I started giggling then. I knew it was because my body had been so tense for so long, and I knew he was referring to how wet I was, but for some reason, it seemed funny. I laughed and laughed and thought if someone was getting his jollies watching, he’d think I’d lost my mind. But then Kage touched me with his tongue and I gasped again. Gone were the giggles, because what he was doing was completely serious. That got my attention.
My thighs tensed up again and I felt myself tilt my pelvis again. I doubted it did any good but it was a subconscious response. And he was doing what he’d done before, that slow teasing motion that should have bored the shit out of me but didn’t. It was just enough to keep a low simmer going…and make me reach my boiling point in the slowest way possible. Breezy? Shit, I couldn’t feel a thing. I was so goddamned hot by that point that I couldn’t register anything else—not the temperature, not the time, nothing. By then, I might have been surrounded by a crowd of people and I wouldn’t have known. I was in my own little world, and my focus was on that little nub between my legs, the one that called Kage master.
I started gulping down breaths of air and I could hear myself getting louder through gritted teeth. I was close, so close, and I could feel all those crazy chemicals swirling in my veins, and in my head I could see Kage’s face—his dark green eyes and strong jaw framed by that gorgeous mane of dark hair. I sucked down another breath and that’s when my body snapped. It let go of it all—all the tension, all the pressure, all the stress…and the doubts, the insecurities, and I gave it all to the sky, all to Kage as I cried his name, not once, not twice, but at least ten times to the clouds, to the lake, to the wilderness, to any fucking being who cared to hear.
I was his. Forever.
Chapter Twenty-four
WOW. I’D FORGOTTEN just how brilliant and bright stars were when you were away from the city lights that drowned them out. They were simple and pure and singing a song of light to me, and even though I felt sleepy and drained, I also felt very much awake and alive.
I could still feel the evidence of Kage between my legs even as he held me close to his body on the hood of my car. The breeze had grown a little cooler now, and I was wishing I had a jacket or a blanket, but he was warm. After he’d brought me to ecstasy, he’d done it a second time, entering me with full force until I cried out again. Then he’d pulled the tape off the car and tried to carefully remove it from my wrists. I’d been glad he couldn’t see me wince as he pulled it off my skin.
I had no idea how long we lay there, but the moon had moved a little since we’d first parked. I could hear the bushes rustle and the water lapping, and it soothed me down to my soul. After a while, Kage said, “I’ve never done this before.”
I inhaled a deep breath and let it out, feeling content, before I said, “What? Fucked outside before?” I found it amusing that I could actually lay claim to having done something before that Kage hadn’t. He somehow had seemed more worldly than I, and yet I knew he wasn’t too much older and probably not much more experienced.
“No. Looked at the stars with someone I loved before.”
Oh. I don’t know why, but that made me sad.
So many times, Kage surprised me, because there were revelations about him that made me wonder how he could be so optimistic, so content in spite of all the shit the world had thrown at him. For him to find such simple pleasure in looking at the stars with me took my breath away. And that he didn’t hold it against the universe for dealing him such a shitty hand that he had to wait until now to enjoy that moment, something that obviously meant a lot to him, amazed me. I didn’t know what to say, but I felt like I had to acknowledge the moment. I ran my hand over his chest and said, “Well, you are now.”
He sat up a little so he could turn and look me in the eyes—or at least try in the semi-darkness. “Thank you for that.”
The enormity of his emotions washed over me, and I felt near tears. I was glad it was dark enough that he wouldn’t be able to see the water building up in my eyes. I could only hope he wouldn’t be able to hear it in my voice. So I didn’t betray it—because I had no idea where the hell that was coming from; I instead just brought my lips to his, letting my body tell him how I felt…because words fell short every single time.
* * *
One Saturday in April, Kage and I got out of bed late morning, and I promised to see if we had anything I could turn into breakfast if he joined me in the kitchen.
“Just wear your t-shirt. I’ll be there.”
I grinned. “I can’t, Kage. I have roommates.”
“So? I’m sure they’d appreciate the view too.”
“Uh…not. They’re straight. And, even if they weren’t, it would make me uncomfortable.”
“I’m just teasing you.”
I stuck my tongue out as I pulled on a pair of light gray sweats. Springtime and my bedroom was still chilly. I hadn’t realized till then, though, that I hadn’t noticed it as much since Kage had started spending time with me. Somehow, my room didn’t feel like such a cold place anymore. He reached out from his place on my bed and grabbed me around the hips, pulling me down on the mattress. When I lay on my back, he hovered over me and said, “You don’t mind that I stay the night, do you?”
“Are you kidding?”
“I just don’t want to make things uncomfortable for you at home.”
“No. We’re a bunch of college girls. We’re used to it.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Used to having strange men wandering in your house at all hours?”
“Strange men?” I laughed. “I didn’t realize you thought of yourself that way. Is there something I should know?” He grinned at my joke and kissed me and then I said, “Things are lots more uncomfortable for me at your place.”
He frowned. “Have I missed something? Is Mark still giving you the cold shoulder?”
“Nah. It’s not bad anymore. I guess I’m still just feeling a little weird.”
“It’ll be okay, especially when I move to my own place.” That had been his plan, but he’d had to put a lot of his spare money toward the lawyer handling his divorce. Funny, because when I’d first met him, I’d thought maybe he had no money problems. The cash had seemed to be flowing like honey. It just so happened he hadn’t had a house payment and his wife had a good job. His money had gone to food, utilities, and his truck and then whatever he’d wanted to blow it on. Fay had her own income from her job as a manager at a doctor’s office. Now, though, Kage was having to be more careful. He was giving Mark money for rent and he had his truck payment and food, but most of the rest of it went toward the divorce, although I knew he was setting some aside for his own place too. Part of me considered asking him if he’d consider moving in together when the semester ended. My roommates and I always understood that a semester change could mean new roomies, so I wasn’t worried about abandoning them, but I didn’t know that Kage was ready to make that step—monetarily or emotionally. Really, I wouldn’t blame him. While I’d had months to wash the taste of Robb out of my mouth, Kage had to deal with Fay on a weekly basis. You couldn’t forget about someone when she was continually wagging her finger in your face, whether literally or virtually over the phone.
Now wasn’t the time. Instead, I let him kiss me again and then I said, “Come on. Coffee time.”
His eyes were so beautiful, so mysterious, so shimmery. He grinned then and said, “All right.” He touched his lips to the tip of my nose and then slid off me and got off the bed so he could find his jeans on the floor. He slid them on and then joined me at the door. But as I placed my hand on the doorknob, he wrapped his hand around mine and said, “Hey, if your roommates aren’t here anymore, maybe we could have a little fun before you have to start studying.”
I grinned. Oh, he was a naughty boy, and I was surprised I was still passing my classes. “Let’s talk about that over coffee.”
When we got to the kitchen, though, his hopes were dashed, because Steph was sitting at the table, her laptop
and several books taking up half of its surface. I found it odd, because of her ABD status. I’d never seen the girl crack a book. I’d seen her grading papers for the classes she taught as a lecturer, but that was it. I asked, “What’s up?”
Kage stood beside me and grabbed two coffee mugs out of the cabinet. Steph said, “I’ve finally been inspired. I’m starting my thesis.”
“Oh, that’s great, Steph. What are you doing it on?”
She turned a little pink—typical Steph. “Uh, well, I hope you don’t take this wrong, but…it’s about the need for the outsiders in society.”
I poured coffee into the two cups Kage had set down and smiled at him when he winked at me. Maybe he thought she was referring to the fact that he was an overt metalhead while I was a closeted one. Okay, so we could be considered outsiders, but I hadn’t felt like one since I’d started college. As a trailer kid growing up, yeah…and what would Steph know about that anyway? I’d never talked about my childhood with her. “Why would I take that wrong?”
“Well…” She cleared her throat and started shuffling her papers. “I was inspired by you and there’s a chapter dealing with, uh…”
I turned around. My coffee could wait. I didn’t want to be confrontational, but now she had my attention. “Spit it out, Stephanie.”
She swallowed. “Infidelity.”
Oh. Okay. I supposed I could live with that. I looked over at Kage, though, because it was more a finger pointed at him than me. “And how does that make a person an outsider?”
Now that she was onto her topic, Steph got excited. She looked at Kage and asked, “Are you still hanging out and doing things with friends you and your wife had in common?”
He shrugged. “No, not really, but we never really had friends in common. She had her friends and I had mine.” Even as he said that, though, I was thinking about how his friends had shunned me, given me a cold shoulder for the first weeks we were together. Maybe he hadn’t felt any effects, but I had.
“Still…could I interview you for my thesis?”
“It depends. What is that? I’m assuming it’s more than the thesis sentences I learned about in school.”
“Yeah. It’s a huge research project we have to do to graduate with a master’s.”
“Oh.”
I nodded. “I’ll have to write one too, but a thesis is related to your major. So Steph’s is about psychology and mine will be focused on English somehow.” I could see the question in his eyes. “No, I have no idea what I’ll write mine on yet.”
Kage sat at the table with his coffee. “So what else do you want to know?”
Steph shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just kind of in the germinating phase. I need to figure out what all I want to explore, but I thought a chapter about infidelity would be good. I can find lots of published research, but if I could add my own primary research, it would be even better.”
“Don’t you have to do some kind of experiment or something?”
“No. Research is fine.”
I sat down beside Kage where there was a little table room. “You could also look at the effects on the homewrecker.”
Kage raised his eyebrows. “Hey…I told you it wasn’t your fault.”
I smiled. “I know, but I suppose that’s as good a term as any for what I did. I was the one on the outside of the marriage—a catalyst, I suppose.”
Steph started typing. “Oh, that’s good. Yeah, Jess, I definitely want to interview you. Oh, gosh, this is gonna be great.”
I placed my hand on Kage’s knee under the table and he raised his eyebrows but then grinned at me. I blinked twice and then looked over at Steph. “I don’t know if you wanted to look at outsider groups too, but I was thinking earlier when you first started talking about it…what about metalheads? Then you have emos, Goths, you know, the types who know they’re outsiders, relish in it, and get in others’ faces about being proud to be on the outside?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I could do that.” She started typing again. “You have lots of metalhead friends I could interview, right?”
Oh…unlike my homewrecker status, that’s where I could fill her book with all the horrors of being the outside kid in a small town and how and why I came to be a kid who clung to her identity as her only means of relief. She had no idea. And that was when I realized that part of me had merely been pretending to be the straight-laced college student. I had denied the deepest, darkest, richest part of my soul.
But I knew it could and would always flourish with Kage. I squeezed his knee, hoping he could somehow know by my touch just how much he meant to me.
Chapter Twenty-five
THAT NIGHT (THE next morning, actually), we lay in bed, Kage holding me close. I was absentmindedly swirling my index finger across his chest, and my mind wandered back to earlier that day when Steph had been telling us we were outsiders.
“Kage?”
“Hmm?”
He was sleepy. I could tell by the lazy tone of his voice. “Oh, never mind.”
His chest rose as he drew in a deep breath, moving my head with it. “No, what?” He stirred a little, as though trying to wake himself up.
I inhaled. “Did that bother you this morning?”
“What bother me?”
“When Steph was calling you a cheater…calling me a homewrecker.”
His voice was low, and I knew the only way my only roommate who was home would know what he was saying would be if she’d crawled under the bed. “Nah. Why would I give a shit what some book smart person thinks about me?” I didn’t say anything, just kept swirling that finger over his nipple. He moved a little. “It bothered you, didn’t it?”
As much as I’d wanted to say it hadn’t, that would have been a damn lie. “Yeah.”
“You wanna talk about it?”
“No. Not that anyway. I mean…I believe you when you say your marriage was already over. I’ve accepted that. I’m okay with it. But it got me to thinking about growing up.”
“You had it rough.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t know how much I wanted to tell Kage. I trusted him, yes, but my past life I wanted to stay in the past. I’d run from it into a new life that I was comfortable in, and I didn’t want to allow those feelings about who I’d been or where I’d come from to drown me again.
“You want to talk about it?”
I kissed his chest just under the nipple. “I don’t know. I just…” Why not tell him a little? “I was gonna be a freshman in high school, right? And high school’s like a new start, you know? Lots of new people, new faces, new teachers. You have a second chance and you can start over. I embraced that chance. So I pursued a dream. I wanted to try out for the cheer team. The cheerleaders at our high school were a big deal, you know? All the kids looked up to them, envied them, worshipped them, and they seemed to have so much fun. So we had two days of working with the old cheer team to get ready for tryouts, right? And I tried so hard. I wanted it so badly, because I just knew if Jessie from the trailer park could get onto the cheer squad, kids would forget that she was Jessie from the trailer park. She would become Jessie from the cheer team, you know?”
I swallowed. I had never told a soul this before, and I hadn’t realized that deep down it still hurt. “But, unlike the other girls trying out—the girls whose parents actually had money—I’d never been in gymnastics or had dance lessons. I’d never had any kind of athletic training that would allow me to do the things these other girls were doing. I had a dream but no qualifications. I couldn’t do the splits. I couldn’t perform a coordinated cartwheel to save my soul. I didn’t have any qualities a good cheerleader would have.
“Oh, the judges were nice enough. They were. They let me down easily. But it hurt. It really hurt. Worse than not making the team was having all those other girls know that I hadn’t belonged there in the first place. Their knowing snide looks, their nasty little comments I couldn’t hear. So when we started school that fall, I had the additional shame of failure.
Yeah, it died down after a while, but it was in the back of my mind.” I felt Kage’s hand run down the side of my head, smoothing my hair. “I suppose shit like that has made me stronger, you know, but being called an outsider just kind of dredges that stuff up.”
“You know that shit doesn’t matter anymore, right?”
I shifted my body and looked up at him. “Yeah, I know.”
“None of it matters. Especially now.” I nodded. “It’s you and me, Jessica. None of them matter.”
I took a deep breath. “You’re right. When I got here to Pueblo and started going to school, it changed my life. I never looked back. But just something about the way she asked…got me to thinking.”
“Let it go, baby.”
I nodded again and my finger resumed its swirling motion. “What about you, Kage? From everything you’ve ever told me, your life sucked. I had a cake walk compared to you, but you’d never know it from the way you act.”
He smiled. “Nah. You’re no different in that regard.”
“Oh, I really am. You have such an optimistic way of looking at things. You seem to look on the bright side no matter what. It makes me realize things aren’t so bad.”
“They’re not, are they?” He sat up, his arm still around me. “The one thing I learned a long time ago—no one can ever take who you are away from you. Oh, and no matter how shitty things look tonight, they always, always look better in the morning.” I shook my head. Yeah, my guy was the one who could find the silver lining in all that fucking gray. “You just have to sleep it off.”
I kissed his chest again. “Just one of the many things I’ve grown to love about you.”
“I want you to see that too, Jess. I do.”
“How do you do it, Kage? I do great with goals. If I have something I’m focusing on, something I want, I’m driven, and I’ll stop at nothing to get it. But I can’t say that it’s brought me happiness. I don’t think I can say I’ve ever been happy.”
Be Careful What You Wish For Page 16
