The Unrequited Page 12

Twisting my hair in his grasp, he swallows my lips in his mouth. He sucks on the shape of my sensitive flesh and all I can do is let him. I put my palms on his shoulders, feeling the heated muscles under the soft material of his t-shirt. His chest shifts and slides over my breasts, like a wave of water. I want to be drenched with it. I want every drop of his sweat, his lust on every inch of my skin. I pull him toward me so he can crush me with his massive weight.

  He doesn’t budge though. He stands there, unfazed, still devouring my lips, immobile. His tongue thrusts in and licks me from the inside—the roof of my mouth, my tongue, my teeth. He is after my essence, the special taste that lives deep. He growls when he gets it, my flavor, and the pressure of his grip on my hair increases tenfold.

  It’s painful, but not enough to tamp down my arousal. I give up my attempts to bring him to me. Rather, I go to him. I lift my leg and wrap it around his waist. My hands creep up and lock around his neck. I climb him like an ivy, toxic and poisonous and shameless.

  I press my body to his and kiss him back with everything I am. I pour my soul into it. For these few moments, I become a balm to his pain.

  But it doesn’t last long. My selfishness and my need for him take over. My core starts leaking and it becomes hard to remember I’m only meant to give, not to take.

  I rotate my hips, searching for that magical friction against the ridged planes of his body. Then I feel it—his erection against my upper tummy. It’s huge. Hard. A heated rod. It’s alive, and when I move against it, I feel it throb. A tortured moan rips out of his chest.

  Thomas tears his mouth away from me and even my soul mourns the loss. We stare at each other, gasping for breath. I’m still clung around him and his cock is still nestled between our aroused bodies. I adjust my thigh around his hip, and it throbs with the small movement.

  “Don’t fucking move,” he tells me, emphasizing it with a tug on my hair.

  “Okay.” I swallow. “I’m sorry.”

  A pained chuckle. “For what?”

  “I made you kiss me.”

  The legendary tic makes its appearance at the heel of my words. It drums on his jaw like a secondary heart, or maybe a time bomb. “You did, didn’t you?”

  Unable to talk, I simply nod.

  In answer, he lodges his thigh between my legs and presses on my core. It’s an electric shock multiplied by a strike of lightning, and I almost burst into flames.

  “Wh-What…” I try to speak but he increases the pressure, eliciting a moan from me.

  “Why?” he whispers, noting my lusty reactions. “Why did you make me do it, Layla?”

  “Because I—”

  Again, he repeats his movements, reducing me to wordless, needy moans. What is he doing?

  “Because you what?”

  “Because I do this kind of thing. I-I’m selfish and bad…” I moan, doused in shame and arousal. “I take what I want because I can’t control myself. I don’t want to.”

  “And you want me, don’t you?” When I don’t answer, he tugs on my hair sharply. “You want me, Layla.”

  It’s not a question, but still I nod my head. Yes, I want him. I’ve wanted him since the first time I saw him. I want him more and more with each passing day. I want him because he’s like me. He’s in unrequited love and I want to save him, somehow.

  His eyes shine with satisfaction, a sense of victory at my answer. He loves my desperation and it makes me hornier.

  We’re so fucked, my omniscient heart says. I agree.

  “I can do whatever I want with you and you’ll let me. Isn’t that right, Layla?” He licks his lips as if savoring his own words. “I can tell you to jump and you’ll ask how high. I can tell you to strip and you’ll strip as if your clothes are on fire.”

  “Yes,” I moan.

  He rewards me by grinding his muscular thigh and my cunt pulses. My lust-addled brain commands me to move, to chase the friction, and I do it. I slide up and down his maddening leg, digging my nails into his scalp as the pleasure mounts.

  I feel the angry and rhythmic jerk of his cock on my stomach and I love it. I love the fact that I’ve shed all my inhibitions and am reduced to this, a lust-drunk puppet. I love that it gives Thomas pleasure. He isn’t sad anymore, or vulnerable.

  Yes, I love all that.

  His pain has become my pain, and it’s going to make me come on his leg. I watch Thomas with hazy eyes. I watch the arrogant slope of his flushed cheeks. I watch his dilated pupils, his wet, parted lips. All the while, I’m moving, humping his leg. Up and down. Up and down.

  “Of course you will,” he rasps. “Will you come for me, Layla?”

  I jerk out a nod. In the back of my mind, I know how wrong this is, how shameful, but I can’t stop myself. As Thomas said, I’ll do anything for him in this moment.

  My movements are haphazard now, jerky, epileptic. I want it so bad. I want my cum to gush so hard it seeps through my panties and leaves a wet patch on his jeans.

  The graphic, vulgar thought pushes me over the edge. Hard and moaning, I come, just the way I wanted—no, just the way he wanted. I was simply following his orders. My mind is filled with cotton and shooting stars and static. I want to bask in it forever.

  Oh God, it’s so good. So good.

  The pressure on my body eases. I don’t feel his muscles between my legs, and the harsh grip on my hair has vanished. In the wake of my orgasm, Thomas has let me go, and in turn, forced me to unwind my body from his.

  I’m still recovering from my climax, leaning against the wall for balance, but I try to focus. Thomas is watching me, intensely, his flaming eyes working double-time to take me in, his hands on either side of my head.

  “Do you understand what I’m telling you, Layla? Can you hear your heart beating? Is it trying to pound through your chest? Do you think you can control it? Tell it to calm down? Your hips are still shaking. I bet you’re still leaking cum, aren’t you? Do you think you can control any of that?”

  I shake my head.

  “Yeah, that’s right. You’d be surprised to know how many things aren’t your fault at all.” His eyes bore into mine, as if telling me the importance of his declaration.

  For a second, I can’t make the connection between what he’s telling me and what happened here, but then I get it. He’s absolving me. He’s rendering me blameless for kissing him, for making him kiss me. I wonder if this absolution includes what happened with Caleb. Am I free of those sins too?

  My heart scoffs. Are you kidding? We tricked him into having sex.

  “I saw you,” I blurt out without thinking.

  As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know in my bones that this will destroy whatever kindness he’s harboring toward me.

  “Through the window,” I add, because I can’t handle not being blamed.

  Everything is always my fault. The broken vases at home. Muddy footprints on the tile floors. The missing bottles of liquor from the cabinet. Caleb’s missing underwear. The fact that he ran off to college a month early and won’t even visit home. The fact that I shoplifted, drank and drove numerous times, crashed parties, broke my mom’s ice sculpture.

  It’s all my fault. It’s just like me to do those things. I want Thomas’ accusation too.

  “I saw how lonely you were. I saw the anger on your face, the way you…the way you paced around the room, like you were trapped.” The scene plays in my head: his frantic steps, his hands tugging at his hair.

  Then the scene changes and I’m outside his bedroom window. “And-And then you were with her—Hadley. I… You were talking and you looked so sad and angry, and then she left. I kept watching your back and your shoulders. They were so tight and I could see the effort it took you to keep yourself together. Then you picked up a vase and I thought you’d throw it against the wall, break it, because I know your heart was breaking, but you held on to it. You set it down gently. You were better than me. I-I could never have done that.”

  Nothing moves on his body. I don’t
know if he’s breathing, if he’s even seeing me.

  “Thomas, I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to see it. I…”

  Then he shifts on his feet and the overhead light slashes his face into two halves of shadow and light. He appears beastly, like an animal with bright eyes and hard face. For the first time since I began my confession, I feel a tinge of true fear.

  I can see he wants to do something, maybe harm me physically. His body is taut with violence. He looks bigger, enlarged with the barely leashed control. For a second, I think he does lose control. His hands jerk and ball into fists, but then he takes a shallow, choppy breath.

  “Stay the fuck away from me,” he says softly, deadly.

  With that, he marches out of the storage room.

  The Bard

  My father was a man in love. He’s been dead for ten years now, and the only thing I can say for sure about him is that he was in love with my mother.

  I never knew my mother. I never heard her voice, never touched her. She died the day I was born. I have seen pictures of her, of course. I have seen her smile, her warm, blue eyes that resemble mine. She was a beautiful woman with dark brown hair and a wide smile.

  Other than that, my knowledge about her is fairly limited. I don’t know what kind of woman would inspire such devotion from a man who never understood how to love his own son. Whatever I know about her came from my father’s poems, which I didn’t know existed until I was old enough to understand that my dad was unlike other dads.

  He was busy. He was silent. A hunched, unkempt man who stumbled more than he walked.

  My father was a poet.

  His desk was always covered by a mountain of papers. Many of them had trails of blue ink webbed across them, as if words had dissolved and run down.

  He wrote and wrote but never published anything.

  That’s because he wasn’t writing for anyone else but himself. He was resurrecting his dead wife through his words. He wrote about her and only her, and most of his poems were unfinished and rough. They were ramblings about silk-spun hair, a blue-green scarf, a mole on her shoulder, peanut butter cookies.

  And I realized this was love—brutal, dark, and never-ending. It’s madness.

  When I left this town, I knew I’d never come back. All I’ve ever known here is loneliness and a role model who wouldn’t even look at me. This town isn’t my home. My father wasn’t my father, even though he gave me the gift of poetry—or maybe the burden of it. I am where I am because of it. If I hadn’t found the magic of words, maybe my life would be different right now.

  But tonight, the kind of madness that has gripped me is different. It has nothing to do with love, and everything to do with a violet-eyed girl who refuses to leave my thoughts.

  My fingers splay wide on the tiled wall as the cold water sluices down my body. The air around me is chilly and abrasive but my body remembers Layla’s heat.

  I shift on my feet and a current zaps through me as my cock touches the cold tile. It’s hard and swollen and angry. It’s wild like me, like the things inside me, things that feel both novel and primitive, as if they’ve been in hiding, programmed in my genes, and I’m only discovering them now. The absolute need to possess someone, to be the air they breathe and the universe they live in—I feel both powerful and powerless at once.

  My eyes scrunch closed and all I see is her, wrapped around my body, moving, bucking. Like she’d die if she didn’t touch me. Like she’d lose her mind. My arousal spikes up and like a reel I can’t stop from rolling, I see Layla behind my closed eyelids. But it isn’t her face or blush-stained cheeks that I see. It’s her spirit. It’s the fact that she stood up in a class full of people and read her shitty poem out loud. It’s the fact that she had the courage to expose her ugliness to me, to cry in front of me, to be vulnerable. It’s the fact that she threw herself at me, knowing I might reject her.

  Could I be that vital to someone?

  It makes me want to hold her close even as I want to push her away. How dare she spy on me? How dare she make judgments about my life? What does she know about it anyway?

  I shouldn’t have followed her. I shouldn’t have lost control and kissed her back. I’ve been good at ignoring her all week.

  But she licked me. In a classroom. In broad daylight. Who does something so crazy? So fucking…erotic?

  A sound brings me out of my thoughts. It’s a soft thud of footsteps. I know it’s her; I’d recognize those light, airy footsteps anywhere.

  But how do I face Hadley now?

  How do I tell her about yet another mistake I made when I promised to put her first? Like a coward, I want to hide out in here, but we have a pull that’s magnetic. If she’s around, I can’t be far away from her. It’s a fucked-up kind of physics.

  I shut off the water, dry off, and with the towel wrapped around my waist, come out of the guest bathroom.

  As I walk down the hallway, I rush through a hundred different scenarios for how to tell her, whether to tell her or not. I cringe at the idea of hiding this, though I’m left wondering why that is. Is it because I want to be honest with my wife, or is it because that kiss meant more than a slip of judgment and deserves acknowledgment?

  Before I can dissect this absurd thought, I see her. Hadley is at the front door with a small bag in her hand.

  At the sight of her, I’m back in this world, in my reality. It makes Layla feel like a creature from a distant, alternate universe.

  “Hadley?” I say her name in a questioning tone, though I know the answer to my unspoken question.

  I’ve never felt a complete shutdown. I’ve never had my breath suspended or my heart skip a beat. People talk about it, the symptoms of falling in love, but this isn’t love. This awful feeling—it’s pure, unadulterated fear. It occupies every corner of my body.

  Hadley is leaving me. For good.

  She turns and her face is wary but blank, somehow. Her posture is both delicate and firm.

  “I’m going to Beth’s.”

  It takes me a second to hear her with the absolute silence pervading my body. “What?”

  “I’ll be back Wednesday.”

  “You’ll be back.”

  The frown that drew me to her for the very first time makes an appearance. Strangely, I don’t have the urge to ease it off her forehead.

  “I need some time to myself,” she says. Her soft voice screeches at my skin, like claws dragging across my body.

  “What about Nicky?”

  I’ve asked this before. We’ve had this conversation before. The night Layla saw me through the window was the night Hadley and I argued about this very thing. I wanted her to stay, and she wanted to take off for a few days.

  Hadley shakes her head. “He doesn’t need me.”

  What about me? I need you.

  “Are you saying your son doesn’t need you?”

  She swallows as an odd look enters her eyes. “He has you, and Susan can stay here for a few days. I just… need to get away.”

  “From what, exactly? What do you want to get away from?”

  “I don’t want to argue, Thomas. I just…I want to go.”

  “Is that why you’re sneaking out at night? Because you didn’t want to argue?” I don’t give her a chance to talk. “Guess what, you can’t escape the argument. You can’t fucking escape me.”

  I know I should control myself. I should. It’s not her fault she wants to get away. It’s me. I’m the one who ruined everything.

  But dammit! Can’t she see how much I love her? How her leaving would fucking destroy me? And if she loves me, how can she do this to me?

  She doesn’t love you.

  “Thomas, I don’t—”

  I take a step forward. “What is it that I’m doing wrong? Tell me. What do you want from me? What do I need to do to get you to stay? Because I’ll do anything.” I reach her and before I can talk myself out of it, I grab her bicep. She flinches at my touch and my gut burns with anger and resentment and fear.
>
  She can’t leave me. She can’t. I can’t be alone.

  “I’ve been a fucking asshole to you in the past, but I’ve changed. Tell me what you want from me and I’ll give it to you in a heartbeat. Just…don’t leave.”

  My words are right, I know it, but my voice is all wrong. The emotions inside me are wrong. Everything about this feels wrong. The darkness, the silence, the fact that I’m wearing a towel, begging my wife to stay. The fact that she’s still unmoved. The look in her eyes is that of being trapped.

  Hadley feels trapped with me.

  “I want you to let go,” she whispers.

  My frightened fingers grip her even tighter. “No. No, I won’t. I’m going to fight for us. I’m going to keep my promise because I love you.”

  I say it like an accusation. It lashes out of my mouth as an attempt to make her understand, make her stay.

  “I don’t want you to. Just let me go,” she says again, and this time, her plea holds all the power in the world. My fingers loosen and then drop to my side, limp and useless.

  She’s leaving me.

  She’s. Leaving. Me.

  A burn makes a home in my eyes and I swallow thickly. Hadley notices it, raises her hand, and caresses my cheek. I shudder and latch onto it, as though I could physically keep her here.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” she says with flickers of emotions in her voice.

  “Then don’t go,” I whisper raggedly. “I need you.”

  She shakes her head with sadness. “I just need a little bit of time. Please.”

  I gave up everything for her. Everything that mattered to me is gone. I kept my end of the bargain. I put her first.

  So why can’t she do the same? Why can’t she love me back?

  My bigger hand clenches around her smaller one. For a brief moment, I want to keep going, keep squeezing until I crush her tiny fingers. Maybe that physical pain will tell her how I’m burning inside. Maybe then she’ll stay.

  But I let go and step back.

  “How were you planning on getting there?” I ask with a ticking jaw.

  She studies my face silently. I show her all of my anger, my pain. I hope she sees the devastation she’s going to leave in her wake. I hope she sees this in her nightmares like I’ll see her indifference in mine.