29. NINEAH
NINEAH
THE LIQUOR WARMED MY BLOOD, dulling the background noise until all that was left was a floaty feeling.
Abraham had retrieved a bottle of aged bourbon from his office and two glasses in, our Thai takeout had arrived.
We’d in eaten silence while I’d avoided the mountain of questions I wanted to rapid-fire like cross examination.
The longer I sat in this house, the more I’d started to feel like a ghost, roaming the halls of someone else’s life and I was suddenly grateful for the nerve-numbing bourbon.
Full and tipsy, I stretched out on the floor on my back and watched the ceiling fan spin as I tried to recall an ounce, a thimble of familiarity in regard to this life, but I couldn’t.
I didn’t remember picking out the deep, chocolate suede sectional.
The hand-knotted Tibetan wool and silk rug.
Nor the art on the walls. While I’d watched Abraham grab dishes, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that I wouldn’t have known where to get them from.
But the most painful of them all—seeing the locked door at the end of the hall, painted entirely in pink.
I hadn’t been able to look inside. This house was a museum of our life together and instead of meeting that realization with my usual curiosity, I was just terrified.
Heavy footsteps returned to the living room and paused in front of me.
“You said if I wanted to know something, you’d tell me,” I reminded him. Abraham looked like a skyscraper from my position on the carpet as he stared down at me. “But you haven’t asked me any questions. Not about myself. Not about what might’ve happened to me. Why not?”
“I know what I need to.”
The alcohol making me brave, I giggled. “Translation—you’re afraid I might have answers you won’t like.”
Abraham wasn’t exactly transparent, but the more time I spent around him, the more that infallible curtain I’d spent months on the other side of, pulled back. It was a complete mind-fuck realizing someone you’d always regarded as larger than life was, at the end of the day, still just a man.
He lowered onto the sofa, the bourbon bottle still in his hand. I sat up from the floor and climbed onto the seat beside him. Resting my chin on my hands, I studied him. “I bet working under you sucked. In the military, I mean.” Believe it or not, I meant that as a compliment.
Abraham swallowed some of his bourbon. “At least I wasn’t fucking my subordinates.”
Blood flamed behind my cheeks.
His eyes tracking my mouth to my breasts where I wasn’t wearing a bra, he lined up his sights and fired his first shot. “Why him?”
This line of questioning was the last I’d expected him to pursue, but the bourbon swirling in my veins told me that if I shared a secret, Abraham might share one, too. And I wasn’t equipped to shut down the possibility of that.
I shrugged. “School sucked. Even if I could afford to be part of any clubs, I didn’t have the time because I had to work if I wanted to eat anything better than peanut butter and jelly and boxed macaroni, so I had no friends.
It wasn’t until I joined the Air Force that I met other girls who taught me how to do my hair, my makeup, basically how to look like a woman.
When I met Jayson, I’d never even been on a date before.
I’d messed around with a couple of girls in high school, but they weren’t social outcasts like me, so being out wasn’t as easy for them.
To have someone, even someone you know you shouldn’t be with, pay so much attention to you, treat you like you matter… it’s hard to walk away from that.”
He stared at me. “Ask your question.”
I must’ve been a little bit more than tipsy because no sooner than I wondered what the faded ink on the inside of his forearm said, I found myself tracing it with my index finger.
“I want to know what makes a southern grown, strait-laced, All-American wrestler who graduated Summa Cum Laude with a 4.7 GPA turn down three D1 offers to pimp himself out to the United States Marines.”
“That didn’t come up in your research?” he said, pretending to be distracted by my nipples.
“Only if you consider propagandized student paper bullshit a credible source of information.”
Abraham picked up the bottle. Taking a long swig from it, not taking his eyes off of me, he swallowed before answering. “My father’s Army. His father was a Marine. And his father.”
I nodded. That, I had known from my background research when Abraham was just a candidate. That time in my life suddenly felt like it was decades in the past.
“I was ten when he married my mom,” he continued.
“Had never had a dad, or any real father figure for that matter. He taught me how to fish, how to hunt, everything about what it meant to be a man. Then he adopted me and gave me his name, considered me his son. But he was real big on legacy—passing along what he knew, being a mentor, that kind of thing. Though he never gave me any reason to doubt that he didn’t see me any differently from my brothers, I guess there was always a part of me that felt I had something to prove.
At least, at first.” Abraham smirked at a distant memory.
“Once I actually found what I was good at, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. ”
I took the bottle from him, tipping back the bourbon, letting a full shot slide down my throat.
Everything moved in slow motion compared to my ever racing brain and I wondered if this was what it felt like to be normal.
Abraham moved a hand to my thigh, his fingers grazing the hem of my skirt as he asked me another question. “Who was the first?”
I frowned, thinking he was referring to my virginity, but he clarified. “Kink has no psychological causation but they don’t exist in a vacuum either. Someone tripped your wire, so who was it?”
If I was flushed earlier, fire now spread across my body from hairline to sternum.
Once again, I was completely unnerved by how astute this man was.
My head swimming from the alcohol and his ridiculously distracting pheromones, I stupidly told him.
“My substitute teacher. Ninth grade reading fundamentals.” I waited for him to laugh.
Not that I’d have been offended if he had, but I was so used to people thinking I was silly or insane, I’d never stopped bracing myself for it.
Only, Abraham didn’t laugh. He just looked unimpressed.
“Let me guess, some John Coffey from The Green Mile looking motherfucker.”
I flinched at how scarily accurate that was. “Okay well, what about you Mr. Judgmental? Did you always like petite nerds with no ass?”
Abraham’s massive hand slid up my skirt and squeezed one ass cheek and raised a brow. My skin burned where he touched me. “You know what I mean.”
“Equal opportunity lover.” He smiled. “I just like women.”
“How many women?”
“Asks the girl who was journaling about her crush on the teacher while I’d already been to war and back five times.”
“I never should have told you that,” I scoffed.
He ignored me. “All you need to know is I’ve only ever loved one. And she’s perfect.”
I fidgeted uncomfortably. Not only was I not used to men complimenting me—the ones I’d actually gone on dates with assumed I was already drowning in male attention and withheld it like bitches—but Abraham administered affection like he was abusing a prescription drug on my behalf. “You talk about me like I’m a doll.”
“No,” he disagreed. “Dolls sit on pedestals. You’re forgetful, wasteful, hot tempered, easily overstimulated.
You’re one of those women who start arguments in public, and you leave your shit all over the house.
But I’m the one who can’t leave you alone.
So, I guess that says more about me than anything. ”
“Yeah. It says you have taste.”
He snorted. Setting the bottle on the coffee table—so I didn’t knock it over, probably—he faced me, his furnace-like heat seeping into my skin, warming me better than any spirit.
The incessant buzzing between my legs was suddenly making it impossible to stay focused.
“It’s not just a size thing,” I blurted.
“Hm?”
“My whole life, men sought respect through fear or violence,” I admitted. “So, I respect the cohesiveness in duality. Intimidating and safe, giant and gentle… I don’t want to choose.”