She looked at me with wild eyes as I slammed myself into her, her hair wet and clinging to her cheeks, her thighs wrapped around me, her mouth seeking mine. She was close, and it was getting rougher, and when I slammed my palm against the wall, holding her hand up above her head, I knocked the rickety showerhead with my wrist, and the device crashed to the floor. We didn’t even notice it until after we were done. Rock ’n’ roll at its best.
She wasn’t mad at me when she was all dressed and ready for work, and I was shirtless and in my sweatpants only, drinking coffee, leaning against the counter in her kitchen.
But she didn’t kiss me goodbye, either.
She just glanced at me from the front door, right before opening it, and said in her poised, mannered, June the Prune tone rather than the one that screamed my name and God’s earlier, “Angelo, this can’t continue. It’s wrong for both of us. It was amazing, but I can’t. I let myself indulge only once.”
“Four, but I get it.”
Nice try, June.
I took a sip, crossed my legs at my ankles, and watched her looking at me before she opened the door and left.
The butterfly had fled.
I hadn’t expected things to change overnight, but they had. I hadn’t expected to feel a part of me leaving with her, but it did.
It had been the most physically and emotionally charged night I had ever experienced. My body and heart had never been this suffused in another.
I used to think of her as marble, and now I realized she was indeed just that—strong, tough, enduring, beautiful, translucent, natural, original, intricate, unlike anyone else. And I couldn’t get enough of her.
I had no idea when and how exactly it had happened, but I was falling in love with the last woman I thought I’d fall for.
My wife.
25
June
I was about to become a middle-aged cliché.
Admittedly, clichés were truth-based and, like the cliché, I needed a good, thorough fuck—or four—to unwind. And Angelo had delivered. Goddamn him, he had definitely delivered. He knew what he was doing, how to touch me, how to make me discard myself and beg for more.
Only, I wasn’t going to be a forty-year-old who lost her mind over a devastatingly handsome, obviously skilled, and charming, decade-younger Italian who had given her a night like she’d never experienced before. And not just physically. The emotional rawness I’d felt with Angelo was something I never had with anyone. If some deity was trying to test my willpower with this whole nine yards of a man, that deity had won the battle. But I wasn’t going to let it win the war.
As much as I craved, as much as my body ached with desire, with yearning and need, as much as my heart begged me to set it free to run wild, no matter the consequences later, I couldn’t let it go any further than this.
I didn’t have a lot of experience with romantic heartbreak—I had managed to get myself this far without it—but when my heart had broken for other reasons, several times in my life, the pain had been enough to serve as a warning. Tears over a childhood scar last night on Angelo’s shoulder had been one proof that I didn’t get over wounds easily.
And Angelo … Angelo posed a potential heartbreak risk in a magnitude I had never dealt with before. I knew that if I let myself, I’d fall so wildly in love with him that he would leave scorched earth behind him. He was bound to. He was everything—caring, attentive, kind, open, generous, protective, smart, and could read me like a map. But there was no way he would feel the same about me. No way I could be to him what he could become to me. No way the two of us, with our age, and personality, and lifestyle differences, would last. I would lose him, all that he was, and be left to pick up the debris of a broken heart. And I just couldn’t.
He had already made me feel things with an intensity that derailed me and challenged my ability to contain. Anger, frustration, hate even; emotions I hardly ever entertained. Lust, desire, longing—I wasn’t used to those. I lived without them, sheltered myself from them. And here they were, consuming every part of me.
I didn’t want to add hurt and pain to the list, so it was up to me to wrench myself out of this, hoping I wouldn’t plunge myself into deeper problems, as my latest experience proved I could.
So, I’d said what I said right before leaving for work and used the drive there to recall the things we’d said to each other in the fight right before I’d caved and lunged at him. While they had been phrased angrily, there’d been truth to everything we’d thrown in each other’s faces. Those things didn’t just go away because we had mind-blowingly and soul-searingly fucked, four times, as Angelo had made sure to remind me.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“All shop talk? How are things other than that? Wanna catch up?” A text from Rio, after we’d messaged about order renewals, sent my heart down to my panties. “He plays beautifully, by the way,” she continued. “If that’s how they test guitars and whatnot, then I’m willing to listen all day.” She added the sweat-drops emoji.
Meeting up with Rio could be my solution to getting home as late as possible tonight. I wouldn’t be able to reveal the real state of things between Angelo and me, but spending the evening out would be better than spending it trying not to jump on Angelo.
“Meet you at Life’s A Beach after work to catch up?” I texted.
“Yes! Seven there. BTW, he came in yesterday, looking for you. I’m sure he found you, ha-ha. But I think you should consider letting Dharma know about you two. She tried to hit on him. Can’t blame her.”
Me neither.
