by Kiki Leach
She turned to him and grimaced, puzzled as to why the hell he would ever doubt himself. “Are you kidding? It was everything I ever imagined it to be and more. You are an amazing lover, Maurice,” she said. He laughed quietly. “I’m serious. And it wasn’t just about what you did or how – though, let’s not dispute how fulfilling that was, because God knows…” She stopped to smile. “You make love to me in a way that shows me that you care about me, about my body, what I want and how. It’s not just all talk. You actually listened to what I had to say and catered to my every need and desire. You’re perfect in that respect, absolutely perfect and I wouldn’t change a single thing because of it. I wouldn’t change anything that happened tonight or any time before it.”
“I’ve only ever wanted to please you, Vanessa, in so many ways. But this…” He paused. “There was a part of me that felt as if this is what mattered the most, because I had everything else down already.” They smiled at each other, and then he started thinking. “I want you to be my wife someday, V. I want you to be the mother of my children. I never dreamed of anyone else being in your shoes, ever. I could make love to you for the rest of my life, and that would be perfectly fine with me. We could have it like this,” he said, “forever. Without people like Nikki, Nathan and Sheila to come and fuck things up like always.”
“Of course,” she replied mockingly. She glided her fingers back and forth across his lips, yearning to feel them against hers once again. “If I asked you to make love to me again right now, what would you say?”
“I wouldn’t say anything.” He moved a hand between her thighs. She shut her eyes and exhaled. “I would show it.” He moved on top of her and she spread her legs, welcoming him inside her once again.
Part Sixteen
As soon as Sheila heard the knock on her door, she went to answer it. Adrian was bent forward with his hand resting on the frame. His head was lowered, but when he saw Sheila standing before him, he lifted his eyes to look into hers. He thought she looked beautiful for someone who had apparently been unable to hold their liquor all night; he could smell the booze through the crack of the door before she even opened it.
She moved aside and waved her arm, indicating that he come in.
“We’ve got a problem,” he told her.
“No shit. And it took you long enough to get here – Nathan could’ve been back by now.” She closed the door and leaned back, placing her hands behind her and observing him as he moved around the room. She noticed the way he looked in his pants and caught herself gaping. “Um…” She moved away from the door and went over to the fridge that sat in the corner of the room. “Vanessa left here after screaming in my face at the top of her lungs. I’ll be surprised if she’s not hoarse in the morning from it. Do you want something to drink?”
“Beer if you have it.”
“We don’t.” She looked back at him as he stared at her. “There’s vodka and water…” She looked a little further in the back. “And not much else in here to choose from.”
“Then I guess I’ll be taking a water,” he said. She pulled one from the fridge, and another for herself, and tossed it over to him. She sat hers on the nightstand and removed her shoes, pitching them across the room. He eyed her as she bent over to sit down on her bed and took a few sips from his water. He turned away when he realized he was gazing at her for much longer than acceptable and cleared his throat. “You’re all dressed up. You look nice.”
“You noticed. Something Nathan barely had,” she mumbled. She clutched her head and leaned forward to massage her temples. “I’m gonna definitely need more pills than a pharmacy can carry, and more than what I’ve got inside my purse or this hotel room to make myself feel better before tomorrow morning.” She exhaled in frustration and looked over her shoulder at him as he stood near the window. “What exactly did you say to her tonight? I don’t think I’ve seen her this pissed off since I came back to the city.”
“I told her everything.” He took another sip of water and moved away from the window. He sat it down and propped up against the dresser while crossing his arms. “There was no point in keeping anything else from her, she was bound to figure it out.”
“So she hates the both of us now because of it. Great. I guess I’m never going to get into that damn magazine after this – all chances have been shot to hell. Not that I had a real shot at it before, but still, I thought that maybe I could somehow get her to reason with me about it and--”
“What magazine?”
“Hers.” She opened her water and drank some back. “A guy we went to high school with, his wife now writes for Attitude from time to time. She told me about getting started, how she’s been writing about her pregnancy, and I thought it might be a good idea for me to do the same about the wedding.”
He grinned and waved his hand across his chest. “Were you attempting to actually write for Vanessa’s magazine, or were you just being petty?”
“It’s not pettiness. It might have been stupid, maybe, because it was a fucking longshot that she would even say yes. But I thought it would’ve been something beneficial for the both of us. She would get more publicity for featuring me in it and I would get more exposure for my wedding.”
“It’s already pretty overexposed in the papers and entertainment news, don’t you think?”
“No. There can never be too much exposure about something like this.” She looked down at her hand and spun her engagement ring around her finger.
Adrian noticed the size of the actual rock, something that hadn’t caught his attention before tonight, and diverted his eyes from the glare. “Listen, I hope you’re not too pissed at me for telling her the truth.”
She lifted both legs on the bed and sat her water between them. “What’s the point? Like you said, she was bound to figure it out. And even if she hadn’t, I knew when you stopped taking my calls after I left your apartment that day that you were going to tell her, just as you pretty much threatened that you would. I just wish it had been in a few days after my headache had passed.”
He drank more of his water then dipped his head. “What’s it from?”
“I went out drinking tonight with a friend – potential friend, I think, in the city. I had too many combinations of something and got sick, but it was worth it at the time.”
“That’s all that matters, right? Having a good time.”
“For some people.”
“Not for you?”
She thought for a minute and placed her water back on the nightstand, outstretched her legs and fell back on the bed. Her dress rose up her thighs but Adrian was determined to be a gentleman and did his best not to look at what she had to offer underneath it, though she presented a great temptation to him. “No, because I was never the party girl – that was Vanessa. She drank, she dabbled in certain drugs. Anytime someone in our group landed on the cover of anything, it was because of her, because we were connected to her in some way. She was the girl who did bad things and got away with them because everyone loved her -- they loved to look at her, loved to talk about her.” She chuckled and covered her mouth to stifle it. “They even loved to smell her hair…” Adrian made a face. “I was the girl who did shitty things and never could get away with them because I wasn’t her.”
“Isn’t it better to be you than someone else, even if that someone else is Vanessa?”
“I used to think that. Before things changed and I started dating Nathan. Now I’m marrying him and I’m still not even sure if he wants to marry me back.”
“Have you said any of this to him?” he asked.
“No! It took me this long to get him to finally commit to a date. I know he loves me, but he’ll never love me in the same way as her. I never understood whatever bond they had in high school and stopped trying to understand it around the tenth grade. I thought that with us being older now, I could finally accept whatever it was; that if I just had him and she didn’t, everything would be fine – or a lot better than they were before. But now I don’t kn
ow anymore.”
He peered and went over to the bed. He hesitated to sit down, but when she looked up and saw him hovering over her, she moved her legs to give him some space. He sat at the edge near the corner and rested his arms on his legs. She stared up at the ceiling and he turned to look at her. He noticed her face and the beauty she possessed, something he went out of his way to ignore the first time he saw her. He wondered why and how she couldn’t feel the same way about herself, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask her.
“If I may,” he began. “What is it that you do want Sheila?”
“I want happiness,” she answered without hesitation. Then she thought a little more about his question and crossed her legs one over the other. “And I want to be loved.”
“That’s what we all want, I think. Some of us never achieve those goals. At least you have part of it.”
She looked straight into his eyes and smiled sadly, the edges crinkling as she attempted to turn her lips upward. “Which part?”
He matched her smile and shrugged. “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”
She removed her eyes from his and faced the ceiling again. “I guess I’m loved,” she said. “But not in the way I want to be.”
“Then maybe you should change that.”
“Maybe…” She felt a strange sensation in her chest as she continued talking to him and sat back up on the bed. This was the first time she would ever be alone with a man and near a bed that she wasn’t sleeping with him in. She swung her legs around until her feet hit the floor. She reached over and grabbed her water, drinking the rest of it, then stood up and fixed her dress.
“It’s uh…” She scratched the side of her face. “It’s getting pretty late and I have a meeting with my planner in the morning. I have got to get some sleep so that I’m not canceling on her at the last minute or acting like some crazy bitch over the placement of flowers around the reception hall.”
“Yeah. Sure, um…” He stood up and stepped back over to the dresser, fiddling with his now empty bottle. She snatched it from between his fingers and flung it, along with hers, into the trash in the bathroom. “Just think about what I said.”
“You said a lot of things to me tonight, Professor.”
A shy grin come upon him and he dropped his head. He had never heard anyone but his students, and Vanessa call him that in the heat of a private moment. It sounded differently coming from Sheila’s lips, more sexual than it probably should have. “I mean for you to think about what I said in regard to what you want.”
“That…” She pointed up at him and waved her finger. “I will. Also… thanks.”
“For what?”
“Asking me what I wanted. Pretending for a few minutes to give a damn, even if you don’t.”
“I do,” he said with a smile. “And I’d say ‘what are friends for’ along with it, but we’re not really friends, are we?”
“No, but it’s not like I have very many of them.”
“Neither do I to tell you the truth.”
She leaned back and wrinkled her nose to hide the mischievous grin making its way onto her lips. “Vanessa would kill us both if she found out that you were here; she asked me to stay away from you.”
“Death might be worth it.” He smiled as did she. “We’re adults and she’s not allowed to dictate who we can and can’t see. If we want to see each other for whatever reason, we should be able to handle it. I like talking to you, a lot more than I did the first time you came to see me. A lot more than I thought I would in talking to you again.”
“Same here. And since we’re both adults who can handle it, maybe we could do it again sometime soon, and see where it goes from there.”
“I’m good with that. I don’t know if your fiancé will be, but—”
“What he doesn’t know won’t kill him. I don’t think he’d care much anyway, but even if he did, so what?” They looked into one another’s eyes, each feeling something they knew they shouldn’t, though they weren’t exactly sure what that forbidden feeling really was. Sheila lifted both of her hands to her shoulders and stared back at her clock again. “I really have to go.”
“Okay, alright, um…” He stammered as he headed for the door and opened it back. She leaned against it, her hand resting on the edge. He stepped to the other side and looked at her one last time. “Goodnight.”
She looked him up and down and rested her head against her hand. “Night.”
He swallowed hard as he backed away from her and strolled down the hallway. She watched him go, lifting her hand to her chest and grabbing at the collar of her dress. Once he was out of her sight, she went back into the room and closed the door. Her knees felt wobbly; her heart was beating so fast she felt as if she were having an attack. There was something in talking to Adrian, a certain satisfaction in not just hearing his voice but what he had to say to her; it was something that she had never gotten from Nathan before, and it scared her to think about. At the same time, it made her hella curious to learn more about that feeling, to understand it and what it represented.
Even though Adrian had openly offered her a hand, he didn’t know whether to welcome the fact that he was connecting with another woman after all these years who hadn’t been Vanessa or some random he had met after returning to the city, or run for the hills in coming to understand that it was possible to do so. What he did know is that he was honest when he said that he liked talking to Sheila, and even more, hearing the sound of her voice when she said his name. He wasn’t entirely sure what was truly waiting for him in forming a possible friendship with her, but he sure as hell wasn’t too afraid to find out.
Part Seventeen
An hour or so later, Nathan returned to the hotel. He spent time outside of Angelino’s sobering up with Eddie so that when he finally came back to his fiancée, he didn’t immediately smell like an entire distillery, or the perfume of every woman that managed to crowd around their table until closing.
Sheila was in the shower and hadn’t heard the door opening and closing from the other room. He called out for her as he removed his jacket and threw it on the bed next to her dress. He walked over and ran his fingers across it, then looked toward the bathroom. While he stood there waiting for her to emerge from it at any second, he felt another low grade headache coming on – a result of the mixed drinks, followed up by the excitement of his team winning the basketball game. He pressed his fingers against the center of his forehead and scrunched his face, but that only seemed to make things worse. He knew he needed a few pills to lessen the pain and that Sheila was a walking pharmacy with the amount she often carried in her purse.
As he searched the room, he finally found it sitting right in front of his face on the dresser, half open. When he reached inside for a bottle of something that could stop the throbbing of his skull, he pulled out a piece of paper instead, with a name, address, and phone number listed from top to bottom. It sat right next to her phone, which fell out beside it. Had he not established that the name belonged to a man he had never heard of, he wouldn’t have thought much of it and continued his pursuit for the pills. But as it stood, seeing the name Adrian Samuels was the only thing he could bring himself to focus on.
After Sheila rinsed the soap from her hair and skin, she got out of the shower and went over to the mirror, wiping down the fog that had accumulated from the warm water. She looked at herself, really looked at the naturalness of her face and skin for the first time in a long time and thought about how Adrian stared at her and said she looked ‘nice’. She assumed he was more or less being polite, but remembering the way in which he said it, and how he looked at her when he had, she felt something she hadn’t in a long time – supremely confident. Nathan hadn’t made her feel like that since high school; like she truly was beautiful and someone worth staring at in a way that made her heart ache and squeeze inside her chest. When she heard fumbling coming from the other room, she grabbed a towel to wrap around herself and turned off the fan abov
e her head.
“Nathan? Is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” he responded in a muffled tone. He held the paper tight between his fingers and flipped it back and forth, then grabbed her phone and scrolled through her ‘dialed’ list. His was the last number she had called that night, but Adrian’s was listed just below it – they were barely two minutes apart. He glared at her in the mirror as she came from the bathroom wrapped in that towel. “I need to talk to you about something.” His already deep voice had lowered to an octave she almost didn’t recognize.
It instantly took her aback, but when she saw him standing near her purse and holding her phone, a flame of anger immediately rushed over her. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked.
“What’s yours is mine,” he said snidely. “Isn’t that what you told me earlier? And since we’re on the subject” – he spun around to look at her face to face – “I could ask you the same thing. Or, ‘who’ might be a better question, I think.”
“Where is this ‘attitude’ coming from?”
“From inside your purse.” He raised the piece of paper next to his face and waved it from side to side. She stiffened the moment she recognized it and grabbed a handful of her wet hair, wrapping it around her fingers and squeezing the remaining water out onto the linoleum. She tried to remain calm, as if she was unaffected by his actions and what he was holding, but Nathan could see right through to her soul that it was an act. “Who the hell is Adrian Samuels?” he asked.
She shook her head and poked out her bottom lip. “Nobody,” she replied in a low, nonchalant tone. “He’s just someone that I know.”
“Is that a fact?” He smiled, though it was anything but sincere. “Now, if I’m looking at this correctly” – he pulled the paper closer to his eyes to get a better look at the number – “the area code that’s been written down on here by you, is from Queens. And you don’t know a single person in Queens, Sheila. Not only that, you haven’t stepped foot outside of Manhattan since you went joyriding with Vanessa to Jersey--”
