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“I do. But you’re bigger than that, Tara. The woman I held in my arms earlier, the one I watched last night, the one I’ve watched for the last six months is much stronger than I thinks she is. And you deserve to live a little, Tara. I don’t mean go wild with alcohol or drugs, but I mean finding out what life is really about. Finding out who you are under what you buried under the addiction.” He paused, his eyes sad now. “Can I please come in, Tara? I don’t expect anything from you, but I don’t want to have this conversation in the hall.”
I paused, uncertainty making the decision hard. Could it be that simple?
“Okay. Come in.” I moved out of the doorway and let him pass. “Would you like something to drink? I can offer, um, Sprite and water. Or coffee, if you’d like that.”
“Coffee is good.” He sat down on the old couch that came straight out of a 1990s furniture catalog, with a rainbow of garish colors all over it in splotches. It was all I could afford from the secondhand shop. Luckily, he didn’t seem to judge my furniture, or the lack of it.
The apartment was tiny, and it seemed crowded now with his large frame filling it. I took a deep breath, put some coffee on, then hitched myself up onto the counter that separated the tiny kitchen from the tiny living room. “So, talk.”
“Do you want to wait until your food arrives?” he asked, watching me from the sofa.
“Oh. Yeah, good idea.” I sat there, staring at the nail hole in the wall above his head. I should buy a picture of some kind to put there, now that I could afford it. But was it necessary? Not right now, I decided and looked away.
Seconds ticked by, then minutes, all spent in silence that he seemed to be comfortable with. The coffee pot gurgled so I made him coffee with milk but no sugar. It seemed he didn’t like his coffee sweet. I’d just turned the coffeepot off when I hear a knock at the door.
The sound had him surging to his feet. Before I could stop him, he’d paid for it and sent the woman on me way.
“Thanks,” I said and put the bag of Chinese food beside me on the counter. “Talk then.”
“You don’t want to eat while it’s still warm?” He waved vaguely at the bag with a look of concern.
“No. I want to get this over with. So. Talk.”
“I know this is new, very new, whatever this is between us. And I know it’s scary. It scares the fuck out of me, and it’s only been a few hours. I’ve not had a real relationship with a woman since my wife divorced me. I got into the motorcycle club when I was a teenager and, well, I guess that life scared her. I can’t say that I blame her. Some of the shit I’ve seen,” his voice trailed off and his eyes took on a haunted look. He visibly shook himself and continued, though. “It’s not the easiest life, the one I’ve chosen, and I’m not getting out of it anytime soon. There’s danger to it, but Tara, you have to know, I won’t hurt you. Not for anything will I hurt you. You’re something unique, special, or I wouldn’t be here now. I’d have let you brush me off and went on with my life. And if I can take a chance, I think you can too.”
“You don’t have a drug problem, Johnny. I do,” I said tersely and lifted my eyebrows at him. “You say I’m strong, that you won’t hurt me, but I don’t know that any of that is true. How do I know you won’t do it by accident? How do you know I won’t fail?”
“Because you, Tara, are brave as fuck, first of all. I saw that in your first weeks at the Red Rose Club. I saw it last night. And today. Bravery can come from stupidity, but you aren’t stupid, Tara. You take your time, assess a situation. All I’m asking you to do is assess this. Assess me. Right here, right now.” He came back to me, standing between my legs in my pink and gray cotton pajamas, his right thumb pushing my chin until I had to face him. “Please?”
“But sex is so personal, Johnny. Obviously,” I rolled my eyes at myself and threw my hands up in the air. “I’m not a virgin because of any religious beliefs, it’s just that it’s a part of me that I haven’t wanted to share. My body was all I had left at one point, it’s all any of us really have. I don’t want to fuck that up. I don’t want to pollute it with drugs ever again. Or STDs, or abuse that could happen. I am not going to let that happen.”
“I understand. But I can promise you I’m disease free, I get tested on schedule believe it or not. And I promise you, one hundred percent, that I will never, ever allow drugs anywhere near you. Ever.” He swallowed hard and I knew that he might have trouble keeping that promise. People made their own decisions about what to do and when to do it. He knew it too.
“Merely seeing drugs won’t tempt me, Johnny. It’s the hard times, when I’m alone, when I can feel that phantom itch to just let everything go, that I worry about. I have enough self-control to say no now, I just don’t know if I can when all I have to do is ask you for something and you can provide it. Can you say no if I ask you?” I inhaled slowly, carefully, knowing this had all gone in a very surreal direction, but everything was surreal with Johnny, and this wasn’t a normal situation. If I agreed to go with him tonight, it was going to be the beginning of something. Something that neither one of us seemed to be able to control at the moment. He was sitting on my couch, in my apartment, which was all the proof I needed that I couldn’t say no to him.
“I will. I have to. It’s what you want and that’s all that matters, what you want, Tara. You’ve made it clear you don’t ever want to go back to the life you had. So, can I show you what life would be like with me? Give me one night, one night to show you. If you want to say no tomorrow, I’ll agree, no arguments.” He held up his hand, as if he was making a pledge, and maybe he was.
“One night?” I could handle one night, couldn’t I?
“One night, Tara.” Johnny sighed and pulled away.
I wanted to say something, but he didn’t look like he was quite finished talking yet.
“I know what heartbreak feels like. My wife left me for an old man.” He paused, his face bitter and twisted, but he looked determined to get this out. “She took our daughter and humiliated me. Utterly humiliated me at 18 and left me without a way to have a relationship with my kid. I didn’t have the tools to fight her then. I was…helpless. I wouldn’t put you in that same situation, Tara.”
“I appreciate that. I mean what you’ve told me, how it made you feel, I can understand that. And I appreciate you not wanting me to experience that. Although, I’ve done it to myself before. I haven’t seen my parents since I was seventeen and probably won’t ever again. I put them through too much.” I stopped talking, afraid I was admitting too much. And I was. There was deep shame in what I’d done to my parents, my old friends, but Johnny had shared a lot with his admission. “I just want to be as honest with you as you are with me. I’m no angel, Johnny.”
“None of us are, Tara. None of us are.” He took another step towards me, his eyes on my lips. “Can I?”
“Can you what?” I asked, feeling the change in the air. Tension sparked between us, but it was the tension of awareness between two attracted adults who knew where they stood with each other now.
“Can I kiss that mouth that’s been driving me crazy for six months?” It was barely loud enough to hear, but I heard him anyway.
I looked at him, noting how his nostrils flared, how red his lips had turned, and how his eyes had gone stormy again. He wanted me. I wanted him. Would we make it out of the apartment at all?
“Please do,” I answered, not caring where we were now. And when his lips pressed into mine, hard and rough, I opened to him, my legs and my mouth. My calves wrapped around his waist to pull him into me, while my tongue twisted around his, tasting him, savoring the cherry flavor that came from the candy that still existed as a sliver against the inside of his cheek.
He leaned into me until I leaned back into him, trying to stay upright because leaning down would break the seal that fused our mouths. Plus, it was fun chasing him around like that. Until my hands became curious and pushed up under the black tank top he had on to feel his skin. Satin. Silk. Hard rock covered with velvet. That’s what he felt like, especially when his abdominal muscles tensed under her touch.
