He eyed my body as if he could dry each droplet with the heat in his stare alone. The water evaporated from his body like an illusion, leaving him glistening and smelling like me. The wash he had used.
“I can hardly wait,” he said with that grin on his face again.
He climbed into bed with me, pulling me to him, kissing me again. We rolled. We switched positions. We touched. We kissed. We licked. We rolled some more. When I could not catch my breath, he sat me on top of his cock and his eyes gave me a silent order to move.
My body obeyed.
I started to move against him as he rolled his hips with me, making the most delicious noises I had ever heard come from deep inside of his chest. Every vessel deeper than my skin recoiled at this. At how he was looking at me. Touching me.
As a truly committed lover would.
He flipped our positions, and adjusting my leg, buried himself in me so deep, I felt him hit my uterus. His eyes closed, as they had never done before, leaving him vulnerable to me. To an attack. And even though it was hard won, my orgasm milked his cock, and he spilled himself inside of me, a look of pure ecstasy on his features.
He stared down at me, and I fought to keep my eyes open. I battled the urge to crumple into myself before I arose from our bed a changed woman. A woman who, whether she accepted it or not, had been claimed by this man, not beast. It would be a part of me that would always return to him. That was how deeply he had embedded part of himself in me. That was how I came to understand all the nonsense about vampires. It was not their teeth that changed a person. That was only a metaphor. It was their claim that did it, no matter what the context to it was—whether in possession or love.
“My wife,” my husband said, leaning down and placing a soft kiss on my head. And then he was gone, and the world suddenly seemed so empty. So cold.
I turned into myself, feeling the change in me start to take root. When I stood from this bed, my name would be the same, my face and my body would still belong to me, but the shift was coming from some place deeper.
A place no one could feel but me.
My entire being was exhausted. I could never remember a time in my life when I had felt so drained. The weak feeling started at my core and radiated out to my skin. The cool air touched the delicate feel of my flesh, and it felt hot, as if I was feverish. I slept on and off throughout the day, thankful, or not, to be alone. I was not sure who I was or what I was about. All I seemed to know was that I had been claimed by a mere man—hooray for me!—and he had gone deeper than skin.
The skin part was better than fine, but the deeper part was not sitting right in my chest. The person I was clawed to come back from the grave.
She would, but perhaps she would come back as a haunting ghost.
He had once said my aria entered his skin and stuck barbs in his chest the first time he had heard me sing.
He would do the same to me.
His needs would haunt me.
I would bring him with me wherever I went. As he would carry a part of me—a part that both loved and hated him. He loved and hated me as well. We were both halves of ourselves, and the emptiness in each of us could not complete the other. We loved each other for our similarities but hated each other because of our differences. I would never truly be the woman he needed, and he would never truly stop craving her. I refused to change for him, and he refused to give up the dream for me.
This was not what I signed up for. However, it was what it was. When I was apart from him, I wanted him closer, but when he was closer, I longed to be separate from him. Perhaps I should have left after Brando Fausti and his spinning toy entered the picture, but I could not do that.
Reference the above.
Staring toward the door that led out to the balcony, I thought of my sister, but I could not summon the energy to call her. Deep down, though, I needed her. We were alike in ways the world could not understand or accept. We demanded happiness, in whatever form our needs demanded it, and we would stop at nothing to obtain it. Our parents were the same. We were raised not to care about feelings or how the world perceived us for going after ours. We just did. Damn everyone else.
What was so wrong with that? I wondered.
We have one life. I refused to live it bowing down to people and their needs. How about this…if the rest of the world was not so selfish, why would they demand anything of me and my life, ah? We are all selfish. Fools talk themselves into believing otherwise. Being demanding and selfish and being a woman was not as accepted as when a man behaved this way.
My sister understood this. She was a younger version of me. But she was still stung about Dario Fausti not giving her a big enough diamond ring. What was he thinking? She deserved better. It was not as if he did not have enough money for it. He would never spend the money he had. Not in this lifetime. Not his children in the next. Not any future heirs. No, the ring he gave her spoke volumes—he did not valueher, as he should. No expense should be spared for a woman of her caliber.
If she would have been right in her mind, I would have called her, had her talk sense into me. It was as if she was an extension of me and could right me when the world felt as if it was turned upside down. That was how I felt. As if I was standing on my head, the blood rushing to it, hot blood pulsating in every capillary, eyes bulging, cheeks swelling, about to pop.
It seemed as if I had blinked and the daylight faded, turning the room pitch black. My husband slipped in bed beside me. He sighed.
“I am broken, Rocco,” I whispered. “There is no fixing me.”
“Tell me, my wife,” he said in Italian. “Is this how you truly feel? Broken.”
“No,” I answered honestly. “Only when I see myself as you wish to see me.”
He pulled me against him, as if our gouged-out halves could stop the bleeding between us. Deathly wounds we had caused each other by choosing each other. Perhaps, at the time, we both saw something in each other that we craved. Upon deeper inspection, what we craved was what we thought we could fix in each other. But vows had been said. Marks imparted on bones. I was his and he was mine. What had been done could never be undone. Time would move on, as it invariably did, and it could not be erased. Nor did I want it to. My choice was mine, for better or for worse.
