Chapter Louise #2
I’d never felt so delicate, so insubstantial, as when I first felt Sean’s kiss.
I was as light as a breeze blowing between the trees of a forest and he was heavy darkness and heat, a creature born of lava and brimstone, scorching me with every touch, making the air shimmer and ripple.
We whipped around each other, twisting together, good and bad, air and earth.
My head pressed back against the wall, my mouth suddenly feeling so soft next to his insistently searching lips.
Every touch of him sent fresh ribbons of heat twisting down towards my groin, every breath coming faster and faster until both of us were panting, desperate for air but even more desperate to stay in contact.
His tongue stroked at the join of my lips and then my mouth was flowering open under him, welcoming him in.
I knew that any protest I could make would be exposed as a lie because he could feel how much I wanted him.
His tongue explored me, seeking me out. At first, as we twisted and panted, I just let him take the lead, going submissive, letting him invade my softness and relishing it.
But every time the tip of his tongue caressed mine, it sent a jolt of heat down through me that turned to trembling, maddening need.
I sought him out: tentatively at first, but every play of our tongues together felt so good I couldn’t stop.
I heard him growl as he felt me come alive.
Kissing him back wasn’t enough, though. Not enough contact, not enough of him.
I grabbed for him blindly, finding his muscled shoulders and going weak at the muscled bulk of them, then sliding my hands up his neck.
My fingertips slid over the sandpaper fuzz at the back of his neck and buried themselves in his thick, black hair.
The kiss was still moving and changing. The only sounds in the room now were the rustle of our clothes and my soft gasps of need every time our lips parted.
My mind felt like it was lifting, separating from my body, and rising up to the ceiling, leaving all my worries far below.
It was hot, but it was more than that: it was floaty and magical, like that first kiss when you’re a teenager, the one you’ve been anticipating for years.
I hadn’t known kissing could feel like that, as a grown up.
And then I felt the fabric of my nightshirt hauled up, my nipples catching for a second on the hem before my breasts bobbed free. The shock of air against them made me gasp and a thin thread of sanity tugged on my floating mind. This is where you’re meant to tell him to stop.
He broke the kiss—only so that he could start kissing down my jaw and throat, but it left my mouth free. I opened my mouth to say, “Okay, enough. Wait. This is too fast.”
But his lips felt as though they were on fire and the winding trail he was following might as well have been drawn in gunpowder. I knew exactly where it would end and the anticipation was making my whole body twitch and writhe. Wait! What am I doing? I don’t do stuff like this!
His lips grazed the soft skin of my upper breast and I caught my breath.
They glided down, ever so slowly, and I arched my back helplessly.
My eyes half-opened, heavy-lidded with lust, and I watched, transfixed, as he came closer and closer to my aching nipple.
A hot, moist breath from his mouth and then—
I cried out as he took me into his mouth, closing his lips around my nipple and then lashing it with his tongue.
I squeezed my eyes shut as the heat rocketed up inside, thrashing my head from side to side to release the pressure.
He kept up a steady, insistent stroke: left then right, back and forth.
I squeezed my thighs together, locking his thigh between mine and grinding against him.
The heat was like a furnace now, burning me up from the inside out, leaving no room for thought.
Just as I thought it couldn’t get any better, he opened his mouth wider, taking more of me inside and enveloping me in hot, sucking wetness.
He began to nibble at me with his teeth: first with his lips as padding and then, gently, without.
The edge of pain was like liquid silver on top of the molten heat.
I gasped and stiffened. My ankles crossed and my feet twisting against each other.
I could hear the blood rushing in my ears, my orgasm swelling inside me, filling every part of me—
That’s when his free hand grabbed my other breast, lifting it and squeezing it hard.
He used his palm to roll it in slow circles as he squeezed and my whole body followed in response.
It would have been too rough, if I hadn’t been on the very edge of orgasm, but now it was perfect, brutish and hard, showing me how hungry he was for me.
God, I was being held up against a wall and mauled—
His mouth left my breast for a second. When he spoke, each syllable was a little blast of hot air against my slickened flesh, making me dig my fingers hard into the muscles of his shoulders.
“This is what you want, isn’t it?” he growled.
“You’re all innocent but you don’t want innocent and fuckin’ sweet. You want it hard and dirty.”
I gasped and panted for air and found myself nodding.
Suddenly, his hand dropped to my groin. Two thick fingers hooked under the front panel of my panties and, before I could even cry out, he was tugging the fabric away, stretching it clear of my body.
The material held for a second and then there was a jagged ripping sound and I was naked below the waist. I saw him toss the ruined panties away and then those same two fingers were between my thighs, probing my entrance, and finding me soaking wet.
They slid up inside me, stretching me, while his thumb found my aching clit and—
I came, shoulders and ass pressed hard against the wall and my back arched like a bow, thrusting my breasts out to meet him.
My cry of release was so loud it shocked me, but I couldn’t hold it in.
And I couldn’t stop: not with his hot mouth still working at my breast, not while his fingers plunged inside me, not while his thumb circled and rubbed.
Not when that big, hulking body was pressed between my thighs and pinned me there so easily.
And not when my eyes fluttered open and I saw that he was staring right into my eyes, those blue orbs gleaming with a lust that matched my own.
I shouted all of it out in a long, keening, panting cry that rose and rose and only ended when I was utterly spent.
My eyes fluttered open and I found myself lying in my bed: no Sean, no broken coffee table or splintered door.
My panties were still in place—though I’d shoved them to the side to plunge my own fingers inside me—and my nightshirt was in place, though it was rucked up around my waist. I lay there panting and sweating, my mind slowly spinning to a halt.
Sean O’Harra?! Was I insane? He wasn’t a guy to fantasize about!
He was an actual, real-life criminal. He existed in a world I barely even came into contact with.
And even if I was going to have some sort of crazy, bad boy fantasy about him, I didn’t like it rough and up against a wall with my panties torn off…
...did I?
I closed my eyes again, reddening. Anyway, whatever I did or didn’t think about Sean O’Harra, he certainly didn’t think about me that way. That embarrassed me even more than the fantasy itself: that I could be vain enough to think some guy like him would want to jump my bones.
On the plus side, I was now very, very relaxed. My eyelids were already sliding down, my head heavy against the pillow. A bit of harmless fantasizing never hurt anyone, right? It’s not like I’d ever even dare speak to him, in real life.
“We’re here to see Dr. Huxler,” I told the hospital receptionist.
She frowned. “I’m sorry: who?”
I dug the Post-It note out of my purse, just to make sure I’d written it down right. “Huxler.”
She shook her head. “Dr. Huxler is Oncology. Next floor up.”
I smiled. I actually smiled. “No, our appointment is definitely here. Endocrinology.” I checked the sign. Yep, we were in the right place. “My sister has a thyroid problem. Or, you know, something like a thyroid problem.”
The receptionist’s gaze flicked to Kayley and then back to me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Dr. Huxler is definitely Oncology.”
It was the tone of her voice that did it. She was so...apologetic.
There are some places your mind just doesn’t go to, as a parent. For the first time, I went there. And suddenly, it was as if the floor had turned to nothing but spider webs, with only a midnight-black void beneath.
“What’s going on?” asked Kayley in a voice I hadn’t heard her use for years. The one she used to use when she woke from a nightmare and she still wasn’t sure if it was real.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s probably just a mistake.” And I took her hand and stalked towards Oncology, pulling her away from the receptionist before she could tell her any different.
Dr. Huxler was in his late fifties with thick, fluffy curls of gray hair. There were orchids in his book-lined office: beautiful and peaceful and probably designed to make patients feel calm. They weren’t helping.
“Your parents,” he said, studying Kayley’s records, “they’re deceased?”
I always think deceased sounds so peaceful, as if they passed away happily in their sleep aged eighty-three instead of being snatched away from us in a heartbeat.
“Yes,” I said. “They’re deceased. I’m Kayley’s legal guardian.”
He nodded. Took a breath and held it. I was digging my nails into my knees, part of me wanting him to spit it out, and part of me wanting him to never speak again.
“Your blood tests indicate that you have leukemia,” he said to Kayley.
I grabbed Kayley’s hand and squeezed it harder than I ever had in my life.
“We need to do more tests to narrow down the exact type,” said Doctor Huxler.
“We can run those right now, if you’re okay with that.
” He was calm, but the urgency in his voice scared the shit out of me.
I nodded. Next to me, Kayley nodded too.
Her jaw was firm, her hand gripped mine, and she didn’t shed a single tear.
But, as we left Doctor Huxler’s office, heading for the first test, she squeezed my hand in a death grip and said, “Say it’s going to be okay.” And I heard the crack in her voice, like a fracture in a glacier that’s about to split wide open.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said automatically.
But I could feel myself shrinking inside the parent suit I’d been wearing for the last few years.
This isn’t right. I can’t do this. As we walked down the hallway, I looked around—I mean I actually, instinctively looked over my left shoulder—for my parents because I needed to hand things over to them, now, and get a hug myself.
But they weren’t there.
They made Kayley strip off her clothes and I gathered them up: the artfully distressed jeans and the belt with the obscure Japanese cartoon characters on it I’d bid for on Ebay as a Christmas present; the lurid pink top we’d argued over for days before I’d let her have it.
The things that made her her. The hospital staff gave me a bag to put them in and Kayley and I exchanged a look as I folded the top down.
This is just temporary, we nodded to each other.
But once she was in a gown, she looked like a patient.
For the next three hours, I watched my precious, fragile sister be stabbed again and again: stabbed in her arms for more blood, stabbed in the base of her spine for spinal fluid, stabbed with a slender, howling drill to collect bone marrow.
The staff were polite and caring, but in the fake, rehearsed way that airline staff swear they’ll take extra special care of your package or your suitcase or your dog.
Maybe it was because she was so stoic; maybe they just saw hundreds of patients and had gotten jaded.
But I wanted to scream at them that she was a child. My child.
When it was all over, Dr. Huxler asked me to come into his office “for a second.” He made it sound as if it was nothing important, boring paperwork that Kayley didn’t have to sit through.
“I want to stay,” Kayley said immediately. “I want to be in there.”
Dr. Huxler caught my eye and I’ll remember the look he gave me until the day I die. “Kayley,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level, “go check your email. It’s okay.”
“I don’t want to check my email,” she said, her eyes huge. “I already checked it. I want to stay with you. I want to know.”
A lump was swelling inside my throat. My chest hurt. I was about to break down in front of her and I couldn’t let that happen. “Check it again,” I said. And took a step away from her, towards the door Dr. Huxler was holding open for me.
“No,” I heard Kayley say behind me. “No! I want to go in!”
Another step. My legs are shaking. Another. Another. I heard Kayley start forward behind me, then stop. I couldn’t turn around or I’d lose it completely. Then a nurse’s voice, murmuring to Kayley: “You stay here with me, honey.”
“No!”
My heart felt like it was tearing in two. I walked into Doctor Huxler’s office and he closed the door.
And then it got worse.