Page 4 of Possessed By You
I nod, unfolding the covers on his side. He closes the door behind him quietly, shaking his head.
“I can’t. I’m not done.”
“What?” I whine.
“You heard me,” he hums with a knowing smirk.
“Well, too bad.” I grab his tie and pull, eliciting a startled gasp from him as his knee drops forward on the bed. He’s laughing when I find his lips. Not one to push me away, he palms the nape of my neck, deepening the kiss with a skilled tongue and determination. Eventually, he begins to ease his way up, something I don’t want to allow.
“They’re on hold,” he reminds me between my desperate assaults. I shake my head, and his mouth curves into a smile against my own. “Darce—”
I groan, letting him go. “All right, okay. Go on.”
He’s chuckling on his way out. I fall back against the pillows with a huff as he shuts the door. Restlessly, I roll onto my side, then my stomach, until I’m on my back, staring at the ceiling.
Suddenly, the door opens and Benjamin reenters, utterly smug, utterly determined. “I’ll call them later.”
I sit up onto my elbows. “Yeah?”
He nods, one knee on the bed, reaches out, and curls his fingers into my hair. “Yeah.”
***
Surrounded by loud jetting vibrations, which make it near impossible to sleep, I slide my leg around Benjamin’s calf while we remain in silence, thousands of feet in the air, headed toward someplace unknown to me. Our skin simmers at our initial touch; our nerves nestled just under in tight, jumbled sections.
They are ignited by a mere graze or caress, and I find contentment in our intimacy. Although it’s been weeks since we’ve rekindled, and months now since I was released from my sentence, he and I have remained firmly in politeness.
We have never been so polite.
Whether we’re meeting for dinner or spending the night at one of our apartments, we don’t allow arguments. We don’t even have to catch ourselves. We talk of everything, everything but what matters.
We haven’t spoken of the year apart, what occurred between those months—to the both of us. I wasn’t the only person who had to become someone else. Benjamin didn’t waste his time alone. He tackled work, his dominating empire, something he had placed on the backburner during the chaos of the trial.
As much as I like politeness, I enjoy truth far better.
“Do you have anything you want to ask me?” I blurt out no louder than a whisper, my cheek burning against his chest. I expect deterring jokes or indifference, or even feigned cluelessness, but Benjamin seems almost armed with an answer, as if he’d had it stored for the right moment.
“Who visited you? Did you make any friends, anyone you could trust there? Was it what you were expecting? The list could go on.”
With a pause at the realization that he’s been waiting as impatiently as I have, I’m struck with the perfectly unsettling urge to tell him everything, in hopes that barriers will be broken.
“Doris was the only person I allowed to visit.”
“Not Kevin?”
“Almost everyone there really liked seeing their family. It makes sense, if you don’t think about it too much, to be excited to see your relatives, your friends. That was weird for me. It was hard enough to come out and see Doris, let alone imagine anyone else. In that situation, I liked being alone.”
“So, that probably answers my other question.”
My eyes rest in the dark on my nails, manicured and crimson red. It’s easy to remember when they were broken and surrounded by bruised knuckles.
“I didn’t trust anyone. I couldn’t there.”
“Why not?”
“Because they knew who I was. They knew about the trial, or about you and me. In there, I was famous and privileged in their eyes.”
“Didn’t you tell them otherwise?”
