Chapter 43
Forty-Three
H ere’s what I’ve learned about snooker tables: they’re uncomfortable as hell.
Alfie and I lay on the unforgiving billiards cloth, our chests rising and falling with exhausting rapidity.
Sweat beaded along my hairline and the skin of my chest was flushed a blush pink.
Our clothes, other than being a little dishevelled–my dress around my waist, his trousers undone–were completely intact.
I kept my legs bent and slightly parted, as I was too sore to close them.
My core felt like it was on fire and there would be bruises on my inner thighs tomorrow from the pounding of his hips.
I felt like I’d been hit by a freight train.
The slow, intimate sex we’d begun with hadn’t remained that way for long.
After the first orgasm that Alfie gave to me with such sweet control, he became altered, angry, and I returned in kind.
Every piece of pent up frustration from our fight spilled out into our touch; I pulled his hair and he thrust harder.
His hand had found my throat and, as he fucked me, he’d looked down at me like he wanted to squeeze harder and steal my breath away.
I’d gazed up at him, wide-eyed and wondering if I wanted him to, if I wanted him to take me to that darker place.
A small shiver ran up my spine at the memory of it.
That kind of sex was a whole different game and not one I was sure I wanted to play.
It didn’t seem healthy for Alfie and I to become so lost in each other.
Here, lying on this godawful table, we should both be fighting sleep and exhaustion after we’d done nothing but fight and fuck all day, and yet here we were, wide awake, our thoughts deafening and our bodies crying out in unison to be moulded together once more.
We were an intense coupling. Alone we burned, but combined we were fucking nuclear. I knew in the back of my mind it was only going to get worse, and I would probably be the one to break when it did. My heart was softer than his and my conscience shouted louder.
“I wanted to hit you.” His voice startled me but I didn’t turn my head to look at him.
Our gazes remained steadfast on the scotch club style ceiling.
“When I was inside you, with my hand around your neck. I wanted to hit you.” He sounded almost in shock.
I felt the same way. We’d come so close to crossing a line tonight and I didn’t know which of us it frightened more.
“I know.”
“I never would,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“I know.”
“You slammed a door in my face, Lola. I wanted to choke you and make you cry for doing that to me.” The cotton of his shirt whispered against the green cloth we lay on and I looked down to see his fists balling up into tight coils.
“But you never would.”
“Never.” He shifted beside me and I lifted my chin to find his steel greys on mine, piercing and honest. “Never.” I sighed in acknowledgement and returned my gaze to the ceiling.
What kind of people were we becoming? Every day I felt less and less like myself. It scared the hell out of me.
Lola O’Connell didn’t get hysterical, she didn’t run away and hide in a games room, and she didn’t lie next to a man who freely admitted to thinking about violence while he was inside her.
But I wasn’t really Lola any more, I was Lola à la Alfie. Lola 2.0. Lola Reloaded.
Was he improving me or damaging me? I had no idea. But I knew one thing for sure.
“That was a punishment fuck, wasn’t it?” I didn’t know why the words came out of my mouth. I hadn’t intended for them to and now they were out there, another peg on the Alfie Tell clothesline of bad behaviour.
That fuck hadn’t been about my argument against leaving with him, it had been about the door I’d slammed in his face. The look on his face when I’d opened the door hadn’t been fury, it had been fear. I’d made him feel weak. And he had punished me for it. It was becoming a predictable habit.
“Yes. Did it hurt?” His gaze roamed over my body, searching for injury, either hoping for it or dreading it, I couldn’t tell.
“Yes,” I answered, speaking for the throb in my core and the ache in my muscles. “Does that make you happy?” I was surprised by how calm I sounded, as if we were discussing the weather and not whether or not he’d enjoyed causing me pain.
Small lines formed between his brows as he processed and filed his emotions into their appropriate place.
I watched him practice this mechanical way of feeling.
It was careful and controlled, but it was starting to slip.
He wasn’t finding it as easy to manage as he used to.
His mask was taking longer to put on. This hate-fuck had been an unwilling glimpse into the inside of Alfie Tell.
He was scared of me. If I could shake his emotional control, that meant I had power over him, and I knew there was a part of him that hated me for it.
But he had power over me too, couldn’t he see that?
“It ought to make me feel better. Instead I just want to punish myself for hurting you. You’re turning everything on its head, O’Connell. You’ve changed all of the rules. You’ve thrown out the damned rule book entirely.”
I wondered what had happened to make rules so important to him.
I knew there had once been an Alfie Tell that hadn’t cared for the rule book.
I gave him a soft smile, one that was supposed to say ‘I know the feeling,’ but apparently it said something different because his eyes darkened in a way that turned my stomach.
“That fucking smile will be the death of me.” He tore his gaze away from mine and resumed his glare up at the ceiling, the muscle in his jaw ticking away. I mimicked him and we resumed our silence, each taking stock of our own thoughts.
Were we in the realms of fucked up? Becoming one of those couples that other people would refer to as toxic?
I didn’t want us to be toxic. I wanted us to be happy.
Alfie shifted beside me as the coil of sexual tension snaked its way through his body again. I couldn’t tell you exactly how I knew it was happening, I could just feel it. Maybe it was chemical. Pheromones or something.
“You’re too far away.” He reached for me, trying to pull me into his arms, but I swatted him away.
“I’m still mad at you.” Toxic fucking wasn’t our only problem, toxic fighting was there too.
As usual he’d managed to sidestep a major issue by fucking me and, as usual, I’d let him.
I was mad at myself too, but I was mad at him more because at least I’d tried.
“I might have to put a ban on you touching me until I’ve decided whether or not I’m leaving with you. ”
“I dare you to try.” He settled a defiant hand on my thigh, a silent compromise that I decided to accept.
His thumb tapped a restless rhythm against my leg.
I had become so in tune with him that the rhythm sent a relentless pulse through my own body, beating a drum inside me, restarting my own primal desires.
Will I never be tired of him? I wanted to roll over, straddle him.
Just to have him inside me would appease us both, but I was sore and we had things to discuss.
Sidestepping couldn’t become our habit. That’s what toxic couples did.
I looked up to see his steel greys burning a hole in the ceiling. He was cogitating on something. I dragged my eyes from him and began burning my own hole in the ceiling.
“What is it?” I asked when the ominous silence became too much and threatened to suffocate me. Alfie’s silence was always deafening.
“I don’t understand why you need to think about it. How can you even consider giving this up, Lola?” He sounded distant, as if his thoughts were too complex for him to be completely present.
“You don’t understand how I could give you up, you mean. Give up the great Alfie Tell, business mogul and wonder-fuck.”
“I wouldn’t word it like that, but yes. I don’t understand it. I can give you anything, literally anything. I can get you a seat on a fucking moon shuttle if you want it. I fuck you well, better than anyone else can?—”
“Do you even realise that you’re saying all the wrong things?
” I cut him off. “Have I ever struck you as the kind of girl that would be swayed by material nonsense? I’m the girl that buried diamond earrings in the garden, remember?
As for the sex, yes Alfie, you are the most wondrous fuck I ever had.
But it’s not the most important thing. So what else have you got? ”
“What else could you need?” I didn’t need to see his face to know it was a serious question. Patience, Lola.
“Alfie, none of that stuff is important. Your money could disappear and there might be a day when you can’t fuck me as well as you do now.
Maybe you get sick, or I do. Maybe one of us gets injured or maybe we just get old.
Maybe a thousand different things. What we are together can’t depend on things that are malleable or temporary.
” I dared a glance up at him. His beautiful face was a mask of concentration as he tried to recalculate.
“Alfie, it’s okay for you to admit that you don’t know what you’re doing.
” I was trying to ease him but when his eyes flashed to mine I knew I’d said the wrong thing.
“I know what I’m doing, Lola.”
I just sighed and looked up at him. “You’re a big faker.” I’d said those words to him so many times but they were still true and I wondered if they always would be. “You’re the most emotionally inept person I’ve ever met. You don’t give a damn about anyone else’s feelings?—”
“And what about my feelings?”
“What about them? You already said that you don’t care about mine enough to put them ahead of what you want, so why should I concern myself with yours?”
He let out an exasperated sigh. “You are pickling my fucking head tonight, do you know that? You are the most exhausting woman.”