming against the zipper. She placed a hand on her chest to slow the speed of her heart as she remembered the taste of his dick inside her mouth, and how the warmth of his come surged against her cheeks.

  Adrian arched a brow and grinned, refusing to hide what he had felt and knew she had seen, and seemingly appreciated.

  “Hi.” His eyes roamed across every part of her room and he dipped his head. “Is this a bad time?”

  “Not at all. I’m alone, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” he repeated, his grin more profound.

  They stared at each other for what seemed like an entire lifetime, optimistic yet nervous at what to say next, before Sheila finally stepped back and opened the door even wider to allow him inside.

  Hesitant but eager to share more space with her, he dropped his hands inside his pockets and shuffled into the room.

  Sheila shut her eyes and said a silent prayer, which mainly consisted of hoping that she would be able to keep her legs closed this time. Vanessa was right, having sex with him again while still engaged to Nathan would not be the smartest thing in the world to do.

  But damn, was he sexy as hell. His ass in those slacks, his body in that shirt, that color of blue highlighting his flawless, evenly tanned skin.

  All logic was beginning to float right out of her skull and through the window on the other side of that room.

  She knew then and there that a simple prayer wasn’t going to cut it. Jesus, Mary and Joseph would need to be contacted directly via her ‘Save a Ho’ hotline if she really wanted to keep herself – and her vagina – in check.

  Adrian leaned back against the wall and watched her anxiously fiddle with the handle of the door.

  When she looked over her shoulder and caught the same suggestive look his eyes flashing across his face as he stared back at her, her knees abruptly buckled beneath her and she fell against the door; though she tried to play it off as if she was fumbling in reaching for the knob to lock it and accidentally lost her balance in not paying close enough attention as to what she was actually doing.

  Adrian laughed to himself while admiring the shape of her curvaceous figure, recalling so intently what it felt like when their bodies finally came together and exploded in simultaneous ecstasy. He could tell from the way she had been acting from the moment he entered her room that Sheila recalled it as well, which made his showing up there unannounced all the more worth it.

  As she kept her eyes to the floor, unsure of what to say next, Adrian whistled to get her attention.

  She looked up at him and smiled again.

  “Have you been alone all morning?” he asked her.

  She nodded. “Yes. Nathan never came home last night.”

  “Why? Did he fall asleep somewhere else he shouldn’t?”

  Sheila laughed aloud, though she wasn’t exactly thrilled with the news, or the reason behind his not being there. “That’s actually an interesting story.”

  “How interesting?”

  “Well…” She paused, thinking of the most appropriate way to tell him what she knew. “He was apparently arrested last night.”

  Adrian chuckled and slightly shook his head. “Arrested? For what?”

  “Disturbing the peace and assault.” She took a breath. “I--”

  But the minute the word ‘assault’ came out of Sheila’s mouth, Adrian was no longer laughing. Within seconds, he had pushed himself away from the wall and raced over to where she stood. Placing his hands around her arms and gently lifting her away from the door as if she was too fragile to move on her own, he visually examined what little of her that he was able to see beneath that white, terrycloth robe; he furrowed his brows and tightened his jaw at the thought of Nathan putting an unwanted hand anywhere on a body he surmised the moment he first laid eyes on it as being hand sculpted by God Himself.

  “Did he hurt you in any way?” he asked, his response coated in fury as his eyes traveled up from her body to meet her eyes.

  She stared back at him with reservation. “What?”

  “Did he do something to you because he found out about what we did last night -- ?”

  Sheila, appreciating his concern – something of which she hadn’t been used to before and thus, didn’t immediately understand the same as someone else in her current position with him might have – placed her hands on his chest and exhaled through a soft chuckle. “No,” she informed him. “No, no, his arrest didn’t have to do anything with me – I never even saw him last night.”

  “Then where was he?”

  “Where else?” she asked.

  Slowly, her hands slid down the front of his body. Remembering so easily the softness of his skin beneath the clothes, she wanted him to take her, to own her again, to prove to her that last night meant more than just two random bodies coming together out of loneliness and desperation, and fear of being alone forever or with someone else who really wouldn’t give a damn about either one of them in the way that they seemed to give a damn about each other.

  But she backed away and moved across the room before he could do anything, before she could hear the same truth that plagued her mind and often left her filled with disappointment and rage and dread; a truth she had heard too many times from Nathan in the past, and had no desire to hear again from someone else in the present, someone that she could see herself truly falling for, and hard.

  “He was with Vanessa,” she finally told him. She glanced at him again before crossing over to the fridge in the corner and grabbing a bottle of water. She pulled another for him, but he waved his hand and declined.

  “How do you know that he was with V? Was it in the paper this morning, did it hit the news stations? Because I haven’t heard much or seen anything. Then again, I haven’t been too in tune this morning with anything that’s been going on outside my head.” And then he paused as what she told him began to sink in. “Wait a minute, is she okay?”

  “She’s fine. Her house might be a little damaged, but physically, she’s fine.”

  “Good, that’s good. But I’m still curious as to how the hell you seem to know all of this. I don’t want to offend you by any means, but even with Nathan being involved, I don’t take you as the first person being on V’s ‘to call’ list. Or his when it involves her.”

  “I’m not,” she replied in a quiet voice.

  Her throat suddenly felt as if it was closing up and her stomach churned and knotted. She ripped the top off of the water bottle and swallowed back a few gulps before wiping her mouth with the palm of her hand and turning back to give him an answer.

  “Instead of coming straight back to the hotel after leaving you last night, I went by V’s house to see her. I felt like we needed to talk about a few things, and
maybe get a few others straightened out.”

  “Really.”

  She bobbed her head and he fell back against the dresser.

  “And we…” She inhaled a deep breath. “We did talk. We got enough straightened out but not much. Because in the middle of all that talking is when she told me about a fight that Nathan was involved in, with Maurice.” She placed the water down on the table next to the fridge and strolled over to him. “You said you had no idea why Nathan brought you out to the Hamptons, right? But that you wanted to go there to see me, so you didn’t really care about the reason?”

  He dropped his head and smiled to himself before turning his eyes back to hers and pinching his lips to the side. “It went something like that.”

  Sheila tried to hide her own grin but was unsuccessful.

  “Well V told me that the reason Nathan wanted you there was to not only get under her skin, but to bust up her relationship with Maurice.”

  “That seemed pretty clear to me after listening to that awful speech beforehand,” he said.

  “Me too. But the reason he was so determined to make it happen was because according to her, he caught them having sex.”

  He pulled his head back and opened his eyes wide in absolute shock before lowering his brows and shaking his head. “Where they in public?”

  “No. No, they were inside her house. Nathan somehow made his way in and found them in her bedroom. And I didn’t tell her this last night, mostly because I didn’t become conscious of it until later, but the night he and I had dinner at TAO Uptown, he was so impatient and wanting to get the hell out of there before we had even been served. I didn’t know the reason behind his madness until after the Hamptons, when I got those random text messages from Joan that I told you about. He couldn’t get me off in a cab and out of his sight fast enough, which means he went to her house the minute I was gone. It also explained why he had been acting so neurotic every day leading up to that weekend. One minute, he was all over me and couldn’t get enough and the next minute, just looking in my direction seemed to turn his stomach. Every time he does something stupid and crazy or becomes hateful to me at the drop of a hat, I can always trace it back to his ongoing feelings for her.”

  “What you’re telling me makes sense, but his reactions to you or anyone else because of how he feels about her isn’t exactly her fault, is it?” he asked.

  Her eyes flew up to meet his. And the moment she got a glimpse of his sincerity in each one while speaking about Vanessa, her heart sank to an open black hole deep inside the pit of her stomach.

  “No,” she replied, though somewhat sarcastically. Her lids fell shut as she tried to maintain control over her emotions. “Of course it’s not her fault that every man she’s ever known seems to drop at her feet the minute she walks into a room. And when they don’t get what they want from her, they treat everyone else around them who would ACTUALLY give them exactly what they wanted and more, like shit. Or…” She waited for an extensive beat to pass and continued. “Or they use the closest thing next to them for a few good hours before tossing them aside until ‘The Anointed One’ chooses to come around again. So no, it’s definitely not her fault. She just can’t seem to help the apparent fact that her pussy is made from gold, or that she’s so fucking clever even Elbert Einstein would be impressed--”

  “Sheila--”

  “And she sure as hell can’t help the fact that her body is what lollipops and gummy bears are made of. The bitch is sugar, spice and ev-er-y-thing nice. Everything not made of me.”

  She skated over to the window and tucked her hands beneath her arms so tightly that her palms turned red and her fingers became numb.

  Adrian stopped for a few seconds to fully take in what she had said, then he turned to her and grimaced. “Your insecurities about Vanessa, and these abnormally long and redundant speeches about how she has everything while you were stuck with shit are starting to wear thin on me. Especially now.”

  She whirled around on the balls of her feet, flinching in fury at his words, and locked her jaw. “What?”

  “I didn’t say much about it last night because you were so upset and I didn’t want to make an already bad situation between you two even worse. But after what happened between us and why? I don’t think I should have to listen to any more of this shit from you.”

  She couldn’t believe that he was talking to her like this. Who the hell was he? Where the hell did he get off?

  At the same time, what he said was the kick in the ass she knew she always needed, but on the surface dreaded the pain of hearing when she finally received it.

  And from someone like him.

  “Now you could ask me to go, or tell me to get the hell out,” he said calmly, recognizing the need she had to immediately bolt from the room if he didn’t leave first. “But I’m not going to. Not until we settle this battle you keep fighting within yourself that prevents you from recognizing when you’ve finally got something outside of yourself that’s actually worth fighting for.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You want to philosize me?” she asked. “Is that it?”

  He bellowed, then tightened his lips and wrapped his fingers around the tip of his nose to stop himself from laughing any louder. “Philosophize,” he corrected. “And no.” He drew his fingers around his mouth and looked into her eyes as she glowered with embarrassment. “The only thing I want is for you to be honest with me about this,” he told her. “Alright?”

  She nodded a few times and sighed. “Okay.”

  “Now do you really think that what happened between us last night was just about me using you for sex? That you were just a body for me because Vanessa never came back around?”

  She lifted her shoulders then threw her arms high up in the air. “I don’t know!”

  “You should,” he told her. “You should because I had been hard up for a while now.”

  She scoffed. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Maybe it would if you’d actually let me finish what I’m trying to say,” he snapped. “Listen Sheila, I hadn’t seen a naked woman that I wanted to touch with more than just my hands since the night before I left for the Congo. And I’m being honest as hell here when I tell you that it’s not all that hard to find willing pussy in Queens or anywhere else in New York as long as you look half decent and don’t have a needle sticking out of your arm. But random pussy during all that time, and even when I finally got back to the city, isn’t what I wanted.”

  “Does that mean you specifically wanted mine, even though I was probably more than willing to fuck you, embarrassingly so, than any other woman you’ve ever met?”

  “Yes,” he answered matter-of-factly. “It means that I specifically wanted yours very badly; in a way that made me almost question every small bit of my own sanity.”

  She gulped, unsure of how to take his straightforward response.

  He walked over and stood as close to her as he could without touching. As she felt the heat from his body fill up the space between them and inflame her from the outside in, she fell back into the window and gasped for air.

  He moved even closer and rested one hand on his waist while lifting the other above her head and pressing it down hard against the glass. She descended beneath him and sucked her bottom lip into her mouth.

  “Since I’ve been back,” he started, his voice dropping second by second as he watched her tongue anxiously swipe back and forth across her lip. “Since the night you first invited me into this room, your pussy made from gold” – he snickered – “is the only one I’ve been aching to put my dick inside.” He shifted his body forward; she sank down even further. “I wanted to taste you that night, to see if you were just as sweet as I imagined you to be the minute you first opened that door. And now I know without a doubt that you are the sweetest I’ve ever tasted.”

  He watched her thighs rub back and forth against each other as she swallowed hard, and pulled up the corner of his lips into a sly grin.


  “We-wer-wer--”

  She had to stop herself as she began stuttering like crazy due to the nerves he brought upon her with his less than sugary sweet but or so sensual words. She bowed her head as if to pray for every sin ever committed before God, and took a few deep breaths.

  Then she turned her eyes back up to his and realized that no sin ever committed before anyone was comparable to the way he made her feel right then, right there against that window, inside that room, enclosed in that small space.

  His smile grew as he watched her struggle with what to say, how to say it; her heart bounced as she thought of his reaction; her legs ached with anticipation when she remembered his hands between them the night before, shoving them apart. And she watched with keen eyes as those same hands slowly shifted down the glass and forcefully wrapped around her waist.

  She held her breath as the spiced scent from the cologne on his neck landed on her tongue. It scorched her taste buds, blistered her throat, and sent a shockwave of sensations straight down to her groin.

  Adrian bent forward and rubbed the tip of his nose against hers when he noticed the soft reaction in her eyes and smiled again.

  “You were trying to ask me something,” he said.

  She took her time and swallowed back her fears, then opened her mouth to breathe out.

  “I wanted to know…” She gulped again. “I wanted to know if those were the only reasons you had in wanting to be with me that night, or last night.”

  “No,” he replied quickly. There was no chance to think, no need; he knew the answer before she even formed her lips to ask the question. “I know that you have wondered about this and even though I wanted it, last night wasn’t just about those things. And it wasn’t just about two people coming together who needed each other. It wasn’t just about you clinging to me because you were left feeling unwanted in your relationship with Nathan or about me just needing to get laid because I hadn’t been with a woman since…” He refused to continue when he saw her becoming uncomfortable, knowing the next word that was about to come out of his mouth would be the end of whatever it was they were trying to begin. He dropped his hands from her waist and glided back. “Let’s just face the facts as they are and stop dancing around the bullshit, because we’ve been attracted to each other since the moment we met.”