Chapter Eight
“You want to take a bath together?” he offered, sounding a bit winded.
Milan nodded and sat up slightly, afraid to disturb the sheets too much, lest she get everything sticky. She had no reason to worry. Julian excused himself, and in the distance, she could hear him preparing the waters, tinkling around in the bathroom. She noted the fast moving shadows, but not too fast…no, just the right pace to let her know he was hurrying, but not rushing.
Soon, he was back at her side and lifting her in his arms. Incense smoke bellowed from behind him in lazy clouds, daring to be observed as they waved their flagrant scents for them to enjoy. He carried her away like a new bride, looking lovingly down at her as the incense continued to pet her face and kiss her nose with pecks of Egyptian musk. When they’d entered the blue and black tiled bathroom, she was in awe how he’d taken the time to place on some new music, some funky chill remix of Freddie Joachim’s, ‘Sweep Away my Sorrows’. He’d lit flickering jade tea candles that made the bathroom dance with sensual flames…
So romantic…
He lowered her into the water—at the perfect temperature—filled with glorious clear, iridescent bubbles and ripples that framed her languid form.
I feel so relaxed, so alive…
From the safety of her new wetland digs, she observed him remove two thick washcloths and towels from the slender shutter closet door inside their aquatic retreat. He laid them down on the toilet seat, then turned to her and placed one long muscular leg after the other inside the basin, until he was sitting on the opposite end, his feet on either side of her. The mischievous glimmer in his eye delighted her soul, called to her on so many levels. The drip of the faucet added the perfect percussion sound as they both just simmered, enjoying one another, melting into silence. The exchange remained nonverbal for quite some time, their shared glances saying enough. They said nothing, but said everything. No words exchanged for the time being…
The, he broke the quiet with the simplest and purest of declarations, while he moved his fingers along the edge of the tub, as if trying to remove a stain, or a sticker that refused to budge. “I’m not through with you.”
He shifted a bit in the water, causing it to crash against her breasts, now growing a wee bit cold while the rest of her simmered hot and bothered right below the surface.
“When we get out of this tub, I plan to have you again and again, until I’m too tired to do it anymore…and after I rest, I’m going to eat your damn pussy…then I’ll be inside of you again…until…the break…of dawn.” He slicked his long tongue over his lips, his gaze hooded.
“What about what I want? What about my wishes?” she teased, no doubt looking coy as her pussy throbbed from his commanding words.
“These are your wishes. And I’m in the granting business.”
“Well.” She grinned, looking at her toes that peeked up out of the water as they grazed against his upper thighs. “Since you think you know everything, what do I wish for right now?”
“I’ve already figured that out, too. You’re spending the night. The groceries can wait until the morning. Your wish is my command, baby…” And before she could respond, protest or tell him that her pussy was wet again but the damn tub filled with sudsy water covered her truth, he rose on all fours, crawled to her like a prowling lion. The water sloshed about, but her gaze fixed on his eyes that were full of deviancy, like the dark smile on his handsome face…
Fuck!
*
“This is called St. John’s Wort.”
“That sounds like something a Catholic occultist puts in a pot,” Milan quipped as they sat at Julian’s black granite kitchen table, her groceries piled into the man’s refrigerator, making it now at full capacity. She was surprised it didn’t burst at the shiny, black seams. The guy insisted on purchasing them when she was more than capable of getting her own things. He also slipped some of that ‘funny food’ into her cart, the kind with only three or four ingredients written on the back and looked as if it had been pulled up by the root from some old lady’s overgrown backyard. She pretended to not notice as she pulled the strings from his over-sized black hoodie she now wore and lowered her gaze once again to her bowl of cereal…
Cereal…
A nasty taste coated her tongue like prickly pickle juice as a troubling memory bubbled up from the recesses of something hidden and locked away like the long, lost hellacious ordeal that it had been. She hadn’t thought about it since her mother’s passing, yet here it was, filling her mouth with puddles of saliva that made her want to vomit…
Vomit…
Mom threw up a lot towards the end…couldn’t keep any food down. But she kept down the cereal.
The memory had been awakened the day after she’d met Julian, but now, it demanded center stage.
“…It had to be done just right,” Milan mumbled as she ran the spoon through the bowl of vanilla coconut milk and the Captain Crunch she insisted upon, despite Julian’s warnings regarding the dyes.
“What had to be done just right, baby?” he asked as he popped a thin, wheat cracker into his mouth and closed the refrigerator door.
“Her cereal. If…If I had the dried fruit in there, the apples, you know, from the oatmeal, then I had to pick it all out… but she didn’t want the plain oatmeal; she’d throw up that. No, it had to be apple, but without the apples, and it had to be a specific store bought brand, not Quaker. She could tell the difference. I had to go to that store, because no other stores carried it…” Milan didn’t understand what she was saying or why, but doing so felt cathartic. So she treaded forward, dragging her internal craziness right along for the ride.
Julian kept mum, just moved casually about, shirtless, his jeans unbuttoned at the waist, like he belonged in the web of insanity of her declarations. He’d unbuttoned them as soon as they got home, giving her more evidence that his comfort level with her had increased tenfold.
He nodded as she spoke, as if she were singing a song that he liked and acknowledged, then casually grabbed a shiny red apple from a ceramic bowl on his kitchen island, leaned against the counter, legs crossed, and bit into the thing. His eyes, so blue, said so much, and that dark hair fell all over his shoulders, now with a slight wave from their mutual shower earlier that morning—the one where he caressed her shoulders so slowly all the while sucking on the side of her neck, and rocked inside of her until she fell apart against the slick, wet wall…
He chewed noisily, his brows dipped in deep deliberation. Transfixed by the sight of him, she felt as if she could just do this—this shit that she didn’t want to do, but felt compelled to. As if sensing her internal struggle, he looked down at his bare feet, strong limbs covered in veins and a small baby toe on each foot that turned awkwardly towards the others as if needing their opinions to simply walk. She grinned at the notion, but the joy was brief, so very brief…
“Keep going…”
His urgings sounded like song lyrics, drifting on deaf musical notes that no one heard, but loud and clear to her.
“The cereal, I’d put it on a tray.”
“What color was the tray?” He took another bite of his apple and looked down at his long hands, nonchalantly studying them.
“Does it matter?”
“It doesn’t.”
“Why ask then?” She turned away from him, shoving her own bowl aside.
“Because you want to tell me the story. So, tell me…”
“It was cream colored, an off-white. She had to have the orange juice, too. It had to be in a certain glass I had. She said the glasses were hers, and that they’d been in her family for years. That wasn’t true. I’d just bought those glasses from Macy’s before I moved her in with me. She threw the cereal at me, telling me it wasn’t the kind she liked.” Milan hung her head, scratched at an imaginary itch under her nostril. “Julian…watching her die was the worse experience of my life. Even crueler though was watching her trapped in her own goddamn body, and her brain failing her, every damned day.” Her voice cracked like a fallen egg against the floor. “She was…miserable. She became combative, not herself. I had to wrestle her into the bathtub most mornings. The cereal became my obsession. I’d stand there in my kitchen, before she awoke, and I’d…I’d count each piece of dried apple. It was crumbly, white dust was all over it from the oatmeal flakes. I still remember how it felt between my fingertips.” She ran her fingers together, as if she were carrying a piece at that very moment.
“I’d pour the hot kettle of water over the flakes and just watch it; then, I’d add a bit of cold milk, and that would make the temperature just right.” She looked towards his kitchen window, her stomach finally starting to settle. “Every now and again, she’d have moments of lucidness. Like, one time, she looked at me and said, ‘When are you going to get rid of that ugly white sweater?’” Milan burst out laughing but stifled it with both hands, shocked at herself. She felt a prisoner to her own self now, witnessing a show that went on without her permission. In typical Julian fashion, he didn’t react. He just looked at her, and took a final bite of his apple before tossing the seedy core into the trash receptacle, causing a thud. He crossed his arms, cleared his throat, and simply waited. No pressure.
“It was funny!” She finally burst free, allowing her mouth and heart to have their will. Hot tears streamed down her face, hotter than the tea he’d prescribed to her the day they’d met, hotter than her anger on many nights when she couldn’t rest due to her mother’s incessant calling out, hotter than the oatmeal that landed on her hand as her mother tossed the bowl her way in an angry fit. “It was fucking funny! She hadn’t made fun of that sweater in so long…she hated that sweater! I wore it all the time. It was my lounge sweater, the kind you only wear in the house. She said those words, and it…it made me just want to crawl up under her linty robe, Julian, and die with her right at that second…because then I could die happy, you know?!”
He nodded, leisurely grabbed a tissue from a nearby box and presented it to her.
“Thanks…” She gripped it and blew her nose, dotted her eyes then balled it tight in her fist. “I haven’t been able to talk about it until now. Grief is something else…” She shook her head. “People tell you that you should be over it by a certain time, that like, if you’re still talking about it months later, you must just want attention or have trouble coping with life. Some people say things like, ‘Well, she is in a better place now…’ Really?! How the fuck do they know, huh?! How do they really know that?!”
She sniffed and pulled at Julian’s jogging pants that were swallowing her legs with their length, even though they were the smallest ones he owned.
“Something unusual, medically strange, happened to my mother. She didn’t get cancer, or something like that. You see, people can understand that, you know?” She looked up at him, wanting something back this time, and realized he was so well plugged into her, their souls were tattooed together. He pulled up a chair and sat beside her, placing his hand over hers. He understood.
“No woman, even at her age, is supposed to get dementia like that, out of the blue, and have it turn to Alzheimer’s. I had…I had video, Julian, of my mother just months before, living it up at her birthday party. My cousins and me, my friends, her friends, all of us were in that woman’s house with the cake, the music, the presents! She was a gray haired fox!” She gripped his hand tighter. “I gave her a big hug, and she hugged me tighter when I said, ‘Happy Birthday, Mama!’ I had no idea it was marking a chapter in our lives that I’d never get to read again! Never! She was stolen from me; the woman I knew was stolen right under my nose. And in her place was this miserable person who didn’t want to go on, but she didn’t know how to ask me to make it stop, because she didn’t trust me…because she no longer knew who I was!” She stabbed her chest with her finger, the tears once again falling fresh against her cheeks. He squeezed her hand tighter, and leaned in so close to her, she could smell his cinnamon-scented breath. It soothed her in her time of need.
“I was the little girl, she told me, that she prayed for. She wanted to be a mother so badly, but it just wasn’t meant to be, she’d said. And when she’d all but given up, there I was! Nine miscarriages later, there I was! She told me that story a hundred times… She said she never had any issues in the pregnancy with me. She was high risk, but the pregnancy was so normal, so right, one of the happiest times in her life—and when I was born, things went so smooth, the doctors were shocked. It was like she had no history of reproduction issues at all. She said I was her miracle, and that was what she was going to name me, but then, she saw a magazine in the store right before I was born, and on the cover was one of her favorite opera singers, James Levine. It said that he was performing in Milan.”
She released the tissue from her hand, and held his tighter.
“She said her stomach was out to here, and she could barely see her bag to get the dollar or two out to buy the magazine. The guy in the store showed pity on her, and just handed it to her. It was her lucky day, she said. When she walked out, she thought about how she liked the sound of ‘Milan’, and wished she could be there to see him perform. Instead, she named me Milan; it was the closest she’d get to it, she believed.
“I was planning to take her to Italy for a surprise, Julian. But then…she got sick and her doctor told me it wouldn’t be a good idea. The tickets, everything was paid for. I had tickets for an opera house there, too…but she never made it to Milan…” She clutched on to him, barely able to see his damned face through the tears. “The illness…it…it stole my mama…stole my mama right from me, Julian!” Anger had a flavor, and she was choking on the shit with each word she sobbed out, falling deeper into a pool of despair. “It stole my dreams for her, her dreams for me; it stole my best friend! I was…so close to my mother… Some may have believe unnaturally so.” She glanced down at her lap. “But…she got me, she understood me. She had high expectations for me, although nothing that wasn’t realistic, or not obtainable. She helped me. That’s all she ever wanted to do…” Pain crawled up her throat, choked and twisted her passageways. “She was like that with everybody. The forever helper…”
They were quiet for a while. He softly kissed her cheek, and let her sob against his shoulder.
Suddenly, Julian’s phone rang, interrupting Milan’s trance-like state. She sat up, startled, as if she’d been awakened out of a foggy dream.
“Go on, get it,” she urged.
He leisurely crossed the kitchen and picked up the cordless house phone receiver. She hadn’t even realized he had a house phone. She hadn’t seen anyone under the age of thirty-five with one for quite some time.
“Yeah…” He put the phone on speaker and marched to the sink to clean up the glasses in which he’d made their green smoothies early that morning. He’d said he wanted to make sure she got some vitamins in her before he took her out onto the slick, ice covered roads.
“Hey, where are you?” came a woman’s voice. “You’ve got people here.”
Milan swiveled in her seat, suddenly aware of the day and time. It’s Saturday. Of late, her days with Julian were all blending together, like music remixes.
“I know…I’m busy. Can you hold it down?”
There was a brief pause.
“You never miss work, ever. Are you okay, Julian?”
“Angela, yeah, I’m fine. Who do I have today?” He retrieved the dish towel and went over a plate before placing it on a rack to finish drying.
Milan interjected with a whisper. “Julian, if you need to—”
“Shhhh….” He turned to her with his finger to his lips, then continued to work in the sudsy sink water. He ran a yellow sponge over some glasses and disassembled the blender parts.
“Who’s over there?” the woman questioned.
“None of your business. Now, who do I have on my schedule?”
The woman on the other end gave a faint laugh, one that seemed all knowing.
“You have a twelve o’clock with a Kyle Rafferty, and a five o’clock with a Janet Newt.”
“What is Kyle getting?” He turned the water on, rinsed the black rubber of the blender under a hot stream, shook the contraption then placed it on the drying rack.
“Um, says here a cobra climbing up a pole with some sort of insignia, I believe it is military.”
“Okay, check Alex’s schedule and if he can’t squeeze him in, call Gail and see if she can come in and help.”
“But she isn’t finished with her apprenticeship.”
“Doesn’t matter. She is doing that just so she could work with Clyde, add it to her resume. She’s already licensed. She is really good and could handle that fine. I’ll be in for the five o’clock.”
“Okay. I’ll call you back if either Alex or Gail isn’t available.”
“Alright.”
And then he hung up.
Milan kept staring at the man, knowing he’d done all of that for her. He was giving her a place to fall apart, but she felt so guilty. Julian was clearly an overachiever, but left that dual-edged burden alone, tossed it to the side as if it were nothing while he focused completely on her and her needs, solely. She hadn’t had someone take such care of her in a while, so much that the sense of neglect all became hot with rawness and sudden awareness. She’d become accustomed to being ignored.
After a few moments, he dried his hands off and sat down beside her again. He took her hands in his, ran his thumb over her fingers as he smiled at her, the way a long time sympathetic friend would.
“Now, where were we?”
“You were supposed to be at work…” She chuckled, swiping another tear away from her eye.
“I’m supposed to be wherever I chose to be…and I chose to be with you.”
“Hmmm, you like me doing this to you? Breaking down like this…”
“I can’t stop what you’re doing. I don’t want to stop what you’re doing.”
“I feel so…”
“Weak? Grief isn’t weakness. I can’t leave you alone because you’re stronger than me.” He reached across the table and put his shirt back on, allowing it to hang loosely open.
She looked at him for a long while, then turned to stare down at the half eaten cereal just sitting there, coagulating. Her head hung a bit lower, and his grip on her became a bit tighter, until somehow he’d picked her up before she’d even noticed he’d released her hands and stood. And then, he sat her on his lap, and held her head to his shoulder. She gripped his shirt in a tight grasp, quietly crying, saturating the damned thing. She vibrated against his hard body and all he did was gently kiss her skin, stroke her cheeks and slowly rock her against him…
Now, she wasn’t sure what made her sadder. The fact that she’d ultimately released her hurt and pain, or that she looked him in the eye, and finally said it…
“It’s true… Mama’s really dead now…”
The sickness, the funeral, nothing made it completely real until that very moment. She looked around her surroundings, foreign to her, yet somehow familiar. She sat on a strange man’s lap, but he was no longer a stranger. In fact, that morning he assured her that she was his, and he wasn’t going any damn where. Peculiar emotions assailed her, although they, too, weren’t that odd upon closer inspection. No, those emotions were old, rotting and stewing. She had simply pretended they weren’t there, but they’d fermented, stunk up the place. In some bizarre way, Julian made her feel comfortable enough to toss the blood soaked rug of negativity off of them, reveal the rubbish and cart the mess out to the trash. The stench still lingered, reminding her of what once was, but at least, this was a start.
Yes.
This was a start down the road of recovery, and he was right there by her side.
Spring-cleaning had commenced…
‡