by Liz K. Lorde
Worn out and spent, we cuddled and cleaned each other, the candle lights flicking and the fountain’s water pouring steady into the pool.
The last thing that I heard as I closed my eyes was the sound of his beating heart.
Chapter 18
Jane
I woke up in Michael’s naked embrace, listening to him snore; I’d never thought that something like that could be adorable, but it kind of tickled me hearing him make those noises. His body being near me filled me with a special kind of warmth; one that cloaked in me a strong, good feeling. One that I didn’t want to lose.
The spot between my legs was still delightfully sore with the attention that he’d given me. My head and heart were starting to race, because even though I could scarcely believe it, I’d just given myself to someone.
Completely.
There was a need then, to get up and make some space. Biting restlessness was working through me. Carefully removing myself from Michael’s grasp, I casually loved the way in which he tried to hold on to me. Even in his sleep he didn’t want to let me go.
There was something genuine about that.
Squirming off the bed, I picked my still naked body from the bed and put my clothes back on. For a second, I could have sworn that I had to sneeze, but I pushed it back down. I turned my head and gave Michael a longing look, before rounding to the other side of the bed. There was an end table and a black vase standing atop of it, with one flower that I recognized.
One of those Blood Roses in which he spoke. Pressure started to build in my nose again.
Padding over to the rose, I admired it briefly, then took it from the vase and smelled it; the beautiful floral scent filled me, and I went to place it back inside of the vase - that was when I felt my sinuses act up, and I sneezed hard, knocking the vase from it’s table.
It crashed against the floor between the bed and the stand, making me gasp sharply. Shit. Shit, shit shit. Water and shards of the vase scattered along the floor. There was something else, too, that I heard. Something metallic clattered.
Not shocking that Michael could sleep through such a thing after the fun that we’d had. Dipping downwards, I made sure to move away from the glass and water, getting onto my knees and looking for what made that noise. Through the moonlit darkness, I saw something small with a dull glimmer.
That’s a key.
Raising my head back up, I looked to check if Michael had woken up yet. He was still soundly asleep, mumbling something unintelligible in his slumber. Bringing myself back down underneath the bed, I crawled far enough that my back was half obscured by the bedding, stretching a hand out for the key.
After having retrieved it, I got to my knees and looked down at it, mentally promising myself that I’d come back and clean the mess I made.
Hopefully he won’t be pissed.
Inspecting the bronze key, I noticed an engraving on it reading MH.
Morganna Hamilton.
I held the key in my hand and moved to Michael’s side, pushing on him gently to try and wake him up, whispering his name. But he wouldn’t wake.
Damn him.
Pocketing the key, I decided to leave the room, off to explore where it might go. Not like he was waking up right now anyway; the restlessness and senses of curiosity were wracking my brain. There was one place in particular that I remembered seeing. Some red door that caught my attention the previous times I was within the estate.
Making my way through the lonely corridors of his mansion, I passed by a few of the guest rooms, until finally coming across the the amaretto face of the door. I stared at it for what seemed like quite a while, contemplating if I should try and use the key on it or not. Or if I should wait.
Curiosity got the better of me.
Jamming the key inside of the lock, I felt my heart turn with the key. Was this okay? I felt like maybe I was snooping.
But I couldn’t sleep. And I wanted to know everything about the man.
None of this felt like pretend anymore, and when the lock clicked in agreement, I descended into the darkness of the forbidden room. Taking a few steps down the stairs, I reached my hand out to the wall, looking for a switch.
Nothing, save for the cold wall.
I shifted where I was standing, fumbling a bit through the blackness, moving my other hand to the opposite wall and feeling around some more. Heartbeats later, and I feel the switch against my palm, moving my thumb to it and flicking it upwards.
The room came to life and white light painted every corner from the multiple circular lights above. The room was painted a striking yellow ochre, and there was a desk up against the wall with papers. Some were neatly stacked, others being scattered haphazardly.
Moving down the last steps, I padded over to the old desk languidly. There was a raven’s quill on it’s surface, and a petite jar of jet black ink just resting there. It wasn’t so easy to see, but there were these red, smudged stains here and there along the surface of the desk. I ran a finger against one of them, feeling what I presumed to be dried blood.
There was a sense of unease dwelling in me now, and I wasn’t certain if I should be looking through these things. Still, I pushed onwards, looking through the stacks of papers, combing over the notes, blinking the dryness from my sleepy eyes. I sat down in the wooden chair with it’s stitching of White Wake-Robins and scooted closer, flipping through the notes. They were letters that the two had sent each other in the past.
Some were poems that he had written for her, depicting a tree. A noose. The love fading from her sad, sweet eyes and burning up his heart, giving him a cold, obsidian stone in his chest.
My heart ached and fluttered as I went through these things, telling myself to stop every time my eyes stung and threatened tears. These were little pieces of his soul on display. Private thoughts and feelings spilled onto the pages, from the most closed off parts of his head and heart. Just as I was telling myself to stop, I practically jumped from my skin when I heard a loud thump on the stairs behind me. The breath in my chest left me hot, and I whipped around, feeling paralyzed with a sense of fear and dread.
Michael took another step down the stairs, almost completely naked, save for his gray boxers. He was looking at me with icy fury, and a dangerous appraisal for what I was doing. “How did you get down here?” He asked, a certain angry snap to his cadence. “...I don’t let anyone down here,” he went down the last step.
“I’m, I’m sorry,” I expressed, getting up from the chair, still not ready to move an inch. There was a part of me that wanted to hold him, hold him tightly in my arms. But being so real with someone was something that I hadn’t been used to.
Was something I thought that I could never do.
I pushed back some strands of my combative hair. “I couldn’t sleep,” I told him truthfully. “And I hadn’t planned on doing anything, really. I uhm, I knocked over a vase.”
Michael moved closer to me, his lips pressed to a hard edge. “You’re a klutz, you know that?” He said it half joking, half mad. But he put his arms at my waist, and I didn’t recoil. “You should have asked me before doing this,” he growled, trying to contain his anger.
“Please don’t be mad,” I put my hands on him in return to his gesture. “I just, I wanted to know everything about you,” I told him.
“How much did you read?”
“More than I should have,” I said quietly. “Not everything was clear, but, well. I saw that you wrote some very dark--” I brought my eyes to the floor, my heart hurting over this, “poetry over her.”
Michael grabbed my chin and lifted me up, so that I could look up to him. “I haven’t told anyone, excepts for Mags and Josh,” he confided, “but they’re family. More family than my Father, for sure,” he continued. “Tim knows about her, but not what happened exactly.”
“Who is he? The one you were telling me about?”
“Yes. The only man I can trust and call my best friend.” He sucked in a breath through his nose, movin
g his hands to the small of my back and bringing me in to his embrace. “Morganna was painfully beautiful, in every little way. The kind of way that would make you stay up at night and think of her. Her moods were like the sea against stone,” he whispered in my ear, “and she suffered from a haunting melancholy.”
I pulled him in tighter against me, aware of his cock beginning to get hard from the closeness that we shared.
“Her pain, and her sadness - her hints of madness, they were everything to me. You had to take Morganna with the bad and the good, because you didn’t want anything else.” Michael brought his hand up to the back of my head and grabbed at my hair, running his rough fingers against my scalp. It was a simple and good gesture, making heat blossom in me.
“But sometimes it doesn’t matter how much love you pour into another soul,” the words came like bitter ashes from his lips. “The sadness ate away at her. More than I could even see. That private dance with her many demons.” He held me tighter, trying to erase both of our respective miseries with the embrace. “I don’t want you to leave tonight.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I purred back to him with patience and understanding. “I know that you loved her,” I told him, “and that’s admirable. But you have to go on,” I caressed his back assuringly. “You can’t let yourself be eaten up by the past. You can remember it. Hopefully learn something from it.”
Michael picked me up suddenly, taking me in his arms, having me wrap my legs around his waist. Rushes of heat filled my body, and this beautiful electricity raked fingers across my brain. Being around him was suddenly becoming an addiction.
Or maybe, I was always addicted.
Taken by his romantic, lustful gesture, I was the first to lean in to his kiss, tasting him long and deep; trying to heal the wounds of his heart and mind. He slipped some tongue in, and I sucked in kind, tasting his sweet saliva. Breaking free from the kiss, I put my hand to the back of his head, feeling the luscious soft hair between my fingers.
The words were already hot in my mouth, coming out in a choke of emotion. “I was raped, Michael.”
His eyes widened some in acknowledgement, the whole mood between us shifting to a grave tone. His pleading eyes asked me to continue, so I did: “It was back in Seattle when I was just sixteen,” I told him, getting off of him and pulling him down to the floor to cuddle.
It was god damn cold, but his body heat helped a bit. “Before he...” the words didn’t want to come, “did what he did. We were best friends. We went to the same school, went to the same house parties, and on weekends we’d sleep over at his place. I remember how his well-off father used to chew mint leaves. He picked that up from him. For a long, long time, I trusted Carter. Felt safe around him,” Michael grabbed my hand harder to comfort me.
“We would stay up late and play Sonic The Hedgehog 2. Read each other’s favorite books,” I gave a bitter, hurt snicker. “Got him to read Wuthering Heights. Or at least he told me that he did.”
“I’m so sorry,” Michael offered, placing a kiss on the back of my hand. “I’m not so great at the whole, being there for people thing. Anymore at least.”
“You’re listening,” I replied. He’s amazing, and I can’t even believe that he’s real right now. “Well one night he tried something with me while we were both tired and in bed. He put a hand down my pants and grabbed me--”
“Your pussy,” he answered for me frankly.
I just nodded with guilt and embarrassment and shame. He put a hand to my cheek and forced me to look at him tenderly. “Well I freaked out a bit, I mean my parents were always really strict and they’re devout Catholics. So I jumped out of bed and told him that I didn’t see him like that, at least, not at that point.” I swept a hand through my hair and let out a frustrated, feminine growl. “I trusted him, I trusted that he wouldn’t do something like that to me. We hadn’t even kissed, and, and we were so young,” I was starting to speak faster now, my heart hammering in my chest at the memories.
It was all flooding back to me in a roaring storm of thoughts and feelings and repressed shit that muddied the waters of my very soul. “He got up from the bed, and I could see his erection.” Michael gave me a look as if to suppose, that he was surprised I didn’t feel it. And I honestly hadn’t. “It was pressing against his jeans. For what felt like forever, when I backed up against the Diablo poster in his room, he didn’t move against me. He told me ‘I know you want it. Don’t be such a tease, it’s just a fucking hand.’”
That was when the tremors started in my wrists, both in memory and in this very moment. “I told him that I wasn’t okay with what he did. That I wasn’t even close to ready for something like that. When I told him that, when I felt the air needle at my lungs, he moved to me like the quickness. I barely even had time to register what was happening. He pushed me up against that wall, and he leaned in close. Could smell his minty breath - still can’t deal with that - on my face.”
“He forced a kiss on me, and I shoved at his chest. I told him no, and I told him again. When he didn’t stop, I went to knee his groin while I squirmed; but he struggled with me and moved out of the way. It only made things worse,” I whispered, “so much worse fighting--”
“Take it slow.”
“He smacked me so hard with the back of his hand that I saw stars. Felt dizzy. Hell, I nearly fell to the floor after he struck me like that. I screamed out in pain, just, ready to start crying and shouting from the top of my lungs. But his parent’s had started to trust us, so they’d left to get some groceries.” I licked my drying lips, wanting to smash my head up against the wall for telling this stupid story. I could still remember what they brought home. A gallon of milk, eggs, two packs of smokes, and some hamburger helper. “He yanked my clothes off, and before I knew it, my panties were torn up. Turned me around... and shoved me hard against the wall, and I - I couldn’t - I was disgusted at myself.”
“Don’t you ever dare feel that way,” Michael interrupted. “Nothing that day was your fault.”
“I was wet. Not a lot. But enough for him to think that it was suddenly okay to just be doing that. To be raping me,” the last words came out in a broken cadence, the hot tears welling in my eyes now, the anger filling my cheeks and soaking my bones. “He shoved himself inside of me, telling me how tight I was. Informing me how wet I was for him. How badly I needed it. I could tell you every fucked up little line, every way that his sick breath caught when he pumped into me; how I could smell the sweat on him. How he came inside of me.” Those last words made me shut up. Freeze up.
Suddenly I was back in that moment. Wanting to be as catatonic as I had been that terrible day. I shut my eyes and the tears slipped from them, falling down, down down. It was hard for me to tell in that surreal moment how long I was crying, how long my nose had been running, and my chest heaving.
But when Michael wiped away those tears, when he pulled me so hard against him that the world vanished around us. When I smelled his manly scent and drank in all that he was; it was like a ray of morning light cutting through the harrowing mist.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him how I had to hide my own abortion and leave for Chaos not but a year later.
That would be for another night.
Chapter 19
Michael
I’d spent the rest of last night consoling Jane, and I wouldn’t have traded a single damn second. But after having breakfast in the nook with her and sending her off to work, the anger was still pumping through my veins.
I wanted to take that man’s life for hurting her like he did. The strength that it took for her to bloom into the woman that I see her, well, that was something special. Even if she hadn’t overcome all of those tragedies, she came out like a burning star that I couldn’t pull myself from.
After letting Joshua go back to sleep for a few hours, knowing that he’s prone to staying up late into the wee hours, I cleaned up my mess and checked outside for mail.
Tied in green and re
d gift wrap, with bow-ties and duct tape strapped over their respective mouths, were Romero and Felix. My pulse quickened at the sight of the bruises on their body.
Ligotti wasn’t making this shit easy on me.
***
After hearing how some, apparently Irish, mafioso single handedly disarmed and beat down my men, I had to go and see Rebbecca.
With my father going behind me back like that, I couldn’t forgive him. He was taking this all too far, and he was clearly a fucking sociopath.
Jane was helping me realize that.
The thought of her was like a cool breeze on my heated mind. She brought me this unreal serenity, this vivacious fire.
Parking just outside the Wahlberg Projects on Wahlberg street, I stepped out of my black Lincoln town car, the one that I used to go to rougher parts of the neighborhood. The bustle of Chaos couldn’t be evaded, especially so in the proverbial hood. The two brick project towers were well over 100ft tall, jutting out from the ground in a rust color. They were cracked in places, tagged by local punks looking to make something crude; more complicated graffiti murals were done by local gangs.
Rebbecca lived in the equivalent of a raging dumpster fire, honestly. I walked through the parched, yellow grass that made up the fields on the way to her place. The place was haphazardly cut, only occasionally maintained by the city. Now and again, my foot would find dirt, or ant hills. Worse so was the used condoms and needles and cracked little soldiers of glass, having once contained crack and the likes of that poisonous shit.
Still, I made my way through the filth ridden slums of Wahlberg, witnessing residents far above me hanging laundry out of the window. AC’s ran furiously at all times, humming along to their own various tunes. Coming from around the corner of the neighboring tower, a gaggle of black kids, young and old, made their way through the field moving opposite of me. They chewed on gum; some sipped on what had to be 40’s hidden in a brown bottle. Two of the older ones with longer hair, dressed up in white shirts and baggy black pants, they looked over the shoulder of one of the guy’s hanging out towards the back of the group.
