Lust (26 page)

“I haven’t really thought about it in terms of a time period. But that really depends a lot on when we get married. And to be honest, Ivy, I’m still working through that. I meant what I said when I told you I would marry you one day, but I still can’t even begin to think of when that will be. I can only promise that I won’t make you wait forever. I’m still enjoying getting used to you being here.” After telling Ivy my deepest secrets, I had made the decision to be honest with her no matter what. It was hardest when I thought I might hurt her feelings, but I learned the hard way that if I didn’t share my feelings, I usually hurt her worse. So that’s what I’ve been doing. I knew my words weren’t the ones she wanted to hear, but they were mine and the truth, that was all I could offer her at the moment.

She shook her head and sat up, pulling me up with her, holding me close. Her hands held mine as she searched for the words, looking at our joined hands. “What if I’ve changed my mind? Would that help you decide what kind of future you wanted?”

“What do you mean? Change your mind about what?” I began to get nervous of what she’d say. It was yet another new emotion to add to the list that I had discovered ever since life with Ivy. It was as if she was showing me how to be human, since life’s circumstances hadn’t allowed me to properly learn how to deal with certain emotions.

She hesitated, making my nerves skyrocket. “About marriage. What if I’ve changed my mind about it and no longer needed a certificate to feel that our relationship’s complete?”

“That would be a lie. And I would never ask you to give that up. It’s important to you. I know it is.”

“It wouldn’t be a lie if that’s truly how I felt. What if I no longer feel that I need that commitment from you? You’ve made me realize that I don’t need a piece of paper to be happy. I don’t need some stupid ceremony or to spend a bunch of money to feel like I belong to you. You do own me, Cade, and I don’t need to stand in front of the three people that we know in order to feel that way.”

“But what about the white dress and the rings and everything you’ve always dreamed of having since you were a little girl? You told me about that, you redream it every time you read your books. No, Ivy. I won’t let you give those dreams up because of my fears. I will marry you, but when it’s right for us. You’ve only been here a little over a month. Let’s just enjoy this time without any pressures or expectations. The only thing I know for certain about our future is that we’ll be together.”

Her hands reached behind my neck and she laced her fingers together, pulling my face to meet hers. She kissed me, hard and hungrily. It was as if she was telling me something with her lips but without the words.

“I don’t want any pressures or expectations, either,” she said as she pulled away from the kiss. “But I did mean what I said. I don’t need the fairytale ending, I am living the happily ever after now. Living it, breathing it. It doesn’t matter to me if I walk down an aisle, wearing a white gown, to you because I get to walk to you every single day.”

“I can’t let you give that up, though. I won’t allow it.”

“Okay. What if we agree that neither one of us wants to get married, and then if the day comes that you want to make it legal, then we’ll go down to the courthouse and make it legal?” Her words were so convincing, much like her eyes, and I had to question the change.

“Why? I mean, where did this come from? Why did you change your mind?”

“I haven’t changed my mind. I have always wanted to be loved. The one thing I’ve always wanted in life was to find the one person that would look at me, all of me, and love me, protect me, and make me feel comfortable in my own skin. I’ve never felt comfortable about myself until you. So, if you think about it, I’ve already gotten everything I’ve ever dreamed of. And more. I got my Prince Charming.”

I couldn’t let it drop. I had to argue her point. “You told me that you’ve always wanted the white dress, the aisle, the whole thing. You can’t just wake up one morning, change the course of direction to your thoughts, and decide you don’t want any of that anymore.”

“Another thing I’ve also dreamed of having a church full of hundreds of loved ones, wishing us the best in life. Throwing rice at me and giving me hugs on our way out of the church. Except, we don’t have enough loved ones to fill the church, not to mention, I’m not all that religious. So there would be no point in the church part. So it doesn’t matter what I’ve dreamed of in the past, because it’s my future—
our
future—that I dream of now.”

“You really mean that?” I couldn’t help but ask, needing her confirmation to reassure my struggling mind.

Ivy nodded and smiled. “I really mean that, Cade. I mean all of it.”

“Are you doing this because you want a baby? Because, I have to be honest with you, Ivy, I am not ready for a baby right now. If it happens then I won’t regret it, but I won’t go trying to have one any time soon.”

She laughed and the skin around her eyes crinkled. “I’m on the same page as you are about babies. Trust me when I tell you that. I’m just now getting used to living with you, I have no desire to add a baby to the mix. Not to mention, I’m still struggling with the fact that I have a fifty percent chance of having a girl and I don’t know if I can handle that fact.”

I was relieved until she threw that last part in there. I had no idea she had any insecurities about having a girl. My relief quickly turned to concern. “What do you mean by that? Why couldn’t you handle having a girl?”

“Oh, you know… girls are trouble. They’re moody and hormonal.” She tried to laugh but I could see right through it.

“No. That’s not why. Just tell me, Ivy.” I started to get really worried. When there was a chance of Ivy being pregnant, there was a part of me that loved the idea of having a little Ivy someday. And ever since we realized she wasn’t, I held on to that dream of one day having a daughter that I could spoil as much as I spoiled her mother.

She huffed and looked down, but before I could raise her chin, she lifted her head and looked me right in the eyes. “I am scared I’ll turn out to be like my mother. Even just a little bit. And the last thing I ever want to do is make my daughter feel the way mine made me feel.”

I took her face in my hands and pulled her face closer to mine, touching the tip of her nose with mine. “You have nothing to worry about.” It wasn’t much of a consolation, but it was all I could give. I felt with every fiber of my being that she would never turn out to be her mother.

She pulled back and pulled a weak smile to her face. “Back to my original question… where do you see us in a year?”

“Here. I see my practice being successful. I see us being successful. Happy.”

She smiled. “What about in five years?”

I had to think about that. Five years. That would put me dangerously close to forty. “Again, I see us here, happy, successful. I see my practice being successful with possibly a partner or two. I see a ring on your finger and at least one toddler running around.”

Her eyes glistened like sparkling silver. “I agree. But I am serious, the ring doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“It does to me,” I answered. “It’s a symbol of owning you for eternity.”

“But that’s just it, Cade. It’s only a symbol. It’s something that can be taken off. And that’s always been your issue with marriage, right? That it’s not always permanent? So why would a ring mean anything to you?”

A thought entered my head and I couldn’t keep the smile from my face. “When the time is right to pledge ourselves to one another for all of eternity, I know just how we’ll do it. It won’t be in a church, it won’t matter how many people are there, you can even wear a white dress, and it won’t be something that can be easily removed.”

“What is it?” she asked with a smile.

“You’ll see… when the time is right.”

*****

“I, Caden Alan Morgan, choose you, Ivy Marie Jaymes, to be my wife in the only way that matters. To have and to hold in darkness and light, in sickness and health, for better or for worse, to own and cherish, from this day forward until the end of eternity. I vow to honor and respect you, protect and comfort you from here on out,” I vowed to Ivy as we sat in the front seat of my car in front of a tattoo parlor.

Eight months after living together, the time was right and I asked Ivy to promise herself to me forever. I didn’t have a ring and we had no intention of going to the courthouse. We didn’t plan to sign papers or have witnesses. We didn’t need them. All we needed were each other and the commitment we made to one another.

Ivy knew I loved her, and I knew she loved me, but neither of us focused on that. We had both loved deeply and lost more than our fair share in life, so marriage was tainted to each of us. We had both lost our parents at such young ages. We had both been through more pain as children, far more than anyone should have to endure.

She repeated her own vows to me. “I, Ivy Jaymes, take you, Caden Morgan, as my husband in every meaning of the word. I promise to trust you with my darkness and give you my light. I vow to give you all of me to own until the end of infinity.”

I gave her a kiss and then stepped out of the car, walking over to the passenger side to let her out. She was wearing a simple white dress that hung casually to her feet. The moment I told her my idea of our wedding, she jumped on it… and on me. She loved it and I loved her for it. There was nothing more perfect for us.

With her hand in mine, I walked into the tattoo parlor and told the receptionist that we were there for our appointment. She looked us up and down, checking out our attire, before taking us around back to a small room. Ivy and I grinned at each other the entire time we each had the word “owned” permanently set into the skin on our left fourth finger. It would never be able to come off, and it was better than any church wedding in any book either of us had read.

My impromptu admission of owning one another became our thing. She owned my heart, and that meant she had my love. But it went beyond that. If I owned her, that meant I’d take care of her, I would protect her, and do everything in my power to make her happy. My cousin thought it was strange that we used that term instead of the typical
I love you
… but that was just it. Ivy and I weren’t typical. Nothing about us or our relationship was typical or cliché. Our definition of “owned” was different than others. We didn’t see each other as an object to possess. We saw each other as our keepsakes, one that we each wanted to cherish forever, for all of eternity. But it didn’t matter what other people thought of our terminology; we knew what it meant. It was our own special language that only we alone could translate. We owned each other, mind, body, heart, and soul. This was even more important than love. Neither of us wavered about that. We had been through enough to know how lucky we were to have found one another. It was as if we were each other’s missing puzzle piece and now that we were together, everything was finally complete.

“You own me, Mrs. Morgan,” I said against her lips as the machine buzzed in the background.

“I’m yours, Mr. Morgan,” she whispered back, pressing her lips to mine one last time.

Two Years Later

I woke up in the middle of the night and the spot on the bed next to me was empty. Instead, all I found were a pile of pillows were her body usually was. I immediately began to panic. The bathroom light was off and the house seemed quiet. Normally, I heard when she got up to use the bathroom or head to the kitchen for a glass of water, but for some reason, I had slept right through her escape from the bed this time.

I got up and frantically started searching, not bothering to put clothes on.

She had been quiet lately—too quiet. And I had already taken her to the hospital twice this week. It was easy for my mind to go to the dark corners first, immediately thinking the worst. I scoured the house until I found her in the office. It should have been the first place I checked, but it was the furthest room from ours, so it was the last room I made it to.

She was sitting behind her computer screen with tears in her eyes and a scowl on her face. I didn’t waste another second before running to her and kneeling on the floor next to her chair. “Ivy, are you okay? Is everything okay?”

She nodded and winced, not taking her eyes from her computer screen.

I spun the chair around, forcing her to look at me. “You’re in pain. How long has this been going on for? This looks worse than the last time.”

“It started about three hours ago, but I didn’t want to wake you up only for them to send us home again. I thought I’d come in here, work on a few things, and wait it out before I did anything. You’ve barely gotten any sleep and I just wanted to wait to see if it got worse before I woke you up again.”

“How far apart are they?”

“Twenty-three words.”

I looked at her with confusion all over my face. I didn’t understand. But then again, if Ivy was in front of her computer, that meant she was working. And when she was working, she had no sense of time. It was impossible to ask her to time something when she was in that frame of mine. Once, she burnt noodles because she decided to work while waiting for it to finish boiling.

“Okay, and that means…”

“It means I think it’s time.”

I froze.
It’s time
means get off your ass and hustle. But hearing the very pregnant love of my life say it as she grabbed her stomach and groaned… I froze. Fear consumed me. This was different than the other times, I could tell. I just knew that I’d take her to the hospital and they wouldn’t send us home without our baby. That meant, the next time I was here, there would be a crying baby with us. And I froze.

“Cade!” Ivy’s cries shook me out of my panic enough to get up and start getting things together to leave. She actually had to remind me to put clothes on, otherwise I would have shown up to the hospital with my dick swinging.

We made it to the hospital in record time, but it helped that the car was already packed from the first visit six days earlier. This time, they admitted us immediately and started hooking straps up to her stomach. The sweet swooshing sounds came through a monitor and it finally put me at ease. That was my baby’s heart I was hearing and it calmed me enough to take in what was going on around me.

Nurses were fluttering in as they were setting everything up. And Ivy was filling out paperwork between contractions. I wasn’t sure how long twenty-three words were to her, but her contractions were coming about every eleven breaths for me.

Over the course of an hour, they checked her at least a hundred times. I was proud of Ivy; she didn’t hesitate once when spreading her legs to allow them to stick their hands between them. They said she wasn’t progressing, which I wasn’t sure what it meant but it didn’t sound good, so they gave her something in her IV to move it along. But then not too long later, they came back and said the baby was in distress. Everything started happening at the speed of light by that point. I wasn’t sure what was going on until I was being ushered into a room to scrub and put on a surgical gown.

The next time I saw Ivy, she was lying on a table with her arms out to the side. She stared up at the ceiling with wide, scared eyes. I instantly forgot what I was feeling and ran to her so that I could comfort her. I was told to sit on a stool that was next to her head. A giant screen was hooked up in front of her and acted as a shield to what was going to happen behind it. This wasn’t how I had imagined my child being brought into the world—being cut out of its mother. But as long as my baby and Ivy were healthy and safe, I didn’t care how it happened.

My primary concern was to calm Ivy. So I looked at her, locking her gaze with mine, and started talking as if we were lying in bed before going to sleep. Just like it was any other evening. “What were you working on at home?”

A tear slipped to the bridge of her nose and then fell over. “My book. I was just writing the epilogue when you came in.”

I looked at her in amazement. “You’re writing a book?”

A smile lit her face up. “Yeah. Don’t know what I’m going to do with it just yet. But I started writing one day and next thing I knew, I had a book.”

“What’s it about? Tell me all about it.”

“You already know the story,” she whispered as the doctors began to work and talk amongst themselves behind the screen. But I didn’t hear anything they were saying, only listening to Ivy.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s our story. Of how we met and fell in love.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh yeah? Sounds like an interesting book. What’s it called?”

“
Lust
.”

That puzzled me. “Why lust?”

“Because without it, I wouldn’t have you.  Lust was a big part of your parents’ demise, lust was a big part of why my mother did what she did to me. She was afraid of lust. And lust is what brought us together initially, although it turned into so much more.”

I nodded, fully accepting that answer. “So… am I hung like a horse with abs of steel and stamina like a champion?” I teased, wagging my eyebrows at her. It earned me a laugh.

“Yes. I wrote you exactly the way you are, Cade.”

“And is there a lot of sex?”

“It wouldn’t be our story without it,” Ivy said and then winced.

That’s when we both heard the cries of our baby, pulling us from our conversation and setting sights on our baby for the very first time. The doctor held the tiny, red, alien looking baby over the curtain and excitedly told us we had a beautiful baby girl. I was ecstatic and felt at ease. She was healthy, she was here. I didn’t care what we were having, as long as it was healthy and happy. But Ivy was still insecure of having a girl, which is why we decided to wait to find out what we were having. I looked to her immediately after they took the baby away to clean her up.

“Hey,” I whispered as I wiped her forehead, hoping to calm her down. “She’s beautiful, just like her mommy.” I knew what her fears were, even though she had come to terms with most of her past. Ivy had a big heart. She was sensitive, caring, and kind. I had seen those actions numerous times when she cared for me. I knew I had nothing to worry about, and eventually, she would too.

“But what if…” She let the sentence hang in the air as she tried to hold back the agonizing cries.

“Ivy, look at me.” I waited until I had her undivided attention. “You’re mother was a very sick woman. You’re not anything like her. I’ll be honest with you and tell you that there was a time after we first met that I questioned your sanity, but I have a Master’s Degree in psychology and I can professionally tell you that you’re good.” I tried to lighten the mood a little, and it worked when she gave me a small smile. I leaned in closer. “You’re going to be a fantastic mom.”

“What are we going to name her?” she asked softly, sounding better than she did a moment ago.

We hadn’t thought too much about girl names since the subject of having a girl seemed to dampen the mood. And the only name we had agreed upon was James for a boy. I shrugged my shoulders at a loss and told her she could name her anything she wanted.

A nurse brought our daughter over to Ivy and held her out to her. Ivy looked petrified to hold her, but cautiously took her anyway. The moment she was holding our little bundle of joy, her eyes lit up. More tears started to fall, and I knew Ivy was a goner. She had just gotten owned by this little being she was holding in her arms.

She looked at me and a smile spread across her face as she said, “Jaymee.”

“Perfect,” I agreed as I looked at Ivy, holding my daughter.

The nurse handed Jaymee to me and I looked down into the tiny, scrunched up face in awe. Ivy and I had created this little being out of love. There wasn’t anything in the world more intense than that. That’s when it hit me, like a sucker-punch to the gut. I had been owned by another female. For when I looked down into Jaymee’s eyes, she took possession of my heart. I felt completely fulfilled at that moment. I had Ivy and Jaymee and we were a family.

Everything that I had been afraid of my entire life suddenly came full circle and made sense.

We belonged to one another and nothing would ever come between us. Sure, we’d have our disagreements and times when we didn’t see eye-to-eye, but I could already feel a bond between us—a bond that would never be broken.

We were a family.