by Gabi Moore
He took the joint from me, took a puff himself and passed his sexy, warm gaze all over my body.
God, I loved the way he looked at me. Like I was something delicious. Something juicy. Instantly my clit throbbed at the thought of what he had told me on the way here. Something changed in the way his hand rested on my knee. He stroked the skin there, just a little, still holding my gaze. I loved how easy it was to slip into a trance like this with him.
“See?” he said and took another hit. “God’s not going to smite you from heaven just because you’re having a bit of fun.”
With shaking hands, I took the joint from him and did the same. The smoke rose up around us. I wanted him. Now. Every last inch of him.
“Are you sure, Adam?”
I smiled naughtily at him.
Suddenly, his phone rang.
Almost by instinct, I stubbed out the glowing tip and hastily blew out the smoke in my mouth. I shot him a panicked look, but he only laughed at me.
“Hey, will you just relax?” he said, and reached over to his jacket pocket to pull out his phone.
“Hello?”
I watched his facial expression change and move, like wind chopping over the surface of a still lake. His eyes wandered around the flat, mouth twisting a little.
“Uh huh. Yeah OK. Uh huh…” he said.
My blood froze as I shot pleading eyes at him.
“Yeah she’s with me. I’ll let her know. Are you sure there’s nothing we can do? We could always get the train and come over, be there in 20 minutes?”
He shook his head, hung up and then looked at me.
“Oh my God, Adam, what?” I said. My head was whirling.
I couldn’t read his expression.
“It’s Belinda. She’s had an accident,” he said simply, then watched my reaction.
“An accident? What kind of …is she OK?”
“Yes, she’s fine. That was Tamara. Hey have you left your phone at home or something? She said she couldn’t get hold of you.”
“I um… I think it’s on silent,” I said meekly. I could feel the blood disappearing from my face.
“What happened?” I asked.
A dark thought was forming in my mind. He looked at me as though he was weighing up his next words.
“She had a little accident in her car…” he said slowly.
The world went quiet. I felt dizzy.
“Is she… is she OK though?” I squeaked. I didn’t want him to see me upset. He came forward quickly and gathered me up in his arms, kissing my neck.
“Hey, don’t feel weird about it, OK? It was just an accident.”
A wave of paranoia fluttered through me. I wondered if I was going to be sick. I pulled back and shot a pleading look at him.
“She’s gone to the ER and they want to keep an eye on her for a few days. She’s hit her head. She’ll be fine but I said to Tamara we’ll visit her in the morning.”
I burst into tears. I didn’t know what to say, except, ‘see?’
He hugged me again.
“Hey, don’t be silly, come on. You don’t really think that you sitting here smoking a joint with me somehow made Belinda get into a car accident, do you? Come on now, that’s crazy. That can’t possibly be true.”
Actually, it was precisely what I was thinking. Before I knew it, his soft lips had closed over mine and he was kissing me gently, tenderly. My eyes fluttered closed and I let our lips hover there on each other. I tried to still my buzzing mind. He was right, of course. It was crazy. Or I was crazy. I sighed and kissed back, feeling at home for a moment in his kiss.
“So what then? Nothing means anything? People get in car accidents for no reason…” I said, my lips felt cold without his warm breath against them.
“It means whatever we say it means. Belinda got in a car accident. So what? I don’t know what it means. But maybe you can stop beating yourself up about it. Maybe you smoke a joint here with me and you change the universe forever in some weird ways we can’t even understand yet.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m not. I mean it. But maybe it’s not all doom and gloom, have you thought of that? Maybe this is the part in the play where things get interesting, you know? Maybe this is a turning point, a blessing in disguise.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, think about it. If you want to get all mystical and tell me that you caused Belinda’s accident, well, maybe that was a good thing.”
“How could it possibly –”
“Because now you can have that role,” he said.
I looked into his eyes, a warm haze developing somewhere close behind my own eyes.
“Just kiss me,” I said. And he did. I didn’t know if I wanted him to keep talking or to shut up. But even with his sweet lips in mine, the thought burrowed down into my brain.
I had never considered it before. Not really. But why not act? Why not now? Why not this play? It was crazy. It was a stupid, pompous idea and I had no right to be glad that Belinda was hurt, and I was awful for feeling excited that maybe, on some crazy, flimsy off-chance, maybe just maybe I could take her place. It was too ludicrous to even think about. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
His hands squeezed at the swell of my hipbone as we kissed, and I tilted my hips towards him and moaned. I suddenly felt on fire for him. I nibbled his ear and whispered fiercely to him, “didn’t I hear something about a kitchen table earlier on…?”
He grinned, squeezed me tightly and pulled me to my feet.
I was already wet.
Chapter 12
The air was always very still in this room. A cozy woven throw on the chair, a lamp, dimmed down almost to nothing, an African carving on the side table that I would sometimes pick up and hold while I talked. And my therapist, who was an extension of the room: a little bit of this, and a little bit of that.
She was a middle-aged, middle-height woman with moderate views, mid-length brown hair and an annoying habit of pushing you about precisely the things you desperately wanted to avoid thinking about. I had been seeing her once a week, every week, since that fateful night when my father and mother took a quick drive and never returned. Psychotherapist Melissa P. Estes had a string of letters after her name and a long waiting list. Yet another thing my sainted aunt had paid for.
“So, you’ve told me all the things you’ve done to keep yourself safe this week, to solidify, to nourish yourself. But that wasn’t the only thing you wanted to practice doing this week,” she said, in a perfectly measured, middling sort of way.
I sighed and sunk deeper into the seat. Now that my actual parents were gone, there seemed to be an awful lot of people ready to step in and take their place. I had poor boundaries. I needed to learn to moderate. Have good clean fun. Like all the other normal people.
“I wanted to learn …balance,” I said.
She nodded.
“I was trying to learn to have fun again, but healthy fun.” I looked at her face to see if I had said the right thing. She looked back at me. I sighed and sunk deeper.
“But I haven’t …I don’t really know how to do the things I really want to do without it jeopardizing everything.”
“So you’ve been getting enough sleep. You’ve been following a good eating routine every day. You’ve been going into school when you should and doing your work.”
“Yup. Doing all of that.”
“And what are you doing for fun?”
I sighed.
“And what have you been doing to put yourself out there?” she asked.
We always got to this point in the conversation. Every damn session. She would talk about ‘putting myself out there’, like I was some kind of cake in a shop window. And I would tell her no, not yet. I can’t right now. Maybe later. And what about aunt Lila. And there’s too much work to do. And I haven’t earned it yet.
“Well …there’s that guy I mentioned to you,” I said quietly.
I prob
ably shouldn’t be telling her any of this. When she asked me about what I was doing to feed my soul, to enjoy life again, I think she expected me to tell her that I had signed up for a pottery class or joined the church choir or something.
But in truth? My new hobby was Adam’s cock. Really, I was doing an advanced course in pleasing him. In lying back and opening myself to him and letting him make me come again and again and again. If I was healing, it was only in his arms, in our secret ‘sessions’ where I would head to that strange flat almost every day after class and kiss him till he made me feel funny inside, and then let his body do things to mine. If I was ‘putting myself out there’ …it was only in front of him. With him.
“Yes, I remember. Adam, wasn’t it?”
“Well, we’re hanging out a lot.”
She looked at me.
“We’re …well, it’s a very sexual relationship,” I said. Her face stayed motionless. “The thing is… we smoke together too and …” I shot her a look.
“And that makes you nervous?”
“Of course it does! Because what’s next, you know?” I looked at her again, waiting for the lecture to come. I knew she couldn’t tattle tale on me to aunt Lila, but I don’t think I could have handled her judgment anyway. Her judgment, surprisingly, didn’t come.
“Well, I don’t know, what do you want to come next?” she asked.
I chewed my lip. Good question.
“I want to keep seeing him. To keep going. I think I really like him.”
“Do you remember what we discussed earlier on? About ‘the question’?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“And what was the question you wanted to keep asking yourself?”
“I wanted to keep asking …is this good for me?” I said.
She smiled.
“Well …he inspires me, you know? Like, I feel so creative around him,” I said. “And he believes in me, too. He’s very exciting. I feel so alive with him, like he just fires me up, and I get this buzz from him, truly, like he’s, he’s…”
“Some sort of drug?”
I nodded. Exactly. Like some sort of drug.
“So how am I supposed to fall in love? What’s the difference between falling in love and just going on a huge bender?”
She laughed. “Nyx, do you already know the answer to that?”
I laughed with her.
“Is he good for me?” I said, and the question made me blush. “Yes, I think so.”
She clapped her hands on her thighs and glanced at the wall clock that one of her old clients had brought back from Peru. We had ten minutes left.
“OK, I think I’m ready to try another assignment,” I said.
“Fantastic.”
“It’s a weird idea though. Maybe you’ll think it’s strange.”
“Does it matter if I do?”
“I guess not. I want to …write a story. And then … I don’t know. Bring that story to life. Act it out. So, I want to plan out ahead what I’m going to do, and then actually do it.”
“Sounds interesting,” she said.
“Like doing set design, except without any sets…” I continued.
“OK. No sets. Then what do we have if not sets?”
I thought about it. “Well, the sets are the people. The ideas. The words.”
“I can’t wait for you to come back next week and tell me all about it.”
“Do you think it’s weird? Is it a stupid idea?”
“Not at all. In fact, it sounds like a very common idea.”
“It does?”
“Yes. You know what it sounds like to me?”
“What?”
“Like you want to write a play.”
I blinked hard. A play. Yes, of course, that is what it sounded like, actually. I stood up quickly and got ready to leave. Aunt Lila wasn’t paying for me to learn how to write plays or be an actress or do whatever selfish navel-gazing I kept seeming to find myself drawn to. It was already pushing it to do set design. It wasn’t as fun, but set designers could earn well, and they weren’t so …artsy fartsy. The course was expensive. Entry into it was extremely competitive. People would kill to have the opportunity I did.
“No, not a play. I didn’t mean I wanted to write a play, not at all,” I said, a little sarcastically.
She looked at me.
“Thank you for a good session,” I said, and left quickly. I went home and wrote …something.
***
It’s a chilly winter-ish day. Blank sky, no blue anywhere, just grey and brown. A woman goes to the house of a stranger she’s getting to know. He doesn’t speak English, and so they have to communicate with glances, with body language, with hints and spider webs and ESP.
At his home, he feeds her an elaborate, magical meal, one inspired from the ingredients from his native country, a place the woman has never been before. The meal is enchanting, and flavored with strange spices and aromas that are entirely new to her. She’s so happy, and she eats it all so quickly that she ends up choking on her food, and soon she can’t breathe at all and starts to go blue in the face. Something is stuck in her throat.
The stranger sees this, runs over to her and squeezes her hard. It looks as though she might die, but just in time, the stranger squeezes hard enough to release the blockage and the woman sputters and coughs and starts to turn the right color again.
As she opens her eyes, she realizes all at once that she is in love with the stranger. She has died and come back from the dead, and when she sees his face again, she realizes that he is her one true love. They kiss. They make love. They fall asleep together. In the morning, the woman makes some breakfast, using all the same magical and foreign ingredients that had caused her to choke the night before. But this time, she knows what she’s doing. This time, she doesn’t choke.
I put my pen down and read it through a few more times. It decidedly wasn’t a play, anyone could see that. Obviously. It was just a …story. Something like a dream. Like a game a child would play.
I took a photograph of the page and messaged it to Adam. He would be the stranger from another country. I followed up with a message containing nothing but a date and time. Tomorrow evening.
I went to my wardrobe and picked out an outfit, the kind of outfit the girl in the story would wear. I settled on something and perched the hanger on the bedroom door. Good.
I didn’t know if Adam would go for it. If I really wanted to literally act out this ‘story’. I didn’t yet know what the point of this story even was, or why I had written it. In fact, I had had no idea what I was doing, at all.
But I was having fun.
Chapter 13
He reached out for my hand and took it, and it felt warm and safe against the cold air. The sunlight was blotted out on the horizon and dulled by a layer of smog.
Without words, we said nothing …and everything. Without the use of words, our communications became more primal. Without small talk, our talk became …large.
I looked over to him and found his warm brown eyes. There was a deep, knowing look in them. I blushed and looked away, but he squeezed my hand. That was a sentence. We walked on a little and I turned to look at him again, back into those heavy warm eyes, and I looked, and this was a question. He returned my gaze, tilted his head. And that was the answer.
Like this we walked to his house.
He was a stranger from a strange land, but from what I could tell, he was still built like a man. He still had square fingernails and pale blue veins on his hands that disappeared into the sleeve of his woolly jumper. He still had lips. His breath was still warm as it left his body and went white in the air as we walked. I wondered how different he was underneath his clothes. They were unusual clothes, sure, but something told me that what I would find underneath would be …familiar.
He led me to his house. Inside was a style of décor I found completely bizarre. Candles and ornaments and artwork on the wall that didn’t make much sense to me.
He closed the door.
He stripped off all his clothes and put on a strange silky robe. His eyes, in their silence, said, this is traditional in my country, now you do it too. So I took off my clothes and took the robe he handed me. He was a stranger. I think his name might have been “Adam”, but in his country, details like this weren’t that important.
I followed him to a living room where he had set up an elaborate feast of foods. Tiny dishes and bowls, candles and foliage tucked in between platters laid out with dainty morsels, and cut crystal glasses glowing with an odd green liquid. The smell was intoxicating, but I couldn’t begin to put my finger on what it was. All I knew is that it smelt delicious, and I suddenly felt starved.
His arms said please, sit and so I did. On folded legs we both began to eat. We continued our conversation, here a smile, here a nod. I gingerly tasted the food, unsure of what it was or whether I’d like it. His eyebrows lifted and that was a kind of joke. I smiled, and that told him I had gotten it. It started to seem that not only were words unnecessary, they were actually far less useful than what we were learning to do with the corners of our mouths, or with the gestures of our fingers or shoulders, or with the quality of the air we exhaled when we sighed.
The food was amazing. Too amazing. I ate quickly. Too quickly. I was enjoying everything so much that before I knew it, I was choking. Something was trapped in my throat. My hands flew up to my throat and this told him, oh god help me, I’m going to die!
His gorgeous face flashed with concern and he was soon at my side of the table, his strong, masculine body kneeling close to me, his hand instantly on my chest. I looked to him with tears in my eyes. He crouched down over me as I felt my throat close over and the last of my oxygen leave my body. I sputtered and sagged in his arms as he looked down into my face, my eyes, trying to listen to what I was saying.
But it was no use.
I was dying.
I was slipping away.
My breathing slowed, the lights in my eyes dimmed and I took one last breath. I shuddered in his arms and closed my eyes, dead. I could feel the horror in his hands. I could hear the panic in his breath. All at once, he had spun me around and was holding me in front of him, my back to his chest, his strong arms linked round my middle.
