"What's wrong?" I asked, reaching out to touch his arm. He wrenched it back, the pained look intensifying, his gaze unable to meet mine.
"I watched," he said, and I am sure my face registered my confusion at what he meant. "I stood out in the rain and watched you and your—" He let that trail off. The look of hurt on his face told me the rest of his statement was too painful to verbalize.
I thought of shutting the curtains last night and how that might have looked to someone watching from outside. Adam sneezed again, and I wondered how long he spent in the rain. A duel of two different feelings erupted inside me. On one hand I sympathized with Adam who was clearly hurt. On the other, I was hurt that he thought of me that way. He was sure I'd done something even though he didn't see it happen. What else could have happened? I hated that was his perception of me.
I should have denied it right then, set him straight with the truth of what had happened, but I didn't. My dueling emotions wouldn't let me. "I asked you not to do that."
He took my lack of denial hard, closing his eyes tight for a short moment, taking it as an admission I surmised by the way his jaw tensed and his eyes kept searching the space behind me.
"He's still in bed," I cut in, trying to get him to meet my eye. He wouldn't.
"I see." He looked both ways and behind him, anywhere but at me. I, however, kept my eyes on him trying to figure out what was going on in his head. "Why, why would you degrade yourself like that? Don't you remember what he did to you? Or do you not care?"
I didn't know how to take that. I had said no, and at least part of my motivation for that denial was that I felt something for Adam and didn't want to be with anyone else. Therefore, his suggestion that I had been degraded, that I had allowed Michael to get one over on me, really pissed me off.
He grabbed my waist and my arms bent, my hands instinctively going to his chest. He held me still so he could look directly into my eyes. It was impossible to look away.
He held me so tight, my insides clenched in excitement. I was being reminded of moments we’d shared before, moments that had ended in great explosions of euphoria. I'm sure my face was a vibrant scarlet. I tried to focus because I knew I'd be analyzing this moment in plenty of upcoming daydreams.
"You're killing me, you know that?" His strong hand moved up to the space behind my neck and held my gaze on his. The whole world dropped away. I felt like we were in one of those photographs where the subject is crystal clear, and the surrounding scenery is dulled and out of focus. A pulsing electricity surged between us. I began to sweat. I wanted to tell him the truth about last night, but I couldn’t speak.
"I haven't allowed myself to feel anything for anyone in years," he whispered, "and now that I've revealed to you the tiniest entrance to my heart, you're revealing yourself to be a callous—"
"Don't blame me for your feelings!" I yelled, using my hands already resting on his chest to push him away. My sympathy had turned to anger and the emotional duel was won by my hurt feelings from being called callous.
His jaw dropped. He stared at me speechless. Now he was the one struck unable to form words.
"I asked you not to watch me. You didn't listen. Now you're blaming me for what you think you saw?" I was ready to tell him everything, how wrong he was about what had happened. I was trying to sort all of the emotions into words I could say. I was so angry I didn't notice that Michael had stopped snoring. He was approaching me from behind. He laid his hand over my shoulder and squeezed the muscle that extended from my neck to my shoulder—the spot where I stored my stress.
"What are you doing, man?" Michael asked.
Adam's feral gaze went back and forth between us and then he took a few steps backward and spun to the side so he wasn't facing us. He seemed to orient himself by searching the trees.
"Is it him you were with, whose phone you used to call me?" Michael couldn't take his eyes off Adam.
Adam's brow furrowed in confusion. He hadn't known about that phone call until just this second. I made an awkward face and cast my eyes guiltily to the ground, but lifted them just in time to see Adam watching my reaction. Hurt flashed in his eyes before his jaw set into some other emotion.
My sympathy for Adam returned. Why had I kept that insignificant detail from him? Why hadn't I wanted him to know about my talking to Michael?
I felt like a modern-day bug infiltrating Adam's healthy world, a parasite on an animal, and with Michael behind me, I was multiplying. I could feel Adam's fragile world shattering because of our presence, yet I couldn't do anything to hold it together. Michael walked around me.
"Listen, I appreciate you looking out for Ina while she's here, but you're overstepping your bounds." He stepped away from me, leaving me in the doorway while he neared closer to Adam, who was on the edge of the top stair now. I still remembered his ire from the other day. Adam eyed Michael's bare chest angrily and I wondered how bad he was imagining the scenario to be.
"I get it, I do," Michael said with a smile. "She's beautiful. She's out here all alone. You must feel like a diamond just fell from the sky, but—"
"Michael!" I screamed, trying to get around him to speak for myself, but he held me behind him.
"Goddammit, Ina, for once will you shut up and let me handle this!" He turned to Adam. "I know what you’re thinking, but she's not interested. We've talked. I know what she's thinking and it’s not you. She might be fucking around with you while she’s here, to get back at me, but in the long run—" Michael looked back to me with a knowing smile. "She doesn't want me either, but she will. I need you to keep your fucking nose out of her ass so we can get back what we—"
"Stop speaking for me, Michael. I need you to stop!" There was more I meant to say, but Michael turned around and nudged me back into the cabin. He held up his hand in a mocking wave and grinned as he shut the door in my face.
I stood inside, alone with my jaw dropped, paralyzed for a second. That was the last straw. Their voices grew louder, but so would mine. I pulled the door open, stormed out onto the porch into the middle of the screaming match.
"Enough!" I jammed my finger into Michael's chest. "Now it's your turn to shut up. And if you try to move me out of the way again I'll throw you off this mountain myself."
I glanced from Michael's angry face to Adam's. There was no way in hell anything was getting solved while these two were together. They were too fired up, too testosterone-fueled. It was impossible to have any kind of real discussion while the two of them staged a pissing contest.
"Adam, please go back to your cabin. I need to talk to Michael alone." I tried to make my sympathy show on my face. I tried to express with my eyes what my heart wanted to say: I want to talk to you, too, Adam, but I can't do it now. I need to drive him away so we can be together. I am sorry this hurts you. I don't mean to hurt you. I’m pretty sure he didn't get any of that.
The look on his face as he wordlessly turned toward the closest trail showed pure hurt. I had made a choice in his opinion and the choice was not him.
I turned to Michael whose face told an entirely different, but still wrong, story. His sly grin told me he was proud of himself. He had fought for the girl and he had won. Only he hadn't. I didn't belong to him. I needed to get Michael on the road, away from this place, so I could return to Adam. I hoped Adam would understand and accept me.
20
"Why did you say those things, Michael?" I pushed him inside the cabin and shut the door behind us. I went over to the coffee machine and began to make us a pot. This morning had grown entirely too exciting for not even having had coffee yet.
He sighed. "I know you don't want to hear it, Ina, but that guy is dangerous. I don't want to leave you here alone with him. I feel like I need to call work and tell them I need to stay, to help get you out of here."
I could see the wheels turning in his mind, and I saw my days on the mountain dwindling as he whisked me back to civilization for my own safety.
I had gone from a childhood
with my overbearing mother to college where I only allowed myself to be free for a month before jumping into another relationship where I would be protected from my own bad decisions—even if I wanted to make those bad decisions. It seemed like I always made sure to have someone around me who would talk me out of them.
"I don't need you to protect me, Michael." I tried to say it with more gumption. I tried to make him see that I meant this. I wasn't saying it for Adam's sake. "I don't need anyone to protect me. I can protect myself."
"I'm not leaving you here with that maniac, Ina!" Michael walked into the bathroom and slammed the door. I'd never heard him speak so angrily to me. I felt small and stupid. Was I being stupid? I don't know. All I knew was that I was so damn mad. And Adam could be scary, but my instincts screamed at me to trust him. Why did Michael think that he had jurisdiction over my choices?
Furthermore, what about all that pushing for all of those years for me to be wilder, more spontaneous, to take chances and not always play it safe? Now that I was doing just that, Michael wanted to know why I wasn't doing the opposite!
Silently, but fuming, I listened to the coffee percolate while I tapped my fingers on the counter and readied my mug. I stared out of the window and into the woods that surrounded every side of my cabin.
As I breathed, I contemplated the trees, how they swayed lightly in the breeze and still stood their ground amid swirling storms and wild wind.
I didn't turn when Michael came out of the bathroom and over to my side. He reached over to grab my hand in his own and I met his eye.
He didn't look angry or forceful. He looked pleading and just as confused as I felt. That was the thing with pushy boyfriends who tried to make you do what they wanted. In some ways, they meant well, so it was tough to bestow tough love on them.
"I know you think you're doing what's best for me," I said, "but I need to decide what's best for me, Michael. I appreciate your concern, but I don't want it to stop me from making my own decisions."
His hand came over to push my morning hair back from my face, a movement that felt so familiar and comforting that I closed my eyes.
"Ina, Ina, Ina," Michael chanted in a deep, low voice that took me back to romantic nights, whispering each other's names in the dark, the all-encompassing happiness that came from knowing you'd found your once-in-a-lifetime early enough to enjoy it for most of your days. "I know I let you down, baby. I understand that you might not even recognize me anymore, but the man you loved is still in here." He placed my hand on his trembling chest.
I'd been fully prepared to explain one final time that I needed him to leave. I needed him to stop pissing off Adam, to stop overriding my choices. But his kindness, his quiet romantic voice jarred me. I could only stand and listen and ask, "Michael?"
"It's me," he whispered emphatically. "I'm back." His eyes didn't move from mine and I shook my head a few times. I knew what he meant even though he wasn’t being perfectly clear. Ever since that day in the dorm room, I'd wondered who was the real Michael? Was it the guy who I loved, who I'd enjoyed for four years? Or was he just a figment of my imagination.
The thought had occurred to me more than once that maybe the real Michael may just be a liar who'd been playing me the whole time I knew him. What I got from his statement was that the real Michael was the genuine one who had said he loved me more than anything. He had been indisposed for awhile, but he was here now. All that confusion and pain could end.
And now that I had him back, there was one huge question I was dying to know the answer to.
"Why did you cheat on me, Michael?"
His eyes closed, but mine didn't. It was a hard question, but it needed to be answered. I needed to know what I had done to lose his love and faithfulness. My eyes were wide open.
"I wish," he said and then paused. Did he know how much that pause hurt me? How many horrible ways my mind could finish that sentence while he fumbled around for the rest of the thought in his head? "I wish I had met you ten years later." His eyes opened and his head tilted to his side. "I love you. I loved you since that first moment I spotted you freshmen year." He smiled at the memory.
I watched his face, his lips, waiting for the explanation to form and wishing it would happen faster.
"Then why?" I pushed.
"Because even though I loved you, I could feel something scary up ahead, something I wasn't ready for. I don't know what it was, or if it was even real. I knew there would be hard times, and I was afraid of them."
"Everyone has hard times," I said, not comprehending. "You'll have them whether you are alone or with someone you love, so why chase away people who love you?"
"It was more than that. It was like staying with you meant moving on to this next phase of my life—this tied-down grown-up section of my life, and I wasn't ready for it. Meeting you early on had kept me from what all of my friends were doing. Because I was with you, I wasn't getting laid by two women at once after frat parties. I wasn't getting the quickie blow jobs my friends bragged about, and I don't know, Ina, I just started thinking, do I want to die without all that?"
I stared at him taking it all in. I mean on one hand I guess I was glad he could be honest with me. On the other, well, it didn't feel good to be told that the love of your life chose a quickie blow job over staying with you.
"I don't know what to say."
"Say that I'm a douche bag! It's the truth!"
My shock showed on my face. "Yes, it is." I shook my head and rolled my eyes, anything to show him how much he was frustrating me.
"The last few weeks, I've been doing the grown-up thing. I've been going to work every day, coming home to an empty apartment. Some of the guys from work go out for drinks regularly, and I've joined them." He shook his head and looked to the ground. "It seemed better in my head," he said. "Now I see it's empty. It's just a different kind of boredom—casual sex. Now I see that I am never going to find anyone nearly as good as the woman I once had and that realization is killing me." He squeezed my hand.
"Michael?"
He took my shaky whisper of his name as some sort of agreement. He began to lean toward me, shutting his eyes.
"Michael, how do you know?" I asked. His eyes opened. His face halted in its approach to my lips.
"How do I know what?"
I could feel his breath on my face.
"How do you know it won't happen again? How do you know when you're thirty, you won’t start wondering in the same way?"
Confusion crossed his face. "Never, Ina," he promised. "Never again. I love you. I love you more than I will ever love another woman in my life. I know that now."
His lips moved closer to mine. I didn't shut my eyes. I watched his face, the smooth expanse of his flawless politician skin and the calm behind his closed eyelids. He came at me with such confidence, as if there were no way he could possibly be resisted.
I realized I'd been holding my breath and I quickly exhaled and let fresh oxygen into my lungs. Then his lips grazed against mine and a flood of feelings and memories flashed inside of me. His arm came up and his hand brushed the side of my face, pushing my hair back. His other arm encircled my waist pulling me closer.
"I've missed you so much. I've realized how horribly I've fucked up. I'm back. I'm back." Between words, his tongue reminded me once more how well it knew my body and what it liked. A part of me wanted to strip out of my clothes and make love to him for old time's sake. When two bodies get to know each other so well, they learn each other's wants and needs and likes and just how to touch. But it was only a very tiny insignificant piece of me that wanted that. When two people trusted each other—
My mind clicked back on. I didn't trust him, and Adam trusted me.
He'd left here calmly because he trusted me.
"I don't want to do this," I said in a strong steady voice.
His lips smoothed over mine. "Never again," he promised. I knew he would try. I knew that he had so much determination that he might not fail. He migh
t be able to will himself loyal.
But I wasn't satisfied with him. I didn't want to be someone he compromised with himself over. I wanted to knock someone off his feet. I wanted to be the someone that the man I loved couldn't resist.
I pictured Adam saying that it killed him for me to be inside the cabin all night with Michael. I saw the raw frustration and anger, and the white knuckles on my porch as he struggled to keep at bay his wild emotions. He had felt that way. He had tried to keep me at arm's length for so many reasons, but in the end, he’d needed to give up because his feelings for me were unstoppable.
Michael let my hands drop and stared into my face until I met his stare. "What are you saying?"
"Thank you so much for coming here, for letting me know how you truly feel. And thank you for talking to your boss about a job for me, but I can't take it."
"Don't be ridiculous." He shook his head. "You're taking the job—even if you don't want me. You deserve it." Hands on his hips, he stared at the floor as if he couldn't believe what I was saying.
"I don't even know if I still want to work in advertising."
His eyes met mine. I shook my head as he stared at me waiting for an explanation.
"But that's all you ever wanted."
"Not anymore. Now, I have no idea. I think I want to stay out here a while, figure things out before I—"
"Not this again." He walked up to me so that our bodies were so close they almost touched. He grabbed my face in his hands so I couldn't look away.
"A job is what you want, and I got it for you. Just take the fucking job. No strings attached. I owe you that." He squeezed my face infinitesimally and moved closer to my face, but it wasn't a kiss he wanted. It was to reach me.
"Where is my Ina who knew exactly what she wanted?"
I flinched and his eyes flicked to my lips. I licked them and he began to move in for another attempt at a kiss.
"Why won't you listen to me?" I stopped him. "I’ve told you what I want."
"You don't know what you want! Nobody does!" He let his hands fall away from me. He walked away, punched a wall, and came back. "Jesus, Ina, what the fuck! This is everything you wanted two weeks ago! You're telling me that I lost you in two fucking weeks?"
Gone Wild Page 15
