Chapter Ten
Fog smothers the sky above the Pacific. No bits of peek-a-boo blue welcome me to Malibu. I pull past the guard gate, down the narrow enclave road, and onto the drive at Tara’s parents’ place in Malibu. The wind whips the palms. The air is cool for a summer day. I park and walk up the steps. The front door is unlocked, just like the last time I was here.
Today, the house feels colder and grayer. Last time I was here, my cock knew what I wanted but my heart, my mind, the rest of me, raged against my need, my desire, my love for Tara.
And now?
My cock grows hard in spite of my doubts.
I walk through the house toward the back slider. Tara stands on the deck and stares out at the ragged surf. The choppy waves pound the shore. Her dark hair swirls on the wind and her fair skin appears porcelain in the gray light. She gazes toward the distance where the water fades into fog as though the world ends at that gray spot miles off shore.
“I betrayed you.” Her words crash into me like glass breaking against tile. She doesn’t look at me, her gaze fixed on the space of nothingness. No light, no water, no sky, no fog, just an impenetrable grayness. “You can’t decide if you hate me or love me.”
A tightening in my chest. My head and heart are in absolute agreement, but my cock wants her. I’m hard. For the first time since the last time I fucked Tara, I’m hard. My body thrums with desire, want, need. I’m furious with her, and yet I want her. Now. Here. My need is carnal and beyond my heart or my mind. This desire seeps deep into my bones.
For five years, Wonderfucking was my salvation, and now my ability to Wonderfuck away the pain is lost to me.
She took my identity, my secret, my solace as Wonderfuck, and gave my story to the world. She took my identity and she’s taken my ability to fuck any woman but her.
I walk to her. My eyes lock on hers. No words. I have no words to explain my feelings. The fog thickens; a shroud between us and the world. I reach for her and pull her to me; my desire, my intentions on my face. My fingers weave through her hair. I bend forward and press my lips to hers.
Slow, hot, and full of need. My desire clear with my kiss. I slide my lips from hers and grasp her elbow. Her body presses against mine. Fingertips over the cotton of her dress sliding down the hem, to the flesh of her thighs. I slide my hands back up beneath the cloth. No panties. Ah, fuck yes, the warmth of her sex bare for me.
My fingertip slides between the lips of her sex and presses her clit.
“Oh Jake, yes,” she moans beneath my kiss. Her hips press forward and my cock strains against my jeans. My fingertip circles her sex and her mouth parts, opening for me. Her hands grasp my zipper and she pulls it down. Hands grasp my cock and pull my sex from my jeans.
My finger slides from her clit into her sex. She clenches around me.
Fuck. I pull my lips from her mouth and turn her toward the ocean. Her hands grasp the rail in front of her and I lift her skirt above her bare ass. My hands slide around the roundness, caressing the soft flesh. I press my lips to the round, fleshy part of her ass. Soft. Smooth. Perfection.
Smack.
Her body tenses. She gasps.
“Jake, oh my god, I’ve missed you.” She turns her head toward me and her face is in profile. The sharp cut of her jaw, the perfection of her cheekbones and nose. I’m so fucking angry with her and yet I need her, I want her, I can’t get enough of her. I tighten my arm around her waist, my throbbing cock pressing upward. She bends forward and my cock presses up into her sex. I thrust. I’m deep into her sex.
Fuck, yes.
Heat rips through my body. I won’t last long. I slide my hand to the front of her sex and circle her clit with my finger. Her head falls back toward me. I slide my finger over her clit and with my other hand reach up beneath her loose dress and pull the taut flesh of her nipple. Her tongue traces her lower lip. Pleasure shallows her breath.
“Oh, Jake.” Her hips press back against me with each thrust.
Hard and fast we fuck. The fog, the darkness growing around us, the angry waves pounding the shore. I press my lips to the nape of her neck.
“Jake. Oh my god, Jake, I love you.”
Her sex tightens around my cock. Heat curls my toes and my balls pull close to my body. Every muscle tightens and I explode into her. Sweet release shatters my brain. I see nothing. An explosion of pleasure with Tara in my arms.
***
“Can we talk now?” Tara sits up next to the fireplace in the living room. “Are you worn out enough to have a conversation?”
“You didn’t enjoy this evening?”
I roll to my side. We’ve fucked on the deck, in the kitchen, and twice in the living room. A fire warms the dark living room where we’ve just finished.
“You’re avoiding the conversation.”
Right. For so many good reasons, not least among them that I’m angry, and talking about what she’s done isn’t going to change my anger. Nope, instead of talking I’ve been engaging in this sort of drive-by fucking with Tara ever since her Wonderfuck story published.
“We need to figure this out.”
“What’s to figure out?” I roll onto my back and stare at the vaulted ceiling. “I fell in love with you and you used me for a headline.” I’m pissed, and petulant, and my feelings for Tara have emotionally castrated me. What man wouldn’t be filled with rage?
“I had a story to write—”
“You wrote about my private life without telling me.”
“I didn’t know it was you—”
“Bullshit.” I turn my head toward her.
“Until ….” She looks away from me and toward the fireplace, takes a deep breath, and then looks back. “Do you remember the first night we were together? The night you ditched me at your place and took off?”
“Not my best moment, but yeah, I remember.”
“You came back late that morning. You’d left me all alone at your place hoping that I’d leave before you got back. That was shitty.”
For a split second I feel bad, because she’s right. That was shitty, and my behavior got worse.
“I woke up before you left and there was a buzzing noise. I thought it was your alarm, but it wasn’t.”
I close my eyes. My Wonderfuck phone.
“I opened the drawer of your nightstand and there was a flip phone. Of course I opened it. I’m a journalist, and it’s buzzing. I flip it open and there is this text, which simply says ‘Want to play?’ and me being me, I text back ‘Play what?’ And the response I got back was ‘Wonderfuck’.”
“You’re not helping yourself with this story.”
“I’m not trying to help myself. What good would lying be at this point? I’m trying to explain what happened. To see if you can understand my side and we can move forward after this or decide if we’re over.”
Over? If it wasn’t for my cock we’d be so over, but so far the only person my dick’ll get hard for is Tara.
“Then what?”
“Then you kicked me out of your apartment with the standard, ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ speech. I went home, ate a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, and remembered a conversation.”
“What conversation?”
“With my girlfriend. A couple months before she’d ended a long relationship with a man and she needed to rebound. One of her friends suggested she call this guy who had made her friend feel better. Not just better.”
Tara breathes deep and her breasts move up and down. Fuck. I want her again.
“But he made her remember who she’d been before she let this asshole-guy destroy her. This guy brought back a part of her that she’d forgotten, and this guy had a name, a very strange name. A name that I’d now heard from her and seen on your phone. His name was Wonderfuck.”
I pull my gaze from her breasts and again stare at the ceiling. I close my eyes.
“I start searching. I post on some message boards. I ask when I’m out with girlfriends. I even start to see this word, Wonderfuck in bathroom stalls and that’s when….” She pauses.
I roll to my side. Her face glows in the firelight. Her voice fills with sadness and a heart wrenching realness in her words.
“I started not to care about the story. I didn’t want the story. I didn’t need the story. What I needed was what Wonderfuck could give me. What Wonderfuck could provide. I missed you and I missed that piece of me that I knew. God Jake, I knew what Wonderfuck could give me back. You could awaken that part of me that I needed to go on with my life, to be whole, to be strong. He could bring back the woman that I was before I lost her and traded her in for whatever Douchey-McDouche-Nugget wanted in a woman.”
Tears drip down her cheeks and she wipes them away with the back of her hand. I fight the need to kiss them away, to sit up and hold her, to tell her it’s okay, because as much as I want to comfort her, what she did, how she did it, wasn’t okay then and isn’t okay now.
I can’t meet Tara’s gaze any longer. I can’t forgive her. Damn, but I understand what she wanted and what she was going through. Fuck, if I can understand, then I can empathize, and if I can empathize then I may forgive her. But I’m not ready to dole out forgiveness, not now, not yet, not in this moment. I’m still too justified in my rage and I want to keep my anger. Hang onto to it like a life preserver in a fucking storm.
“I got some women to talk before I met with you that first time, and because of what they said, I knew that I had to see you. I wanted you as Jake, but you wouldn’t have me that way. You’d already told me that you wouldn’t. So I made a decision. If you wouldn’t be with me as Jake, maybe you’d be with me as Wonderfuck.”
I tilt my head. I glance into her eyes. She lifts a brow. “You heard my voice on the phone message,” she says softly. “You had to know.”
“I knew.”
My words come out raspy and thick with emotion, almost as though saying them makes my complicity more real. I don’t want these facts to be true, but they are. I knew. When I texted Tara I knew who she was. I guessed what she wanted and I took the risk. Intentionally. For reasons that I’m not quite sure of now, I took the risk.
“I wanted you too…I just didn’t know how…I didn’t know if I could be with someone again. I…” I close my eyes and take a deep breath. Admission of introspection… vocalization of introspection is not easy for me. “I’ve used Wonderfuck to stay safe.”
Tara nods and there’s a look is in her eyes like she’s figured all this out. Maybe she has. She’s been with me as both Jake and Wonderfuck. She’s written about me. Maybe she’s analyzed me inside and out and nothing I say or do surprises her. Maybe she knows me better than I know myself. Maybe that’s part of why I’m angry with her.
“When I got to the hotel I knew that you realized who I was and that I was coming to see you. I was terrified you’d throw me out or not be there. All I knew for certain was that I needed you, and if I couldn’t have you as Jake, I’d take you as Wonderfuck.”
Heat burns my eyes. The weight of her words exhausts me. “I don’t know where to go with this…us….from here.”
Sadness winds through my body. What we could’ve had together, what we lost, what Tara did, created this toxic mix of could-have-beens that I can’t see a way past. “Why the story?” I search her face for the understanding and the forgiveness I so desperately want. I’m begging her to help me find a way past what she did to me, to us.
“I…I didn’t have a choice where the story was concerned.”
“We all have choices.”
She glances away and her gaze drops to her hand, palm flat on the carpet. She shakes her head and says nothing more. In the silence after her words, even though I seek it, I still find no path to forgiveness.
“If I could take it back I would.”
I don’t believe her. I want to believe her words, but I don’t because there are too many good things happening in her life for me to believe that she’d trade them for my love.
“Please, Jake, can’t we at least try? I didn’t want to hurt you. I just wanted women to know that they aren’t alone. That they don’t need to stay with the men that hurt them. That there are good men who are generous and kind and want to have sex with them no matter how ugly the men in their lives have made them feel.”
I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. My heart wants to try again with Tara, but my head tells a different story. The drama of being with her is almost too much for me to bear.
“I don’t know how to trust you.”
“I feel the same way.”
My heart jolts. I turn and look at her.
“You’re not the only one with doubts.” She raises an eyebrow. “You spent the last five years sleeping with hundreds of women. Doesn’t help that I walked in on my fiancé banging a woman in his office six weeks before our wedding.”
It’s easy and selfish of me to forget that Tara has her own demons to deal with. Each of us does. I’m asking her to trust a man who uses sex as his primary source of serotonin.
“If I can trust you not to sleep with ten women a week then I think you can at least try and trust me not to betray your confidence.”
“It was never ten.”
“More?” She lifts a corner of her mouth and smiles at me.
I roll toward her and drop my arm over her waist.
“Can we leave Wonderfuck behind?” Her eyes peer at me, a solemnity on her face. “Can I be Tara and you be Jake and we can be together? Just us. Not me looking for a story and not you fulfilling your vocation. Can we do that? Can we try?”
Every part of me longs to say yes to this woman, regardless of the betrayal, the past, my problems, her problems, our shared history. Every part of me wants to move forward with her by my side, and yet, there is flag tinged red, hovering in the distance, waving back and forth, because life is just not this easy. Not for me. And I don’t know if what we’ve built is strong enough to withstand the problems that will inevitably shake each of us and this relationship we both want to have.
“We can try,” I say. Her gaze has me. My body and heart is hers. To deny my desires and feelings is a lie.
I lift myself up and I’m above her now. Tara’s bright blue eyes are joy and sunshine and all the goodness in the world.
“That’s what I want. For us to try, and to be with you,” she says.
I press my lips to her lips, and in this moment I know that while we both believe that we’ve agreed to leave the past behind and try to be together again, life has a way of shaking you to your core.