The Other Man(48)

It was a talent, really.

Well, yes, he was young, and yes, of course, he was quite a bit younger than, say, me, but what toll did it take on a person to see the things he’d seen?  To withstand the things he’d withstood?  To do the things he’d done?

Yes, quite a toll, I could see.  In every line of his tense, readied body, every word out of his cold, hard voice, in every thought in his fractured, paranoid mind, laid that toll.

What did years matter when held up to that?

Not a lot, indeed.  Tragic as it was, violence had aged him more profoundly than years would ever touch the average human.

And, after all of that, who was I to push him?  Of course he’d have secrets, but he could reveal them to me at his own damaged pace.

I’m a patient woman, I reasoned to myself.

I’d laid out all of the justifications for him in a scrumptious little buffet that he hadn’t even had to prepare himself.

He was on top of me, spent but still planted deep inside of me, his hips between my thighs, pinning me to the mattress.

He’d tied my hands, but he was already undoing the restraints, his mouth on my neck, tongue on my skin, while he worked at the knots with his agile fingers.

“I shouldn’t have come, either time,” he murmured, his voice rumbling into my flesh with every word.  “What I’m working on right now—it’s very sensitive—I don’t have the right to be doing any of this, but none of that mattered enough, apparently, because here I am.  Again.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m glad you came,” I told him just as my hands came loose.  I wrapped my arms around his head, cradling him to me.

“This can never be what we want it to.”

That sounded ominous, and I felt myself stiffening.  “We?” I asked him.  “We’ve never talked about what we want this to be, so how can you know that?  How can you know we even want the same thing at all?”

“I think we do,” he said simply.

He was nuzzling his way down my body.  He paused when he found one soft nipple.  He rubbed his lush lips back and forth, once, twice, until it puckered for him.  With a groan, he sucked it into his hot mouth.

My hands stroked over his hair as his rough hands pushed my breasts together, and he let go of one sensitized nipple and kissed his way to the other.

“What is it you think we want?” I asked him, a needy quaver in my voice.

With a gasping sigh, he pulled himself out of me, took his lips away, and just lay on me, low on my body, his cheek pillowed on a soft breast.  He was so heavy that his flat abs, pushed high between my thighs, were pressed flush against my sex.

I kept stroking his hair.  I was struggling to breath under his great weight, but not wanting him to move so much as an inch from this very spot.

His body was trembling on top of me.  “I want you and you want me.  It’s that simple.  Every time I get to be with you, I’m better for it.  Every single time.”

For Heath, a man of few words, this was as good as a declaration.

With the way he was laying, ear to my chest, I knew he could hear how my heart rate went wild at those words.

“Just when I think I’ve given up on you completely, you say something sweet like that,” I whispered, kissing the top of his head.

“Like I’ve said before, I’m not sweet, not even close, so if I said something that was, you should take it to heart.”

I did.  Once again, I took it all to heart.

And then he ruined it.

“This is the last time I’ll be here to see you,” he told me.  “It has to be.”

“Why so final?” I kept my voice surprisingly even.

“I have to leave.  Have to go somewhere far from here, and I can’t say when I’ll be back.  Too long to ask you to wait for me, certainly.”

Something in his voice was asking me to anyway.  Like he knew it wasn’t fair, knew he couldn’t ask it, but some part of him couldn’t help but try.

“Days, months . . . years?  Can you tell me that at least?”

“I can’t.”  At least he sounded like he regretted that.

But still, regret was not enough.  I needed more.  I deserved more.

Just give me some information, I wanted to say to him.

Give me an excuse, any sort of explanation, and I can work with you, I almost told him.

Tell me you’ll be back someday, just make me that paper thin promise, and I’ll wait for you, I almost said.

So many things were on the tip of my tongue to say to him, but they never quite came out.

And so we both had regrets.

I wasn’t bitter about any of it, I swear.

Not then at least.  Later, I’d find my bitter (with some help), but it was not my first inclination.

I went through stages after he left.  Which was surely bizarre when I thought about what a short time we’d actually been together.

I mean, what did we have, really?  We’d spent mere days together, mere hours.  And it was a fact that most of that time we were in bed, and some part of him was inside some part of me.

That did not a love story make.

But no matter what I told myself, he’d made an impact, left an imprint, on every part of me he’d touched.  When I took inventory of just what that meant, there was very little he’d left of me unscathed.