8. JUSTICE
JUSTICE
Before Monica died, I never paid Kira any attention.
She and my wife were close as sisters, had been since high school, and that was exactly why she never once registered to me as a woman.
She was Monica’s friend. Background furniture in the house of our life.
She’d watched our love story bloom from a seed to a full rose, sat at our table for fifteen years of Thanksgivings, held both my girls in the hospital the day they were born.
Kira was family. She was never a temptation, because you don’t look at family that way.
It wasn’t until these last few months that any of that changed.
I knew I was wrong. I hid this in the deepest pocket I had.
I especially didn’t want my girls to know.
Nothing was ever going to come of it but what it was, two grown people using each other to not be alone at two in the morning, and a child can’t understand a thing like that.
Doesn’t need to. Kira poured into Storie and Dream like they were her own, always down to sit with them when the family’s business pulled me out into the dark.
Monica had named her their godmother, and she’d honored it.
That’s what made all of it uglier. She was good to my children, and I was repaying that goodness in hotel rooms I’d never let them know about.
I’d been honest with her, at least. That was the one clean thing I could say.
I told her from the jump I didn’t want a relationship, didn’t want love, didn’t want anything past what we did in the dark.
She said that suited her fine. Her divorce had only been final a year, and she wasn’t looking to be anybody’s woman yet either.
I told her the truth I’d told myself every day for three years.
I would never be ready. Not for her, not for anybody.
Because Monica was my first love, and I hadn’t been a perfect husband to her.
God knows I hadn’t. The best I had left in me was the promise I made over her casket, to be present for our girls, every single day, for the rest of my life.
Remarrying, loving somebody new, letting a woman matter again, that was more than a man carrying what I carried could hold.
So this was all it was. This was all it was ever going to be.
It started a few months back the way these things start.
A hard night, a bottle of Banks Reserve between us after she’d put the girls to bed and I’d come home wrecked from something I couldn’t talk about.
One drink turned into three. Somewhere in there she was laughing at something I said.
Then she wasn’t laughing. Then I kissed her, and neither one of us stopped it.
In the morning we both knew what it was and what it wasn’t.
And every so often since, when the loneliness got louder than my good sense, we found our way to a room like this one.
The suite was on the top floor, city lights burning low through the glass.
I set my phone face-up on the nightstand where I could see it, and before I did anything else I pulled up the door-cam at the house.
The quiet house holding steady on a four-inch screen.
Only then did I let myself be anywhere but there.
But I checked periodically. I also had motion sensors throughout the house to alert me if one of the girls got up in the middle of the night.
I was fifteen minutes away from the house and could get there in ten. We did this maybe once a week.
Kira crossed the room to me slow, already out of the dress she’d worn to make a point.
She was a beautiful woman, I never once pretended she wasn’t, all soft curves and light caramel skin and a mouth that knew what it wanted.
She put her hands flat on my chest and looked up at me with everything she was never supposed to be feeling written all over her face.
I looked back at her and felt none of it.
That was the arrangement. That was the mercy and the cruelty of it both.
“You came,” she said, like she’d doubted it.
“I said I would.”
She kissed me, and I let her, and my hands found the shape of her out of muscle memory more than hunger.
She walked me back to the edge of the bed and pressed me down onto it, and then she sank to her knees between mine, unhurried, holding my eyes the whole way down like she’d been waiting on this all week. Maybe she had.
She freed me from my slacks and took my pulsing dick in her hand first, slow, then in her mouth, and a groan came up out of my chest before I could hold it.
She knew what she was doing. She always did.
She worked me deep and unrushed, one hand and that clever mouth moving in a rhythm designed to wreck a man’s thinking, humming low around me until my hand curled into the sheets.
I dropped my head back, let my eyes fall shut, let the pleasure of it climb.
That hot pull built at the base of my spine while she took me to the edge, eased me off it, took me right back. Over and over. Patient as sin.
And God forgive me, somewhere in the dark in my mind, it wasn’t Kira I saw.
It was a dimple pressed into a right cheek.
A pair of almond eyes that had burned clean into my soul the second they found mine.
A woman whose voice had woken up a want I’d buried with my wife three years ago.
My body drew up tight with a desire that had not one thing to do with the woman on her knees in front of me throating my dick.
And I let it come. I didn’t fight it and I didn’t feel one way or another about it.
I let that other face pull me under, and when I finally broke, it was her I was chasing. Not the woman in this room. Her.
I busted my nut down Kira’s throat, releasing all the tension built up by thinking about Skye. I had no place feeling this way about her.
I came back to the room slow, chest heaving, jaw tight. Kira rose up looking pleased with herself, wiping the corner of her mouth with her thumb, reading my wreckage as her own doing. She’d never know it wasn’t.
We moved to the bed. I gave her what the arrangement called for, and she gasped my name into the dark like it meant more than it did. I let her have that too. It cost me nothing. That was the point of Kira. She cost me nothing, and lately, that was starting to feel like a debt all its own.
After, she lay with her head on my chest, tracing lazy circles on my skin, and I could feel her working up to something before she said it.
“You know,” she started, careful, “I could just come to the house. Save us both the drive and the room. The girls are asleep anyway. They’d never even know I was there.”
“No.”
It came out flat and final, no room in it for a second try.
“Justice…”
“I’m not doing this under the same roof as my daughters.” I sat up, and her head slid off my chest. Ready to return home, I reached for my shirt. “Not ever. I’m not fuckin’ another woman while they’re under my roof. That’s their home and they need to feel comfortable there.”
She was quiet a second, and I heard her decide to push anyway, which was the thing about Kira lately. She kept pushing on a door I’d told her a hundred times was nailed shut.
“You’re allowed to move on, you know.” Her voice went soft, went reaching. “It’s been three years. Monica loved you. She would’ve wanted you to be happy. She would’ve wanted you to move on and—”
“Don’t.” The word came out of me low and cold, the register that empties rooms. I turned and looked at her, and whatever she saw in my face made her go still.
“Don’t speak Monica’s name to me again. Not to make a case for yourself.
Not for any reason. You don’t get to tell me what she would have wanted. You don’t get to use her like that.”
“Justice, I didn’t mean…”
“I know what you meant.” I stood and buttoned my shirt, already somewhere else, already gone. “We’re done for tonight. And if you push this shit again, we’ll be done for good.”
The hurt moved across her face plain, and under it a thing that had been growing in her these last few months that I kept pretending not to see.
She wanted more. She wanted the thing I’d told her on day one she would never get.
And every time she reached for it, I felt the arrangement getting heavier, felt myself dragging a woman along behind me toward a cliff she couldn’t see.
I checked the door-cam one more time. Everything looked good. Both my girls still safe.
“Get home safe,” I told her, gentler, because she was still Monica’s best friend and my daughters’ godmother. None of this shit was worth turning cruel over.
Then I left her there in that suite with her feelings and that big pretty view she’d paid too much to be lonely in front of.
Rode the elevator down alone. And the whole way home through the empty three a.m. streets, I did not let myself think about the truth of it.
That I’d spent the last few hours with one woman and craved a different one the entire time.
A caregiver. My grandmother’s caregiver. A woman I knew nothing about, who’d been in my life for barely any time.
I was in more trouble than Kira would ever be.