Tainted Love (Sweetest Taboo #2) (2 page)

Still, there wasn’t a lot I could do about the lying. I just couldn’t tell her that I had met up with Tom again and that we wanted to have some time alone to make things right. I didn’t even want to think about the list of questions she would ask me. Where had I met him? Why I had even talked to him in the first place, after the scandal he caused when I was in high school? And what did I mean by saying I’d fallen in love with him? Even if I had fallen in love with him, did that mean I needed to run off and stay in a hotel with him, play his…

It was too dangerous to entertain these thoughts, so I cut them off before my head could spin out of control. I knew very well what my mother would say, and how difficult it would be to make her understand that Tom and I loved each other, that we could have a healthy and lasting relationship. She was more open-minded than my father, but she still wouldn’t understand, and with my reinvigorated love for Tom, I didn’t think I could stomach having her question my love or our relationship. So I lied, promising silently to myself that I would make it up to her one day. I would tell her the truth, and explain to her why I felt the need to protect her from my relationship with Tom. Some day, maybe when I finally had a family of my own, she would understand all of my reasons for the deception.

“You can’t even stay for dinner?” she’d asked, her forehead creased in confusion. “You have to leave right now?”

“Yes, sorry mami, I really need to catch the flight today,” I mumbled, tossing things haphazardly into my suitcase.

Tom and I had agreed to meet in two hours at the same coffee shop, and I was already running short on time. I didn’t have my car in California anymore as my parents and I drove it cross country when I moved to DC for school, so I’d have to take a taxi which would take forever and would cost a fortune. I didn’t want to be late, even if it meant rushing out of my parents’ house without adequate explanation and sufficient goodbye etiquette. “Give Papi a kiss for me, okay? I’ll call Tony later to say goodbye.” I thought suddenly of my brother, who would never believe this story. I’d put the scandal of my high school years behind me, for the most part, even though Tony had hinted once or twice that he’d known what happened between Tom and me. I didn’t know how it was possible since I had been especially careful about our relationship after the whole police investigation incident. On the other hand, I had talked on the phone with Tom on many nights even after the investigation, and we had always run a risk of someone else picking up another phone while we talked. Tom’s wife had done it, once, and it led to an argument and a subsequently strained relationship between the two of them. I had always wondered if Tony had ever overheard me talking to Tom on the phone, or if he had ever picked up the phone to listen in on our conversations. It would explain his casual references to my high school love life and my interest in older men. Tony had never made any direct accusations, or any threats, but I knew my brother, and if I started acting secretive again, there was no way he would let it slide.

In order to keep Tony out of my business, I would have to come up with a better excuse than the one I used on my mom, because Tony had a tendency to poke around and ask questions when he wasn’t one hundred percent certain of something.

My mom had believed my story, but she had been beside herself at my sudden departure and I couldn’t blame her. After all, I had been gone for a year, across the country attending school, and had just visited during Christmas for a few days. I hadn’t wanted to come home, to this town where everything reminded me of Tom, and I ran the constant risk of running into him. Instead, I had focused on my studies, quickly rising to the top of my class, while landing this prestigious internship in DC. It had come at a price, though – I hadn’t seen my family much over the last year, and had started drifting away from my father. My mom and I spoke almost daily over the phone, but it wasn’t the same as spending time together. I owed her this trip home, and I owed her more time than I was giving her. I was her only daughter, after all, and we had a wonderful relationship. She looked forward to my trips home as they broke up the monotony of living in an all-male home, something my mom was not accustomed to.

But now everything had changed, because I’d discovered Tom again, and he was all I could think of. I hadn’t even been sure – after deciding to go away with Tom – if I would even return to DC for the internship or if I would just stay ‘away’ with Tom for the remainder of the summer break. I couldn’t wait to run away with him and I’d felt like I was sitting on top of the world. I hadn’t wanted to think about having to go back to DC at all, so I’d pushed the internship to the back of my mind, telling myself that I’d make a decision about it later, and finished packing my things. Surprisingly, I’d managed to get out of my parents’ house with very little crying, and had managed to leave town with Tom undetected. Tom drove us to a cozy bed and breakfast about fifty miles south of our town, where we’d planned to spend the next two weeks reconnecting and getting to know each other again, if we had ever forgotten.

Now, as I lay in bed pretending to still be asleep, I realized that the world had turned upside down on me, yet again. Granted, Tom and I had finally found each other again and had spent the last week talking, enjoying meals, taking early morning and late evening walks, and making love at every possible opportunity. This was the first time that we’d ever experienced the ‘normal’ things that people do in relationships and it felt incredibly liberating. Anyone watching us would have thought that we were an attractive couple, deeply in love and very affectionate, two people who would likely spend the rest of their lives together. The truth is, anyone watching us and thinking any such thoughts would have been half right. It was wonderful being with Tom again, feeling his arms wrapped tightly around my waist, to be in the presence of his charm, which I’d always found so irresistible. I couldn’t believe that I’d gone for so long without it, and now was having trouble remembering how I’d held him off, and refused him outright when I decided to break things off with him over a year ago. I remembered that I’d had a good reason, and that my decision was grounded on my own emotional turbulence. That and my inability to picture a future with Tom, and in retrospect, I couldn’t for the life of me, understand how I could have gone through with it, without breaking down and running back to him. My desire and need for him, now that we were together again, felt so innate and so overwhelming. The best part about reuniting with Tom was the fact that he’d left his wife; he was divorced and ready to start a life with me. Tom was finally mine, all mine.

Still, no matter what my reasons were at the time for breaking things off with him, I had hurt him deeply because of the way I so callously rejected him and turned my back on him without ever giving him the opportunity to explain himself. I had failed to give him any concrete reasons and had ended our relationship simply refusing to take his calls. Not very adult of me, and I wouldn’t blame him for being upset and having a wounded heart, and possibly never wanting to see me again. In spite of all of that pain I caused him, in spite of the fact that I turned my back on him without giving him the time of day, without at least offering closure, there was no trace of anger in his eyes when he looked at me. There was no confusion, no hurt, no frustration or mistrust, there was only love in his eyes. Tom had always worn his emotions, not on his sleeves, but in his eyes. The love I could see in his eyes went deep and his look told me he was ecstatic to be with me again and at peace to have me in his arms where I belonged. It was obvious where his heart was, and evidently was still stuck on me.

Tom had been overly attentive in the past week, buying me flowers and telling me again and again how much he loved me, how I was the only one for him, and how he was so glad I had come back. One night as we lay in bed snuggling, with our arms wrapped around each other’s bodies, Tom asked innocently, “Do you realize how much I’ve missed you? Do you fully understand what a gaping hole you left in my heart when you walked away from me, do you even get the pain you caused, how much you hurt me?”

I wasn’t sure if he was trying to make me feel super special or incredibly guilty for leaving him a year ago. With a meek voice, I said, “But Tom, I never wanted to walk away from you, I just had to, the whole thing was tearing me up and you never gave me any indication that you would leave your wife, or that you even wanted a real life with me, a real relationship, a future, I mean, how was I – ”

Tom gently covered my mouth with his hand and shushed me, “I know, baby, I know. I’m not playing the blame game. I stopped playing that game months ago. We just weren’t open with each other back then, the way we should have been. Had we been a little more forthcoming with our feelings, maybe things would have turned out differently. But sweetheart, it doesn’t matter because that is all behind us. We’re here now, we are free to be who we are, to be together, to live our lives the way we choose and not the way anyone else dictates. Isabel, I am so happy you came back, so happy that you gave me a chance to explain, to tell you that I was divorced, that I was on my own, and that I was loving you and yearning for you the entire time you were in DC. I am so happy, baby.” Tom kissed me gently and as I closed my eyes to take in the moment and enjoy his tender kiss, I felt and tasted tears. This time they weren’t mine, they were Tom’s. I opened my eyes and saw tears streaming down his cheeks, making their way down through his five o’clock shadow.

“Don’t worry about me, Isabel. I’m fine. These are tears of satisfaction, joy, and utter happiness,” Tom whispered, now cupping my face in his hands. He came in for a salty, but delectably tender kiss, the kind of kiss that makes your body shiver to the core. Tom was sharing his emotions with me, sharing, as he’d not done before. It was almost like he was making up for lost time.

I’d spent over a year harboring suspicions about him, though, and thinking that he’d been seeing other people – perhaps just his wife – and doing things behind my back. It was hard to come to grips with that, I mean, why should it really matter to me…especially the way I had turned my back on him, leaving without saying a word. We hadn’t spoken since then, and I’d assumed that he had played me for a fool. The entire time I was gone, that suspicion had multiplied when I saw what I saw in the school parking lot. On that fateful day, I had run into Tom while I was trying to warn Christine, the girl I had seen in his truck, that Mr. Stevens shouldn’t be trusted, and that I had also been in her shoes once before. Tom and Christine had managed to explain the reason why she was in his truck, with help from Christine’s mother, but for some reason, the story didn’t quite sit right with me. And then there had been that scene, that image that has been etched in my mind since, when Christine – who’d been about to leave – had turned back to Tom and asked for her necklace back, the necklace he’d been ‘safe keeping’ for her. Of course that exchange caught my attention, how could it not?

Tom used to hold my necklace for me during swim practice, for safe keeping, during the very early stages of our flirtatious exchanges. The safe keeping of my necklace was obviously an excuse for Tom and I to talk, to be close to each other, to flirt when there wasn’t any other excuse readily available. Tom had held my necklace for me during swim practice, safe in his front pocket, and singled me out every afternoon to return it to me. Often times, when we became more comfortable around each other, the return of my necklace stretched into long conversations, sometimes he would even offer to put the necklace on for me and I would feel his fingers slightly brushing against my skin as he fastened the clasp at the nape of my neck. Other times the return of my necklace after practice would result in rides home and from there the game had changed, to him taking my necklace off for me, in far more intimate settings. So that seemingly innocent exchange, that scene with him handing Christine her necklace back right in front of me, and all the potential meanings of that loaded exchange – all the things those moments had meant to me when I was
that
girl – had raised a hundred red flags in my head. So had Christine’s defiant grin, directed at me, and Tom’s inability to acknowledge what had taken place right under my nose. All I remember is Tom asking me a question about something irrelevant, something so flippant I can’t even recall what it was, to get my mind moving in a different direction.

By default I’d given in to his charm, though, and had melted into his arms like I had back in high school, demonstrating about as much restraint as the fifteen-year-old girl I once was. Tom had sworn that I was the only one for him, told me that he’d been waiting for me to come back to him for the entire year, and that he’d separated from his wife so that he could offer me more than just an extra-marital affair, so that he could offer me everything I deserved. He’d told me that he loved me that he could never be with anyone else, and wanted to know if I still loved him the way I used to or if my feelings for him had changed.

All of the walls I had built in the last year had finally crumbled and I had submitted, torn by my love for Tom and by the overpowering feeling that I belonged with him. I’d been overwhelmed by the emotion of it all and had found my way willingly back into his welcoming arms. I hadn’t been disappointed; he’d been everything I remembered – the charming, sweet, sensitive man from my younger years. From the moment we talked through the key issues at the coffee shop, all we wanted was to be alone, to withdraw from the inquiring eyes of the world, if only for a few days or weeks. The one-hour drive to the bed and breakfast had been a sweet agony of suspense and desire. Once we were safely in the room, we dropped our bags and embraced each other for what seemed like an eternity. My hands slowly made their way under his polo shirt, my fingers feeling that familiar skin again. I caressed his back as he kissed me, first slowly and teasing, then his kisses turning more passionate and urgent. Without even noticing, I had helped him to remove his polo shirt, dropping it on the floor next to us. Tom’s hands expertly unbuttoned my sleeveless summer shirt, opening it to expose my torso, my chest, my bra. I helped by dropping one shoulder at a time, allowing the shirt to simply fall off and join Tom’s polo shirt on the floor. As we kissed fervently, I inhaled a lung full of his skin’s scent, a scent I had missed so much. Tom always smelled of fresh laundry that when combined with his pheromones made for a love potion I could not resist. Tom and I made love all night, breaking only for snacks and a cool drink at midnight. We hadn’t been able to get enough of each other, our bodies yearning to be one, to be united and connected. During those first twenty-four hours I’d forgotten about my doubts – the image of Christine asking Tom for her necklace back and him fishing it out of his pocket – being too enraptured with this man to think of anything but our love.