NINETEEN
Tressa
I woke the next morning, soft strains of salsa music piping up the stairwell.
I stretched, the scent of man greeting my nose.
Bastien.
The last twelve hours throbbed between my legs. I pushed out of bed, eyes finding my pile of clothing rumpled on the floor next to the tiny twin bed. A woolen blanket discarded at the foot. Tears pushed out of my eyelids and down my cheeks.
Salsa music played on.
I slid my fingers into my hair, every ounce of me hating every bit of myself in that moment. In a countless array of bad decisions, this one took the cake.
Fucking the priest now, eh, Tressa? Way to make ’em proud.
I bent over, gathering my socks into a fist when the padding of footsteps on the stairs landed in my ears.
“Morning.” Bastien walked into the room, naked as the day he was born into this world, every one of my twenty-four years feeling painfully inadequate.
I pushed my socks across my face to erase the tears before I stood, tucking the sheet around my torso a little tighter. “Hi.”
Bastien registered my awkward arrangement before his hips swayed toward me, the thick curve of his dick half hard and growing as he drew closer. My mouth watered, the desire to give up a real life and be his sex slave strong.
“Me enamoré de ti,” he mouthed the words of the song playing from the kitchen downstairs.
My stomach churned.
His eyes hung suspended, glinting with the afterglow of last night’s pleasure.
“Dance with me,” he ordered in Spanish, the memory of my grandmother’s own richly accented words making my heart swell impossibly bigger and slightly more ravaged at the thought of leaving the man who made me feel this way.
He pulled me closer, fingers on one hand lacing with mine as the other settled at my back. He tugged at the sheet separating us, the cool fabric falling to our feet as he whispered along to the lyrics, his honeyed baritone curling around his mother tongue and cementing the sentiments in my soul.
He knew I had at least a mediocre understanding. But somehow, when he sang it in another language, it felt less real and yet more real as if, in our little bubble, we spoke in our own love language, a dialect only he and I had the dictionary for.
“And I fell in love with you,”he breathed the lyrics gently, fingertips whispering across my skin as we danced in the dim room, polished wood infused with the holy scent of incense.
I clutched at his bare shoulders, the muscles taut and unforgiving under all that creamy copper skin. It would break my heart to end this, but end it, I would. Before something out of our control could.
“You’re my first dance, sweet dove.”
I peered up into his puppy-dog eyes, shame filling my heart that I’d soon be breaking his. “Your first dance ever?”
Tomorrow.
I would go home, collect myself, have one good night’s rest, then gather all of my things and march over here in the morning.
There would be no next Mass for me.
The deeper we both sank into this cesspool of a love, the better the chance we’d drown in it.
A double love suicide.
“First dance ever,” he confirmed, patting my backside once as the song ended, something faster taking over the airways. Bastien spun me into and out of his arms once, eliciting a giggle from my otherwise sad lips. I was plotting to leave him while he wooed me every step of the way. I was his villain. Born to break his heart, shred his soul, and teach him every life lesson he never knew he needed to learn.
I was that girl.
