LOVING HER SOUL MATE (17 page)

She, in fact, looked so angelic,
and so serene to him, that tears threatened to come into his eyes again.
 
He should have been stronger.
 
He should have never dreamed of taking her
down this one-way, dead-end street with some burned out shell of a man like
him.
 
She deserved a younger man,
somebody in their twenties too, who didn’t have the baggage he carried.
 
And it wasn’t right.
 
He knew it wasn’t right.
 
But he was so weak for this woman that it
stunned him.

He looked down, at those lips he
had kissed so passionately.
 
He looked at
her exposed, up-tilted breasts that still contained his suck marks all over
them.
 
And he knew he was cooked.
 
He couldn’t just walk away.
 
He would do her a favor if he walked
away.
 
But he couldn’t.
 

He placed his hand on the side of
her pretty face.
 
He smiled at the way
she warmed to his touch.
 
She even moved
her body as if his hand alone was turning her on.
 
And then she opened those devastatingly
beautiful eyes.
 
And he was a goner.

“Hey,” she
said,
when she saw his face.

He smiled again.
 
“Good morning.”

She stared at him, at the
spider-like lines on the side of his soft blue eyes.
 
“What time is it?”

“Early.
 
Three
a.m..”

“Three o’clock?”
  
Then she saw that he was dressed and ready
to go.
 
And her fear, that she would mean
nothing more to him than another notch on his belt, was being realized.
 
But she had to accept it.
 
We are bound, she knew, by the decisions we
make.
 
And she had decided, of her own
free will, to go down this path with him.

“You’re leaving me?” she asked in
such a vulnerable way that John’s heart dropped.
 
Leaving her?
 
How could he leave her?
 
And it
suddenly seemed almost insulting to him.
 

“Leave you?” he asked.
 
“Why would you say that?”

But they both knew why, and that
was why Shay didn’t respond.
 
She just
stared at him and placed the ball squarely where it belonged: in his court.

He exhaled and stared deep into
her now troubled eyes.
 
“No,” he
said.
 
“I’m not leaving you.”
 
And then he stood up.

He removed the jeans he had put
on, snatched his shirt back over his head, rendering himself naked again.
 
And then he got back in bed with her.

Although Shay didn’t resist moving
over to allow him back in, her heart was still unsure.
 
If the end result was going to be another hit
and run, she would have preferred a quick hit and run rather than this
lingering one.
 
Because the longer he
stayed in her presence, the harder it was going to be on her.
 
She knew it.
 
And as he pulled her into his arms, and they stared into each other’s
eyes, she knew he knew it too.
 
And they
both just laid there.
 

Then he spoke.

“I have a confession to make,” he
said.
 

Shay’s heart pounded.
 
“What is it?”

“I’m usually out of here by now,”
he admitted, and then looked at Shay, to make certain she understood.

She did.
 
Her intelligent eyes always did.
 
“That’s why you were dressed?”

“Yes.”

“You were going to leave without
saying goodbye?”

“That’s usually the way I do it,
yes.”

Shay frowned.
 
“Why?”

“Because I’m
a bastard, Shay.
 
Because I’m thirty-seven years old and still
commitment phobic.
 
Because I’m
the last human being on earth a girl like you should have given the time of
day.
 
I’m not worth it.”

Shay just stared at him with such
sincerity in her eyes that it broke John’s heart.
 
He wanted her, there was no doubt in his mind
that he wanted this woman to stay by his side, but he knew he didn’t deserve
her.

Shay, however, didn’t know what
she wanted at this point in time.
 
She
respected John, admired him even, but a hot and heavy romance with a man with
his reputation was such a risk.
 
And this
was a small town.
 
The talk could get
outrageous.
 

“You’re hopeless, is that what
you’re saying?” she asked him.
 
“Or are
you saying a committed relationship with me is probably hopeless?”

Physical pain shot through John’s
body.
 
“A little of both,” he said.

“Bull,” Shay replied.
 

John looked at her.

“That’s bullshit, John,” she said
again.
 
“Good men are good men because
they choose to be good.
 
Bad men are bad
because they choose to be assholes.
 
It’s
a choice.
 
It’s not a sickness or a
disease.
 
It’s a choice.
 
And if our trying to make something work is
hopeless, it’s because we didn’t try to make it work.
 
It’s our call.
 
It’s up to us.”

John’s heart wanted to soar.
 
He stared at Shay.
 
Could she really take him on?
 
Was she really the one who could do it?
 

“I’m gruffy and scruffy and can be
very ill-tempered,” he said, still staring at her.

Shay was staring right back at
him.
 
“Same here,” she replied.

“I don’t suffer fools well, even
if it hurts their feelings.”

Shay could be that way, too.
 
“Same here.”

“The kind of sex we had tonight is
the kind I enjoy having.
 
I sometimes
like it rough.”

Shay didn’t even have to think
about that one.
 
She wasn’t sure if she
would enjoy sex the way John had laid it on her, but it nearly blew her mind it
was so intense.
 
“Same here,” she said.

John’s heart could barely contain
his joy.
 
He therefore went for
broke.
 
He was going to be completely
honest with her.
 
“I’m not a weakling,
Shay,” he said.
 
“I handle my woman.
 
Not the other way around.”

Shay smiled.
 
“And I handle my man.
 
Not the other way around.”

John laughed uproariously.
 
“Child, please,” he said in a vernacular that
caused her to laugh.
 
“You truly think
you can handle a man like me?”

“Yup.
 
Watch me.”

John shook his head.
 
This kid had that cockiness in spades.
 
His instincts about her were being proven
absolutely right.
 
“Come here, you,” he
said as his smile began to dissolve.
 

Shay moved closer and he pulled
her on top of him.
 
They were face to
face.
 
He wrapped her into his big
arms.
 
Then he rubbed his hand slowly
down her soft,
bare
back, and then onto her butt,
giving it a nice, hard squeeze.
 
Which
was fine by Shay, since her bruises were now completely gone.
 
And then John spread her legs, just enough so
that his penis could rest in between.

“What can I do, Shay,” he said
like a man grasping for life again, “to make this work?
 
What can I do to be the kind of man you would
want to be with?”

Shay swallowed hard.
 
This was
do
or die
time for her.
 
He either was going to be
all in with her, or they needed to get out now.
 
While her heart could still take it.

“No bullshit,” she said.
 
“No lies,” she added.
 
“And especially no other
females.”
 
She said this and
looked at him.
 
He saw that troubled look
of doubt in her eyes.
 

“Before I met you, the last part,
about the other females, would have been out of the question for me.”
 

Shay’s heart began to pound.
 
Was this when he told her she either
allow
him room to roam or forget about it?
 
She would have to forget it if he did go down
that road, but that wouldn’t lessen her pain.

He kept on.
 
“I liked variety and I had to have
variety.
 
But now,” he said, staring deep
into her eyes, “it feels almost as if it’s the opposite.
 
It almost feels as if it’s out of the
question to think that I would want any other female.”

Shay knew it was always out of the
question early on.
 
Until
the routine of being with the same woman day in and day out set in.
 
She looked at his chain, and rubbed it.
 
“So it’s as easy as that?” she asked
him.
 
She then looked, once again, into
his big, blue eyes.

John shook his head, pulled her
closer.
 
“No, babe, it’s not going to be
easy at all,” he admitted, rubbing her hair.
 
“I know it won’t be easy.
 
Not for
a man with my kind of appetites.
 
But I
guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m willing to try it.
 
And that alone, for a man like me, is
progress.”

Shay smiled.
 
Her heart didn’t quite relax, but it did stop
pounding.

“What about you?” John asked her.

“What about me?”
 
When he didn’t respond, just continued to
stare at her, she got the message.
 
“I
don’t know,” she said.
 
“It’s kind of
scary, to be honest with you.”
 
Then she
scrunched up her face.
 
“If that makes sense.”

John chuckled.
 
“It makes perfect sense, my darling.
 
Taking me on isn’t going to be as simple as
taking me on.
 
You’ll be taking on a lot
of baggage too.”

His last statement particularly
caught Shay’s attention.
 
“What kind of
baggage?”

It was something John had never
spoken of.
 
Not ever.
 
It happened and it was over with, forever to
be buried away within
his own
nightmares and
pain.
 
And right now, even though he
wanted to tell her all about it, and unload it once and for all, he
couldn’t.
 
“The baggage,” he decided to
say, “of being a man who had one long-term commitment in his entire life, a
commitment that ended disastrously.
 
That kind of baggage.”

She could sense there was more to
his “baggage,” a lot more, but she didn’t question his decision not to go there
now.
 
They were like a hot air balloon
just getting off the ground.
 
Now was not
the time to take on the heavy loads.

“Did you do all you could to make
your marriage work?” she decided to ask him.
 
He had invoked his ex-wife as a buffer once.
 
She needed to know if that marriage was as
over as the print on their final divorce decree said it was.
 

But he wouldn’t even respond to
that simple question.
  
This worried
Shay.

“Why aren’t you answering?” she
asked him.

Because he was ashamed, he wanted
to say.
 
“I
just.
. .,” he said stumbling.
 
“No.
 
I didn’t do all I could to make that marriage
work.”

“You cheated on her?”

After she cheated on him, he
wanted to say.
 
“Yes,” he said instead.

Shay closed her eyes.
 
It was the one thing she always dreaded in a
relationship, a cheating man.
 
How in the
world could she even think about going down some romantic road with a man who
was right now admitting that he was a cheater?
 
She moved to get out of the bed.