The Original Sinners: The Red Years
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“Better let me take over,” Nora said. “You don’t need to be driving my baby in your condition.”
Zach took a few calming breaths before exiting the car. He walked around slowly to the passenger side and got in. Nora dropped into the driver’s side and turned the engine on.
“You okay?” Nora asked as she backed onto the street and headed toward his apartment building.
“Haven’t decided yet.”
Nora turned onto his street.
“I’m just following your rules. No fucking until the book’s done. I guess I should hurry up and get that book finished.”
Zach rubbed his face, breathed through his hands. “Please do.”
“Better give me my homework then. If we’re going to play again, I guess I’ve got to get some work done this week. And for some reason I get the feeling you may want to play again.”
Zach could still feel her heat on his hand. He could hardly think or speak and she was talking about the book.
“I’ll email you tomorrow morning…when I’m lucid.”
“Lucidity’s vastly overrated. I shall await your email with bated breath.” Nora pulled in front of his building.
Zach opened the door and stepped out. Once exposed to the cold night air his senses finally returned to him. He walked around to the driver’s side and Nora rolled the window down.
“What was that you said to Soren tonight right before we left? It sounded like Italian,” Zach asked, curious about their cryptic exchange ever since he witnessed it.
“Cloro al clero. It’s pretty common graffiti around the Vatican. It means ‘poison the clergy.’”
Zach laughed appreciatively. He could agree with the sentiment.
“Are you ever going to tell me what you were doing when you disappeared for over an hour tonight?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Are you at least going to tell me if it was fun?”
Nora looked at him and didn’t smile. But there was dark mirth shining in her eyes as if she knew a great joke that she wanted to tell him.
“I’ll tell you this…I didn’t have sex with a man. And it was so much fun it oughta be illegal.” Zach took a step back as she revved the engine. She rolled up the window.
Then she was gone.
Zach stared after the car and felt Nora take a shard of himself away with her. It was his rule, his proclamation that they wouldn’t become lovers until the book was finished. But for a few moments he’d felt no guilt, and the world hadn’t ended.
Zach entered his building and took the elevator up to his flat. He was out of his coat by the time he got to his door. He pulled off his shirt, yanked down his jeans and kicked his clothes into the corner of the room before crawling with the reluctance of a weary soldier into the bitter trench of his bed.
Closing his weary eyes, Zach couldn’t stop himself from picturing Grace. Some nights she would stop his hands, desperate to undress him herself. Her brief flirtation with aggression over, she would turn timid as her fingers, earnest and nervous, unbuttoned his cuffs, his collar, slipping the shirt off his shoulders so slowly he would shiver. And she would look at him with such wonder, such desire that he, a married man, a graduate of dozens of beds, and so accustomed to the appreciative stares of women that they no longer registered as flattery, would find himself feeling suddenly shy. She looked at him as if she’d never seen his bare chest before, his uncovered arms, his naked stomach and back until he felt he had never been seen like that before and knew, likely, he never had. The next day he would yawn and stretch and stumble through the hours grateful he’d gotten a better offer than a mere good night’s sleep.
Zach came hard on his hand and rolled over onto his stomach. God, he missed his wife.
* * *
Nora stood at the foot of her bed and stared at the black silk abyss before her. Like many of her characters she slept on black sheets. But unlike them, she did so for reasons more practical than seductive. She wrote in bed and often fell asleep with her pens uncapped and dripping. Wesley’s moving in over a year ago put a stop to any overnight guests. These days the only stains on these sheets were from ink.
Nora pulled on her pajamas, grateful to be in comfortable clothes again. What a night…she’d been so stupid to take Zach with her to the Circle. It was a miracle they’d made it out without anyone telling Zach she wasn’t just a Domme, but a Dominatrix and that the Circle wasn’t where she played but where she worked. He’d stomached the Circle but just barely. Wesley loathed what she did. Zach wouldn’t be any more understanding than the kid was.
The kid… The ghost of guilt passed through the room as she remembered Michael. But still…he had been so eager and ready and so desperate to know that he wasn’t alone in his strange desires. And if it hadn’t been her, it would have been some girl, vapid and foolish and completely unaware of the rare creature she fumbled about with awkwardly. Michael deserved better. He deserved the ceremony and the story.
After they’d finished and she had untied him, he had curled into her arms and cried. She’d rocked him and let him talk. “I always thought there was something wrong with me,” he’d confessed. “I thought I was wrong to want this.” And she knew he wasn’t weeping because of sadness or shock, but because all babies cry when they’re born.
Nora glanced around. The ghost was gone. But there was no way she could sleep in her own bed tonight, not with the memory of Soren’s taunts still echoing in her ears.
She padded down the hall in her sock feet pausing outside a half-open door. Wesley lay on his side, his back to her, the sheet draped over his hip.
“I’m awake, Nor,” Wesley said without turning over.
Nora tiptoed into his room and sat on the edge of his bed. He rolled onto his back and looked up at her.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked.
“There’s a monster in my room,” Nora whispered unnecessarily.
“Big baby.” He threw back the covers. “Get in.”
Nora dived in with juvenile glee and wriggled next to him flipping and flopping over like a fish on land until Wesley grabbed her by the arms and pinned her down.