3. Sienna
3
SIENNA
Life is good.
I have my gallery. Victoria and Caleb have Holly. It’ll soon be the holidays, and the world is already twinkling like the sky spewed fairy lights everywhere.
There was a time when I believed that Christmas was for other people. The ones who still harbored that tiny kernel of belief in their hearts that a man with a fluffy white beard and a red outfit could travel around the planet in one night and spread joy and happiness. But over the years I’ve grown to enjoy it because I get to share it with people I love.
People I choose to love.
The ones I keep in my life because they’re important to me.
The holidays were different when I was a little kid. Instead of waking up at the crack of dawn, too excited to sleep, I would lie in my bed, waiting for the house to reveal whether it would be a day for smiling or a day for hiding in my room, trying not to make a sound.
Images pop into my head before I can stop them.
I wake up on Christmas morning to snarling voices reaching me from the kitchen. I climb out of bed and sit on the bottom of the stairs to listen, shivering from the cold. The living room door is open, but the Christmas tree is dark, the baubles clinging to the branches, waiting for the fairy lights to bring them to life.
“Who the fuck do you think pays for the electricity?” My dad’s voice is filled with sickly yellow anger.
“It’s Christmas, Hooch.” That’s what everyone calls him. Hooch. Including my mom. “She’s just a kid. Let her have the lights. Just for today.”
He snorts. “The stupid fucking lights or dinner. Your choice.”
There’s a pause before my mom replies. “But we all got to eat. You’re gonna make her sit in the living room and go hungry because you don’t want the lights on the tree?”
I’m glad I can’t see his face when he says, “You’ll be sitting right next to her.”
“What about dinner?” My mom’s voice is pleading now.
“I’m going out. You enjoy your fucking fairy lights. I’m sure the kid will understand that you chose them over putting food in her belly.”
“Hooch, you can’t do ? —”
There’s a sound like a cupboard door being slammed, and I jump. It’s the same sound that always precedes my mom telling me that she walked into the door.
We have fairy lights on the Christmas tree that year. Mom and I sit on cushions in front of it eating cheese sandwiches and orange slices, while the bruise on her jaw turns black and purple and she dabs the blood from her swollen lip with a kitchen towel.
I shiver despite the perfect temperature inside the gallery.
I wish I could go back and tell five-year-old me that it will get better. That it won’t be long before he leaves us for good, and that one day, long after my mom’s passing, I’ll learn that the holidays bring out the best in people. It’s probably due to cheesy Hallmark movies, but still, it’s the one time of year when people raise their heads from their phones and smile at one another.
I’m still smiling when I go to lock up the gallery and switch off the lights.
The door opens, and someone steps inside, shaking raindrops from his suit jacket.
Kyle.
I never got a chance to tell him at the opening night, but his sabbatical has done him good. His brown hair is longer, wavier, curling around his ears and over his shirt collar, adding to the rock-star look that comes with the ear piercing and the tattoos sneaking out from under his cuffs. His eyes are brighter too, like Ireland managed to put the sparkle back in them.
Now, he’s less the suited-and-booted mafia lawyer, and more the man I met in a nightclub years ago. The man who spoke about giants and legends and told me that everything he made me feel, was all me.
“What are you doing here?”
“Can we talk?”
I peer outside at the rain zigzagging like lightning down the windows and catch a glimpse of my reflection on the glass. I look ghostly, drab, barely here beside Kyle’s renewed energy, and my confidence slips through the keyhole as I close the door behind him.
Raising my head, I face him and try to ignore the way my pulse races, his green eyes taking me straight back to New Year’s six years ago. I swear I can still feel the music thrumming inside my chest.
“You waited till I’m closing the gallery to come and speak to me?”
He shrugs. “I almost didn’t come.”
I drag my eyes away from him and head through the gallery to my office, away from the windows and the prying eyes of anyone passing by. The butterflies inside my heart are back, the little traitors. Don’t make eye contact , I tell myself. If I don’t meet his eyes, I’ll be safe.
I pause in the middle of my office, suddenly hyper-aware of how much space Kyle consumes just standing there. He didn’t seem this tall the night we met. Probably because we were in a noisy crowded club where we had to lean in close to hear each other speak.
“I had a lot of time to think in Ireland,” he begins, filling the chasm between us and sucking me in.
Seriously, how am I so weak that I can’t even be alone in a room with him without my body reminding me of that night?
“I don’t expect you to forgive me for leaving you that night, Sienna. I can’t even begin to imagine how afraid you must’ve been when you realized that you were alone. I’d hate me too.” He sucks in a deep breath and exhales shakily.
He’s right about one thing: it’s the scariest fucking thing that has ever happened to me.
“I’ve never been able to let you go, Sienna.”
His eyes lock onto mine and, too late, I try to look away. But I’m already trapped.
“Call it obsession, or survivor guilt, or whatever. I know how I felt about losing you and I know what I want.”
I don’t speak. I’m transfixed listening to him, my heart drumming its own peculiar beat like it wrote this tune especially for Kyle. I’ll hear him out, it’s the least I can do, but he just doesn’t get it. The last six years were different for him than they were for me. He didn’t have to undergo numerous surgeries. Or lay awake at night wondering what kind of man could leave a woman to die alone on the highway. Or watch his physical scars morphing into something that he still couldn’t face showing anyone.
Our paths followed different trajectories after the car crash, like pieces of shrapnel from an explosion, and not even all the Murray money can bend them so that they meet again somewhere in the future.
“I want you, Sienna. I’ve wanted you since the first time I saw you, and nothing will ever change that. Have you ever wondered why I didn’t ask your name that night?” he asks, and I chew my bottom lip and shake my head. “It might sound crazy, but I felt as if I already knew you. You could’ve been called Jane or Greer or Thomas?—”
“Thomas?” I smile. The chasm is gradually closing.
He smiles too. “It wouldn’t have mattered what you were called because you were already you. You were already the you I see in front of me now.”
I shake my head and sniff back tears. “I’m not the same person though. Too much has changed.”
“You’re right: too much has changed.” He shrugs. “But you know what, when I look at you, I see you , Sienna.”
He steps closer, and I’m rooted to the ground like a centuries-old tree.
“I see what’s inside. I see the sunrise over the Grand Canyon, the colors bursting to get out of you and onto canvas, and the fearlessness like a lioness in the wild.”
“A lioness?” My voice is barely there.
“A leoin.”
He reaches out, so slowly his hand might not be moving at all and touches the dip between my collarbones. His caress is kitten-soft, and my breath hitches in my chest.
“Please don’t…” I shake my head, but I don’t pull away.
There’s no air in the room. His oxygen is my oxygen. His heartbeat is my heartbeat; if his heart were to stop right now, so too would mine.
“Tell me you don’t want this.” His fingers tilt my chin so that I’m looking directly into his eyes. “Tell me to walk away and never come back, and I will.”
My heart is frantically trying to claw its way out of me. My pussy is clenching at his touch. But the fear is still there, like a lump of ice deep in the pit of my stomach, warning me not to trust him. He left me once before; he can do it again.
“Say it, Sienna. Tell me you don’t want this, and I promise that you’ll never hear from me again.”
“ Never ?”
Is that what I’m afraid of? That Kyle will be true to his word, and I’ll never be this close to him again? Why does the thought of never hearing him call me leoin again feel like a spear poking holes in my chest?
While he was away, I got my life back onto an even plane. No ups, no downs, no distractions. Just me and my work. Kyle has been back for a week, and here I am all over the place like I’m trying to walk across a frozen pond.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I don’t even have to ask. When he’s this close to me, I’m transported back to that dark alleyway, every nerve-ending in my body screaming to be fucked.
“Well?” Kyle asks. “It’s your call, Sienna. Tell me you don’t want me.”
“I…”
Kyle’s lips are almost touching mine. I can feel his breath on my face, see the bottle-green flecks in his eyes, smell his cologne.
It would be so easy. Tell him to turn around and walk away. It would all be over.
But I already feel the emptiness of losing him like Goldie Hawn’s character in Death Becomes Her with a hole straight through her middle.
“I can’t…”
He cups my face with both hands. His tongue is in my mouth, and I can’t even believe the sounds that are coming from me. My body has made the decision for me, and now there’s no turning back.
Kyle picks me up and carries me to my desk. The pot of pens rolls onto the floor and lands with a crash. I push Kyle’s damp jacket over his shoulders and fumble with the buttons of his shirt, our lips attached, tongues chasing each other around my mouth.
Everything else is forgotten.
Kyle raises my arms in the air and pulls my chunky sweater over my head. I gasp. The overhead light in the office is stark, designed for computer work.
“Kyle, no,” I breathe against his neck.
“No?” He pulls away, and I cross my arms over my chest.
“Let’s go to the studio.” The studio is in darkness. He won’t see my scars.
Too late. He’s already spotted them.
I try to get down from the desk, and he helps, offering me his hand. I’ve not felt this exposed or this vulnerable, well, ever. “This was a mistake. I’m sorry.”
But he pulls me towards him, his free hand entwined in my hair. “Trust me, Sienna. Please.”
I don’t speak.
He holds my gaze long enough to know that I’m not going to bolt, and then he traces the scars across my neck and chest with his fingertip. “Don’t be ashamed of your body, Sienna. These marks are part of you. They are what makes you so special.”
He dips his head and kisses the scar that starts between my cleavage. He traces the puckered skin with tiny fragile kisses, across my chest, around my collarbone, and up to where my jawline meets my left ear.
“Mo leoin, you are so beautiful.”
His kisses travel to my mouth and keep going. No part of my face is left untouched. He sucks on my earlobe. My neck. My hairline.
My entire body is tingling, and I realize that my arms are no longer crossed over my chest, and my bra is on the floor.
Kyle unzips my pants and tugs them down over my hips while his lips continue to trace damp patterns from my belly button to my abdomen. He slides my panties down, and I step out of them. No one has seen me naked since the accident, and I’d kind of accepted that it was how it would always be.
I feel his tongue between my legs and instinctively reach behind me for the edge of the desk to keep me upright.
“You’re beautiful, Sienna.” He peers up at me from between my legs, his eyes greener than ever, while his thumb strokes the livid scar on my inner thigh. “You believe me, don’t you?”
I nod. My pussy is dripping, and his tongue has barely touched me. God, I never realized how badly I wanted this. How badly I want him .
“Say it.” He spreads my legs while still holding my gaze. “I’m beautiful. Say it.”
“I’m beautiful,” I whisper.
“Say it like you mean it.” He watches me closely, eyes narrowed. “You want me to make you come, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I want to make you come, Sienna. I want to suck this pussy dry, but I can’t do it until you tell me you’re beautiful.”
“I’m beautiful.”
My breathing is growing ragged, and he still hasn’t touched me, but my pussy remembers. It remembers, and now that we’ve come this far, it’s pleading for him to fuck me with his tongue.
“That’s better.” Without warning, he drags his tongue between the folds of my sex and the reaction is instantaneous. “You taste so fucking good, Sienna. Sweeter even than I remember and fuck, those memories have kept me going all this time.”
He spreads my legs even further, and I arch my back, pushing my sex onto him. He licks around the outside of my pussy, dragging his tongue back and forth and teasing me with the tip just far enough inside to promise me the orgasm to end all fucking orgasms.
His tongue comes out, and he kisses the scars above my mound.
I know what he can see. I’ve studied the shiny skin in the mirror until I could recreate it on canvas with my eyes closed. But for the first time, I don’t feel as though I need to hide it.
Kyle inserts a finger inside me. Two fingers. Three. “Don’t come yet, mo leoin.” He finds the spot and drags his hand back and forth across it while his tongue catches my juices. “How fucking wet are you? You’ve been saving this up for me, haven’t you?”
The fingers slide out. His tongue replaces them, my pussy clenching around him. My breathing is ragged; it was ragged from the moment he opened me up, and the lack of oxygen reaching my brain is making the world spin.
There is only his tongue. Nothing else exists.
“Come for me, Sienna. Come all over my face.”
Back and forth, my pussy throbbing, my clit tingling. My orgasm explodes, and Kyle holds my thighs, his tongue relentless. The spasms just keep coming and coming.
I barely have a chance to catch my breath before Kyle lowers me back onto the desk. He raises my legs and rests them over his shoulders while he unzips his pants and releases his cock. Gripping it with one hand, he rubs it around my sex, smothering it with my cum.
“Guide me in.” He places my hand around his girth.
He’s solid and silky at the same time. I place the head inside my pussy and thrust my hips, pushing myself onto him. Deeper and deeper. Till I think there’s nowhere else for him to go, and then he leans over me, raising my ass off the table and giving him the extra space he needs to fill me up.
My eyes widen. I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him.
I can taste me on his tongue. I still hear Kyle’s words from almost six years ago: All I’m doing is waking you up. The rest is down to you . His kisses are demanding. There’s no air for me to breathe but his, and that’s okay. It’s exactly as it should be.
His cock pounds into me. Our bodies merge into one happy chaotic mess of cum and pre-cum, and I know that if I could pull him in any deeper, I would.
“I’ve waited so long for this, Sienna.” His words bleed into my mouth, and I’m not even sure if I imagined them.
“Me too.”
He pauses, just long enough for me to see the glimmer in his eyes, and then his mouth smothers mine again, and his body judders as he fills me up with his cum.
When we are both still, he smooths the hair away from my face. “You’re even more beautiful than in my memories. Promise me that you’ll always remember this. No matter what happens, you’ll never forget how special you are.”
I reach up and kiss the tip of his nose while his dick shrinks inside me, and my pussy squeezes him out. “No matter what happens? Why does this sound like goodbye?”
He nuzzles his nose against mine. “It’s only goodbye if that’s what you want.”
“It isn’t.” And I mean it.
He supports his upper body on his elbows, and it feels like we’re in a tiny cave, shielded from the world outside. Nothing bad can happen to me here. I feel it, and I believe it, and the tiny part of my consciousness that understands this moment won’t last forever is thankfully silent.
“Sienna, I?—”
I place my finger on his lips. “Don’t, Kyle. You don’t need to say anything.”
“I do.” He sighs, and I already feel the outside creeping in, and the moment seeping away like water through a crack. “I know that you don’t want to be a part of my world. But I would give it all up for you, Sienna.”
“I… No.” I try to move out from under him, but he doesn’t budge. “I can’t ask you to do that. Not for me.”
“You’re not asking me to do anything. I’m telling you this is what I want.”
“It would never work, Kyle. You would always resent me. Your family would never forgive me.”
“How could I ever resent you for making me happy?”
“But I…” I’m wasting my breath. I could toss a hundred arguments into the equation, and he’d shoot every one of them down in flames. “What if I don’t make you happy?”
He smiles. “You’re all I’ve ever wanted, so it’s a no-brainer. We could relocate to Ireland.”
His eyes search for a glimmer of hope or excitement in mine, something he can hold onto and mold into a future that belongs to us both.
“Sienna, I would move to Antarctica with you if it’s where you wanted to be. I’d be happy on a deserted island, living in a roofless shack with no running water and an endless supply of watercolor paints. I’d even move to fucking Timbuktu if I could wake up to your smile each morning.”
I chuckle. “Is Timbuktu even a real place?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
The eagerness in his voice is so real that I feel a sharp stab of guilt in my chest. I shouldn’t have allowed this to happen, not if it’s going to give him false hope. He said all the right things. He made me feel beautiful again, and sexy, and desirable, but it would be wrong to drag him away from everything he knows, even if he believes it will make him happy.
It won’t.
If we shrink our world to the two of us and my art, bitterness will inevitably spread through his veins like poison. It will taint everything that he thinks he loves about me until all that remains is a shriveled nugget of bone-dry dust that once resembled affection.
“I don’t want to go anywhere, Kyle. This is my home. It’s your home too. Now that I have my gallery…” I was about to say that I have everything I want, but I can’t bear to see the hurt in his eyes. And it isn’t strictly true. “I have everything I want, for now.”
“You can open an art gallery anywhere, Sienna. You can have a chain of galleries around the world.”
He makes it sound achievable, and I wonder if there’s anything that the Murrays’ mafia money can’t buy.
“Think about it, that’s all I’m saying.”
Kyle stands and offers me a hand to help me off the table.
He pulls me into his arms, and it would be so easy to say yes. To watch his face light up with joy. To know that he would protect me with his life and that I would never want for anything again.
But the past needs more than a shit load of dollars to wipe it clean.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Thank—”
Before he can finish, the buzzer sounds beneath my desk for the front door and makes us both jump. Kyle, my nakedness, the feel of his cock inside me, the fact that we just had sex on my desk, it all evaporates as reality kicks back in, dragging me back down to earth with a skull-shattering jolt.
“Fuck!”
I grab my panties from the floor and almost fall flat on my face as I step into them, adrenaline pumping through me. Kyle grips my arm to keep me standing, but I can’t look at him.
“Are you expecting a late client?” He zips up his pants and buttons his shirt, and I don’t know how his fingers are still cooperating with his brain.
My panties are already saturated with his cum, but there’s no time to deal with it now. Not that I keep spare clean underwear at the gallery. I tug my pants up over my hips and drag my sweater over my head, wishing that I wore a lighter outfit to work, one that didn’t set my skin on fire where Kyle’s fingerprints linger.
“It isn’t a client.” My mouth is dry.
The bell rings again.
Fuck, fuck, fuck! I should have turned Kyle away while I had the chance.
I catch a glimpse of us in the mirror. Kyle is as immaculate as ever, his damp suit jacket almost dry, not a crease in sight as evidence of what we just did. And there I am beside him, rosy-cheeked, my hair looking like I just climbed off a vertical loop roller coaster in gale force winds.
I push my hair back and fasten it into a messy bun on top of my head. Then I lick my index fingers and try wiping away the dark smudges under my eyes where my mascara has leaked, probably while I was in the throes of the best orgasm of my life,
“You look beautiful, leoin.” Kyle meets my gaze in the mirror. “No one would ever know that my cock was just inside your beautiful pussy.”
He comes closer, and I can smell me on him. Or can I smell it on me? I clamp my hands over my mouth and exhale into them, checking out my breath. It’ll have to do.
My stomach twists as I switch the office lights off and walk through the gallery. Maybe I should’ve warned Kyle that I was expecting Nick, but it’s too late now. His beige cashmere coat is visible through the window, and as we approach the entrance, his smile fades when he spots Kyle.
Deep breath. I unlock the door.
I only agreed to the date because Nick refused to take no for an answer. But right now, sitting opposite him in a swanky restaurant, feigning interest in his conversation while my body is still tingling from Kyle’s touch, is the last thing I want to do.
“Hello, Nick.” I can feel the tension emanating from Kyle. “You met Kyle at the launch party.”
I have a vague recollection of Nick whisking me away from Kyle when he arrived and somehow manipulating my movements so that our paths didn’t cross again, but I tuck it away for later.
“Kyle Murray.”
Nick doesn’t shake Kyle’s extended hand, he doesn’t smile in greeting, or exchange any of the pleasantries associated with making new acquaintances. Instead, before I can diffuse the obvious hostility between the two men with a flippant comment, he says, “I had a feeling we’d meet again, although I didn’t expect it would be so soon.”
His tone is cold, a million miles away from the soothing cadence of the voice he has perfected for anxious patients.
“Kyle popped in to see how I’m getting on,” I say.
“I’m surprised he didn’t just do some digging or get one of his cronies to check up on you. That’s what guys like you do, isn’t it?”
My gaze flits between the two men. I’ve no idea what he means, but the chill in his voice has just obliterated the contentment I felt in Kyle’s passionate embrace a short while ago.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
Nick arches a well-groomed eyebrow. “Your friend here has been making inquiries about me. Perhaps you should’ve warned him that you don’t need his permission, or anyone else’s for that matter, to date other men.”