Chapter 68
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
Gabriel
I carried her into my bedroom. Kicked the door shut and laid her down on the bed. A salty breeze blew through the open window and the branches of a tree scraped against the weathered gray shingles.
It was just us and the moonlight shining on her skin and reflecting off my ring on her finger. A promise of things to come. A future I hadn’t dared hope for but now it felt within reach. Tonight everything felt possible.
Cleo rolled onto her side and propped her head on her hand. “I like your bed.” She held my pillow to her face and inhaled. “The sheets smell like you.”
“Are you saying this is the first time you’ve been in my bedroom? You didn’t come in here snooping around?” I teased.
The mattress dipped under my weight, the springs creaking.
“I have some self-control.”
I kissed the side of her neck. Her shoulder.
Her breasts. “You were free to come into my bedroom anytime you wanted.” I kissed the inside of her thigh.
Her ankle. “The middle of the night. The crack of dawn…” I kissed the sole of her foot.
“You could have slid under the covers and watched me sleeping.”
I climbed up her body and settled between her legs.
My hands slid over her thighs. Up her sides. Into her hair.
“What would you have done if you woke up and saw me staring at you?”
“This.” I kissed her. Deep. Urgent. She tasted sweet like mangos. Salty from the sea.
I slid into her. Slowly. Stilled.
My eyes drifted shut. “God.”
“I know,” she said softly.
I found her left hand and let my fingers brush over the ring before clasping it and resting our joined hands on the pillow.
“I’ve missed this so much,” she said. “Not this. ” She touched my face. “You.”
“I’ve dreamed of this so many times.” I moved inside her. She curved off the mattress and I thrust harder. “I almost feel like I can remember it.”
Lowering my hand to where we were joined, I brushed my thumb over her clit as I stroked in and out. Cleo gasped, writhing beneath me. The sensation of her hips grinding and her walls tightening around me hardened my cock.
I couldn’t breathe for a minute. It was almost too much. Almost.
“More,” she said.
“So greedy.”
Her nails raked my back and I thrust fuller, harder.
Her legs wrapped around me. I pushed in deeper. I could fucking live here inside her sweet pussy.
She whispered my name, chanting like it was a prayer. “Gabriel. Gabriel. Gabriel.”
Her back arched. I kissed her lips, swallowing her moan.
She convulsed around me. Our mouths met as she panted my name.
My eyes closed as I filled her. It seemed to go on and on and on.
My God. How had I lived without her? I couldn’t get enough.
“That was…” I shook my head. I was still inside her. “I don’t have a word for what that was.”
“You, who has always been so good with words,” she teased.
“Why was it like that?”
She laughed. “I don’t know. But I think I might have blacked out for a few seconds.”
“I’m pretty sure I did.” My forehead dropped to hers, our bodies shaking with silent laughter.
Reluctantly I pulled out and rolled off her then grabbed a towel from the bathroom and cleaned her up.
I lay down next to her and she snuggled against my side, draping a leg over me.
I squeezed her thigh. I was already getting hard again.
“Just give me another five minutes, and I’ll be ready to go again. ”
“You weren’t kidding about all night long.”
“I would never joke about something like that.” I tucked my hand under my head and stared at the ceiling, envisioning all the different ways I could fuck her. “Get ready for a sex marathon.”
She burst out laughing. “I’m not sure I have that kind of stamina.”
“Don’t worry. I’d never leave you behind. I’ll carry you over the finish line.”
She laughed again and buried her face in my neck. “You’re crazy.”
“For you, baby.”
After round two, I let out a contented sigh as my hand settled on her hip. “I could die happy right here and now.”
“I don’t want you to die. I want you to live happy.
” She pulled away. “I read your notebook. The one you wrote in when you were in the desert. And I know I shouldn't have…I know I had no right to read it but…I found it on your bookshelves and I couldn’t seem to help myself. But Gabriel. You wanted to die?” Her voice cracked on the words.
Fuck. Had I left it in the bookshelves? Now I was cursing myself for not hiding it better. I’d said a lot of shit in that notebook. All true at the time but not something I would ever have wanted Cleo to read.
I leaned over and grabbed the pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the nightstand. “Want one?”
“I shouldn’t…” With a sigh, she took the lit cigarette out of my hand. I lit another one for myself and took a deep drag, sucking nicotine into my blood system.
We sat side by side, smoking our postcoital cigarettes with our backs leaning against the oak headboard.
“I’m quitting at the end of the month,” I said, referring to the cigarettes, not her. I couldn’t quit her if I tried.
“Good,” she said. “You smoke too much.”
I watched her from the corner of my eye. She’d pulled the sheets up, so they covered her breasts, but her shoulders were bare, and her hair was wild. Sex hair. In the moonlight, her skin glowed alabaster.
Her full lips were kiss-bruised and swollen, the bottom one trapped between her teeth.
“Gabriel,” she whispered.
I blew the smoke out of the corner of my mouth. It lifted on the breeze and curled out the open window.
I took another drag, squinting into the distance, and listened to the music playing in my head. Mazzy Star’s “Flowers in December.” It was the song playing in the art gallery when I turned and looked at Cleo.
But I’d heard it before that night. Cleo loved Hope Sandoval’s dreamy, ethereal voice.
My eyes closed. The lyrics floated through my head. A flash of memory prodded the edges of my mind. I tried to grasp it.
“I love your voice so much,” she said. “And I love that song.”
I hadn’t even realized I was singing. “I know. Summer of ’96. I headlined a music festival in Scotland.”
“You climbed the scaffolding like a wild man, but the crowd loved you,” she said, filling in the gaps. “I stood in the wings and watched you blow everyone away with your voice.”
“Mazzy Star was in the lineup. Radiohead…” I kept my eyes closed, trying to see it. “It was cloudy and gray. You were wearing wellies and a short skirt and a cropped T-shirt with my flannel shirt tied around your waist…”
“You were busking in the campsite,” she laughed. “You put me on your shoulders so I could see the stage better.”
“We drank whisky in a pub in Glasgow and made out in the alley.”
“Yeah, you had your hand up my skirt…” Cleo cut herself off and sighed.
I wanted to hear more, but she was done tripping down memory lane.
I put out my cigarette and then put out hers too in the glass ashtray. I lit another cigarette, even though I shouldn’t have, but I knew where this conversation was heading.
She wanted to talk about the things I’d written in that notebook, not about a festival four years ago.
But when I thought about it now, it felt like another lifetime. I felt so removed from it.
Glasgow. The notebook. All of it.
“Tell me,” Cleo said quietly.
She was asking if I had really wanted to die. It wasn’t an easy question to answer. I moved to the window and looked out at the moonlit garden.
I didn’t really want to talk about this, but I guess it was all part of being in a relationship. You couldn’t brush the dirt under the rug and pretend everything was great when that wasn’t always the case.
I turned from the window. “I’m still a mess sometimes.
Maybe I always will be. Maybe I always have been.
I don’t know. I smoke too much. I’m on medicine.
I’ve been to three different therapists.
They’ve done studies on my brain for science.
I’m a lot,” I admitted. “But I don’t have suicide ideation anymore.
I’m not trying to outrun myself or whatever it was I was trying to do when I left you.
I have bad days, but the good days outweigh the bad now. ”
I grabbed the back of my neck and released a heavy breath.
“I just…I thought about death a lot back then. Or, rather, just not being here. I could never go through with it though. Life always won out.” I shoved my hand through my hair.
“But if I’m not the man you fell in love with, if it’s too much for you… if I’m too much, I’ll understand…”
“Understand what exactly?”
I thought it was pretty self-explanatory so I just shrugged, said nothing.
She snatched one of my T-shirts from the dresser drawer and put it on then slammed the drawer shut and spun to face me, her hands going to her hips. “Are you seriously pushing me away now, after you just fucked me twice? What’s the deal, Gabriel? You don’t want to be with me now?—”
“No! That’s not what I’m saying at all.” Did I really have to spell this out for her? “I’m giving you an out.”
“Oh, wow.” She nodded slowly. “How gracious of you. I don’t want an out.” She joined me by the window. “You’re still you , Gabriel. You’ve always been a lot. But so am I. That’s just who we are. And I have always loved you just as you are.”
She shook her head. “Don’t you get it? The notebook upset me because I don’t want you to leave.” She smacked my chest. “I don’t ever want you to give up again, do you hear me?” She gave me a shove.
I clenched the cigarette between my lips and captured her wrists in my hand. “I love it when you get all feisty.”
She ripped the cigarette out of my mouth and crushed it in the ashtray.
“Stop trying to kill yourself. I can’t lose you, Gabriel.
I can’t. You need to stay,” she said between clenched teeth.
“Because if you don’t, I don’t know how I would go on.
I don’t want to live in a world without you in it.
” She swallowed, her voice quavering. “Don’t you dare make me do that. ”
This was Cleo, vulnerable.
I pulled her into my arms and held her tight. If it were up to me, I would never let her go. “I’m not going anywhere. Not if I can help it.”
“Promise?” She lifted her gaze to mine. “Promise me, Gabriel,” she prompted.
“I promise. Swear on my life. On music. On Led Zeppelin and Nina Simone and all that is good and true and holy.”
“Okay.” She released a breath and nodded. “Okay. As long as you stay, I’ll take the rain. Your bad days won’t scare me off. You have never been too much for me, Gabriel. So please don’t ever think that.”
I rubbed my hand over my chest. It felt tight. My heart ached, but it was in a good way.
I’d never been more me than I was with her. And to think she loved me anyway.
What a gift. What a fucking gift.
I smiled. “My twin flame.”
“Yeah,” she said softly. “God. We burn so bright.”