Chapter 5 #2
Christian looks down at his blue jeans that he paired with a black t-shirt. “Terrance told me I should go shopping.”
Squinting, I take a step down to examine his outfit. He’s also wearing sneakers.
I take one more step and…
Ahhh. I get it.
I scoff, looking from his sneakers to his t-shirt. “You’re insufferable.”
“What—Lana.”
I turn, go back up my porch steps, and open my front door, slamming it behind me before he can follow me in. His shoes are Gucci and his fucking t-shirt has its tiny Prada logo at the neckline. His fists pound on my door. “Lana!”
“Leave!”
“Lana, please!” He pounds on the door again. “Lana, I’m not leaving.”
“Good!” I pound on the door from the other side, my fists hurting from the force I use. “Then I’m calling the police!”
Christian doesn’t punch the door again, instead it’s a quiet thud that I imagine is his forehead against my yellow painted door. My hands flatten against my door, and my forehead thuds against it too.
“I’m not leaving,” I hear him say again.
I hiccup on tears that want to break out of me. I swallow before I say, “I don’t believe you.”
“Trust me,” Christian says, “please.”
“I can’t. I don’t,” I croak.
I wish I did and I wish I could, but I haven’t forgotten what happened last time I trusted him and it’s been four years. If I let him do it to me again, the stitches will rip and the wound will bleed me dry.
My heart can’t afford another disappearance—another person to grieve. Especially grieving the same person twice, I don’t have that in me.
I sniff quietly and my hand trembles as it slides down my door. It wraps around the handle, my thumb presses the button, and I pull the door open. I am met with red, silver lines eyes and his hair is all disheveled the way I like it, and his hands are gripping the door frame.
“Tell me—” My voice cracks. “Tell me why you’re here.”
“Lana…”
“Tell me,” I croak. “And I’ll think about it.”
“I’m here because I miss you,” he says, his voice also breaking. “I’m here because I hate my parents for taking me away from you. I’m here because I need you more than I need anything else.”
It’s a low blow, I know, but I whisper, “But not more than you need alc—”
“Yes,” he says, and takes a step, the toes of his sneakers just on the line between the house and the porch. “More than that.”
“Christian, you can’t just say nice, romantic things and expect me to just let you back in. That isn’t enough. You’ve been here for a week—”
“I know, baby—”
“I need more than that from you,” I tell him. “I need something.”
“I love you.”
“Not that,” I murmur. Yes that.
“I love you and I’ve never stopped loving you, and I want to keep loving you. I want you to let me love you so much that I die from it.”
I shake my head, taking an arrow in my heart. “Christian. Those are just…really nice words.”
Words I’ve missed hearing. Words I’ve dreamed about hearing. Words I’ve replayed in my mind. And words that feel like a stitch through a long and deep wound—but a stitch nonetheless.
I gave up a long time ago on the idea that I would hear him tell me he loves me again.
“Just…patience,” Christian breathes. “I need patience. I’m not…I’m working on—”
“Christian—”
“I want to touch you,” he growls low. “Can I just…hold you?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” On my part, at least.
Christian nods and his entire body slumps, like he might just sink into himself and disappear, but I don’t want that. He disappeared once and, whether I liked it or not, parts of myself disappeared with him.
He isn’t something you can close away in a box or behind a door with hundreds of locks.
He isn’t the thing you forget about until you see it again after cleaning under your bed or emptying out your closet.
He is always there, tall and proud and beautiful like the statues people admire in museums for hours on end.
And perhaps I am an idiot, because my hand reaches out and I follow it with my eyes. Slowly, my palm lands on the center of his chest and I feel the warm cotton beneath it. “Is this enough?”
Christian puts his hand over mine and whispers, “I’ll take what I can get.”
My eyes flit up to his, and I can’t tell if they’re sad or angry or if he’s grieving, or it’s everything all at once in a messy slush of emotions.
But I wish I could take it away. I wish I could let him go and sleep in his car with those emotions, but he might drive away to “the store” and come back to my house with bottles from “the store.”
The more I think about it, staring into his warm coffee eyes, I know that he wouldn’t do that. Not now, not here. If he is telling the truth, then he knows better than to go to the store and come back here, to my house, and drink himself dead.
With the corners of my vision blurry, I lift my other hand and it goes to his chest too. “Better?” I rasp.
“A bit,” he says, his voice deep and husky. He stands a bit straighter.
I take a step and press my hands harder against his heart like I might be able to take it out and heal it before I put it back in his chest. I take another step and his hand curls around my hip, his fingers bruising punishingly, but in the sweetest way.
“Lana.”
“You look nice in jeans,” I say. “Now that you wear them again.”
He sniffs a laugh. “I’m not too good for jeans, Lana.”
I wrinkle my nose. “You sure?”
The corners of his lips twitch, but he says, “I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I want to.
“I have to believe that you are,” I whisper. Eventually.
“And if I prove it to you?”
“Then I’ll really believe it,” I whisper. “When I see it.”
Christian gives me the subtlest dip of his chin and his fingers burrow into my hip, his touch searing through my dress, practically melting the fabric away. And I wish it would so I could feel his skin on mine, just to have something to hold onto tonight. Even in my anger.
“Lana, I’m going to,” he promises. “I will.”
“Okay,” I rasp. “And I’m sorry too.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Christian husks. “It was me. I left. I hurt you. I hurt us.”
Those eyes…
Those eyes drop to my lips quickly, just to flick back up into my eyes. I mimic him, stealing a glance at his full, rosy lips, and then back up—just for fun. Well, it is supposed to be just for fun until the gleam in his eyes makes my lower belly tighten.
“You look beautiful tonight,” he whispers. “Too beautiful for him. Too beautiful for me.”
I swallow thickly. My hands smooth up the cotton of his shirt, both of his hands at my hips now, until my hands are in his hair at his nape. This is bad. “Thank you.”
“I took off twenty points.”
“I took off ten when he didn’t open the door for me again. And when we split the bill.”
Christian tries not to smile, but he shakes his head. “Idiot.”
“Be nice.”
“Not to him,” he nearly growls and all amusement fades. “Did he kiss you?”
I stare at him for a moment, and he stares straight through me. I shake my head and I feel the tension escaping his body. His forehead drops onto mine with an exhale. Relief.
My lips part at the closeness of his, like an instinct. My lips know his, feeling them close by and remembering the breath that comes from between them.
“Christian,” I breathe, a split second before his lips are on mine. Fitting together like we were crafted for each other, tailor-made.
I forget the drinking and him leaving and his parents and the heartbreak. I only remember how good we are at this, all the ways we fit, and how much he loved me then.
He growls when I moan into his mouth, and I stagger back from how hard and deep he’s kissing me. He catches me with a hand around my back and his hand wraps around my throat.
We stumble back into the house, the door closing behind us. “God, Lana.”
I gasp when the edge of the entry table digs into my lower back. Christian wipes away everything that is on the table and he lifts me onto the wood. My dress hikes up around my waist as my legs spread to make space for him between them. “Christian.”
His hand angles my head, exposing my throat for him and his lips. I arch and my legs wrap around him, the heels digging into his back. Christian’s mouth comes back to my lips and it is a sloppy and messy war of tongues, and my nails are digging into his arms.
I love him in t-shirts. As hot as he is in suits, nothing will ever be hotter than my Christian in jeans and a t-shirt.
His hands run up and down my body beneath the dress, stopping at my ass to squeeze tightly and pull me to the table's edge. I feel him hard between my legs and I moan, the sound only pulling me closer to his hips.
I bite at his lip and breathe, “You aren’t allowed to kiss me.”
“No?”
I shake my head, whimpering as I kiss his Adam’s apple. His pulse, his jaw, under his ear. I kiss him everywhere I can reach before I go back to his lips and take everything that’s mine. Mine.
“Stop kissing me then,” he dares me.
I shake my head and pull him close with my hand curved at the back of his neck.
“Don’t ever stop fucking kissing me,” he growls.
“Okay,” I gasp.
Stop kissing him! Be angry! Push him away! Be a shark!
His hands gripping my ass lift me and he walks through my house like he’s been here a thousand times. He wavers a bit, looking around while I kiss his neck, until he sits back on my couch.
I fall into him and my lips latch on to his again, and, for some reason, I think about our old couch in our first apartment together.
My body burns from the memories of him making love to me on that couch, all the ways he killed me with orgasms that left me breathless and boneless.
All the ways he brought me back to life with the way he kissed me—my lips, my neck, my breasts, my thighs, between my legs.
“I fucking love this dress.”
I giggle, breathless. “Yeah?”
He chuckles, breathless. “Yeah.”
Take it off, are the words I don’t say, but the way his hands run over my skin in reverence and adoration is enough.
Then the images of the ways I have found him drunk and passed out on our old couch invades me, and it drags me to a war I don’t want to be in anymore.
Christian is still kissing me like he might die if he pulls away, and I am slowing us down—bringing us back to the reality of him living in his car in my driveway, and my heartbreak.
I steal one last kiss, long and soft, and pull away breathless. His brows pinch and his coffee eyes tell me everything I already know.
“Chri—”
“I’ll go,” Christian husks, broken.
“I—”
“I know. It’s okay,” he says. He gently lifts me off his body and onto the couch. His hands around my waist linger before he finally—reluctantly—lets me go. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I watch him leave the same way he came, and the yellow door closes behind him. The sound of a car door closing comes next, and I curl into myself on my sofa, waiting for the engine to roar.
It doesn’t, and somehow that hurts more.
I force myself off the couch and kick off my heels, my vision clouding.
The only light coming into the living room is from the street lamps, no headlights.
I pad over to the window and split the blinds with my thumb and forefinger, blinking, and I find him in his driver’s seat.
The seat is reclined and he lies there with an arm bent under his head and the other on his chest.
I want to invite him in, tell him to stay in the guest room. He is sleeping in his two seater car and his long legs and his back are being tortured—my Christian.
But then what?
I know better. I know that if I let him in, I’ll let him off easy and I’ll let him kiss me when there needs to be boundaries. There needs to be proof. Actions.
I cry in the shower and some more against my pillow, my heart twisting knowing he is in his car when he could be next to me. But at least he’s near, right? I think I actually like having him here.