For Paige
Prelude
I sat in the chair at the kitchen table looking at the arrangement of Calla lillies I had gone to pick up from the florist only a few hours ago. Their beauty mocked the feelings that were dwelling inside what soul I had left. She had texted it. That was how my marriage had ended. With a text. Four words:
We need 2 talk
. Are you fucking kidding me? I thought to myself. That was how a decade together would come crashing to an end.
We need 2 talk.
I called her unable to wait for her to get home and demanded she tell me what I already knew. Our marriage was done. She was moving on with someone else.
Never in my entire life had I ever hit something as hard as I swung out with a raging cry and punched the heavy vase. It exploded in a hurricane of glass, water, flowers and blood. I was shaking as I sat at the table and watched my hand bleed onto the table and down onto the soft gray carpet. First staining it with perfect red droplets of blood and then those droplets merged into a steadily growing puddle. I could have cared less. Instead I pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it with the hand that wasn't spliced open with gaping wounds and prickled with shards of glass.
Once I had believed that my wife was the most beautiful woman in the entire world and now saw her only as the ugliest being on the face of the planet. I hoped that in the future her heart would suffer as much as she had made me suffer with her lies and betrayal.
The afternoon gave way to the night and I had gotten myself sufficiently drunk and was almost done my second pack of cigarettes since receiving the text message of our marital demise. She had tried to call and I had bitch-buttoned her every time. I guess she had taken that as a hint not to come home that night and here I had spent so much time trying to figure out what the hell I would say to her. Left alone, I had collapsed in the bathroom after puking again and grabbed the bottle of whiskey to take the taste of vomit out of my mouth. Sitting on the floor just inches away from the toilet bowl if I needed it, with a pile of cigarette ash mounting like an ant hill, I looked up and saw the mirror that hung on the back of the bathroom door. My long hair that my wife loved so much, dangling in front of my face.
"I hate you," I told the reflection. My eyes were bloodshot from the tears I had tried so desperately to keep damned up. As I wobbled to my feet I grabbed hold of the bathroom countertop to steady myself. I reached into the medicine cabinet and found the small pair of scissors that my wife had next to the toenail clippers. Thrusting my hand into my hair I pulled a handful away from my head and cut across. My hair fell into the sink and I grabbed more, pulling and cutting until my scalp was a mess of tufts of hair.
I reached into the shower and grabbed the shaving cream and razor and turned back to the sink and turned on the faucet. Steam began to rise from the sink. It took almost half an hour to completely shave my head. When I was done there was a pile of hair, hot water, shaving cream, and cigarette ash in the sink. I took the last drag of the cigarette in between my fingers and dropped it into the sink.
The sight of myself made me sick. I wanted to change. I didn't want to be the person that was standing at that sink in the middle of the night.
"Good-bye."
I left the house with only my backpack filled with some sentimental belongings, none that included my wife, and a fresh pair of clothes. The first night I crashed in a hotel, the next few nights I bounced around from one friend's couch to another until I secured a top floor loft in the city. The building was under renovation and only had a handful of tenants. I liked the idea of being solitary for awhile.
For a few weeks I watched as my phone never rang or alerted me to text messages from my wife. She had left. She was gone. And I would never hear from her again. All those wasted years.
In the following month I had thrown away my last pack of cigarettes and found a gym down the street that was within walking distance. Soon I was jogging there every day. I had even picked up some classes at a local martial arts school. Within six months I had lost half my desired weight and was training for my first amateur MMA fight. The bar across the street that I visited had offered me a job bouncing a few nights a week. Some women talk about a sexual awakening, it turns out that men can have them as well, and mine would come at my evening job one of my few nights off.
One
Things would never be the same again after the moment I met Katie. The way her hips swayed out in the darkness of the dance floor with piercing beams of multicolored light. Her eyes closed as her body made love to me across the dance floor. When they opened, her deep blue eyes, entranced me and I could feel a hollow beat in my gut as if at the tip of a rollercoaster ride just as it plummets over the precipice. Her blond hair was short but long enough to fall across her eyes like a tattered shade. My eyes traced her ivory skin down her neck to the line of her breasts as her tits rubbed against each other while her hands rhythmically groped at the air above her as though reaching for a lifeline that was never going to come. Her stomach so tight and glisten with beads of sweat as she moved in time with the beat of the music.
Ivy came up behind her. First the girl with the long purple hair had her hands on Katie's hips but they soon climbed up her body until they went under the grey fabric of her shirt and were cupping her tits. Ivy pushed her lips over Katie's cheek until their mouths connected and they kissed in the center of the dance floor. I wasn't the only one watching them, but Katie had her eyes open and they were locked on her target.
Me.
While she kissed Ivy she extended her arm and a finger that pointed directly at me. Her hand turned over and she summoned me with that pointed finger, drawing me out of my seat and away from the bar. I went to her like an obedient dog, dodging dancing bodies and other girls as they tried to get me to dance. She summoned and I came.
Her fingers laced between mine, they were warm and a bit damp from all the sweating on the dance floor. I squeezed her hand tighter in mine as though she could just slip away in the night crowd. As we moved through the crowd and away from Ivy, Katie called out to her that she would call her later. As her legs slid over the backseat of my motorcycle, a Kawasaki Ninja her fingers laced together against my hard abdomen. All this time I was thinking I was the one in control. I revved the engine and we were off into the night. Racing down the highway and swerving through traffic like a ballerina on the stage.
Our first kiss was at a red stop light between Broadway and Fordway. One hand slid down and grabbed by crotch while the other turned my head into hers and our lips embraced and our tongues danced. I should have known then that I was never in control.
I took her into my apartment on the top floor and we were three steps into the living room when she pulled at my shoulder, turning me to her, and saw she had already taken off her shirt. She fell on my like a lioness on a gazelle. We missed the couch by at least four feet. The floor was hard and cold as she pulled off my shirt and my bare skin touched the cool wood. Katie's hands grasped the sides of my face as she kissed me and ground herself against me. She pulled up for a moment to take a breath and unhooked her bra. She grabbed and squeezed her own nipples as her mouth came down to me again and then she guided my hands to her tits and squeezed them.
We were still kissing when my hands were all over her ass, getting up the courage to go down her pants, when she suddenly broke away from me.
"Will you still respect me?"
"What?" I asked, completely confused.
"Will you still respect me in the morning?"
I tried to kiss her to reassure her but she forcefully pushed me down, the back of my head striking the floor harder than she probably meant. Or maybe not.
"Yes. Of course. Jesus Christ, why would you ask that?"
She kissed me lightly and whispered to me, "I like you. More than I should."
"Then stop overanalyzing shit," I said and grabbed a handful of her hair and we kissed hard and rough. My free hand finding its way down the back of her jeans, over the curves of her ass and between them until my fingers found her wet pussy and I plunged two fingers inside of her as deep as I could from that angle.
Katie sat up, undid her pants as I undid my own and before long the two of us were completely naked and her wet pussy was spreading as it slid over my hardness to the tip of my dripping cock and then like driving a stick she put it in reverse and I entered her from tip to base. Katie sat all the way up and began to ride me, her eyes closed as her hips moved back and forth then harder, a hand on my thigh and one on my abdomen. Both my hands firmly gripped on her ass. She never even made a muffled noise as she began to squirt all over my trimmed pubic hair and stomach. Katie just continued to ride me as she came again and again.
At the end of it when I told her I was ready to come she pulled me out of her pussy and put me in her mouth.
"I want to taste you," she said as her eyes locked on mine while her mouth devoured me.
