by Sam Mariano
I’m sleepy and happy and all I want to do is live in this moment for the rest of my life.
Once we’re both clean, it’s time to leave the shower. I’ve never been sad to leave a shower before, but I should probably be relieved his hot water tank didn’t chase us off before now.
The casual intimacy of standing in such close quarters and drying off after the shower gets me, too. I wouldn’t have said I was holding back if asked, but the way I feel now, I must have been. My feelings for Sin haven’t just been unleashed, they’ve intensified. Two days ago I could have convinced myself I could go to Chicago and lead a happy life without him, but right now, I don’t know why I would ever want to.
I’m exactly where I belong, and I never want to leave.
As if reciprocating the thoughts I didn’t give voice to, Sin appears in the mirror behind me, wrapping his arm around my waist and kissing the ball of my shoulder.
“Every shower I take alone now for the rest of my life will be an immense disappointment.”
Smirking and placing my hand over his around my waist, I say, “No kidding.”
We go to his bedroom, still with damp hair, wearing nothing more than towels. I don’t even want something as flimsy as material between us, so I drop my towel and climb on his bed naked.
Sin slows in front of the bed, but doesn’t move to follow me. His eyes rake over me, a gleam of interest on the surface. I wait to see what he’ll do. I really want him to fuck me. I can feel him opening up more to me today than he has before, so I don’t know what we’re waiting for.
“Spread your legs,” he tells me.
A faint flush crawls up my neck, heating my cheeks, but I do as I’m told. I watch him as I part my legs, baring myself for him. Even though he just got me off, I feel the stirring of arousal as his hot gaze lingers on me, like he’s looking at something beautiful. Something he likes a whole hell of a lot. I’ve never had someone look at me there the way he does.
After a moment, I finally break in to tease him a little. “See anything you like?”
His gaze drifts to my face and he smirks. “Oh, yeah.”
I smile, but then he drops his towel and my smile melts as my gaze drops. I realize when I have the chance, I’m admiring his dick just as much. My love for his dick is intensely irrational and I’ve never experienced it before. If I could look at it, hold it, or taste it endlessly, I would.
Sin places his palms down on the bed, narrowing his eyes in a predatory fashion, then he pounces on me. I grin as he climbs on top of my body, bringing my hands to his sides and tugging him down for a kiss. Now that I can have those, we have a lot of lost kisses to make up for.
He leans down in his own time despite my tugging. Then his lips brush mine and I sigh with pleasure. I love all of this so much. I want to ask if I get to stay here after this, but I’m too afraid the answer will be no, and I don’t want to ruin it.
When his lips leave mine, I decide to ask about something else I noticed the night he took his shirt off at Rafe’s. I intended to ask that night, but then that stupid whore texted him.
Well, I guess now she’s dead, so I shouldn’t call her a whore anymore. Not altogether sure how I feel about that, but hey, if she tried to poison me, the bitch had it coming.
I reach a hand up and rest it on the inside of his left bicep. There was no tattoo there when I was in his bed before, but now there are a pair of handcuffs inked into his skin.
“This is new,” I say.
“It is.”
“Why did you get this one?”
He glances at the tattoo, casually flexing his bicep as he does. “Same reason I got the others. I hurt a woman I cared about. If I leave a mark on them, they should get a mark on me.”
My stomach drops. I’m not sure if it’s because I must be the woman he’s talking about—that must be my mark on his body—or because when I met him, he already had two other tattoos. That means he hurt two other women who matter to him—or mattered.
“You got it for me?” I question, since that’s the safest question.
He nods his head, his lips curving up faintly. “It seemed fitting.”
Despite my anxiety, I offer a little smile back and roll my eyes. “Because you held me captive, you big brute.”
Sin shakes his head. “Nah. I may have kidnapped you, but you’re the one who’s held me captive.”
My stomach sinks again. I reach up and grab his shoulders, yanking him down until his perfect lips are on mine again. He gets so many kisses for saying that. I never want to stop kissing him. I lock my legs around his hips, pulling him against me. I want him inside me, but I’ll settle for as close as I can get him. As I kiss him, I push my fingers through his hair, overcome with tenderness, bursting with affection. There’s nothing better than his naked body pressed against mine.
I feel him getting hard again and it triggers arousal in my core. Before I can get too excited and think he might actually fuck me now, he breaks our kiss and pulls back to look at me.
“Don’t you want to know who the others ones are for?” he asks, like he was waiting for me to ask.
“Sorta.” I cock my head in consideration. “But I also really want you to fuck me, and I feel like that’s close to being on the table.”
“I’m not going to fuck you before I tell this story. If you distract me you will get an orgasm out of it, but I’m not going to fuck you.”
Sighing heavily, I relent. “Fine. Let’s do this. Tell me whatever dark secret is lurking in your past. It’s not going to change anything for me.”
“Well, I hope not, but I have to be sure. Things with you have gone way too far beyond casual for me. I fuck you, that’s it. That changes things between us, things that can’t be changed back again.”
I remember him saying something similar when he thought I’d slept with Rafe again after the night I saw Sin with Marlena, how I might not have been Rafe’s before, but I changed that when I slept with him. “Sex is permanent for you,” I say. It’s not a question. I don’t entirely understand, but the evidence points to that conclusion.
“Sex with someone I love is.”
My eyes go wide and his gaze drops.
“Ah, Christ,” he mutters, raking a hand through his hair.
“No.” I reach up, my heart pounding in my chest, by tummy filling up with butterflies. “It’s okay. I love you, too, Sin.”
“I’ve never fallen for someone this fast before,” he says, like he’s trying to explain. I don’t know why he thinks he needs to, given I suffer from the same affliction.
“I have a theory,” I tell him. “Sometimes people in… I don’t even know how to describe our situation and circumstances, but… Sometimes when two people go through something together, they form an attachment to each other. My sister could probably explain it better, but the point is, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with us. I think our circumstances opened a door, and our compatibility with one another lured us through it.”
“Does it last?”
He asks so earnestly, it makes my heart ache. Reaching a hand up to caress his face, I nod my head. “Sure, it can. It’s like any other kind of connection. What happens next is up to the two people involved. It could amount to nothing, or you could choose to build something that endures. The connection is just the beginning, Sin. We decide if it lasts.”
“I want it to last,” he tells me.
“So do I,” I assure him.
His gaze drifts past me at the bed for a moment, like he’s lost in thought. All of a sudden he climbs off me, moving over to his side of the bed. I climb into my spot, preparing to lie down and cuddle with him, but he doesn’t lie down; he reaches into his nightstand drawer.
A moment later he turns around with something in his hand, something so small that I have no idea what it might be with his hand closed. He hesitates another moment, then unclenches his fist.
My eyes widen as the light in his room catches on a golden band nestled in the palm of his
hand—a wedding ring. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it, so after staring at it for a moment, I look up at him.
“I used to be married.”
That’s the logical assumption to draw from him presenting a wedding band, so I don’t know why his words cause my stomach to drop, but they do. “Okay,” I say with forced calm.
Nodding at the kneeling angel on his right arm, he says, “That one is for my wife.”
I cringe, hearing him say those words. Shit, that shouldn’t sting. Clearly she isn’t his wife anymore. I wish he would call her his ex-wife, but this isn’t the time to be territorial, so I shake it off.
“Paula,” he adds. “Her name was Paula.”
I don’t know if I should keep urging him, or just wait for him to tell me everything, but it seems like he’s trying to get the words out. Or maybe trying to get them right? For now, I remain silent and let him talk in his own time.
Looking down at the band in his hand, he says, “We got married young. You may have picked this up, but I tend to be a one and done kind of man. I don’t piss around looking at what else is out there once I have something worth hanging onto. I lock it down and that’s it.”
Smiling faintly, I nod my head. “I like that about you.”
“Yeah, she did too, back then.” He says it absently, maybe a little dismissively. He says it the way you talk about something you don’t believe anymore—just a review of what you thought then, before you knew you were wrong. “Thing is, it didn’t last. I liked our life. Even when it got harder, less exciting. Even when it wasn’t perfect, I never wanted to leave it. To me, it was just something we needed to get around to fixing. She felt differently.”
Even though a small, selfish part of me is glad this idiot threw him out so I could have him, the larger part of me feels bad for the pain this must have inflicted on him. “She left you?” I surmise.
He shakes his head, looking a little haunted. “No. That would have been one thing, I guess. Direct enough that I know there’s a problem I clearly need to fix. No, that’s not what she did. I felt her pull back, I started to notice distance, but I didn’t want to see it. She stopped responding to things, even when I would try. If I’d surprise her with something I knew she liked, she could hardly muster a smile. It was like she was just so fucking tired of me, nothing I did could renew her interest.”
I want to hug him. I need to hug him. I can hear leftover agony in his voice, and it hurts me—not in a jealous way, I just don’t want him to relive this old pain. I don’t need him to. He was married and now he’s not—fine. I can accept that. Not a big deal. Let’s put it behind us and never think about it again.
“This part’s almost funny,” he says, glancing at me, though there’s no humor expressed in his features. “She came onto Rafe one night when we were all hanging out, when I was in the other room. He came and told me because, you know, we were friends. I told him he read too much into nothing. I didn’t want to believe that, you know?”
I nod. “Sure, of course.”
“I should have confronted her that night. We should have fought. There should have been a big fucking blowout where we just aired all our problems and dealt with it—I realized that later, but at the time, I just…. I convinced myself she would stop, she was just bored and acting out for some reason. I told myself the problem would fix itself, even though I know from professional experience, problems almost never fix themselves. I had my head in the sand. I was young, you know.”
I remember him telling me I’m young that night he said all those awful things and chased me off. It seems like he has more faith in me now than he did then, but the way he uses youth as an excuse has me thinking we should touch on this base again later so I can remind him my age doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.
Finally, he says, “She cheated on me.”
Oh, God. “Not with Rafe?”
That startles him, and he finally looks at me. “No, no. Not with Rafe.”
Sighing with relief, I nod my head. “Okay.”
His mouth curves up faintly now. “You think I’d have stayed his friend after that? Fuck no. No, our relationship wasn’t complicated until you came along. Before that, we were friends. Neither one of us would have ever worried about leaving our wives alone with the other.”
That makes me feel kinda shitty. “Sorry,” I murmur.
He transfers his old wedding ring to the other hand, freeing up the one closest to me so he can reach over and place his hand over mine. “None of this is your fault.”
I don’t want to drag him off track, so I tell him, “Anyway, sorry, I interrupted. What happened?”
“She got pregnant,” he states, looking down at the bedding. Just in case there’s any doubt, he adds, “Not by me.”
“Oh, Sin.” Now my heart isn’t the only thing aching—my stomach joins in.
He doesn’t look up. “When she told me, I think she expected that to be it. Most sane people would probably… they’d be done at that point, but I wasn’t. I’d made a commitment, and I intended to see it through. I was so pissed and hurt and—” He trails off, shaking his head, like he can’t find the right words. “My whole life was just ripped out from under me in an instant. I should have had the upper hand—she fucked up, everything was fucked up, but she’d be sorry and she would be desperate to fix things. It was too big for me to shove aside and ignore, too big to pretend it didn’t happen. This wasn’t flirting with my friend, this was fucking another man and getting pregnant by him. This was fucking huge. Insurmountable, some might say. But none of that happened. She wasn’t sorry. She wasn’t desperate to fix things. She was cold, detached. Told me there was nothing I could do to fix it—me, like I was the one who fucked up. Our marriage wasn’t even over, and she had already moved on. She told me she was leaving me for that fucking asshole, and I saw red. Literally… just a red haze overtook me. I didn’t even realize what I was doing until it was too late.”
Oh, God. Oh, no, please not this. I want to stop him, I want to beg him not to tell me his deep dark secret is that he killed his pregnant wife. I swore to him nothing he said would change things for me, but I cannot stomach the idea of that being the skeleton in his closet.
I fight the urge to clamp my hands over my ears, but just barely.
Fuck. My mind is already trying to salvage this, reaching for excuses—a crime of passion, temporary insanity, perhaps a legitimate mental break as his life shattered, an episode of psychosis. Things that would make this less his fault.
None of them make me feel less icky.
Why wouldn’t Rafe have played that card? How could he leave me here alone with Sin after that helicopter date if he knew Sin had a history of snapping like that? I could have been killed!
Unaware of my nervous breakdown, Sin continues his story. “I drove to the guy’s house. I knew who he was, but I don’t know how she met him. I meant to ask her, but I forgot. It didn’t matter anymore, all that mattered was making it go away. Making all of it go away. Getting control over my life, because it was spinning the fuck out of control.”
“Was this after…?” I halt, not knowing how to phrase this. After you killed your pregnant wife?
Sin frowns slightly. “After she told me she was pregnant? Of course. So, anyway, I go over and get this guy and I bring him back to our house. Paula’s here, but she doesn’t know what’s going on.”
Wait, Paula is alive? I realize I got the story he’s telling and the story in my head confused—he has not killed the wife, he just left his house in a hazy red fog and went to get the man she cheated with. Okay, I’m back on track. Phew.
“I bring him inside and she freaks out. I mean, I was pissed, so it wasn’t pretty. His face was all busted up, I had already beat the living shit out of him. She was flipping the fuck out, calling me a psycho, telling me I was going to get us all killed.”
“Get you all killed?” I question.
“He was connected. Ran with a rival crew.”
I
nod my understanding. “Got it.”
“Now, I could hear her, but I couldn’t find it within me to care. I hauled his ass upstairs to the bathroom, shoved him in the bathtub. I went back and got her, dragged her upstairs.”
Oh shit, I hope he isn’t getting to the “then murdered her” part. I won’t jump to conclusions this time, but I’m struggling to see a way this story ends without someone being murdered.
“I cuffed her to the towel rack on the wall by the sink. I didn’t have the house set up the way I do now, so I didn’t have the bars. Towel rack had to suffice.” He pauses, glancing at me briefly, but then turning his attention back to the bedding, like he can’t look at me for this next part. “I chained her there and made her watch while I bludgeoned him to death in our bathtub. The whole time she’s screaming bloody murder, begging me to stop, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Not until he was dead.”
Wow. This is pretty fucking intense.
“She knew what I did for a living, that I did dirty work for the Morelli family, but she had never seen it with her own two eyes. She’d never seen me like that. It horrified her, understandably. She was screaming and crying, telling me not to touch her, that I was a monster.”
I flinch, remembering when I called him a monster before I fled Vegas.
“I knew she wasn’t going to stay after that. She was terrified of me at first, then when she realized I wasn’t going to kill her too, it all turned to hatred. She fucking hated me. The sane thing to do at this point, I realize, would have been to let her go. Let it end, let her get away from me.”
Grimacing, I say, “I take it that’s not what happened.”
“That is not what happened,” he verifies. “I convinced myself that with the other asshole gone, we could come back from what happened. The cheating, killing that motherfucker, the pregnancy. We had always planned to have a family one day. It wasn’t the way I pictured it, obviously, but I still loved her even after all that. Or, I convinced myself I did, anyway. Looking back, I don’t know if I can call that love. Anyway, I installed shit all over the house so I could keep her here, whether she wanted to be here or not. For a while, I had to keep her locked up a lot of the time.”
