Chapter 12
twelve
Petra
Barry makes love to me all night. Not once do we use protection.
I was taken doggy style on the floor. Railed against the glass picture window that overlooks the courtyard.
I’ve had his head between my thighs more times than I can count.
We’ve been in missionary, our tongues intwined, his intense eyes holding mine.
I’ve had my face shoved into the pillows while being gloriously used like a sex doll from behind. He came on my face in the shower.
Sucked my nipples so thoroughly that they’ll be tender for weeks.
But it wasn’t only physical love. We whispered secrets to each other in the dark.
Quizzed each other on our favorite things.
Talked about places in the world we want to visit.
He confided in me about the roadside bomb that left him with the scars on his face and put him in the hospital for six weeks in an unfamiliar country.
I told him about my sisters. How they can be really mean but ultimately have my back and would help me hide a dead body, if I asked them to.
Barry told me about his cabin.
The hand-carved fireplace mantle and the pond where he smokes a cigar from time to time. I waited for him to ask if I’ll visit. He seemed right on the verge of asking me, but he never did. No, he only wants to meet me in Vegas. At a hotel so we can have sex.
Now…
Now, he’s packing my overnight bag into the rear cab of his truck.
I’m in a daze, wondering if this is real. How…how am I supposed to wake up tomorrow morning without Barry in bed beside me?
We haven’t spoken since we woke up wrapped in each other’s arms.
We packed in silence.
Dread swims in my stomach now as I climb into the passenger seat.
A moment later, Barry gets into the driver’s side, cutting me a sidelong look.
His heart is right there in his eyes, his lids and jaw heavy with emotion.
Aren’t they? Am I only imagining the way he held me so tightly this morning upon waking?
Can I be the only one who is in distress at the imminence of parting ways?
Oh, I know he’ll help support me if I end up pregnant, but how long will it take for me to know? Weeks? Months?
Will we be strangers who share a child someday? Or…more?
Barry starts the truck and we pull away from the valet station, waving to wedding guests who are still waiting for their cars to be brought around.
I stare straight ahead, trying to dissect the weekend and figure out where things went wrong.
Maybe they went wrong from the start. I forced Barry to bring a nineteen-year-old as his date.
I seduced him. I knew his mother got pregnant young and was abandoned, but he probably came inside me ten times yesterday without one of us reaching for a condom.
Is he…regretting last night? His promise to support me?
The whole time we spent together?
I twist my hands in my lap, despairing, my eye straying to the clock.
One hour until the man I’ve fallen in love with drops me off and leaves.
Barry
What the hell was I thinking last night?
This girl probably can’t wait to get the hell away from me.
I lost my mind. I was like an animal in that hotel room. I couldn’t stop fucking her. Couldn’t stop slaking myself over and over with her tight body. My dick wouldn’t quit getting hard. It was as if…I wanted to get her pregnant.
As if that was my goal.
Are you pretending it wasn’t?
Even now, I am very close to pulling over and taking her behind a gas station because what if she only needs one more load to conceive?
I have one ready. I could give it to her deep and hot.
She’d not only allow my touch, but she would also enjoy it.
I don’t know when or how the lines got blurred between our professional and personal relationship, but there is no doubt in my mind she found physical release with me.
Countless times. I can still feel her shaking. Hear her moaning my name.
But I don’t want to be her client anymore.
I want to be her man.
Forever.
I want to drive right past Vegas and keep going, all the way to my cabin in the nature preserve. I’m having dangerous thoughts of keeping her there, whether she likes it or not, but no. God, no. That’s not me. I want her to choose me. Against all odds.
And if she doesn’t?
That possibility is what keeps me in a chokehold as we draw closer to her home.
A house she shares with her sisters in a suburb of Vegas.
According to the GPS, I’m only a few blocks away and my palms are beginning to sweat on the steering wheel.
She’s so quiet, staring pensively out the window, her spine ramrod straight.
Is she dreading us parting ways, or is she dying to get away from me?
I don’t have time to brace myself for her reaction.
As soon as I pull up in front of the house, she’s grabbing her overnight bag from the rear cab of my truck. She looks at me across the front seat. Her lower lip trembles. Then she bursts into tears, all but throwing herself out of the passenger side and running up the driveway to the house.
“Petra!” I shout, alarmed. Sick. Confused. “Petra, wait.”
What just happened?
I turn off the ignition, exit the truck and run after her. But before I can reach Petra where she’s standing on the front porch, the door flies open and she dashes in between two women. Actually, make that four.
Four very pissed-off women.
Each of them has a slight resemblance to Petra, but they don’t hold the same spark and wonder in their eyes. The same magic. No one does. No one in this world.
“Who are you?” one of them screeches.
“What did you do to our baby sister?”
“I’m Barry. Petra!” I shout, over the noise, panicking. She was crying and I need to make it stop. Immediately. “I need to see her. Please.”
“Where did you take her, you…gigantic man?”
“A wedding,” I say, scanning over their heads for some sign of Petra.
All four of them trade a perplexed look. “Did she, um…escort you there?”
“That’s how it started. I called the agency and no one else was available, so she showed up to help me and…
” I double over and plant my hands on my knees, unable to contend with the reality that Petra is crying somewhere inside the house and I can’t get to her.
“Please, I know how it must sound, but I’m in love with your sister. ”
“What?” they all exclaim in unison. “Why is she crying?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out!”
“If you love someone, you don’t make them cry,” another sister points out.
I release a miserable bellow. “Petra.” I stumble toward the sisters, no choice but to physically move them out of my way. “Princess. Come talk to me.”
The four sisters form a barricade. Four cans of pepper spray are produced out of seemingly nowhere. Held at the ready.
“If she doesn’t want to talk to you, there’s a good reason for it.”
“Don’t spray him,” comes a wobbly voice from within the house. It’s Petra.
My heart clogs my throat when she comes into view at the top of a staircase, her face tear-stained and red.
“Petra, can we please talk?”
“We had the whole car ride to talk.”
She’s right about that. I make a mental note to never delay another conversation, lest I find myself staring down the barrel of four pepper spray cans and a crying angel.
“I didn’t know what to say,” I rasp, begging her with my eyes to come closer.
“I was afraid to tell you how much I love you. I was afraid to find out I was…just a job to you. One you wanted to be over.”
She descends a couple of steps, as if in a trance. “How could you think that?”
“I live like a hermit. I’m…disfigured. I’m—”
“Thoughtful and brave and forthright and protective?”
A crank turns in my chest, making it impossible to speak.
I can only watch with my heart in my mouth as Petra reaches the bottom of the stairs and closes the distance between me and her. The sisters blessedly step aside, so I can see her, my princess, only a few feet away from me now.
“Did you mean it when you told my sisters you’re in love with me?” she whispers.
“Yes,” I scrape out, trying to stress the truth of my claim with my eyes.
“You’re the most joy I’ve ever felt in my life.
I don’t even think I knew joy until you answered that phone.
I never wanted this weekend to end. I just didn’t know if you felt the same.
I couldn’t bring myself to find out if you didn’t.
If you…don’t.” I have to hold the doorframe for support.
“At the wedding, you made me feel…not just normal. But like I belonged. I belonged for the first time in a long time, but that’s only because you believed it enough for the both of us.
Until I could, too. You’re extraordinary in every way, Petra, and that’s the only reason I have the balls to ask you now…
to come with me. Let me try to be everything you need. Let me learn.”
Tears spill over and run down her cheeks. “You don’t just want to meet at a hotel in Vegas next weekend, like you said?”
Her sisters gasp, disgusted.
I mentally berate myself for ever making that suggestion.
“First of all, I’m sorry I asked you to do that.
I was worried a relationship would be asking for too much.
That maybe you didn’t feel the same way about me.
But I never want to be your client again; I want to be your boyfriend.
Real, not pretend. If you’ll let me.” I swallow a rusty nail.
“Second of all, I would split open and fucking die waiting a whole week to see you, princess. I’d never make it. ”
Her whole body jerks with a sob. “Then I guess I better come with you now.”
The ground trembles beneath my feet. “Really?”
She nods vigorously, launching herself over the threshold into my arms. “I love you, too, Barry. Since I answered your phone call. It was your voice. Then it was just…you.”
I stumble backward with Petra in a tight embrace, my vision a blur of color. “I’ll learn how to make you happy, Petra. I won’t let you down.”
“You already make me happy, Barry,” she whispers, pushing high on her tiptoes to kiss me. “So happy that the next wedding we attend together will be ours.”
My chest seizes with love so true, it could never be denied. And when she gazes at me like I’m the greatest man on earth, I vow to spend the rest of my life proving her right.