AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Great show yesterday.” He stabs out the words. “Makes the deal sweeter.”
“My God. He’s really enjoying this.”
“Every fucking minute of it.”
“Okay.” I take a breath to calm, to think. “Let’s talk about how we should handle him.”
“No.” He rejects that outright. “Malcolm isn’t your problem. He’s mine.”
“How can you say that?” My voice raises, dismayed that we had taken ten steps forward only to end right back in the same place. “It’s my past or some sullied version of it that Malcolm is lording over us. This concerns me too.”
“I won’t have you involved any further. It’s better for now that I go back to the condo.”
I stutter backwards as if being hit. It hurts that much.
“Dee, I’m—”
“Don’t!” I set my mug down on the counter with enough force that the coffee sloshes over the sides. “I don’t want to hear any more apologies. Or excuses. We don’t work through what’s difficult. What’s messy. What’s unpleasant. Not when it comes to you. That’s off limits. But pleasure you give me in spades. Sex is the one thing that you can totally control.”
Temper flashes in his eyes. “You think I fuck you to control you?”
“To control the situation sometimes.”
“That’s bullshit!” He bangs down his own mug and glares at me.
“We didn’t finish resolving anything. But we made love, didn’t we? All night long and again this morning.”
“So, what’s your point?”
“That sometimes sex is a way of avoiding the difficult things. Like talking about why you slept on the sofa.”
“The reason is obvious. I could have hit you in my sleep the last time. I wasn’t going to chance that again.”
“Why didn’t we talk about it then? Why did you sneak out in the middle of the night?”
“I didn’t sneak out. You were sleeping.”
“That’s not why,” I scoff. “You knew you were going to leave. You planned to. Don’t lie to me. I can’t stand that.”
“I’m not lying,” he snaps. “It was on my mind and I couldn’t fall asleep. But I wasn’t going to wake you to say I was going on the couch. You would have been upset and I’d already dumped enough on you.”
His admission adds to the festering hurt. “You just proved my point.”
“What point?”
“That you didn’t want to upset me. That’s difficult. You can’t control my feelings or reaction. But sex between us is easy. Emotionally and otherwise. You know exactly how to please me. We get lost in it…at least I know I do. You make me so crazy with wanting you that nothing else matters.”
“It’s the same for me. So why is our great sex life a sudden problem?”
“Because as amazing as the sex is, it’s not the only important part of our relationship. Everything else matters too. Open communication being at the top of the list, even when things are hard to talk about. You can’t control it all, Mick. Sometimes bad things happen.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“I think you blame yourself for too much of it. Your mother. Papa T’s death. The custody case. Not being there for me when I was pregnant. You blame yourself for things that aren’t your fault.”
“It is my fault that I didn’t use a condom. I got you pregnant. You were scared. You saw me with another girl. That’s why you left.”
“I could have used birth control. I could have told you about my pregnancy instead of making you think I was having doubts about us. I could have confronted you about Tamara. I had other options besides leaving. But you won’t let me take any of the responsibility.”
