Chapter 24 #2
“Anyway,” Kelly concluded, suddenly sounding sad, almost ancient, “I’m not saying you’re to blame for it. All those women chose to do what they chose to do. Just like all the men I was with before. I used to think…”
There was a pause. And Caleb found himself holding his breath until she finished her sentence.
“What?” he asked at last, when she never completed the thought.
She shook her head. “Nothing. I used to think sex could be simple—just something to do. I never really thought about what might be going on with the other person.”
Caleb had been exactly the same, rarely thinking about the human being on the other end of the encounter. The revelation hit him with more power than it should have.
Kelly went on as if she were speaking to herself now. “I went a really long time without ever knowing what it was like.”
“What?”
“Having sex with someone who saw me as a person and not a body. And who I saw in the same way.”
Caleb let out his breath and took another swig of Coke as his belly clenched sickeningly.
She’d been talking about herself, but the words so clearly applied to him too.
Surely there had been someone—in all his years of fucking—who’d wanted to be with him for no underlying reasons. Who’d simply wanted him… for him.
It was tragically implausible, but if there had been someone like that in his past, Caleb couldn’t recall her.
Until Kelly. Maybe Kelly. But she might not even really want him either. Not completely. There was so much more going on inside her that she wasn’t revealing to him.
Why had she fucked him just now when she hadn’t really wanted to?
“I’m sorry I messed up our hot sex. I’m still trying to work through a lot of issues, I guess, so it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.”
It hadn’t been good at all except for the empty physical release.
As they rode back home in exhausted silence, Caleb realized something else that hit him just as jarringly.
Their fucking hadn’t been much different from most of what had passed for good sex in Caleb’s life, until Kelly had entered his world.
It just had never bothered him before.
They only said a few words during the remainder of the drive. And when they got to his house, Kelly went right to bed while Caleb went to his office to return a couple of calls.
When he got up to the bedroom a half hour later, he saw that Kelly was under the covers.
She hadn’t brushed her hair, and her dress was tossed on the floor beside her shoes.
He’d half expected her to take a shower before going to bed, and the fact that she hadn’t wanted to immediately wash off all evidence of Caleb’s body on hers relaxed something in his chest.
Maybe it had just been one of those things. Maybe it wasn’t something he needed to feel guilty about.
He did though. And it was somehow all tied up in his mind with the guilt evoked by his conversation with Vinnie.
He took off his clothes, dropping them on the floor next to her dress, and then crawled under the covers beside her.
“Are you all right?” he asked, scooting over toward her.
She turned to face him, and even in the dark room he could see that her eyes were slightly red.
She’d been crying.
“I’m fine,” she assured him, smiling faintly. “I’m glad you didn’t work all night.”
Caleb didn’t even register her comment. The small comfort he’d taken in the fact that she hadn’t showered had dissolved completely at the sight of her face.
He was overwhelmed with another sick, heavy feeling rising in his gut.
It wasn’t guilt so much now as knowledge.
There was so much going on inside Kelly that he didn’t know about. Her life was every bit as complex and conflicted as his was, and that meant everything she did might be more than what it initially appeared.
She could come on to him—fuck him like an animal—and not really want it. She could say yes with her mouth and body and say no with her heart. She was deep and haunted and torn and human. And human .
Like him.
He didn’t want her saying no to him—not any part of her. He wanted what was between them to be real.
“Kelly,” he murmured, unable to resist the instinct to pull her into his arms.
She didn’t pull away. Her shoulders shook a few times, and she burrowed against his side.
So Caleb held her, had to acknowledge that she was desperately wounded from more than one experience in her past, that he hadn’t really been thinking about what was best for her.
He could see himself as if from a distance as he’d been brutally pounding into her body from behind, even as he’d somehow known that she wasn’t in the mood, that there was more going on with her than he wanted to acknowledge.
He stroked the tangled, golden glory of her hair.
And he thought about what she might have been trying to hide this evening with sex.
Caleb held Kelly for an hour or so, trying to figure everything out.
He wasn’t capable of thinking clearly this evening. In any way.
He kept going back to the idea that Kelly had started coming on to him after the strange interaction with Wes, and the suspicious part of his nature wondered if she had been using it as a distraction, trying to hide something from him.
But he couldn’t figure out anything that had to do with Wes that she could possibly want to hide.
Finally, when he could feel she’d completely relaxed in his arms, he murmured, “So what happened earlier? Why did you get so upset?”
She tensed briefly but then relaxed again. “I don’t know.”
“You know something.”
After a long moment she finally said, “Do you ever think something is a good idea at first but then, once you start down that road, you realize it’s not what you want at all? But then it feels like it’s too late to take it back?”
Caleb knew she was talking about the sex they’d had earlier, but he suddenly saw himself all those years ago, thinking there was an easy way to deal with a problem that threatened to ruin him and then getting dragged into something utterly wrong but being in too deep to take it back.
He said softly, “Yeah. I’ve been there.”
“That’s all it was. Once I realized it wasn’t really what I wanted, it was too late to take it back.”
“It wasn’t too late. I would have stopped?—”
“I know. Of course I know that. But it just felt… I don’t know.
” She pulled out of his arms and straightened up so she was kneeling beside him on the bed.
She looked down on him, her hair tumbling down her back and the straps of her little gown slipping off her shoulders.
“It was my fault. I shouldn’t have had sex with you like that when I wasn’t in the mood. I’m sorry.”
A tension in his chest relaxed. In spite of everything, his body couldn’t help but respond to the sight of her kneeling above him, the lush outline of her breasts beneath the fabric of her gown, the full curve of her lips. “I’m sorry too.”
Kelly must have noticed the signs of his growing arousal even though he had no intention of acting on it. The mood was deep and intense between them—almost uncertain in a way that wasn’t like either one of them.
Caleb wanted her as much as he always had, but he felt like she was somehow more than she’d ever been before.
Or maybe he was finally recognizing all of who she was.
She still looked lost and confused and beautiful. Her breasts swayed slightly as she moved, and her hair cascaded down around her body as she leaned over him.
She pushed the covers down, slid her hand under his waistband, wrapped her fingers around his cock, and started pumping it steadily, her breasts jiggling slightly with her motion.
Caleb stared at her, feeling just as lost and confused as she looked. But he could sense some of the pulsing ache inside him transform to a building climax.
She was giving him something, but he wanted to give her something too. So he nudged at her thighs with his hand until she parted them farther, and he slipped his fingers in between until he’d found her pussy.
She gasped when he maneuvered one finger and then two inside her. He started to move them.
So in breathless, fumbling silence, they brought each other to orgasm with their hands. It should have been embarrassing—like two groping teenagers instead of experienced adults. It was awkward, almost childish.
But Caleb couldn’t bring himself to care.
He felt Kelly’s hand on his cock as she built up the coiled tension in his body. He pumped and curled his fingers inside her. He stared at her twisted face, almost hidden by her hair, and at her tensing body.
Soon Caleb’s body was tensing too, and his pelvis was bucking a little.
He heard Kelly suck in a breath and freeze abruptly. Then whimper as she moved clumsily over his hand.
Her fingers clenched around his cock spasmodically until Caleb came too, with a grunt and an upward thrust.
Afterward Kelly fell asleep, his arm around her, her head resting against his chest.
Caleb didn’t sleep at all.
He stayed awake and brooded all night.
He wasn’t thinking about his business. He wasn’t thinking about Vinnie DiMauro and the secrets that could never come out. He wasn’t thinking about sins for which he could never atone. He wasn’t thinking about Kelly’s ex-lover and the trauma from her past that she would never tell him.
He wasn’t even thinking explicitly about Kelly, although she was underlying every one of his thoughts.
As he lay in the dark until dawn, Caleb tried to remember all the women he’d fucked. All the call girls, one-night stands, other men’s wives and girlfriends. Tried to remember their names, their faces, the color of their eyes.
And couldn’t.
He tried to remember the name of the last woman he’d fucked before Kelly. Only a couple of months ago, before Kelly had entered his life. She had been brunette, that one-night stand. Her name had been one of those silly diminutives, but he couldn’t even remember what it was.
Caleb wondered what she’d been like—for real, beyond the sex they’d had—what she might have really wanted. He wondered if she’d cried like Kelly had after he’d fucked her.
And the woman before her had been a call girl, a woman with a full history that had brought her to that place. And the one before that… he didn’t know.
An endless stretch of empty experiences.
Every one of the women Caleb had ever fucked had chosen it, had consciously agreed to it. They’d seduced him, asked him, begged him, accepted the money he’d offered.
But Caleb wondered, as he lay beside Kelly that night and didn’t sleep at all, about every one of them—all of the women over all of the years who had somehow ended up in his bed.
They’d said yes. Every one.
But he wondered how many of them had been silently saying no.