Remember Our Song (9 page)

Jeremy leaned down again, one hand leaving my face to slide down my back and pull me against him, the other moving to the back of my head and his fingers running through my hair.  I felt him against the entire length of my body, held tight like he was never going to let go, his heat driving away any lingering chills the cold air had caused as he brought his lips to mine again, with more urgency, kissing me until I was driven half-wild with excitement.

I was pushed backwards with the pressure of Jeremy’s body until my back hit the doorframe we had entered by and Jeremy was pressed against me even harder.  I wrapped my arms around his back and strained upwards into his kisses as his hand slipped lower, down to my ass, pulling my pelvis towards him.

“I need you, Bea,” he said between kisses.

“Yes,” I whispered.

The tall billionaire’s other hand slid down my back to join the first on my ass, before he lifted me off the ground and I wrapped my legs around him.  I could feel his need pressing against my most private place through my clothes, that hard presence seeming to grow every second.

I bit my lip, caught between lust and timidity, it had been a long time since I’d had
any sex that I remembered and I didn’t recall it being that great.  My body paid no heed to such considerations though, apparently absolutely sure about what it wanted, my legs gave him a squeeze, pulling his manhood against me even more.

With a quiet whimper of pleasure, lost in the middle of a kiss, my hips gyrated, rubbing against Jeremy and sparking a jolt of pleasure that hummed up and down my spine, settling into a growing pool of arousal in my stomach.  The next thing I knew, Jeremy lifted me away from the wall and began walking back towards the main house, steady on his feet despite the uneven ground and the fact that he was carrying me.

Soon he had crossed the short distance between the two buildings and I was set down on the doorframe of the house just like when we first arrived, sans awkwardness, just kisses and roaming hands.  I shuffled backwards, making room for Jeremy to climb up, getting to my feet the same time he did and then taking his lead as if we were dancing, letting him steer me down the hallway towards one of the bedrooms.

The room Jeremy chose was cluttered with not one, but two, beds that
presumably-competing interior design companies had submitted for our consideration.  I fell backwards on to the closest one, Jeremy climbing on between my legs, putting us in the same position we had been when he was carrying me, except now we were horizontal, his strong body pressing down on top of mine.

Jeremy unbuttoned my jacket and I struggled out of it as his hands started working at the buttons of my shirt as well, which was also soon discarded.  I reluctantly let him go when he pulled back to a kneeling position, quickly removing his jacket and pulling his sweater and shirt off over his head in one motion, revealing the kind of sculpted body normally reserved for athletes.  No wonder he’d been able to carry me like I weighed no more than a feather.

I caressed his chest and six-pack with my hands as he lowered his head to my breasts, gently kissing and licking the exposed flesh above the cups of my bra.  My back arched instinctively, pushing my soft mounds against him, when his hands reached around to each side of my body, seeking the clasp, which was soon released.

I pushed my
supple chest against his face, unable to stop a moan of pleasure from passing my lips when he sucked one hard nipple into his mouth, his tongue flicking across it playfully before transferring to the other.  Tentatively, I reached down with one hand and felt his stiff rod through his pants, growing bolder when he made no hint of protest and caressing the entire length eagerly.

Jeremy raised his head and his face hovered over mine, our gaze locked together as I stroked him through his pants.  The barely-restrained passion I read in those eyes was both flattering and intimidating at the same time and I felt a
quiver of nerves in my stomach.

“Be… gentle,” I said.

He didn’t say anything but nodded slightly and kissed his way down my body, my bare skin tingling with every peck and lick until he was kneeling again, unbuttoning my pants before gripping them by the cuffs and tugging them off my body taking my shoes and socks with them and leaving nothing but my panties between him and my most intimate flesh.

Jeremy hooked his fingers into the waistband of my underwear, dragging them slowly downwards as if teasing himself with waiting a few extra seconds for his first sight of my folds to be revealed by the retreating material.  When my last remaining article of clothing was bunched up around my ankle, Jeremy’s hands stroked up and down my legs, pausing at the scars with a pain
ed expression before moving on.

I expected him to take his pants off but instead he lowered his head between my legs and began kissing all around my upper thighs and around my slit, which responded with ever increasing excitement.  Every one of his kisses was framed by the rough texture of his stubble in such contrast to the softness of his lips, I was driven nearly wild with anticipation before he ended my torture and I finally felt the touch of his lips on my sex.

As far as I could remember, I’d had one boyfriend and a fling but neither of them had ever gone down on me.  I hardly knew what to do with myself, I ran my hands through my hair, his hair, squeezed my own breasts and draped my legs over his shoulders as the ball of pleasure growing in my belly became bigger.

Finally I held on to the sheet for dear life as Jeremy teased me towards an orgasm that threatened to be more potent than anything I’d ever felt before.  Jeremy seemed to know exactly what to do, pushing me to the brink of climax over and over again until, when he finally pushed me over that cliff of ecstasy
, I was almost blinded by the intensity of it and shut my eyes against the world, leaving myself floating in darkness.

When the last throbs of my orgasm were faintly bouncing around my
body, Jeremy backed off the bed and my legs flopped off his shoulders, falling to the mattress with a limp thud.  Never taking his eyes off me, I heard him kick his shoes off before he undid his pants and pushed them and his underwear down at the same time, revealing his erect manhood to me for, effectively, the first time.

I wouldn’t have said he
dwarfed
my previous boyfriend or fling, but he was without a shadow of doubt the biggest, and as he climbed back on the bed between my still-shivering legs, I licked my lips nervously and repeated my request.

“Gentle…”

Jeremy guided his throbbing member to my labia with one hand, slowly rubbing the tip on my sensitive petals, coating himself in my juices before gradually pushing forward until I felt him inside me.  With great care, Jeremy moved his upper body over mine, his masculine presence never invading me any further until our eyes were only inches apart and our fingers interlaced.  Then, watching me closely, reading me like a book for any signs of discomfort, he slowly thrust himself inside until there was no more of him to thrust.

I breathed deeply, trying to get accustomed to the feel of him, I’d never been so
full
in my life.  He didn’t
look
significantly larger than any man I’d had before, but whatever difference there was made for an entirely new sensation between my legs than anything I’d experienced.

Jeremy began riding me gently, every outward stroke leaving me wanting him inside me again, gradually picking up pace until the sound of our bodies meeting every time he bottomed out reverberated throughout the room, the bare floors and walls sending the sounds of our passion echoing out into the hallway and beyond.

I’d been nervous about having sex again after so long, but my body remembered.  More than that, my body seemed to remember
him
and soon I was meeting his thrusts with a hunger all of my own, taking just as much pleasure from him as he was from me.  Time seemed to be a completely irrelevant concept as I was kept completely enthralled until at last I heard him groan his ecstasy and felt his thrusts become more sporadic as his own climax rocked his body.

I was utterly exhausted from our exertions and my eyelids felt heavy as Jeremy collapsed to the side and stroked my hair.  Eventually,
Jeremy made me the ‘little spoon’ and we dozed.

At some stage I woke up to find it was dark outside, the sound of the generator had stopped and there were blankets over me.  Jeremy was in the same position I remembered him being in when I fell asleep though, and my body ached from head to toe from our exertions.  I wasn’t awake long before drifting off to sleep again.

Chapter 9

Regret.  That’s the first thing I felt when I woke up, the first rays of sunlight shining in through the curtainless window through my still-closed eyelids.  Sitting there, cold and hard in my stomach like a cannonball and just as impossible to ignore, I eased myself out of bed.

Taking great care not to wake up Jeremy, I quickly gathered my clothes and found a bathroom to get dressed in, already beginning to shiver from the early morning chill in the unheated and unfinished house.  A mirror was leaning against one wall, but I could hardly bring myself to look at my reflection there, afraid I would hate the person I saw.

I’d been played, the base urges of my body had been… satisfied to say the least, but without their voices adding to the cacophony of contrad
ictory viewpoints in my mind, this morning was a much more one-sided debate.  Jeremy was a handsome, powerful, rich man, he knew it, and I’d let myself forget my promise for a nice view and a recording studio.

Fully clothed once more, I wrapped my jacket around myself protectively, my arms crossed tightly with my hands in my armpits to keep them warm too.  I went out to what was apparently going to become a dining room and stared out over the lake trying to figure out just what in the hell I was going to do with myself.

I was still there when Jeremy woke up and wrapped his arms around me from behind.  I shied away when he tried to nuzzle my neck, not sure if I should feel angrier with him or with myself, but he didn’t seem to notice the passive-aggressive aura I was trying to radiate.

Jeremy seemed lost in his own little world chattering about all kinds of random topics, including dropping in a line about how we wouldn’t be able to send that one bed back to the furniture company.  My eyes widened at that and I clamped my jaws against a torrent of abuse that threatened to spill out, regaining control after a very near thing.

“I think we should go back to L.A. now,” I said.

“Hmmm.  Yeah, we’re all out of supplies here.  Let’s go.”

I waited at the top of the last rise on what would one day be an actual driveway while Jeremy double checked that he had locked everything on the house and recording studio.  Steadfastly refusing to let the undeniable beauty of the lake win me over again, I began walking by myself when I saw Jeremy heading my way, the blankets now stuffed into the mostly empty picnic basket.

With my physical confidence buoyed by the success the previous day, I managed to walk the entire dirt track without grabbing on to Jeremy for support and let myself into the car while Jeremy put the picnic basket into the trunk again.  We were
just about at my apartment before Jeremy seemed to notice my cold responses.

“Is everything… OK, Bea?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t think so.”

“What is it?”

“It’s you, it’s yesterday, it’s everything.  I don’t feel… I don’t know how to say it.  Connected to myself… I guess that’s as close as I’m gonna get.”

“What else can I do, Bea?  I don’t know what…”

“Nothing.  I need some more time alone.  Like
really
alone.”

Jeremy pulled over in front of my apartment

“Please, Bumbl… Beatrice.  We’ve never been apart so much ever since we met, this is killing me.  Most of the time it feels like we’re apart even when we’re together.  What can I do?”

“Nothing.”

I stepped out of the car, closed the door behind me and heard the window winding down before Jeremy called my name and I turned around.

“What?  Look.  Don’t call me, I’ll call you,” I said.

“Please… just don’t do anything rash… OK?”

“Who
the hell are you to tell me what to do?”

“I’m… I’m nobody, I guess.”

Jeremy pulled out without looking, another car screeched to a halt and honked at him as he drove off, narrowly avoiding a crash.  I watched the black car, with engine revving hard, disappear around the corner before turning towards my apartment.  I had a lot to do.

The fact of the matter was, I couldn’t trust myself around Jeremy.  Yesterday had been a mistake, a slip up.  Despite having my own space I couldn’t
find
myself in L.A… it wasn’t my home.  I needed to go back to Seattle.

I needed to get away from this crazy city where so many people seemed to know me, but I didn’t know them.  As far as I was aware there
were
no paparazzi in Seattle these days… that would be a nice bonus.  Maybe I could find some old friends that I actually remembered and be able to retrace my steps starting from even closer to the time my memory cut out.

Maybe I wouldn’t though.  Even now, even after yesterday, I couldn’t see how the person I used to be became the person everybody told me I was.  This was my chance to push the reset button on my life.  It had already been pushed on my memory, maybe this was some divine intervention helping to get me back to where I was supposed to be.

My first order of business was to check and see if my old bank account still existed, the one I had when I was eighteen and long before I had met Jeremy.  I still remembered my login details for internet banking, hopefully I hadn’t been particularly security conscious and changed my password.

Thankfully it appeared that my account was still open, and had been pretty much untouched in a long time.  The last deposits were from
Bloxhamtech back in 2009, my final salary payments I guessed, and the withdrawals had rapidly dwindled until the only thing coming out was bank fees.  There was a little over ten thousand dollars in there, I hoped that was enough to get everything done that I needed to do.

From my walks I remembered that there was a branch about fifteen minutes away where I could get cash out, the only question was just how much I’d need.  I wasted about an hour on the internet looking for what I thought was a pretty reasonable set of expectations for a car.  As cheap as possible while still being road legal and being sold somewhere that I could get to that very day.

It took most of the day but eventually, at the cost of a shade under four thousand dollars, I managed to find a car that I felt reasonably confident wouldn’t break down or explode or something, though how long it would last, I had no idea.  I came away from the trip to the bank with enough cash for the purchase of the car and several days’ worth of expenses, so paying for things with my own money wouldn’t be a hassle.

Packing up the few things that were mine was easy, I’d arrived with suitcases not so long ago and hadn’t acquired much since then.  One at a time I brought the suitcases downstairs and put them in my trunk.  I’d just finished and was giving the apartment a once-over just to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything when a text came through from Jeremy.

‘I’m sorry for leaving like that.  Can I come see you?  Tonight?  Tomorrow?’

I didn’t reply, I had to get out of town before I lost my resolve.  I turned off my phone before Jeremy started calling and, with a surprisingly difficult inner goodbye to the apartment that had given me my first sense of independence since waking up in the hospital, I closed the door behind me, went down to my car and headed north with the sun warming my left cheek through the window.

After driving for about five hours, I was starting to get sleepy and so pulled into a motel in a place called Stockton.  I thought I vaguely recalled visiting Stockton once to see an elderly aunt of my mother’s, but I’d been a little kid then so I wasn’t completely sure it was here.

Wireless internet access was included in the room rate, so I spent a couple of hours in the evening applying to view a few apartments in Seattle later in the week, as well as updating my résumé.  I was
mentally exhausted by the time I was done, and slept like a log until the morning.

The sound of cars pulling in and out of the car park and people walking past my room talking gradually invaded my dreams until I was inevitably roused from my slumber.  Before I opened my eyes I swore I was back at the house on Lake Oroitz and I could feel the warmth of Jeremy hugging me from behind.

When I sat up he was nowhere to be found, of course, and I fought down the feeling of disappointment.  I wasn’t meant to be a billionaire’s wife living in the land of make believe.  I had to be tough, just like I promised. 
They can only hurt you if you let them
I reminded myself.

That’s crap
another internal voice responded unbidden,
you were happy out there by the lake, admit it.

“Shut up,” I said aloud.

I swung my feet out of bed and went to have a shower, which turned out to be pretty sub-standard.  Low pressure and
barely
hot enough, hardly refreshing at all, but it got the job done I supposed.  I checked out and drove into the center of town, grabbing some breakfast before finding a place that sold paper, pens, stamps and envelopes.

Sitting at an outside table in front of a café with a coffee rapidly cooling, I stared at the blank piece of paper for a good ten minutes trying to figure out what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.  How could I tell him, in the kindest possible way, that he wasn’t a bad person but we weren’t right for each other?  ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ had probably not stopped being a cliché in the last eight years.  I failed to come up with anything, and instead tried to keep it as short as possible.

Dear Jeremy,

I’ve gone back to Seattle, that’s where home is for me.  I just don’t fit into the life everybody says is mine, I’m sorry I can’t be the person you knew.  Please don’t contact me, or try to find me, I need to be back where I belong.  I can’t remember anything about us, and it’s been so long that maybe this amnesia is permanent.  I’ve changed the phone number for my cell, so don’t try calling.  If my memory comes back, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, but we need to live our lives as if it won’t.  I’ve put the bank card for your account in the envelope, I will make arrangements to pay you back everything I’ve used in the past few months as soon as I can.

I deliberated for several more minutes trying to think of the best way to sign off, but every option sounded stupid.  ‘Regards’ was cold, as if the letter itself wasn’t cold enough.  ‘Have a nice life’ was ridiculous, and maybe even colder.  Eventually, I decided there was no good way to sign off a ‘Dear John’ letter, and just signed my name.

I stuffed the paper and the card into the envelope and finished my coffee, scanning up and down the street looking for a post box I could use.  Unable to see one from where I was sitting, I eventually went for a short walk, finding one quite quickly and also finding a store where I could get a cheap pay-as-you-go sim card to put in my phone, which would have to suffice until I knew where I was going to live, and what my budget was.

With all that done, I put Stockton into my rear view mirror and continued north, stopping for one more night before eventually reaching Seattle, driving up the same stretch of Interstate 5 that Jeremy had driven the previous month.  The familiar surroundings lifted my spirits, helping in my efforts to drown out the voices of dissent in my head.

Finding a place to live was not a walk in the park to say the least.  I checked into one of the cheaper motels I could find to use as a base to view apartments, having no idea how long i
t would take.  Between the landladies who knew who I was from the gossip magazines and the horrendous conditions some of the places were in, it ended up taking two weeks before I found one that I felt was safe and hygienic enough.

However there was another spanner to be thrown in the works.  The landlord at this place didn’t like the fact that I didn’t have a job and so chose another applicant.  It was yet another week before I found a place that was acceptable, and they didn’t like that I was unemployed either.  Thankfully, they were willing to take a chance as long as I paid three months of rent in advance, in addition to the normal fees and deposits.

My bank balance was looking pretty scary after all that and though I was now able to concentrate on finding a job I had no idea how long that would take either, apparently the world economy had gone to hell in a hand-basket during the time I couldn’t remember.  Before my cash reserves dwindled to nothing I went to a supermarket and purchased a few things that wouldn’t have been out of place in a bomb shelter, a big bag of rice and lots of canned goods.

At least now, even if it took me quite a long time to find a job, I wouldn’t starve to death.  The cheap-but-plentiful food was bolstered by a fruit and vegetable store situated just around the corner from my new apartment where I could go to make sure my diet had at least
some
healthy variety.  The last thing you want when you’re on a job hunt is scurvy, I imagined.

Nobody was interviewing over the Christmas rush, but I did manage to get some temp work in a mall wrapping presents for people, which helped keep the wolf from my door for the time being and stopped me from eating into my savings too much.  It was work that had to be conducted at a pretty frantic pace, which kept me from thinking about anything else.

I made sure I always wore a hat and some glasses with non-prescription lenses so people wouldn’t recognize me.  I felt kind of like one of those super heroes with nothing but a woefully inadequate disguise between day to day life and widespread discovery of my secret identity, but it seemed to work.