by Amanda Heath
I sit her down on the bed and reach down to pull her t-shirt over her head. Her black bra stands out against her peach-colored skin and I have to suck in a breath. We fooled around those two weeks we were together but I didn’t try to get far. I really didn’t want her to think that’s all I wanted.
She takes the white shirt I’m wearing off and tosses it behind her. Then she leans in and starts kissing my chest, paying extra attention to my nipples. I chuckle and twist my hands into her long hair. “I thought this was about you?”
She looks up at me with wonder in her eyes. “It totally was but then I got to see this,” she waves a hand at my naked chest, “and I got distracted.”
“Okay,” I mutter, pushing her back and making her scoot back. Her hands never leave my skin and I think about how amazing it is right now for her to be touching me. It might be a dream I’m having, or it might not last, but I won’t turn her down.
I would do anything for her.
Her eyes twinkle up at me after I’ve taken her pants off. I lower myself slowly on top of her, skin to skin because she got rid of her bra at some point. Her nipples poke at me and I want to put them in my mouth but I refrain. She bitched constantly about how much they hurt so I learned to leave them be.
My hand trails along her sides, down her hips and waist until finally I feel the silk of her black panties. I slip my hand inside of them and rub a finger down her slit. I lower my forehead to hers so I can watch her face and eyes while I give her what she wants. Her breathing gets very labored and mine starts to match it. I slip a finger inside of her, loving how wet she is. That’s all for me, no one else.
My thumb works the sensitive nub there. I finger her this way until I see that flame start to build in her eyes. Her hips move against my hand, letting her find her pleasure. When it explodes through her I push my pajama bottoms down past my dick and take my hand away from her sex. I use a finger to push her panties to the side and I enter her. Her eyes never leave mine and I see all the things she wants to hide. Her love for me is plain as day and I wonder how I ever missed it. “Court!” she shouts against my lips, making me remember the night we first did this. And every other time I’ve made her come since then.
She’s still coming, so her wet heat clutches me hard and it’s only a few thrusts before I find my release. And for the first time in my life, I realize I didn’t use a condom. I have a thought to panic but I remember we already got pregnant. No need to help prevent something that’s already happened.
I roll off of her and lay face first into the bed. I feel her get up and I assume she’s headed to the dark bathroom adjoining my bedroom. The light flickers on but she shuts the door putting me in semi dark again. The lamp left on doesn’t give off all that much light. I should really go get some higher wattage light bulbs for it.
I hear the toilet flush before she opens the bathroom door and I watch, fascinated, as she fixes her panties and throws my shirt over her head. The white shirt does nothing to cover her hard nipples and the black panties.
Damn that’s hot.
Fuck my life.
She turns the light off and walks into the bedroom. She bites her lip and looks at me shyly. “Do you care if I stay the night?”
“You are staying the night. It’s after midnight. I’m not letting you drive back to Meadows this late. It’s four hours away.” I roll up off the bed and pull my pajama bottoms back up.
When I make it to the bedroom door she asks, “Where are you going?”
I stop and squeeze the door handle. The sex is one thing because she’s right when she says I’m the only one she should be having it with. That doesn’t mean I’m sleeping beside her. “I’m sleeping on the couch.”
“Oh.” Her voice sounds small but I don’t turn around. I refuse to give in. Not until she talks to me and we straighten everything out. I’d do anything for her, except this. I’m standing my ground on it. “Well..goodnight then.”
“Night.”
Chapter Thirteen
Soft laughter in my ear and then, “You’re the only one who can make me laugh.”
I jerk awake to the sound of a pan hitting the stove. Then I hear something I never thought I would hear again.
Rachel singing.
I listen to her sing while lying on the couch, pretending I’m still asleep. She sings about not starting a war, letting someone in, a wrecking ball, not walking away and always wanting someone. I have no idea what song she is singing but she can sing it around me every day. I love to hear her sing.
That’s something it didn’t take me long to figure out about Rachel. She sings in the shower, she sings while getting dressed, she sings while doing her homework, she sings while she’s cooking, and she sings while driving in the car. She never sang when someone other than me was around and I started to think of it as mine.
This song though, is sad, very sad. And as it goes on I realize it kind of fits us. It’s weird how a song can do that to you. I never paid attention to music before Rachel came into my life, and once I started listening to lyrics, I knew she picked songs for a reason.
Just like she picked this one.
Rachel shows her emotions to me through her singing and it’s the most amazing way she can. Her voice is like vanilla cake with chocolate icing. Sweet, with a bit of awesome. The sound waves crash over me like I’ve been hit by a train, but in a good way. The first time it took me by surprise.
I had been laying on my bed trying to figure out my Calculus homework and she was taking a shower. She told me before that one of her favorite bands is Fun. so I’d already listened to the song she was singing, “We Are Young.”
I’d thought an angel had come into the bathroom to take Rachel to heaven. Okay, not really, but she sure as fuck sounds like an angel. I know you’ve heard that before, but really, what sounds better than an angel? Not much.
She’d been embarrassed to find I could hear her, but I said she couldn’t ever stop. So she started doing it more and more. A lot of the time I did what I’m doing now. I closed my eyes and just listened. The girl was born with a gift and I found out she shares it with her brother. Wes has let me listen to some of the songs they have recorded together.
I asked her why they never went viral with that shit and she said it wasn’t what she wanted. She loves music, like, loves it to distraction, but she doesn’t have the desire to sing in front of a bunch of people. Royal probably would but he’s going to Juilliard next year and he’s more interested in his guitar.
“Pierce! Get up! Your bacon is going to get cold,” Rachel screeches from the kitchen. I was so lost in thought I hadn’t realized she’d stopped singing.
I groan before rolling off the couch and padding into the kitchen. She’s still in my shirt and her panties. I’m positive she did this on purpose because she knows I have a hard time concentrating when she’s dressed like that. “I see you remember how I liked my bacon,” I mutter angrily while taking my seat at the table.
She appears next to me and shovels bacon onto my plate. Then she shovels eggs onto it before moving on to her plate. “Just shut up. You’re going to eat this shit and then I’m going to talk to your ass. Then we are going back to Meadows and picking out a house.”
She slams the pan on the stove and comes back to the table. “What, to the what?” I stammer, knowing I heard her wrong.
Her brown eyes glare at me before she picks up her fork and shoves eggs into her mouth. She chews for a while then swallows to answer me. Little devil, that’s what she is. She does things like this all the time too. She gets a little pissed off about something and tells me what she is going to do about it. She’s never rude or controlling though. I’m finding I don’t like the controlling thing. “You heard what I said. I’m going to explain what happened on my part. You’re going to hear me out and then we are going back to Meadows. I’m not raising a baby in my parent’s house and I’m not raising it in your mom’s house. We need a house and since it’s Monday, I made an appointment
with my cousin at the realtor’s office. We both have huge trust funds and can pay in cash so it wasn’t hard to get in,” she rambles on, while looking at her eggs like they are going to end world hunger.
“I don’t want to listen to you. I don’t want to go back to Meadows. And I don’t want to look for houses.” I glare at her over the table and I’m about a second away from storming out of this room.
She drops her fork on her plate and glares right back. “Fine, we can do this now. I’m fucking hungry because your child thinks I need to eat every fucking second of the day. So I was trying to eat so my attitude wouldn’t be bad, but you can have it your way. This is just going to sound even more bitchy.” She crosses her arms over her chest, still glaring at me.
I scoot my chair back from the table and stand up. I take the plate and walk out of the kitchen, or, I try to. A big pile of eggs land on the back of my head. I spin around fast and look down at the floor where a big pile of yellow scrambled eggs sit. “What. The. Fuck!” I bellow, pounding my fists into my thighs.
Rachel stands there with her plate up by her head. “You walk out of this kitchen, Courtney Pierce. You go right ahead. I’ll keep throwing shit at you all day. And before you say I’ll run out of eggs, I’ll make some fucking more.” When I don’t try to leave (because my anger is boiling in my body and I don’t think I could even speak right now, let alone move) she sets her plate down and puts her hands on her hips. Ever my fierce girl. “I was fucking scared, okay? You terrify the shit out of me.” Then she deflates down to the floor.
I feel my clenched fists loosen and I kind of deflate too. It’s one moment when I find what I was looking for but didn’t know I was looking for it. I just wanted to hear her say it. I just wanted her to admit why she did this. Why she tried to ruin us.
She leans her head against the back of the chair and stares at me. “You were everything I wanted when I didn’t even know I wanted it. I thought I wanted all the big things in a relationship, but once I started one with you, I didn’t need it. I just wanted you to hold my hand, kiss my neck when you saw me, or when you said goodbye. I wanted you to hold me when I was asleep, to hold the door open when we enter a building together, and to fix me a bowl of banana pudding to eat on the way to school because we were late.”
A tear escapes down her face and I want to move it with my thumb but I don’t move. I won’t give in yet. I want to hear all of it. I need to know everything. “It was nothing to you, you know. You did those things like it was second nature and you did so much more than all that. Being with you was so fucking easy and uncomplicated. Jesus, we didn’t even fight until the day I ended it. You even held my hair back every time I got sick and you should have seen my mom’s face when I told her that. I thought she was going to ask you to marry her instead of me. No one could believe what I did. And after, I couldn’t believe I did it either.”
Her eyes bore into me but I still don’t give anything away. She’s not done. Not all of her cards are out on the table. I’ve got to have all of them before I touch her, because the second I do, we are going to be going at it like monkeys. The rush of emotions I’ve been feeling have to be let out somehow.
“Then about three nights in, I woke up from a weird dream. The dream’s not important because apparently you have a lot of weird dreams while pregnant, but anyway you said ‘Ella’. It was gentle, it was quiet and it kind of broke my heart. I’d never heard you say my name like that. I was jealous, but since I had no idea who the hell you were talking about, I didn’t bring it up. I think I should have because it would have saved us a lot of trouble. But that’s in the past.” She shifts against the chair and I want to move her off the cold floor but I don’t trust myself to touch her right now.
“Then you wanted to hang out with Nathan and I thought it was a great time to ask Wesley about Ella. I never put two and two together. You never called her that in front of me. And, if anything, I thought she would be Anna or Bella, not Ella. I had no idea that’s who you were calling out to at night. I wanted to puke and die at the same time. I thought my heart was ripped out of my chest.” She pauses and I realize it’s to choke back a sob. “I thought I had died for a second. I thought if I lost you I would never be happy but I couldn’t compete with her. I could never hold a flame to Annabella Gage, the girl you’ve been in love with since you were thirteen.” She wipes tears away from her face and lets out a giggle. “Wes has this stupid Matchbook Romance soundtrack on her iPod and that stupid song came on while we were driving to your house and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I was singing that emo shit in my head for a long ass time. God, I was ashamed to be a rocker.
“Anyway, I knew I had to let you go. I couldn’t make you stay with me when you wanted her. You were forced into a relationship with me because of our child. I didn’t want that. I just wanted you to want me. I just wanted for someone to love me and not fuck me over. What Kellan did was horrible, and it fucking hurt, but then I saw you and I knew that it could have been worse. After that night we made this baby, I wanted so bad to be with you. I just couldn’t compare myself with Annabella like that. I didn’t think I stood a chance.” She starts to stand up and I notice the red marks from the floor on her legs. I stand up too and I reach over to her and pick her up. I carry her like I did that night, the night we made our baby, and I set her down on the couch. Then I sit down on the love seat.
She looks at me with wide eyes for a moment and then she shakes her head. “Long before I found out about who Ella was, I found myself wanting to know everything I could about you. I wanted to know what happened with your dad, because my dad wouldn’t tell me. And I wanted to know everything that happened with Annabella but you wouldn’t open up. I didn’t know why…I just thought you couldn’t trust me. And I thought that was a bad thing because I’m going to be the mother of your kid.
“So, I lost it after I found out about the dreams. I just couldn’t take any more.” Then she sobs hard and falls into the couch. It’s hard to force myself to stay in my seat. I can’t comfort her yet; I have to hear this last little bit. When she finally calms down enough to finish she looks at me dead in the eye and states, “I was doing the same thing I was accusing you of. I kept all that in and I didn’t talk about that with you. I was a hypocrite and I swore a long time ago I’d never be that.”
I’m up in a flash and I sink down next to her. I lift her head off the couch and place it in my lap. “When I was seven years old, my father beat the shit out of my mother and me. He started beating her, but he didn’t know I was home. I was supposed to be at Wes’s but my mother was acting funny right before I left, so I came back. She was on the floor, blood everywhere, and her left leg looked like jelly from the knee down. I couldn’t even see anything of my mom in her face. It was all blood and gore. He was standing over her still kicking her and I jumped in front of him. That’s when he started in on me. He cracked a few ribs and broke my arm before he realized Ma wasn’t there anymore. Me stepping in front of him took the heat off Ma and she got to the phone.” I close my eyes blocking out the blood and pain from the here and now. “He went looking for her. To this day, I don’t know how she got to the phone. She should have been unconscious.
“He started in on her again, so I took Van’s metal baseball bat from the corner of the living room and swung the damn thing at his head as hard as I could with my good arm.” Tears leak out the side of my eyes, but I don’t notice them until Rachel reaches up to clean them away. “He died instantly.”
Chapter Fourteen
The second the words leave my mouth Rachel sits up and throws her arms around my neck. I’ve long since needed comforting for what happened that day, but I know she needs it. It’s not every day you find out the father of your child killed his own father.
“The police know what happened, because the second they entered the house they found me curled into a ball on the living room floor, and I kept repeating over and over again what I did.” It’s still vivid in my mind, the faces of
those cops. They couldn’t believe that a little boy bashed his own father’s head in, and with a broken arm. “I just wanted him to stop hitting her. That’s the only thing that was going through my head. I didn’t mean to kill him and I didn’t want to kill him.”
Rachel’s head comes up and her hands cup my face. “I know you didn’t, baby. You wanted to save your mom. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I know. They were worried I was going to become a little psycho or something so I spent two years in intensive therapy. They say I only had the strength to do it because it was an act of desperation. I was seven; I didn’t know my mother was going to live. I’d watched movies I shouldn’t have been watching. I thought that much blood meant she wasn’t going to make it. I could live without my father, but I couldn’t live without my mother.” Her tears flow so I wrap my arms around her waist and hold her close to me. Her hands still cup my face and I’m so happy she is here right now. I need something to ground me to the present, so I don’t slip into the past. “They were fighting over me. He couldn’t stand how much she loved me. He thought I was worthless and Donovan was the perfect child. I heard him tell her she should have gotten rid of me like he told her to. I don’t know why he hated me so much, I tried to do everything I could to make him proud, but nothing ever worked. That kind of thing fucks with a kid’s head, you know?”
Rachel kisses my forehead and I love the way her warm lips caress my face. She really is an angel. I didn’t want to tell her about my father because I didn’t want her to run from me. I didn’t want her to be scared of me. This next part though, will probably be the end of us. For real this time. “When Ma was in the hospital I snuck away from everyone. I kept repeating over and over in my head all the horrible shit he said to me. He promised to kill me because he didn’t want me. He said I wasn’t worth the shit on the bottom of his shoe. He said he hated me and I shouldn’t have ever been brought into this world.” I close my eyes and see myself, that little seven-year-old boy. He was lost and he felt alone. “I walked out into traffic. I tried to kill myself because I didn’t know how anyone could love me after what I did. I knew killing was bad and that’s what I’d done. I’d done a really bad thing.”
