A shudder goes through him at my words and his forehead drops to my breastbone. I sink my fingers in his gorgeous, lush hair and clutch him to me, in longing, in tenderness. Maybe I did make a difference just now.
But then he stands up, flicks his finished cigarette away. Crazily, I think that it’s going to leave a mark on the carpet. He takes his cock out of his jeans. It’s hard and angry and red—just like him. I know he’s going to use it to punish me.
Yes, punish me for being selfish enough to want more, to want to talk.
I deserve it. I’m beginning to think I’m the worst harlot ever.
I tip up my chin and open my legs, ready for him. Thomas clenches his jaw and in one stroke, jams his cock inside me. I nearly come off the desk, my nails skating along the hard wood. Gasping, I go back down and grab the edge to brace myself, because in the next second, I’m in danger of flying off and crashing to the ground.
His slams are punishing. Brutal. Borderline violent. My teeth chatter with every stroke. My breasts heave and rebound. His grip on my thighs is going to leave marks, I know it, but most of all, it’s the obvious pain of his hip bone hitting the desk that jars me. He is punishing himself as much as he’s punishing me.
But, no matter what, no matter how brutal or violent he becomes, he never fails to make every fucking cell in my body sing. He never fails to send my pulse hurtling. I want to melt into his violence. I want to dissolve myself in the moment so he can absorb me in his body and find some peace.
His eyes are narrowed to slits, his jaw clamped as he presses his palm on my lower abdomen, increasing the pressure on my organs. My head lolls, insanity washing over me. I want to tell him to stop but I won’t. I’ll take it.
The slapslapslap of our flesh is interlaced with the slurping, wet sounds of my pussy. The sloppiness of my core makes me blush all over. As if that’s not enough, he looms over me, bringing my thighs to his shoulders, deepening his thrusts.
He frames my face with his hands so I have nowhere to look but him. “Do you hear those sounds, Layla?” he whispers thickly. “That’s me talking to your pussy.” Then he changes angles, holds himself inside me, rotating his hips, bucking up and down, hitting me in just the right spot. In turn, I hear the sloppy gurgling of my core, a slightly different tone than the previous sounds, wetter and angrier.
“And that’s your pussy telling me she likes it, saying she loves to feel me inside her.” He stops grinding at that and starts ramming with a savage force that doesn’t let either of us breathe. Sweat drips from his forehead, plopping onto mine. “That’s all the talking we need to do. That’s all the fucking talking we ever need to do.”
He fits his face in the crook of my neck and bites my skin, launching my climax through my body. My hips arch up and become rigid in the air, the muscles of my thighs locking around his shoulders. My loss of control brings out his own and before I can blink, he whips out his cock and comes on my stomach, groaning.
In a fog, I realize he forgot the condom. He never forgets it. He’s always so careful. He never discards his cigarette on the carpet. He never litters. Never. Never. Never.
The anomaly scares me, terrifies me more than anything ever has.
His sweat-soaked chest and torso contract with every heaving breath. He lets go of my thighs and grabs hold of my chin, looking deep into my eyes. For once, I don’t want them on me. I don’t feel any pleasure in their blazing, fire-breathing look.
“I’m not your boyfriend, Layla. I’m not going to hold your hand or take you to a movie. I’m not going to talk about my feelings with you.” His fingers flex on my jaw. “Tell me you understand this.”
I blink my heavy lids and tears fall from the corners of my eyes. They make him even angrier. There’s a harshness in him I haven’t seen before. Maybe he’s been fooling me all along. Maybe I never made anything better. Maybe it was all an insane dream I made up to keep doing this.
“Tell me,” he says harshly.
Afraid, I jerk out a nod, but he shakes his head. “No, say it. Give me the words, Layla.”
I hear the shatter of my heart. I hear that sound from long ago when I broke the bottle of that expensive champagne when Caleb left. But this time around, the sound is like a gunshot, more jarring and deafening. It’s the sound of my castle falling through the air and crashing to the ground.
“You’re not my boyfriend and you won’t take me to the movies or hold my hand, and you won’t talk to me about your feelings,” I say in a monotone. I say it without halting or stuttering. I say it clearly.
His grip loosens and a look flashes on his face, but it’s gone before I can decipher it—and I don’t want to decipher it. I just want to leave. Thomas moves away, goes to the window, and lights another cigarette, like he did that first night he fucked me. Everything is coming full circle now, but I’m a lot different than what I used to be.
Swallowing, I try to sit up. Wounded and battered, my body is a warzone, a torn-up village after a sandstorm. I dress myself while Thomas is busy watching the darkness. Usually, he takes me home in his car and I’m under my purple blanket within ten minutes, sleepy, dreaming of him. Tonight, though, it looks like I’ll be walking home. It’s no big deal. Midnight streets and I are old friends.
Before I turn the knob, I face Thomas. “You know I want you. I’m the crazy girl who lets you fuck her however you want. You can see it in my eyes. That’s what you said, isn’t it? It’s in your eyes. You can play with me. You can play with my body because you know how much I get off on it. I’m an open book to you.” I take a deep breath and unlock the door. “But I can read you too. It took me a little while. It took a lot of staying awake at night, thinking about you and yeah, stalking you, but I finally figured it out. You’re suffocating yourself, hoping to breathe life into your relationship, into your love. You’re holding on too tight, and maybe you need to let go, because if you don’t, you might just…kill everything.”
I close the door behind me, and then I walk away. From him. From the only home I’ve ever known.
The Bard
It takes me a few minutes to come out of my stupor.
She’s gone.
She left, all alone, in the dead of the night. I see her running through the darkened streets, crying, her wild curls flying, in disarray. What if she stumbles and falls? She has a knack for doing that. What if she bumps into a boy? A drunk boy who can’t see straight, let alone understand the meaning of the word no?
Layla is just…a child. So young and fragile, but brave too—brave enough to be with me, to take my abuse. Her courage floors me. Her courage highlights my own cowardice.
I can’t let her go like this. I can’t. I can’t let her go. Period.
As I throw the cigarette out the window and button up my shirt, I become still. I become afraid. Am I not always that way?
All this time, all these nights that she came to me, she has always been alone. She has walked those streets all alone, unprotected, probably without a care because she was eager to get to me.
And I have been just as eager. I have been just as bent out of my head for her to get to me that I never once questioned it. I never once questioned how she got here. I never asked her if she was being careful or if she met someone on the way over, or if it’s safe for her to walk at night.
I never once asked her anything. I just took and took, like I always do. I become so wrapped up in my head that I never care about anything else—but didn’t I tell her this already? Didn’t I warn her? Why did she keep coming back? Why did she keep offering herself to me like a fucking sacrifice?
I told her she’d regret this.
My head is aching, burning up. I need to make this right, but I stubbornly don’t move from my spot. I won’t move. I told her. It’s not my fault that she left crying, that she thought this was more than what it was.
I’m rooted in the middle of the room when there is a click and the door swings open. For a fraction of a second, I think it’s Layla, and my bo
dy comes out of its deathly stillness—but it’s not. It’s Sarah.
She has a bundle of papers tucked in the crook of her arms. Even so late at night, she appears put-together, her hair polished and well-kempt.
“I came to get some last-minute printouts from my office for tomorrow,” she explains, motioning to the papers.
Tomorrow, Sarah and I are heading to New York for a poetry convention. We’ll be back Monday, hopefully with a bunch of signups for the coming semester, given I’m the bait—the youngest poet to win the McLeod genius grant.
“Layla Robinson,” she says, her demeanor cold. “You’re having an affair with her.”
The flame flickers to life in my abdomen, and I tighten my body for the first electric rush of heat. No matter what the situation is, her name is powerful enough to affect me deeply.
I neither confirm nor deny. Affair isn’t how I’d describe what Layla and I have. No, it’s more…complicated than that, more layered. Sordid. Pure. It’s more than I could ever put into words.
And right now, she’s out there alone because of me.
It’s not my fault.
“What, no response? What happened to all your sarcastic wit?” Sarah smirks, shaking her head.
“Get to the point,” I manage to croak out, gritting my teeth.
“So you’re not denying it, then. You are, in fact, sleeping with one of your students. Jesus Christ. You know, I didn’t believe it. I knew something was fishy with all those meetings you had in here that strangely required her to go to the ladies’ room after, and then, imagine my surprise when I find you here in the dead of the night after I saw Layla running out of the building.” Her eyes are shooting icy daggers at me. “Congratulations, Professor Abrams. You’re both an incompetent teacher and a pathetic human being.”
She was running. That’s all I can think about. She was running when she left, and I know she’ll slip or stumble and she’ll fall. I need to get to her before that happens.
My feet move but then come to a halt at Sarah’s next words. “You’re such a piece of shit, Thomas. You’re married. You just had a kid and this is what you do to your wife? Sleep with a student behind her back?”
Yeah, a piece of shit. That’s what I am. I’m a motherfucking piece of shit who only thinks about himself. I am selfish, incompetent, pathetic. Her insults sound like my own conscience—the conscience that was buried under my anger at Hadley and my need for Layla. It’s surging now, along with the nausea.
“What do you want?”
“What do I want? Is that all you have to say for yourself? You’ve broken a thousand school rules, not to mention successfully wrecked your marriage. Hadley will never forgive you for this—you know that, right?”
“What Hadley will do is none of your business.” She left me. I fist my hands to curb my impatience. “What I want to know is what you plan to do with the information.”
“Sure, let me give you a step-by-step description.” She smiles tightly. “First, I’m going to go to Jake and tell him everything. I’m sure, being your friend and all, he’ll try to save you somehow, but I won’t stop there. After Jake, I’ll go to the chairman. I’m sure he’ll have something to say when I tell him his star poet is sleeping with a student.”
The headache explodes. “I’m asking you again, what do you want from me?”
Her face is streaked red with her anger. “What I want is for you to quit your job. I deserve that position more than you ever will.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then be prepared to get fired anyway, because I’m not going to sit on this. So, it’s really your choice, Thomas: do you want to get fired and be disgraced, or do you want to go quietly?” Before leaving, she adds, “Go back to where you came from, Thomas. You don’t belong here.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. White stars pulsate behind my lids, temporarily blinding me with the pain and anger.
I can’t go back. I need this job. I need to stay in this town.
The thoughts float inside my head by default, like some sort of a memory that won’t stop playing. They go on and on and on, until the words change and become something else. I don’t want to go back, because where I came from, there is no Layla.
The shock of it is enough to get my legs working, and I take off at a run.
I run and run, doing exactly what Layla has been doing every night, exactly what she did tonight. I come to a stop, right in front of her apartment building. I don’t know what floor is hers because I never bothered to stop long enough to find out. I’d drop her off and rush out of there.
Panting, I crane my neck up and stare at the top of her building. I can’t imagine her living anywhere else but at the top. She belongs in the sky. She belongs with the stars. She is bright and loud.
But more than that, she is scary.
Layla Robinson is fucking scary, and I don’t know what to do with that.
Now that I am here, I don’t know why I came. What was the purpose of it all? What was I hoping to do? Go up to her apartment and knock until she opens the door? And then what? Apologize? For what? For telling her the truth? For setting her straight? No, this is better. We have no future. Maybe I told her those things because I never want her to come back to me.
I’m not brave. I don’t know how to be brave, and I don’t fucking know how to talk.
Gritting my teeth, I turn around and walk away.
________________
I’m woken up by the light footsteps. They are moving toward me. I know them, that light tread.
Hadley.
Am I dreaming? I don’t even remember falling asleep. My body is curved in an unnatural angle on the floor. I open my groggy eyes and realize I’m in Nicky’s room, sitting under the window. Last night, for the first time in a long time, I came back home before dawn. I checked up on Nicky and then crashed on the floor.
I blink and find Hadley on the threshold.
She is back.
I spring up to my feet, any sleep forgotten, the entire world forgotten at the sight of her.
I whisper her name.
Now that she is here, her absence glares even more. I remember all those calls I made, frantic and panicked, the voicemails I left during those first couple of days. She never got back to me. After that, I was too blinded by my rage to call her.
Or maybe it wasn’t rage. It was the weight of all the wrong things I’ve been doing. It was my lust, my need for someone else. When she left, it was a small kiss, but now my lust has a life of its own. It has a body, a heart, and a soul. It is strong and vibrant, and she needs to know. She needs to know the person I’ve become in the last ten days.
“Thomas,” Hadley whispers, walking forward.
We meet in the middle of the room.
“Hadley, I need to—”
“Will you hold me?” she asks, delicate and vulnerable. Her words shock me. It’s a zap to my already chaotic system. It’s everything I’ve been dying to do. Just hold her. My arms, my chest, they tingle with memories of holding her…but there’s something else too. There’s relief. I don’t have to tell her about Layla right now. I can hold her. I want to hold her.
Selfishly, I take the out she gives me. “Yes.”
“I missed you…” she whispers.
I nod but the reciprocating words won’t come out.
She wraps her fragile arms around me and I do the same. She slides into place, tucking her face in my neck, and I breathe her in, her sweet, feminine scent. I let her sagging posture sink into me. I nuzzle the soft skin at the nape of her neck and my gaze falls on my son. He sighs in his sleep as if he knows this is it. This is where Mommy and Daddy have made up, and now everything will be fine.
At last, I have everything.
This hug has all the makings of a new beginning. This right here is what I’ve been waiting for.
Still, my stomach churns. Still, I gasp for breath. Still, my lungs are suffocating as if I’m holding on too tight. Still, I feel like this is the end of
something and I’m dying.
A few days ago, when everything was perfect, Nicky said his first words. Lay-la. Yeah, that’s what he said.
He looked right at me with Thomas’ eyes, gave me a drooling chortle, lifted his pudgy hand in the air, calling me to him, and said, “Lay…la.”
I remember tearing up, and then laughing, and then tearing up again. It was a weird thing to do in the middle of Crème and Beans on a Saturday morning.
“Did you just say my name?” I asked, and then I looked up at Thomas, whose lips were twitching. “Did he just say my name?”
“Lay…la. Layyy…la!” Nicky jumped up and down on his dad’s lap and laughed again, bumping his head on Thomas’ chin.
“He did!” I remember being astonished. “Oh my God! He did. Am I his most favorite person or what?”
“Don’t get too excited. He’s probably just making up words like he always does.” He ruffled Nicky’s hair. “And in his defense, your name does sound made up. Two randomly put together syllables.” Thomas shrugged. I remember the dark strands of his hair catching the winter sun and hitting me right in the chest.
I pretended to be outraged. I don’t remember what I said in retaliation, something like, Oh yeah? And what is Thomas? Tho-mas. Isn’t it, like, a lame modification of Christ-mas?
He laughed. I remember that because I was bursting with pride in being the one who brought it out in him.
It’s Saturday again, and it’s all I can think about as I enter Crème and Beans. Nicky’s voice is all I hear, and Thomas’ glinting hair and amused eyes are all I can see—and it’s a good thing, too, because if I think about whom I am here to see, I might turn back and never come out of my room.
As if he senses me standing here, he looks up from his mug of coffee. My chest is caving in on itself as I take in his face, a face I haven’t seen in more than two years. God, he looks…older. So much older, as though he’s let himself go, given his body permission to grow out on him. Longer hair, broader shoulders, shadow of a beard.
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