Chapter 4 Lucy #2
While it’s running, I grab my old childhood laptop.
Might as well watch something while I soak in the tub, and there’s no way I’m bringing my work laptop in here.
I run the charging cable and set it up on the closed seat of the toilet, and, yes!
It works. Although, it takes me a hot minute to update it.
I don’t even know why it’s still here. Why it never moved with me. Until I see the folder on the desktop.
Zachary.
“Don’t do it,” I say out loud. “There is absolutely no reason to open that.”
I go to the tub, swirl my hand in it under the pretense of checking the temperature. I’m even convinced that I’m not going to look at it.
But instead, I walk straight up to the damn laptop and open the folder where all the videos I ever made of the two of us are.
“Shit,” I say on a sigh, as I enter the password on the folder and open the first file.
It’s one of those silly close-ups where we are laughing too hard.
“Watch the nuts, Bug,” he says, gasping for breath. He grips my hips and moves the way I’m sitting on him. It was before he had the undercut. Just layer after layer of thick waves I was envious of.
“I said say hi. It’s our anniversary. Six months of dating.”
Zach looks to the camera, composes his face. “Hi.” Then, he bursts into laughter again. “Now, turn the camera off so I can get back to what I was doing.”
And given the way he grips my chin and turns my lips to his as the screen goes blank, I have a pretty solid guess of what that was.
I yank a chair from the bedroom and place it right next to the tub. “You’re gonna get electrocuted,” I mutter as I put the laptop on it. Once I’m certain it’s secure, I strip, place a towel to dry my hands next to the laptop, and climb into the tub.
The water is too hot, despite checking it.
But I embrace the burn.
Once I’m situated, I press play on the second video.
The camera is placed on a shelf, pointing toward Zach’s bed. He’s asleep on his front, with the cover just over his ass. I smile when I come into the shot. My hair was longer, and I’m in soft gray cotton underwear, a bra, and panties with a white waistband.
I put my finger to my lips at the camera, then go jump on him.
But I misjudged him being asleep. Instead, just as I near him, he rolls and grabs me in his arms. I get a peek at his already-hard, condom-covered cock as he playfully nuzzles my neck and growls.
I study his hands, almost the size of dinner plates. The way they’d grip me just an inch from painfully. He always held me so tight. His arms wrapping around me in a way that would make it hard to breathe, and yet calmed me as easily as it aroused.
No man has ever handled me that way since. Too concerned about bruising or hurting me, they were gentlemen playing by the Bloomsbury Rules or some shit.
But Zach…
God, he never held back.
I swear I can feel the scratch of his scruff against my cheek, now, as he kisses me hard on the video and moves above me.
I hit pause.
I know what happens next in this video, and I’m not sure what would happen to my sanity if I watched it. It’s not the only sex video we have, but it’s definitely one of the longest and hardest hitting.
My throat is soft as I raise my hand to it and squeeze it gently. Erotic asphyxiation is one of the most beautiful things. To have so much trust in the person you are with that you let them do something arousing, and yet, dangerous.
Some call it reckless. Foolish.
But for me, it’s the most beautiful dance between life and death.
A ride that’s impossible to put into words.
Like a masochist, I press play again, soaking in the way his thumb strokes the side of my neck.
“Do you trust me?” Grudge asks.
“With every cell in my body. Choke me, please.” There is desperation in the last three words.
We stare at each other, intently. A never-ending silent expression of trust and love and adoration. When Grudge kisses me, it’s slow, tender.
Unhurried.
Passionate.
The way his lips treat mine with reverence.
His hand slips between us, guiding himself into me, and we both gasp at the intensity.
“Zach.” The word escapes on a whisper as his hips begin to thrust.
When his fingers return to my neck, I tilt my head back against the pillow, giving him room to grip me more fully. My hair folds in waves across the pillow.
“No one else could ever give me everything you do,” Grudge murmurs against my lips.
His hips begin to increase in speed, but his fingers? They stroke my skin, his thumb rubbing up and down my pulsing vein.
And slowly, begin to squeeze.
Here in the tub, I swallow deeply, my throat dry. Memories flood me of how it used to feel, the brilliant dots of light, the sense of panic, and waves of overwhelming trust.
They mix with the sounds of our lovemaking. The sticky slap of skin on skin.
The way his breath catches as he gets close to his own orgasm.
The gasp of my own, and then—
I hit pause and close the file.
There’s a throbbing ache between my legs, but I can’t bring myself to do anything about it.
For a while after Zach had started his prison sentence, I’d watch the video over and over to masturbate to.
My own homemade porn where I was the star, with the man of my dreams as my co-star, and we could still have our own happily ever after. But for his sake, I’d divorced him.
The only way my father wouldn’t abuse his power and work against us to get him the maximum sentence.
I didn’t want Grudge to go to prison, at all.
But the promise that if I did as my father said, he would endeavor to get the sixteen years maximum Grudge was facing reduced to eight, felt like the least I could do.
My father suggested that with good behavior, he could be out in four.
The loss of my husband, in return for twelve years less prison time, felt like the right balance, given he was going inside for defending me.
Eventually, I realized that I was training myself to only be aroused by Zach. The first time I had sex with someone else, I faked an orgasm because it felt impossible to reach a real one. Part of it was blow back from the assault. Therapy helped with that.
But the person didn’t sound like Zach, didn’t feel like Zach, didn’t taste like Zach, had a smaller penis than Zach. And no amount of therapy could help with that.
Over time, I found a way to shift him from memory. Time has done a lot of the healing.
But only Zach has ever been able to make me feel safe enough to be choked and taken roughly in the most passionate and romantic and uninhibited of ways.
He’s the only man who never shied away from the darker things I crave, never wondered if I was okay, psychologically, because of the things I want.
And if I watch it now, I know I’ll cry for the loss of it.
I look at the date the files were loaded and skip to Thanksgiving.
The camera is on me. I’m wearing a white lace bralette, reclining in Zach’s bed in his first apartment. God, the place was ugly. Wood-paneled walls in poorly varnished pine. Orange and brown curtains. A beige carpet with bald spots and three cigarette burns.
But we were so freaking happy we finally had a place to ourselves.
Light seeps from the gap in the curtains and dances on the headboard. The watery warm sunlight only ever hit the bed in the morning.
“Five reasons you love me,” Zach says; his voice is rough.
“Your eyes,” I say quickly, and I’m looking slightly above the camera as I speak. “They tell a thousand stories, like you’re an old soul who’s walked this earth a good few times before this one.”
“Reason two?”
I look away for a second. “When I need you, you’re always there.”
“Obviously,” he says. “That’s my job. To be there for you.”
“Yes, but many men wouldn’t be or aren’t. So, I’m grateful. Is it crude to say how good you are in bed as a reason?”
I hear his gruff chuckle, then see his hand slide up my rib cage and cup my breast. He had his hands tattooed by then.
The four letters of my nickname, L U C E run across his knuckles as his thumb brushes over my nipple.
“Are you kidding me, Luce? Hearing your woman tell you she thinks you’re a sex god is good for the ego. ”
My cheeks go pink, and I try to cover my face. But he grips my wrist and tugs my hand away. “Nah, babe. I want to see it when you talk about sex. Love the way you want the dirtiest things but get all shy talking about ‘em. What’s reason four?”
“What you just said. You love me as I am. You don’t want to change me. You just wholeheartedly encourage me to be the best version of myself. Like pushing me to go apply to Harvard. You want that for me, even though it means we might be apart for years.”
There’s a shuffle of the camera, and suddenly, Zach appears next to me. His hair has an undercut now, and what is left is up in a messy bun. But he’s naked. So utterly confident in his own skin.
He kisses me. “You’re gonna make me so fucking proud when you graduate. I’m gonna watch you walk across that stage with my heart in my mouth.”
My smile slips for a minute, but Zach is so in the moment, he doesn’t notice. I knew I could only get two guest tickets for one of the events. And I wasn’t sure how I would reconcile my father and mother wanting to attend, with them having to sit next to Zach at the other.
It would be a toss-up between the man who paid for the whole thing—my father—and the man who I knew would support me through the whole thing—Zach.
Zach tugs me under his arm, and I snuggle up into him. “What’s the fifth reason?” he asks.
“You never let me hide the shadow parts of me. You dragged them into the light. I was on a path. I think my father has had my career as a lawyer mapped out in front of me since the day I was born. But, as we’ve grown, you’ve opened up my world, Zach.
And I’m happier here, in this place with that nasty green bathroom, than I’ve ever been anywhere else. ”
Zach smiles as if I gave him all the right answers, and watching my younger self offer them, I see the genuine love I had for him, the optimism I had for the two of us for the future.
He pats along the edge of the bed, and then, produces a ring box.
In it is a simple engagement ring. A narrow band.
Four little chips of diamonds set together to make it look bigger than it really was.
I still have it.
“Then, marry me, Luce. I want history to know that the two of us existed, that we loved each other, and wanted to spend our lives together.”
Sitting in the tub, tears sting my eyes. The flood of joy and surprise and love I felt in that moment back then, flood through me again now.
He was offering me the future I wanted.
“God, of course. Yes. I love you.”
The phone gets dropped onto the bedding, so I can no longer see the two of us. But I remember him kissing me. Hard.
“Let’s do it soon,” he murmurs, and I touch my neck, shivering at the memory of what it felt like when he kissed me there.
“When?” I ask.
“Let’s get a license today,” Zach replies. “You and me is all we need.”
I chuckle. “It’s Thanksgiving. I’m pretty sure the County Clerk’s office is closed.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
Looking back, now, with the benefit and wisdom of age, I know we didn’t have all the answers, but God, it really felt as though we did.
“I love you more than life, Luce. There’s nothing I won’t do for you, I promise.”
And the fact he lived up to that promise is the very reason we’re apart.