55. ABRAHAM
AbrAHAM
Haunting sadness, humor, and beauty—the volatile combination of everything I used to hate because obsession was an uncontainable drug—Nineah Lin-Lawton looked like both the desert mirage and the hallucinating traveler as she stumbled out of my hands, grabbing my wrist.
Pulling me out of the kitchen, through the door into the hall, she put a finger to her lips and tried the first door she came to.
The laundry closet was hardly big enough to fit both of us, something we’d already found out the hard way once, but I followed her anyway because I could twist, skirt, and evade the truth, but I couldn’t change it any more than I could pretend I’d had a choice since the first time I laid eyes on this woman.
Every vice I’d succumbed to, I’d always eventually been able to reel myself back in if I treaded too far deep into turbulent waters.
When kicking doors had all but permanently fucked with both my body and my nervous system, I’d made the switch to intelligence.
When gambling had nearly ruined me, I’d quit cold turkey.
But this… this was simply out of my grasp. And maybe that was the point.
I lead by example, acted with intention, and I dominated because I loved the feel of this woman’s accession to my power, but if I was under any false delusions as to who served who, a lethally smart, but infallibly submissive woman corrected me as she hesitated, waiting for me to take over.
I didn’t disappoint her.
Picking up my wife—because a paper couldn’t divorce us anymore than it could marry us—I braced her back against the wall and yanked the slack where the dress tied at the base of her neck.
The top part falling over her breasts, she arched her slight body and pussy heat burned through my shirt.
I wanted to wrap a hand around her throat and bounce her like a toy, but I threaded my fingers in her hair and kissed her lips.
Her cheeks. Her ears. I pulled her bottom lip into my teeth and left an impression as I massaged her scalp and my inadequate apology was accepted on a conditional basis—that I didn’t stop.
Squeezing her thighs hard around my torso, Nineah moaned into my chest. “Wait. I… before we… I just need to make sure—”
“You are mine,” I murmured. “For ten consecutive lifetimes, in this reality and the next, you are mine. That’s how you atone.”
Her lidded brown gaze snapped up once before lowering again in her own brand of obedience.
“I understand if you can’t forgive me. I took shit too far.
After everything you’d been through, I invaded your privacy, I manipulated you professionally, and though I can’t speak for the state of mind I was in when I pursued something with you, I knew it was wrong and I did it anyway.
I know you loving or wanting me doesn’t just magically erase that and I don’t want to pretend like it does. ”
“Then don’t.” Drawing the zipper of her dress down her back, I traced the length of her spine as I kissed a soft brown nipple.
“But also don’t pretend that wrong or not, you chose a life with me.
You committed to that life. And you sealed that decision with an oath.
You don’t want to insult my memory, then tell me it was real. ”
“Of course it was,” she whispered. “I was practically sedate on intravenous pain meds in a foreign hospital and I still knew you. I still wanted you, even when I didn’t trust or understand it.”
“Then let it go.” Trailing my tongue along the curve of her neck, I breathed her in like a hit. “I know you and I know what we had and ultimately, I left because I didn’t want the diluted version of that as some kind of consolation and that hasn’t changed. It’s all in or all out, Nineah.”
“And Miri?”
Pulling back to look at the woman in my arms, it hit me just then.
She was neither the woman I’d married nor was she the one I’d divorced. Sometime in the last few months, she’d expanded her world to include someone other than a work colleague, Zajre, or myself. Someone she wasn’t just responsible to, but responsible for.
I stared at her with a newfound respect.
“The last thing I want is to disrupt your routine, but I’m also not going to tip toe around her.
Eventually she’ll have questions about me and what place I might have in her life.
If it comes to that, I don’t mind deferring to you but I’ll want a say.
It’s not in our nature to do things separately. ”
She looped her arms around my neck, her brows furrowing. “She’s not a Marine, Abraham. She’s a little girl. A silly, sensitive little girl who’s too intelligent and too perceptive. And I… I’m afraid.”
“Of?”
“Having my opinion of you altered forever should you make her love you just to find out later that you have no interest in being a father.” She dropped her forehead to mine.
“Part of me wants to keep you separate. Like if those parts of my life never meet, neither of them can be ruined. And I know that’s irrational, I know it is, but fuck, no one warned me that ninety percent of this mom shit is having one million irrational, intrusive thoughts every five minutes.
Like right now. You’re touching me and kissing me and I dragged you in here to bend me over the washing machine, but I’m actively terrified Miracle is going to sneak outside to go catch lightning bugs and someone in a black van is going to pull up and throw her inside or she’s going to trip into the lake and drown.
And this is my life now. This is who I am now. ”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” Fingering the thin gold chain that wasn’t the one she’d fleeced off me nearly a year prior, I let it hang and ran thumb over her bare skin before grasping her chin and tracing the dimple in her cheek.
“Because that is who I’ve been since I met you.
” Not affording her the slack to respond or overthink, I palmed her breast, dragging my thumb over her nipple at the same time I dragged my teeth over the place where her pulse jumped.
I loved her life even more than I loved her mind, her scent, or her beauty.
When she worried, bled, or hurt, she reminded me she was still here and as long as that remained fact, I would always be that man, fighting the world to accommodate her and not the other way around.
I didn’t know how else to be and I couldn’t imagine I’d be any different with a child.
“Take your time, set your pace, but don’t ever doubt my capacity to love any and every extension of you. Especially, your daughter.”
Nineah closed her eyes, letting her hands fall to my chest. When she opened them again, her gaze was watery but resolved and she gave me a slight nod. “Okay. You can fuck me now.”