Complicated: A Tainted Love Novella (7 page)

As I stare off through her window, silent tears trailing down my face, I wonder if she is safe…alive. I send up a silent prayer, hoping against all hope that she is and that she comes back to us soon.

Her birthday is in two days. What a gift that would be.

Rachel

I
heard the soft sobs drifting into my room and the sound was like a swift kick to the gut. Not until this horrible situation had I ever heard a man cry. It took the captivity of blinding light to plunge these very manly men, and myself, into utter darkness. The only sliver of light I have seen has come through being with Marshall again, but the pain is still there. The gaping hole left by Delilah’s absence is impossible to not notice, and being in this apartment again without her here makes my heart ache more than I can describe with mere words.

I hate hearing Marshall cry, but I can’t stop my own tears either as the reality of the situation sinks in. It’s been two days and no Delilah. The tears we all cry now are tears of desperation. We miss her, we’re scared, and we’re helpless but not hopeless. We need some good fortune, a shift in the atmosphere or something. We cry because we need our girl back; and as time slips by, so does she.

As a child, my father would always tell me that a crying man was a weak man. My mother would tell me that a crying woman was a fool. Both of them detested emotional displays due to their collagen-injected demeanor. Everything was always plastic with them. Fake. Stepford. I never did quite fit into their plastic bubble and I’m glad I never did.

When I was five, I fell off my bike and scraped my knee. I went crying to my mother who had been drinking in the sitting room and flipping through a Cosmo. I’d thought for sure she would have scooped me in her arms and tended to my wounds, but as soon as I neared her, she shrieked and plucked me by the collar and moved me away from her. She called one of my many nannies, Bernadette, to take care of the “situation”.

As we stepped out to the foyer, I saw my father and I shook out of Bernie’s arms and bounded to him. When he saw the tears streaming down my face, he stooped and became eye level with me. I thought I saw a smile, but I was proven wrong when he said, “Crying is for wimps, Rachel. Stop your sniveling and patch yourself up.”

I stopped crying immediately. Bernie took me to the kitchen, cleaned my cuts, dried my tears and gave me ice cream before kissing me on the head. That evening, I swore that I would never cry again and I didn’t. It wasn’t until I met Delilah that I started feeling again. I know I should create some distance between Marshall and me, but I can’t help myself.

My feet carry me out of the emotional safety of my bedroom, and closer and closer to the sobbing man. As if his despair calls out to me. I step into Delilah’s room and a grand sense of loss, coupled with the broken man hanging his head low, causes my knees to buckle. Like calls to like, and Marshall’s broken heart calls to my own. I want to give him something to take his mind –
our
mind – off of our mutual loss. It’s selfish of me, knowing this will never be anything more than our bodies connecting, but I begin to strip out of my clothes, pulling my blouse over my head.

Marshall hears the shuffling and his head snaps up from its prone position and pools of sorrow greet me. It halts my movements, my blouse dangling from my fingertips, as we silently communicate with our eyes, blue locked on brown.

“What are you doing, Rachel?”

“I’m making us both feel something other than despair.”

“Rachel…”

“No, no more talking.”

I step toward him, my movements slow, but determined. Stopping in front of him, I pause, allowing him to make the next move; to show me if he wants this too. My rapidly pulsing heart lurches to my throat when his hand makes contact with my hip and he pulls me into him. His other hand snakes up my leg until he reaches my hip, where he grips me tightly and buries his tear-stained face into my stomach.

For a moment, a frisson of panic rises, until I remember that there is no baby there and he didn’t know that there had ever been one. Panic morphs into relief and relief morphs into desire as Marshall nips the skin of my waist. I shiver from the contact, my fingers finding their way into his hair. The soft tresses are like a calm to my raging heartbeat, but the feel of his warm wet tongue on my skin also sets me ablaze.

A feverish moan leaves my lips and I grip his hair tighter, trying to hang on, as my legs begin to shake from the overload of pleasure from his simple touches alone. He pops the button on my jeans and slides the zipper down before pulling them down. Marshall looks up at me, all traces of sadness gone, now replaced by strong currents of desire, as he slides the material down.

My jeans make a slow, tantalizing trek over the curve of my ass, down my hips and legs, before they reach my ankles and I step out of them. The look I see in Marshall’s eyes causes me to swallow hard. It’s a look of hunger; it’s one that I relish. Without waiting he strips my panties down my legs and off. It’s almost unfair that I am completely naked and he is still clothed, but Marshall in a suit still has the same effect on me as Marshall butt-naked. He is a sexy specimen of man, clothed or not.

Spreading my legs, Marshall stares in wonder at my cleft, his hungry gaze making warmth flow through my stomach and wetness to seep between my thighs. I need him to touch me there, but this moment is so intense, so charged that I just might combust from his ravenous regard of my sex alone.

Marshall licks his lips and it is the only warning I get before he buries his mouth into my opening, poking his tongue out to find my needy clit. The touch is electric, pleasurable jolts racking through my body triggering uncontrollable shivers. To find purchase, I grab on to Marshall’s hair while he grabs my leg and throws it over his shoulder. He opens me up even further, licking, sucking, nipping…devouring.

His satisfied moans mixed with my keening ones fill the room, his ministrations prompting a crescendo that begins to grow in my abdomen. When Marshall inserts two fingers inside me, I simply detonate, screaming his name loudly and repeatedly as I grip his hair with a force meant to rip the captured strands from their roots.

I find myself on the bed, somehow, with a naked Marshall looming over me. Space and time must have short-circuited at some point and I’ve missed a few minutes of reality. Marshall stares at me, his eyes piercing and scorching me with their heat. He leans down and claims my lips in a bruising, synapse-frying kiss and when he pulls away, I know he took a part of me with that kiss. As I feel my lips tingle, I know I took a part of him too.

“I’m going to fuck you, Rachel,” Marshall rumbles, his voice clogged with desire, sending tingles right down my shivering spine to my clenched toes. “And we’re going to forget…about everything. Nothing else matters but us. Nothing else matters but this moment.”

I nod my head frantically, unable to utter a word, lest I weep. We both need this.

Marshall eases his throbbing shaft into me slowly, my moist depth accepting him. Having him inside me makes me feel whole, righted, restored. Everything disappears – all our problems, all our hang ups – and as Marshall said, nothing else matters but us and this moment.

He drives into me with much more force, setting off a series of muttered curses and passionate epithets that rip from my throat in a cloud of vocalized gratification. His movements are slow, but powerful, meaningful. In this moment I feel more than desired, I feel loved and cherished. This is not going the way I want it, but damn if I can do anything but enjoy it.

“Fuck, Rae,” Marshall groans when I clench my vaginal muscles. “It’s always so good, so fucking good.”

I whimper at his worshipful words, raking my nails down his back. I accept his owning of my body, his owning of my pleasure, because I own him as well. Try as I might to deny the pull, to deny what I’ve known since I was sixteen years old, I can’t. This man is the other half of me. Too bad I won’t allow this to go any further.

“Jesus, your pussy is so warm and wet,” he mutters. “My cock is sliding in and out so easily. I bet no man has ever made you drip like this.”

I bite my lip not wanting to confirm what he already knows is true. Instead, I bring my hand up to his neck and lower his head to mine so our lips can touch. No more words is what I wish to accomplish with that move. His words have always been my undoing, and I refuse to give into the feelings his words now try to elicit in me. His touch is already driving me crazy, adding words will only add to my madness.

We kiss and I feel like weeping. We’re making love, not fucking, and it causes the walls around my heart to crack further. Marshall picks up his pace and I feel the slow tendrils of an orgasm curl their way into my belly. He pounds, unrelenting, breaking our kiss to accommodate breathing. He moans and groans, calling my name after erotic expletives. The climax slams into me at full force when he pinches my nipples and twists them hard.

I see stars when I splinter apart, screaming until my voice is raw. Pieces of me are flung into the Earth’s atmosphere as pleasure radiates through me. As he stares down at me, getting lost on my peak of ecstasy, Marshall keeps up his unrelenting thrusts until he finds his own cathartic release.

“Beautiful,” he whispers, just before he groans and his body jerks, a warm stream of semen spurting inside me.

He grinds into my core for about a minute, rubbing out the remnants of his orgasm, never taking his eyes off mine. I feel incredibly stripped and laid bare, but I can’t seem to turn away from his intense orbs; eyes that seem to see into my soul and perceive every single truth I hide. My body is racked with spasms as I come down from the sexual oblivion that Marshall has just shot me to.

He’s right, no man has ever made me feel like this. No one.

As we lie on Delilah’s messy bed wrapped around each other like entwined vines of lust, our breathing becomes steadier, sleep no doubt creeping in to claim us like a burglar. I drift off from the soft, lulling breathing of Marshall, only to be awakened by his quiet but rumbling voice.

“What happened all those years ago?” Marshall asks me. I stiffen, but I don’t respond, trying to pretend as if I’m still asleep so he lets it go.

No such luck. He untangles himself from me and I close my eyes, hoping he thinks I’m deep in slumber; but I hear him chuckle instead.

“I just felt your body go rigid, Rae, I know you’re not sleeping.” I open my squeezed-tightly-shut eyes to see Marshall staring at me expectantly.

The small smile he had been sporting fades, as a look of melancholy replaces it. “What happened to us, Rachel? What made you change? What had I done? What didn’t I do?”

The pain in his voice brings the memory of my real life pain back in seamless waves. Had it just been seven years since the procedure, the thing that unequivocally changed things between Marshall and I? He deserves to know. He deserves to know my wicked deed so he can take me off of the pedestal he put me on in his heart, so he can stop loving me.

But the thought cripples me and lies spew out instead, “I wanted to live. I didn’t want to be tied down, not yet. I was seventeen and already living like a married woman with two point five kids and no social life. I wanted more.”

My lies are like a slap to his face. I see it the moment the words connect to his cheek, to his heart. The shock of what I’ve said causes his features to slacken and become devoid of color. The truth, however, would have been worse. It doesn’t stop me from wishing it were the truth that came out of my mouth, though. I hurt him, the one thing I hated doing.

He nods infinitesimally, a look of understanding painting his handsome face. “I get it,” he says. “I knew I was holding you back, especially with us having to hide our relationship. I guess it was too soon to want a commitment out of you.” He lies back on the bed and gathers me to his side.