One Safe Place (24 page)

He looked up in to her wet eyes, and said, “I have many things to tell you, and none of what I have to say is about us being apart. But, there is a lot going on. Maybe because we haven't had troubles like so many others, we lost our way, but you know trouble brought us together. Maybe some struggle will remind us of what we mean to each other.”

Her tongue slid in his ear and she said, “Could we talk in the morning? Right now, I want to ride this hardness, and feel you get off inside me. I want your dick to go to war inside and make me give you my last breath. Then, my dear, I want to sleep in your arms like I haven't in a long time.”

He didn't have to answer as her hips started going up and down on his dick. She rode him in a funky-sexy-rhythm, prompted by the band Incognito with Maysa Leak singing “Beneath the Surface.” The song's intensity picked up as did Meeah, while riding her husband's hardness. The showerheads changed pattern again to short, powerful squirts. Tylowe made Meeah stand up, and turn around. She braced herself against the shower wall. With his hands holding her hips firmly, he looked down on her spread, round ass; he was rubbing his dick on the crease of her ass, watching his dick head pop through. When he stopped, a clear stream of pre-cum was attached, like a string connecting his head to her ass in the mist of the steam beading on her ass.

Tylowe moved her over to a specific spot. He reached over and
hit a button, and eight more showerheads started spraying up from the floor and sides. He angled his dick, and she felt a driving force shocking her. When Tylowe pulled out of her pussy and off her ass, just a little with each hump, several shower heads jetted long streams of hot water up and under the shaft of his dick, and on her asshole and her clit. He humped harder, trying to cum inside her. Both of them were loud, swallowing panting breaths.

He leaned his chest on her back and wrapped his arms around her stomach. He arched his feet up to his toes and humped like a wild dog, yet it was not long, deep penetration. The head of Tylowe's dick was just past her opening, rubbing on her G-spot. Meeah humped back with short, rapid thrusts. She was working on a mini orgasm when finally Tylowe held still. He let out one long grunt as his cum shot hard into Meeah. She felt a vigorous force of warm fluid inside her. The hard gush felt as if it could have shot across the room. His body followed with short, erratic, animalistic lunges.

He rested on her back; his thighs were camping a bit. She held him up as she felt his hot shot inside her flooding around his dick, and oozing out as he lost his firmness.

As the showerheads changed their spray pattern again, they finally showered.

C
ome morning, the rain was washing the windows with a deluge as Tylowe and Meeah sat up in bed. Gold-toned, heavy-thread-count sheets covered their legs. Her breasts and his chest were bared to the world—they were comfortable and at home. The mirrored ceiling over their bed reflected the two leaning on each other. The rain made the lake look blurry, and the cloudy sky seemed to be at eye level as the wind blew. A powerful wind caused whistling sounds that died down and returned in sweeping bursts. The early morning gray sky went grayer in their eyes, as if smudged with a paint brush. The night before, a beautiful sunset had met them in the living room, and had set in motion the love they had made in the shower as the last of its light disappeared.

Many events in their life had set the stage for a conversation long overdue. It was time. With so much on his mind, he hoped all he had to say to his wife would not turn into a storm all by itself.

When…just when, do you tell the person closest to you difficult things?

Missing pieces of knowledge call out for understanding, if you don't know who knows what and when. He had information to share. He had questions of his wife that included their past. Tylowe told his wife about Elliot reaching out from prison, and how he and Psalms had visited him. He recounted the part about slugging Elliot
finally, as he had wanted to many years ago. Elliot had hurt Meeah, and his own daughter, treating them badly with his perverted lifestyle and criminal activities.

• • •

In a previous life, Elliot and Meeah married because her father pressured her, for reasons she wished he would burn down in hell. In her life with Elliot, he treated her like a marble. He rolled her in and out of games, all for his own personal gain. The man drained her soul, and twisted her family. He mixed with the Russian mob, leading a criminal enterprise.

The stress of feeling trapped caused her to lose her emotional balance and disconnect her from reality for a short time. The mental breakdown allowed Elliot to take Meeah's daughter away.

Meeah regained her balance, but then she was forced to live apart from her daughter. Elliot manipulated Meeah's agony. Forced to remain married to him for the right to have some interaction with her daughter, she did what any mother would do. She bowed down to his ugliness and evil deeds to be in her daughter's life.

How did it all go bad? Elliot conned her father, an influential Caribbean artist with a sizable fortune from his art galleries and an enormous art school in Vancouver, B.C. In a well-planned blitz, Elliot gained full control of all his holdings after Meeah married Elliot and her father died.

Prior to Elliot ripping her life apart, Meeah was a model working runways all throughout the Caribbean, Canada, and Europe. She had art skills, too; she'd inherited her mom's and dad's artistic abilities, and Meeah's talent was receiving recognition.

Meeah loved her father to no end, but he was a playboy, with art groupies sucking his human ink. Her parents worked together as
a team, but not as a loving couple. Her mom loved her dad, but Dad painted many women down on vertical canvases with brush strokes of sex.

After her father passed away, Meeah met her father's other women and her other grown half-brothers and half-sisters. They emerged from all over the Caribbean, contacting her or Meeah's mom. Some came with a hand out; others just let their truth come forward.

Meeah and Elliot had a baby together, Mia. Thinking Elliot would be different from her father, Meeah eventually opened her eyes. Elliot also had other children around the world. As Elliot became increasingly verbally sadistic, she was determined not to be a fool like her mother.

Her saying no to Elliot's behavior and trying to walk away with their daughter became a nightmare. Tylowe just so happened to have walked in to her life, and woke her up the moment they met.

Before Meeah made the break from Elliot, he planted one of the ugliest seeds a man could plant in a woman's mind and between her legs. He told her he had other women because she was a bore in bed, and he'd rather make love to a dead virgin.

When Meeah met Tylowe, and she thought that he wanted to make love to her, she told him she might not be able to satisfy him. Meeah was strong, but damaged, when Tylowe met her. Tylowe, the man he was, took the time needed to listen to her. He understood for his own sake that she was the woman who could heal him. He had been living with his own version of a fractured spirit. Tylowe stepped up and took on the challenge of loving Meeah. In doing so, he found loving her and accepting her love was easy. Tylowe found her love for him to be perfect.

The challenge was the fact that Elliot and Tylowe used to be best friends. When he met Meeah for the first time, Tylowe did
not know that Elliot was her husband. It was a distressing case of déjà vu, but the tables were turned.

Tylowe and Elliot had a nasty history, like having a mouth full of vinegar and not being able to spit it out. Elliot had been one of the major factors that caused Tylowe's breakup with his fiancée over twenty years earlier. Because of that breakup, Tylowe didn't know that he had a daughter for ten years. Elliot only agreed to give up certain information to reduce his prison sentence.

Tylowe and Meeah married after all the dust settled. They raised their two girls together. Tyreene Pearlene, was Tylowe's daughter by his ex-fiancée. The ex-fiancée had passed away before he found out about his daughter. Other people were raising her, but they had hoped one day Tylowe would find out and come for her.

The girls were grown now, living healthy, productive lives, leaving Tylowe and Meeah alone with each other, but maybe missing the responsibilities that helped to bring them together.

• • •

As Tylowe told Meeah of Elliot's other children, she cried. Hearing his name more than in passing made her sick. Hurt and angry, she understood it fit the life of a man who had once made her life hell. She had heard there could be other kids, but she never connected with them or knew where they were. She had assumed most of the kids he'd fathered had no knowledge of who he was.

Tylowe had much to tell her, and even told of his meeting an ex-girlfriend. She got up out of the bed, and got his belt. She playfully threatened him, and told him he'd better not give her good thing to an oldie-and-no-goodie-anymore hoochie mama.

“Well, babe, if I'm willing to tell you, I am more assured than you. There is no woman I know whom I could tell. I feel proud of
you, myself, and our relationship that I can come home, and not have to carry any guilt. It's foolish for either one of us to act as if other people aren't attracted to us.”

Meeah kissed his forehead. “Oh, babe, I see women still looking at you. In a strange way, I get turned on when I know I have you, and another woman is checking you out.” Meeah leaned against him again and squeezed his hand.

He told her about finding the kids and the trouble they encountered, though he didn't give her the details of all Suzy Q's deeds. Meeah knew better than to ask.

“Honey…Tylowe, let me get us some coffee. I always pray in front of you, all the time, with no problem, we both do, but I'm going in the kitchen and have a little talk with God. You could have been hurt. Maybe even worse could have happened while you were in Vegas messing around with dangerous people. This stuff bothers me! I'm disturbed. I thank God for delivering you back to me, but dammit, Tylowe.” Her face was tight, and her brown skin lost the battle to crimson tones. His eyes opened wide, turned to circles, and lit up like new silver dollars.

“Honey . . .” She took a deep breath. “You are the man who excites me and you've stepped up and been the man I needed. There is no doubt you can take care of yourself.” She took an even deeper breath, and then took a long pause before she continued. “I'm trying to be careful how I say what's on my mind. I'm saying this because in no way do I want to belittle you. You know that's not me. I never talk crazy to you. I learned a long time ago to trust you, and let you lead because I have faith in you as my man. So forgive me if what I say comes out wrong, but I will mean what I say. You are not Psalms Black. You are a hell of a man to me, but Psalms Black is some kind of warrior that you are not. I don't want you to be
anything like him. I'm not putting him down. He is your friend; I respect him, and I respect your friendship with him. I do like him. He has been your friend since you two were in grade school, yet there is a dark side of Psalms that I fear. I fear you will try to emulate what he is capable of if pushed to the wrong corner. I'm not scared that he will put you into something bad, but I wonder will you, in an effort to prove yourself, do something that you…are…not…made…for!

“How he would handle a dangerous situation, as opposed to you, is like a runaway freight train running into a Benz sitting on the railroad tracks. He does things I don't know about, and don't want to know, but I do know they are different from how you approach things. With that said, I don't want you in any type of situations he's apt to be involved in at that level.

“You won't react like him, and that might have me receiving a call telling me you will not be coming . . .home. I believe Psalms will kill to protect us, and that could be a blessing. Men like him see justice through a different scope. He and Suzy Q live by another code and Q is my sister in many ways, so I know how she thinks just from being near her all these years.

“Psalms is like The Black Avenger. Hell, he protected the president; I wish he was protecting the black president now with all these crazies. He protected Gabrielle abroad. When I see him, I think he comes right out of a superhero comic book, and it's for him no joke.

“I know you know, Tylowe. He's been your friend forever. I know he don't don a cape and fly, but he can cause destruction on his way to saving people. And…most likely, sleep well, believing he's done the job needed.

“It got around about what happened on the boat about the husband who was beating on his wife and now he is soon to be an
ex-husband. The woman says she doesn't know what happened to her husband in that room, but he damn near delivered his whole paycheck to Darcelle's office when she told him to only give twenty-five percent.”

Tylowe smiled, as she did, too. “It does sound funny, but if a man gives up that percentage enthusiastically, no questions asked, he smelled his own hurt close by.”

“Yeah, babe, you're right about that.”

“Gabrielle loves Psalms something fierce. If his underwear is funky, she'd love the smell of them, so I know he's a man that knows how to love, and must have positive qualities of a softer side, I'm sure.

“Gabrielle, she understands things I don't. She worked in a world where she could justify which country got aid for sick kids and no aid for other poor kids in another country. For her to have a man like Psalms, it works on whatever level it is.

“Baby…honey, please be my kind of stud, my kind of man, and my kind of lover as you have always been. Be my blessing at the start of the day and before I close my eyes at night, but please don't try to be a mercenary-type warrior against people who don't have a heart like you. Be my kind of protector and please keep being the man I have loved, but please don't be a headstone I go visit once a year.”