Forget Me Not

by Tyler, Q. B.

  “Me too.”

  “Do it now,” he grits out and while he can’t make me come on command, he does know when I’m close and uses that to his advantage. “Milk my cock, Olivia. I need you to come and for the juice from your sexy fucking cunt to drip down my cock.”

  I fucking lose it.

  I come so hard for a second I’m not sure I’m even conscious as I slip into what feels like a dark abyss. I can only feel the pleasure between my legs that seems to go on and on. It’s hot between my legs, the flesh wet and slick as his cock slips out of my pussy. I watch in fascination as cum drips from the tip onto the floor and I clench at the sexiness of our fucking.

  His pants are still around his ankles as he boxes me against the wall, one arm on either side of me. “God, I love you.” His nose rubs against mine and I sigh as his lips ghost over mine.

  A thought floats across my mind now that the fog of the sex high has lifted slightly and my buzz is lessening and a giggle escapes my lips.

  He runs a hand through his hair, pushing it back and shoots me a grin before tucking his dick back into his pants. “What’s so funny?”

  “I was just thinking,” I whisper, “Amanda didn’t argue with any parts of your story.”

  He freezes and kneels back in front of me to help me into my panties. He leans forward in an attempt to kiss my pussy again and I put my hands on his shoulders stopping him. “I’m just surprised…I mean, clearly you nailed what happened between you guys. I’m just shocked she didn’t call your bluff?”

  He doesn’t look at me, just straightens my dress before he stands up. “Olivia, she needed to go and I did what I had to do to get rid of her, alright?” He tucks a hair behind my ear and kisses my lips gently.

  I pull back slightly, not wanting to get wrapped up in kissing him. “That…doesn’t exactly answer my question.” I bite my lip and it’s almost as if my mind is screaming at me to connect the dots faster. “Clarke, you had a number. Did Wren tell you it had only been three times? I mean if it were more, she would have called you out on that. It’s like as soon as you pretended you had your memory back, she backed off.” I smooth my dress down and pull my hair over my shoulder, knowing I’m going to definitely put my hair up as soon as we step out of this stall.

  He doesn’t say anything again and his silence is starting to trouble me. “Why aren’t you saying anything?” I ask him.

  “Olivia…I just…” He clears his throat, pushing his hands into his pockets as he looks away from me. “I wanted her to leave us alone.”

  “Bennett…” My brows furrow as the words sit on the tip of my tongue. Tears are building in my chest as I prepare myself to speak the words that will change everything.

  He wouldn’t.

  There’s no way.

  “Do you…remember?” I shake my head. “Being with her? Being away from…me?”

  Fuck.

  I knew things were going to get messy the second I lost my shit with Amanda. I just needed her to go away permanently and the only way to do that was to allude that I remembered and to call her on all the bullshit she’d been spewing at Olivia. She wouldn’t refute it once I spoke the truth, and I was hoping her silence was enough to corroborate what I was saying. Olivia needed to know we weren’t more. We could have never been more. She needed to know I never told her I loved her, that we were nothing more than a few drunken hookups spurred on by losing the love of my life.

  But I’d gone too far. I’d gotten too specific and now my very teary eyed wife is putting together the truth.

  That once again, I’ve deceived her.

  “Bennett…” She bites her lip to prevent herself from crying but I watch as a tear escapes and trickles down her face.

  “Livi.” I breathe her name out, like a plea. “Maybe we should go home and talk?” I know she hears the guilt in my voice, I’m just hoping she lets me take her home before she realizes just how guilty I am.

  “No.” She swallows and I know she’s crossing over from sadness into anger as my avoidance is confirming what I know to be her question. “You do, don’t you? You fucking remember everything.”

  “Sweetheart.” Fuck fuck fuck.

  “Don’t you sweetheart me,” she barks. “Tell me the truth, Bennett. Now.”

  In a men’s room? “It’s complicated…baby, let me take you home.”

  “Oh my God.” It’s hard for her to move in the tiny stall, but she reaches for the door in an attempt to leave. “I have to get out of here.” I press my hand against the door, preventing her from opening it.

  “Wait.” My voice is pained and barely above a whisper.

  She spins around, her eyes full of fury. “Fuck you, Bennett,” she growls. “How. HOW?!” The tears are welling in her eyes, her hands are shaking and I note her curling them into fists. “How long? Oh my God, was this all a ploy? To get me back? Was any of this real?! Oh my God, you tricked me!” She puts a hand over her chest and I can only hope she’s not trying to shield her heart from me. “How could you do this to me? After everything?!”

  “No, Olivia…baby…it was real. All of it was real. I really did lose my memory. This wasn’t a ploy. I swear.”

  Her eyes are hard and I don’t see a trace of the woman I know loves me more than anything. “Nothing you say means anything, Bennett…I can’t trust anything you say. Now let me go.”

  “No,” I tell her, refusing to let her out of this stall. My voice is low and demanding. I press her against the door. “Listen to me.”

  Her eyes meet mine and I can see the devastation lurking behind the anger. “Please. Please just stop. You’ve hurt me so much. I can’t take anymore from you.”

  “I got my memory back a week ago,” I tell her honestly. “I swear. The night we slept together at my apartment.” I cup her face. “It’s like my body knew I was coming back to you…”

  She scoffs. “That sounds like a load of bullshit.” She pushes me back and removes my hands from her face forcefully. “Were you ever going to tell me?”

  “Yes,” I tell her immediately.

  “WHEN?” she screams. “When were you going to tell me?! When was the right time to tell me if not that exact second you figured it out?”

  “I just wanted to make sure we were solid before…”

  “And you think lying and deceiving me was the way to create something solid?”

  “I needed to make sure we could get through getting my memory back and what it would mean. You’d want to know about Amanda. We were going to have a lot to take on and…”

  “And you wanted to continue fucking me without having to deal with that,” she snaps.

  Her words are like a punch in the gut. Does she think that’s all she means to me? “You know it wasn’t about that.”

  “Oh really? Because that’s not what this was?” She points around the stall and between us.

  “No. Baby, you know there’s so much more to us than sex. I’ve loved reconnecting with you this week and—”

  “But that’s the thing! That wasn’t us reconnecting! Reconnecting is working through the pain of the past six months, which we haven’t done! I’ve been forced to put that into a box because you couldn’t remember, and you were too much of a coward to tell me because you feared what would happen if and when I had to open that box.” She points at me. “And I was so caught up in who you were that I forgot who you are now. And that’s a liar.” She spits at me. “We are so done, Bennett.”

  “No. Olivia, listen.” My hands shake at her words and I wrap my hands around her forearms, gripping her tightly. “Please.”

  She shakes her head. “The time to talk has passed. You’re only coming clean because I caught you. Who’s to say you ever would have told me?”

  “I would have!”

  “It’s easy to say that now.”

  “We’ve both had a lot to drink and you have every right to be upset…” I start as she tries to wiggle out of my grasp.

  “I have every right?!” she screams. “
How fucking dare you tell me about any rights I might have. You lied to me. Right to my face! For A WEEK. I can’t even believe we’re here again.” Her lip trembles. “Let me go, Bennett.”

  “Livi…I can’t.”

  She’s about to respond when there’s a knock on the stall door. “Everything okay in there?” the voice booms through the door. “Is she alright? I heard her say to let her go.” Olivia looks towards the door with a frown as he continues. “Ma’am, are you okay in there? I can get security for you.”

  “Back the fuck off,” I growl at the door. “I’m her husband and she’s fine.”

  “Frankly pal, that doesn’t mean shit. Ma’am, say something please so I know you’re alright.”

  She lets out a shaky breath, knowing she’s far from alright but having to pretend that she is so that I’m not potentially at risk of people thinking I’ve physically hurt my drunk and emotional wife. “I’m okay. We’ll be out in a second.” Her nostrils flare and she squeezes her eyes shut. “Thank you,” she whispers. “It’s nice to know there are still good men out there.” Her eyes flash to mine angrily and the words are like a pierce to my heart.

  “Alright.” I can tell his hand hits the stall and then I hear him walking away and the door opens allowing a cacophony of sounds to blast through the room.

  By the grace of God, I convince Olivia to let me take her home. Olivia hates riding in Ubers or taxis late at night by herself, and despite her anger, she knows she’s drunk and doesn’t want to be out alone with her sense of awareness drastically lower. Wren and Alyssa had long since texted us while we were fucking in the bathroom, that they were calling it a night and had left. Which also worked in my favor because the last thing I needed was to add Alyssa Hamilton into the mix.

  Olivia is silent as we leave the Upper East Side and cross back to our side of town. She’s staring out the window, and I stare at her for most of the time. I reach for her hand, and although she whimpers uncomfortably, she doesn’t pull away. She doesn’t look at me either, but I’m counting the minor contact as a small win.

  “Excuse me,” she says softly and my head snaps up from staring at our hands to see she’s talking to our Uber driver. “It’s actually going to be two stops.”

  “No. It’s not,” I say immediately and she glares at me.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I’m her husband,” I inform the driver whose eyes are now trained on me through the rearview mirror.

  “Stop calling yourself that,” she snaps and now it’s my turn to glare at her.

  “I am. Just because you’re angry, it doesn’t change the law, now stop being childish.” I know my eyes are angry at this point, the thought of her denying me that title making me almost irate.

  “Fuck you,” she bites out and when I look back towards the driver, I catch him rolling his eyes, realizing that we are clearly just having a fight.

  When we pull to the front of our building, she doesn’t wait for me to get out to open her door before she’s on the move. I’m behind her instantly, my hand at the small of her back, guiding her. We move through the lobby, without a word to the concierge who gives us a polite nod and a warm smile.

  The elevator is so tense the air between us is almost stifling. Olivia won’t meet my eyes as she keeps hers trained on the floor. “Olivia. Baby, look at me,” I tell her and she puts a hand up, shaking her head.

  I follow her out of the elevator, towards our apartment and once we’re safely inside, I try and talk to her again. “Livi.”

  She kicks her shoes off, flinging them as if she has doesn’t have a care as to where they land and walks toward the kitchen. She opens the refrigerator and stares inside as if she’s trying to figure out what to eat, and I move to the other side to look at her. “Are you hungry? I can make you whatever you want? Or I can order something?”

  She closes the door and glares at me. “I need you to leave. Go to Wren’s. Go to your mother’s. I don’t care. I don’t want you here,” she tells me. My apartment is already in the process of being sublet, so I can’t go back there, not that I had any intentions of leaving tonight.

  “No, Olivia we need to talk tomorrow when we are both sober.”

  “I’m plenty sober, Bennett.” She turns her back, walking towards her bedroom and I follow her. We’d been sleeping mostly in our old bedroom, and I hate the thought that she wants to sleep away from me tonight.

  “Do not follow me,” she growls over her shoulder before slamming the door in my face. I open it anyway and move inside as she pulls her dress off over her head. “Go away, Bennett, I don’t want to see you or talk to you or even be near you right now.” She’s not yelling or crying and frankly, I wish she was having a more passionate response. This quiet, cold indifference is worse.

  “Well, I need to be near you.”

  She snorts. “And it’s always about you and your needs, right? Never mind, that I didn’t even fucking want you here in the first place. I knew you’d bulldoze over me. I knew you’d break me down.” She pulls one of her t-shirts on and a pair of leggings before moving past me and towards the bathroom. “I just didn’t know you’d break my heart again in the process.”

  I drop to her bed, digging the heel of my palm into my eye as I think about her words. I pull my shoes off, tossing them with more force than I intend into the corner of the room. I yank off my jacket and begin unbuttoning my shirt as the water begins to run in the bathroom.

  I grab my phone and pull up my texts with Wren.

  Me: You were right and now Olivia knows. I fucked everything up.

  Wren: Where are you guys?

  Me: Home. She’s pissed.

  Wren: You need a place to crash?

  Me: God, I hope not. I need to talk to her. I can’t lose her again, Wren. I won’t survive it next time.

  Wren: Tell her that. Make her listen. Grovel.

  I’m putting my phone on the nightstand when Olivia comes back into the room. Her face is free from makeup and her hair is piled into a bun on the top of her head. She blinks her eyes several times and shakes her head. “You’ve lost your mind if you think you’re sleeping in here.” I had hoped that seeing me shirtless might tip the scale in my favor but she practically looks through me as she makes her way to her side of the bed. “Get out.”

  “Olivia.”

  “OUT!” she screams as she points at the door. She climbs into bed and turns the light off on the nightstand before lying down with her back to me. “Go. I mean it.”

  My shoulders sag and my head lowers in defeat. “I love you,” I murmur as I back out of the door slowly. “I’ve never stopped loving you.”

  “Why the fuck did you let it come to that?” Wren barks into the phone. It’s rounding two-thirty, and I’m not all that surprised he’s still awake. He’s always a night owl, and I’m sure he fucked Alyssa to sleep and is now sitting up watching Sports Center while eating cold pizza. I’m pacing the length of the living room, too keyed up to sleep and worried about what the morning will bring.

  “I needed Amanda to just…go. And I wanted Olivia to be a witness to it.”

  “And that’s all well and good, but you should have told Olivia the truth FIRST. You ratted yourself out!”

  “In hindsight, it wasn’t my best move, but I was drunk and having to deal with my ex-mistress while my drunk and horny wife who I’d just fingered on the dance floor was standing next to me, excuse me for not thinking clearly.”

  “Jesus, B, keeping my wife from killing you is becoming a full time job. Can you imagine what’s going to happen when Olivia gets her on the phone?”

  “That is the fucking least of my worries.”

  “Well, it’s the top of mine. You make it really hard to stay your goddamn friend sometimes.”

  Fury spikes in my veins. I’m not prepared to lose my wife and my best friend in the same night. I don’t want to lose either, but both may actually kill me. “Fuck you, Wren, I don’t need this shit from you.”

  “And Ol
ivia doesn’t need this shit from you. You destroyed that girl. She was already struggling with trusting you and you think this makes it easier? You know Olivia loves you. Nothing will change that. But if she can’t trust you…” He trails off. “She’s not going to be with a man she can’t trust, you should know her better than that.”

  “She can! I just…I needed more time.”

  “With her pussy? Because that’s what it seems like you’ve been doing the last week.”

  “No! With her. With Olivia…I just missed her.”

  “And you think she hasn’t missed you? But you weren’t being fair to her. You got to see her but she couldn’t see you.”

  I’m silent as his words sink in. I drop to the couch. “She thinks I made the whole thing up to get her back. Well, maybe she doesn’t anymore, but she thought I did.”

  “You don’t exactly have a track record of transparency,” he says. “Of course she thinks this was all a ruse.”

  “It wasn’t man, I swear.”

  “I believe that. But I believe I also told you, memory loss usually comes back in a few weeks. I was expecting this to be honest. Of course, I thought you’d tell her the second it happened.”

  “I just…I knew the second I told her, it would change everything. What if…what if at that point, when we started working through everything she realized she didn’t want me anymore?”

  “But how is it fair for you to deny me that choice?” Her voice washes over me and I look up to find Olivia standing across the room, her eyes full of tears. Her body language shows me she has her guard all the way up and when I stand up she immediately takes a step back.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I tell Wren, my eyes not leaving Olivia.

  “Be honest with her, Bennett. No bullshit,” Wren says before hanging up.