The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(123)

All the same, even as he idled away the time in imaginary conversations, he never once envisioned the crucial confrontation he ought to have had with Daisy. He never went back in time to rearrange events. To imagine himself walking into the kitchen of her apartment and saying to David, “You need to leave.” Going upstairs and hearing what she had to say. Or even making his way to her as she smoked on the back steps. The next day at dawn. A week later. Even a year later.

No hypothetical do-over for the calls he didn’t return and the letters he didn’t answer. No yelling at her, cursing at her, telling her he hated her. He took only the best of the best and constructed an idealized castle in the air, suspended in present tense in a parallel universe. Just Daisy hanging around being Daisy.

He managed his thoughts with astounding discipline. He was almost smug about the rules. Casual mental musings were allowed. Wallowing would not be tolerated. Sexual horseplay was punishable by death.

It worked well for a couple weeks. Like a chaste Sir Galahad, he made do with the memory of their bond, their soulful friendship, their effortless support of one another and the comfort her presence always brought him. He kept alive her keen intelligence, her humor and wit, and her astonishing talents as a dancer. He consoled himself with his dumb, made-up conversations, and managed to keep the recollection of his physical relationship with Daisy locked away in a stone fortress. Every now and then he would stick an extra pillow behind him and pretend she was snugged up against his back. Her hip bone softly poking him. His heart calm under her palm.

It was all he allowed.

Until now.

At some point you just gotta start living the truth of who you are and what you feel.

Miles’s offhand remark was a bowling ball, sending his stringent rules skittering and spinning. The stone walls Erik so carefully built around the ardent memories were crumbling. Through a chink in the stones Daisy appeared and crooked her finger at him.

He went. Lying in bed, in the shadow of his wife’s sleeping body, Erik went looking for buried treasure with a map, a pick axe and a vengeance. He crawled back through the archives, dug in and began to catalog. And in defiance of all the laws, he wallowed in it. He scooped up the sex, poured it from his hands onto his head and bathed in it.

The memory of kissing hollowed him out, filled his chest and belly with gnawing heat. He could press his fingers sideways across his lips and in an instant, they were her mouth. But kissing was an innocent snowball tossed down the mountainside. Next thing he knew, Erik was being swept along in an avalanche of sense memory.

The thought of her lithe, muscled body made his palms ache with memory. He put out a hand and her breast curved into it. He could distill her scent out of mere air. Her perfume. Or the damp, musky smell when she was excited, writhing as he either slid her out of her clothes or just pulled them enough aside to get to what he wanted.

I want. I want. His body coiled in a quenchless thirst, needing to beat fists against the walls, foam at the mouth and bay at the moon. I want it.

He gazed into space, remembering how she took her clothes off for him. The sight of her, wanton and hungry, breasts overflowing from an unhooked bra beneath a shirt pulled halfway up, thighs trembling inside panties pushed halfway down. The tips of his fingers prying her open. The slick, pink flesh quivering when he breathed on it. He touched his tongue to the roof of his mouth and remembered the tart, sweet taste of her. The heavy drop of her hand on his head. The noiseless rush of air through her throat when he made her come.

Lying in bed—hard, crazed, burning—he went through it all. All the lovemaking in dorm rooms and the apartment on Jay Street. Sex in the morning when their bodies were still wreathed in sleep. Sex at night when their bodies were screaming with need. Fingers and mouths, sweat and juice. Craving it. Begging and dying for it. Building a cathedral. Being in love and being wanted. So safe in a web of physical trust, he could make love to her like a sweetheart one night, throw her down and f*ck her the next. It was all the same thing. Staring into her eyes without speaking was making love. Being buried in the heat of her frustration was making love. Whether her kiss crashed into his mouth, or just brushed it like a passing dream, he could taste her love. And nothing could top it. Nothing could surpass it.

Not even Melanie.

It was deplorable behavior. He knew it. It was selfish and cruel to his wife, her body curved like a parenthesis away from him. He imagined the waves of betrayed hurt radiating off her back onto his. But it was Daisy in his head in hot, candy-sweet ribbons he could not ignore.

You’re cheating on Mel, he told himself. All this maudlin, mental jerking off to the past? It’s no different than if you were f*cking someone else. You’re a shit husband.

He couldn’t help it. Any more than he had been able to help falling for the high of cocaine all those years ago. This high was even more addictive because it was organic. It was cooked up in the laboratory of his soul. He sucked it up from the depths of his heart, up into his nose and let it melt down from the top of his skull.

Stoned, he stared into the dark and Daisy’s face materialized. She was lying on her side, staring back at him. One hit and he could put her there. One toke and he could bring it back—the serenity, the stillness. He wasn’t reaching out to her merely for sex. Sex was only part of it. Sex was an extension of the love and peace and deep understanding in the depths Daisy’s eyes. A connection so soulful, it was cellular.

“Consanguinity,” he said, moving his mouth around the word but making no sound. A blood bond. A soul bond.