Our parents were always there to cheer for us – always physically present – and yet emotionally and metaphysically away. It’s hard to explain now, difficult to put into words, but it was as if they were never really there.
Ever since I can remember, our parents had their own lives. My father, the renowned doctor and later the founder of a prosperous pharmaceutical company, worked late into the night and all weekends. He was always traveling and running meetings.
My mother had her philanthropic activities. She was the head of a number of boards that raised money for a variety of noble causes. She didn’t get paid, but she worked nearly as hard as he did and organized all of our days and the house staff on top of all that.
It’s maybe cruel to say this, but my parents gave me the impression that love only meant one thing. My parents said that they loved us, but their love was complicated. It came with expectations and, inevitably, disappointments. It was never the kind of love often featured in movies. They were never mushy and hopeful and exuberant. They were both too busy with either work or their social obligations to really show love. Or at least, the way I expected it to be.
And so, coming back to my original thought. How do you know if you truly love someone? How am I expected to know if I love someone if their love was the kind of love I had only ever known?
Before I broke both of my legs riding a wild stallion, I never had time to think about these things. But now that I’m bed bound for more than six weeks, it seems all I do is think. I had to remain active somehow, and my mind was the only place I had left.
Brielle enters the room carrying two cups of tea on a tray. She has been here for six weeks. Six of the happiest weeks of my life. I have never been immobile for this long before, and yet her presence has made it, somehow, bearable. If it weren’t for her, I’d be tearing my hair out. I’d be drunk all day just to pass the time. And yet, with her here, we find things to do that do not involve going outside much or using our legs.
* * *
I think I’m falling in love with Brielle. Her long hair, her tender eyes, her soft skin. I don’t know anything about love, I’m the first to admit it. Yet, I also know that I’ve never felt this way about anyone before. Sometimes, when I see her, my heart jumps into my throat, and I forget to breathe.
Other times, when she’s away from me for a couple of hours, I feel anxious and uncertain. I don’t know what to do with myself and spend the hours just looking out of the window or staring aimlessly at the television screen. I can’t read a word that makes sense. All I can do is wait for her to return.
Brielle has been bringing me breakfast, lunch, and dinner and has made Mr. Whitewater all but useless. The responsibility of those things would’ve fallen to him, but she asked him if she could do it. I think she likes being useful. In fact, I’ve never met someone who enjoys being useful so much. It’s almost as if she really loves taking care of me.
I feel myself falling in love with Brielle, even though I’m not sure if I know what that means. But does anyone? Isn’t love just some sort of feeling that bubbles up from within us, from some place deep within our core that we didn’t even know existed?
There is one problem, however. And it’s a big one. We – Brielle and I – have decided to keep things professional. I believe that the only reason she’s even here is that our relationship is now strictly professional. Or so she has called it. But in reality, it’s not professional at all. Only a fool would think that our interaction is professional. We are more like friends. Close, close friends. And it’s clear, at least I think it is, that I want more.
“What a beautiful morning, right?” she says plopping down on the couch next to me. “What do you want to do today?”
I want to kiss you, undress and lay in bed looking at and exploring your naked body until dinner. I want to say this to her, but instead I lie.
“Not sure, whatever,” I shrug and remember her hurtful words.
“No more kissing, no more romance, or whatever it was that was happening between us,” she said in my hospital room. I felt woozy from all the pain killers, but I remember each one of her words as if she said it a minute ago. “I just want to work here for the year, like I’d agreed, and be friends.”
“Okay,” I had agreed.
“You promise?” she asked. “This is one of my conditions of staying. The only one.”
I remember looking into her deep brown eyes and nodding. Then agreeing verbally to the only thing that would keep her in my life.
* * *
“You feeling alright?” she asks. Neither of us has said a word in a few moments. She touches my hand with hers sending shivers up and down my legs, as always. My cock grows hard, and I press down on it, trying to calm it. Ever since we’d decided to be friends, she started touching me more and more. More than she ever had before. But the touching is not sexual, at least not on her part. Just a pat of the hand, a small hug, a nudge, but each touch still makes me get hard.
I want her. I want her up against the wall. On the bed. Outside in the desert. In the shower.
“Hey, Wyatt?” she asks leaning close to me with a look of concern on her face. “How are you, today? Is everything okay?”
“I’m good,” I fake a smile. “Why?”
“Something seems off,” she shrugs. “Oh, I almost forgot, I got your pills, here.”
I stare at her. Brielle mentions the pills in the same nonchalant way she has for the last six weeks, but this is the first day that I turn them down.
“Nah, I’m feeling okay. I don’t think I need them today.”
Her face lights up. “That’s great!” she wraps her arms around me. “I’m so happy. You’re making so much progress. Maybe you’ll be able to take the casts off soon, too.”
Now, there’s a thought. To stand up and hold my body weight with my own two feet. I’ve taken that for granted for so many years. Then when I suddenly couldn’t stand up on my feet and had to use crutches…the helplessness that came with that was unimaginable.
I smile with my whole body at the thought of taking the casts off.
“Yeah, I can’t wait,” I say. “I hate being a blimp. I feel like I’m totally useless. And like I’m getting fat.”
Brielle laughs. It’s a small, quiet laugh that only gives me a small peek at her perfect white teeth. Then she looks me up and down.
“No, not at all.”
“You have no idea how hard this has been for me. I mean, I know it hasn’t been easy for you at all, waiting on me all the time. Which again, you don’t really have to do. We have staff here for that,” I say.
She starts to say something, but I cut her off. I know what she’s going to say. She is the staff, she’s happy to do it, or something in that vein.
“That’s not what I want to say. What I mean is that it’s been really hard for me to be so inactive for so long. I love being outdoors. I love riding horses. Playing basketball. Football. Baseball. Whatever. Using my body is a huge part of my life, and these past six weeks, it’s like I’ve become someone else. I couldn’t do that. And if it weren’t for you…I would’ve been completely lost. It would’ve been much more hard. So what I’m really trying to say, very artfully, is thank you. Thank you so much for being here. And being you.”
Brielle takes a moment to internalize what I’ve said. Then she leans close to me. It takes all of my strength not to place my lips on hers, but I’ve long made myself a promise that it would be her, this time, who has to make the first move.
“It has been my pleasure,” she whispers in my ear and pulls away.
* * *
Brielle jumps off the couch and the mood in the room changes. I watch her walk over to the large floor to ceiling window looking out onto the desert in front of us. A large raven perches on top of a crooked Joshua tree in the distance and then flies away.
“I finally found some tape, and I’m going to take care of that bird problem,” she says. By bird problem, she means that too many birds are flying i
nto our spotless window and killing themselves. Mr. Whitewater, who washes that window almost every other day, isn’t going to be happy, and we both know it.
“You know, he has been hiding this thing from me for all of these weeks,” she says with a smile and picks up the roll of duct tape from the tray. “I’ve been asking him for it forever.”
“What can I say, he loves keeping that window clean.”
“I know he does, and the view from it is beautiful. But we can’t just sit by and do nothing as birds continue to kill themselves on it practically every day.”
“I guess not,” I chuckle.
“Where do you think I should put it?” Brielle asks.
Over my hands and then to the headboard, so that I can’t touch you as you go down on me. And then I will wrap it around your hands and do the same to you.
Of course, I don’t say any of that out loud. Instead, I point to a few spots on the window, which have resulted in the largest amount of casualties.
“You know, I talked to my mother again this morning,” Brielle says as she tapes the window.
“Oh yeah, how is she?” I ask. I only mildly care. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad she’s doing bette,r but mainly because that means that Brielle doesn’t have to go back home and take care of her.
“She’s doing even better than before,” she smiles.
The $250,000 check that I sent her for her mother’s treatment was worth that smile alone. Brielle starts telling me all the details about how her mother’s feeling. Her breathing is improving, not much pain in her hips, blah, blah, blah. All the information comes into one ear and goes out the other. I’m not paying attention. Not even a little bit.
Instead, my mind drifts elsewhere. I look at Brielle’s round butt and the way it fills out her jeans. Her jeans have little decorative hearts on the back pockets, and they draw my eye on the roundest part of her body. I don’t know why clothing designers put them there. Do they know that they make women’s butts look irresistible? Is that the whole point? Do the women know just how hard it is to look away from those two little hearts? Does Brielle?
When she turns to face me and tell me something else about her mom’s condition, my gaze runs up her body. Brielle’s small waist accentuates her hips, making them appear wider than they really are. Then I land on her breasts. She doesn’t wear a bra often, but her breasts are firm and erect. When the temperature in the room falls below 75 degrees Fahrenheit, her nipples get erect and resemble the tips of a ripe strawberry. I’ve gotten into the habit of turning down the furnace and praying each morning that today would be the day that she again chooses to go without a bra.
“Hey, are you listening?” Brielle asks.
“Yeah, so your mom is happy with the new doctor?” I parrot the last thing that she said to me. I developed this talent of reiterating the last line that someone said back in sixth grade, and it has served me well way after I was done with formal education.
My words put her at ease, and she continues on with her story while I curse myself for ever agreeing to be this hot girl’s friend.
Fuck being friends!
We shouldn’t be just friends.
Friends with benefits maybe.
Fuck buddies.
Lovers.
Girlfriend?
Fiancé even.
Maybe more.
I shudder at the places that mind is going. Girlfriend, maybe. I’ve had a few girls who I liked enough to call my girlfriend. But fiancé? Really, Wyatt? What are you thinking? That’s exactly it, though. I’m not thinking. I’m just feeling.
Chapter 12 - Brielle
I don’t know why the fuck I ever insisted on being friends with Wyatt. The friends status was supposed to protect me. It was supposed to make me feel safe and to make me feel as if nothing is going to happen between us. I thought that it would create distance between us and release some of the tension that forms whenever we occupy the same room. But it’s only making things worse.
I want him.
I want him to want me.
He does. I can feel it. But he won’t make a move. He made me a promise, and he’s keen on keeping it.
Even now, standing on this stupid chair, taping tape onto the glass to stop the damn birds from crashing into it every day, I feel Wyatt’s eyes burning a hole in my back pocket.
He’s staring at my ass, and the scary thing is that I want him to But more than that, I want him to grab it and pull me up to his lap and kiss me.
Of course, he won’t. He has made a promise.
So now it’s all up to me. And I’m afraid. And I’m a coward.
* * *
After I taped all the spots where birds have crashed into the past week, I get down and sit next to him on the couch, which has become his home. Wyatt hasn’t moved much in weeks. He pretends that he’s fine, but I can feel his anxiety growing.
“I need to get the hell out of here. Out of this room. Away from this couch. I want to see Sebastian again.”
I get goosebumps at the thought. Sebastian is the crazy, untamed, three-year-old stallion that broke both of his legs the last time he tried to ride him. I don’t want Wyatt anywhere near him. He was lucky to get out of that situation with only both legs broken. The doctors said it could’ve been much worse. He could’ve broken his back and ended up like Christopher Reeves.
“Can I ask you something?” I ask.
Wyatt nods and waits for the question.
“Why did you ever get on him, in the first place? What were you trying to prove?”
I don’t know much about horses, but I do know that no one in their right mind rides stallions. All the testosterone makes them crazy and wild. Unbroken.
“Nothing,” he shrugs in the casual way that makes me swoon. “I just felt like riding him, that’s all.”
I don’t believe him. “I don’t think so,” I say staring straight into Wyatt’s deep eyes.
“You don’t? Why?”
“I think you were angry with yourself. And you wanted to, I don’t know, take some of that anger out on yourself.”
Wyatt’s eyes meet mine. I can tell by the way he sits back in the couch and adjusts his stature that I’ve hit on something.
“Oh, please,” he shrugs and rolls his eyes. He’s lying. Either to just me or to the both of us.
“No, I do,” I smile. “Really.”
Then his face grows serious. The casualness that just danced across it all but disappears.
“Listen, Brielle,” Wyatt says. All I hear is the irritation in his voice. “Please don’t psychoanalyze me, okay? I’ve been through that enough with a ton of real doctors. The last thing I need is some more psycho babble from some novice.”
His words sting. More than that even. They pierce my heart. I feel tears bubbling up and I’m about to let them all out.
“Fuck you,” I say and leave before I show even more vulnerability.
“Brielle, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I hear Wyatt yell after me, but I don’t turn around. At this moment, I hate him. I hate him the way I never hated anyone.
* * *
We don’t speak the rest of the day. By the next day, my anger with Wyatt dissipates a bit. He apologizes again, and, this time, I accept his apology. By the afternoon, we joke and laugh like before. I’m glad that things between us have improved, but I am still keenly aware of the boundaries that separate us. Now, I’m also more cautious. Certain things can’t be talked about or joked about.
That afternoon, over a very late lunch or an early dinner, I ask Wyatt about his family. He tells me about his domineering father and the pharmaceutical company that he started when all the kids were little.
“My father’s got four kids, but that company was his real baby,” he says. “And we all knew that for many years.”
“What about your mom?” I ask.
“Mom was there and not there. She had her own commitments, but most of the time she was absent. It’s like she had her own interests that none of us kids eve
r fit into.”
“Not even Ophelia?” I ask. I know that mothers can often be closer to their daughters than to their sons.
“Not even O. We’ve all had nannies, though, so that was supposed to make up for everything, I guess. It felt like they loved me, all of us, I mean, in their own way, but it was somehow never enough. You know?”
I nod. I try to understand, but Wyatt and I come from two completely different worlds.
“What about you?” he asks. “What was it like for you growing up?”
I take a moment to consider the question.
“It wasn’t really easy,” I say. “My father left when I was little when my little sister was only two.”
“I didn’t know you had siblings.”
“I don’t. Well, not anymore. I never know how to answer that question about brothers or sisters.”
“What do you mean?” he asks. He moves closer to me with a steadfast look of concern on his face.
“Well, I used to have a sister until I was fifteen, but then she died. She was sick almost her whole little life and, after she passed, my mother was never the same after that.”
“What did she die of?” he asks even though I have the feeling that he already knows.
“Cancer. What else?” I shrug.
“Like your mother?” he gasps.
I nod. “My mom was diagnosed soon after. Right when I graduated from high school. That’s why I never went to college. She was the sole breadwinner and, after her diagnosis, she couldn’t really work. Not with all the chemo and radiation. So I got a job at the diner. And then another one at the bar. And I’ve been sort of stuck there ever since.”
I look at him. I like the way he looks at me. There’s pity and sorrow on his face, but it isn’t as depressing as the looks other people typically have.
“But it’s okay now,” I smile. “Thanks largely to you.”
Auctioned to Him 7: The Contract Page 24
