AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was three months before he’d recovered enough mentally and physically to the satisfaction of the doctors to be released from the hospital. By then, he’d remembered who he was and why the police treated him with such hostility, doing the bare minimum for a prisoner who was in jail for aiding someone who’d tried to kill two cops. He found out he had six months left on his sentence.
Was it a dream? Was all of it some type of twisted retelling of A Christmas Carol to get him to change his ways? No and yes. Because that night had happened to Scrooge. It was a dream, but it was real as well.
It’s illusion and reality both…
“Aarrgghhh…” Back in his cell, he snarled into his pillow, pressing his face against the scratchy surface. He wanted to beat his fists on the concrete walls until they were bloody to assuage this gnawing inside. “Who are you? Who are you?”
* * * * *
He kept quiet, kept to himself during those six months. He began to write letters.
Letters that he tore up and rewrote again and again, until he was regularly bartering for more packs of notebook paper. When he finally got one right, he’d carefully address it and put it on the shelf above his bunk, never mailing a single one, though the stack grew. It wasn’t time to mail them. He didn’t know how he knew that, just that it felt right. He was following his intuition. Lauren, Narcissa, Lady Jane… Even Mac Nighthorse.
His mother…then Eliza. The hardest one of all, a letter he would have to put on her grave because he had no ability to change what he’d done to the first person who’d ever truly loved him. He had to discard at least two versions because the tears he couldn’t manfully control made the ink run and stain.
When he wasn’t doing that, he did laundry duty or walked around the yard by himself. He paced by the portion of the fence that let him see the highway coming from the east. Keeping his eyes focused there the whole time, he felt like a tiger in a cage, waiting for release to go in that direction.
A red car…a woman with dark hair…
The other inmates gave him no more trouble. He didn’t think to question it until Mario stated it baldly to him one day while they pulled laundry out of one of the carts.
Mario was in for life and had been at the prison over twenty years.
“You got the ‘Come to Jesus’ look, the look of a man who know what Hell be like,” he stated matter-of-factly. “The others don’t want no part of that. Our boy Jonathan, he know what true fear is now. ”
“Nathan,” he corrected automatically, and started folding.
Studying himself in the mirror in his cell, he saw it. A disturbing, haunting quality, something apparently so uncomfortable that many of the inmates never met his gaze now. In fact, most gave him a wide berth entirely.
That was fine, because nothing but that name he couldn’t remember could ease the loneliness inside him. He couldn’t face his own haunting expression for long either. It reminded him of too many things. Horrors that shifted in his mind like lingering shadows, too elusive to hold on to, but dogging him nevertheless. Particularly in his dreams, to the extent he slept as little as possible. He needed her healing touch…her love. Had he lost it? Or had he never had it, and he was making her up entirely, a hallucinatory side effect of his near-death experience, as the doctor suggested? Why couldn’t he remember her name, otherwise?
But the only thing that gave him the courage to close his eyes at night was the occasional visit from her. She was worth any terror…
* * * * *
He was on his knees, naked, in a room where the fire glowed warm and comforting, the heat sensual on the skin. Not searing or punishing. She was there, sitting in a wing-backed chair, her legs crossed, hands lying slim and graceful on the arms. She wore a short blue silk dress that clung to her breasts, showed him the high proud set of them, the points of her nipples. The indentation of her waist, flare of her hips, the line of her thigh. Her feet were bare. It was odd, the small toes painted a cherry red, curling into the carpet, when the rest of her looked so intimidating, so in control. Her sable hair waved around her face in a Twenties starlet type of way, accentuating those incredible lips. Her dark eyes seared his soul in a way that would make him gladly crack open his chest for her to brand it completely.
He had to approach her or he would simply die from the pain of not being near her.
She granted his wish.
“Come here. ”
Moving forward on his knees, he kept his head down until he reached her feet. He groaned with relief when her fingers brushed his jaw, curved under his chin and lifted it so he could look into her face.
“I love you,” he said. “I’ll always love you. I’m so sorry. ” Tears ran down his cheeks, over her fingers. Taking her hand to her mouth, she pressed the salt of him to her lips, keeping her eyes on him. Then she put her hands on his shoulders. “Lift me. Lay me down on the carpet and take off my clothes. ” His hands trembled as he slid one arm around her back and scooted her forward to position the other hand under her knees. He picked her up. As he rose to his feet, he’d never felt anything as perfect as holding her in his arms, looking down into her face.
Feeling her body relaxed, trusting his strength to hold her, take her where she commanded. Turning, he stepped before the fire and dropped to one knee to gently lay her down on the soft rug there. Her arms left his shoulders, drifting out to either side of her so she could grip the long strands of the carpet.
“Rough, Nathan. Take my dress off rough. I want to feel your power wash over me, knowing it’s all mine to command. ”
It was a simple truth. All she had to do was say it and he would obey. It rose in him, savage and pure. He laid his hands on the neckline of that perfect, formfitting dress with its array of sparkles and rhinestones that followed the upper curves of her breasts and moved in a serpentine line around her hips. That design gave him a flash of some other memory, terrifying and arousing at once, gone before he could identify it.
He didn’t pause though, because his Mistress had ordered him to do something.
Tearing the fabric from the point of the neckline to just below her mound, he found she was completely bare beneath it. She arched up when he froze, holding the fabric tightly in his fists. He stared down at her, the pink nipples, the delicate point of her bare sex, the graceful curves of her woman’s body.
“Tear it all the way open. ”
