When You Come to Me (59 page)

“Oh, Lord,” Natalie said with a heavy sigh. “Well, I think it’s time that I go looking for him…”

“Good luck…I should go back and man the DJ table…”

She started her search for her missing husband, but got distracted when Maya wanted her to pose with a group of ladies from her church for a picture, or when Asha wanted to know where the guests should put their presents, or when Granny Marie wanted a hug, or when Joanna wanted to give her sex advice in the middle of the dance floor. She did manage, however, to ask each of them if they’d seen Brandon and all of them had given her the same answer: he’d walked away with his father.

She was en route to the event room’s exit when her mama crossed her path and stopped her cold.

“We need to talk,” her mother advised.

Natalie agreed, but she wasn’t sure that she wanted to talk about it then. She wasn’t sure that she could deal with all of her mother’s emotional baggage that night (her special night). She only wanted to rescue her husband at the moment, wherever he was, and she surprised herself when she leaned into her mother, kissed her cheek and said, “Not now, Mama,” and continued about her way.

#

He wasn’t sure if he bought his father’s apology, but he enjoyed that vision of watching his father squirm, of watching his father in a state of humility. They stood in the lobby of the Inn and Brandon had his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He clenched his teeth tightly, to keep from saying something that he’d regret, all while Jack Barrett Greene reminded him of how important he was, how all of his sons were important, and how he didn’t mean for any of it to get as out of control as it did. He told him that he appreciated his level-headedness, his vigor, and that Natalie was a great girl, blah, blah, blah. He even tried to apologize for his mother’s words, for his mother’s reaction to the situation, to the terrible things she’d said to Natalie’s mother about their financial situation. His father stood back and did nothing! Not a goddamn thing!

He wasn’t as willing to forgive his father as easily as Natalie had forgiven her mother. It would take some time, perhaps on the honeymoon, where he could relax, collect his thoughts, be away from anything and everything that brought him stress.

When his father started to move into the conversation about his future with Natalie (i.e. finances, living situations, etc.), he became increasingly uneasy, until he felt something grab at his arm.

Natalie had found him, had returned to his side, and he allowed himself to breathe again.

“There you are,” she told him, smiling at his father. “Mr. Greene…”

“Natalie,” his father said to his bride. He then looked in Brandon’s direction and sighed. “Son, we’ll talk about this later…”

Brandon nodded compliantly. Of course they would; when he had all of his thoughts sorted out, when he could articulate his feelings and tell his parents about how much they’d hurt him and Natalie over the past year.

He was finally alone with Natalie again, in an empty lobby, while the music blared from their event room.

He reached for her hand.

“Are you okay?” she asked him.

He nodded. He was more than okay when she was around.

If she only knew…

“And we’ll talk about this later?”

He nodded again. He most certainly didn’t want to ruin that night, her night…

Another hour had passed, and Brandon knelt before Natalie, who sat in a chair, his hands, climbing up the length of her right leg until he wrapped his fingers around the garter encircling her narrow thigh. Natalie giggled, genuinely embarrassed and ticklish, covering her mouth with her hands until he finished. He gave it a quick toss over his shoulder. Ha, Scotty caught it…

They finally cut the cake together, and when it came time to feed it to each other, Natalie impulsively smashed the cake against the bridge of Brandon’s nose. And while the guests jeered and clapped, raising their champagne flutes in the air in their direction, Brandon stood there glaring at her with complete disbelief. Laughing, she proceeded to lick the icing off of his face, getting some of the butter cream goodness around her mouth.

Asha caught the bouquet of roses that Natalie threw high over her head. Her bridesmaid then looked in Scotty’s direction, rolled her eyes and dropped the bouquet on the ground out of protest…

Brandon and Natalie locked eyes and snickered to themselves, mentally acknowledging the fact that they would deal with the Scotty-Asha saga on another date…

Then they said goodbye, standing in the lobby, in front of the elevators. He cordially shook his father’s hand, gave his brothers, Scotty included, lengthened embraces as they wished him well. He watched as Natalie hugged her sisters, Asha included, and Joanna, who all had tears running down their faces, then her Grandmother and her aunts and uncles, and then her mother. He watched her start to cry then, watched as her mother whispered something in her ear, Natalie nodding obediently. She then pulled away from her mother, held her hands lingeringly, swinging them left to right, before they both took deep breaths. Helen then reached out to wipe Natalie’s tears away before her daughter started to walk away from her…

It wasn’t until they got onto an elevator that he suggested that she look at the expression he had engraved in her ring. Natalie slid the ring off of her left hand, brought it closer to her eyes and slowly read:

Since Trent road…

She couldn’t believe what she was about to do, couldn’t believe that it took her this long, couldn’t believe that her body felt this warm, this ready. She blamed the sensation on all the champagne that she consumed over the course of the reception, as if she knew what would transpire once they got back to the bed and breakfast, beneath moss-laden trees on Harper Creek Road. They’d kissed for a while, completely ignoring the bowl of fruit and plate of bread and cheese and bottles of wine that Scotty and Asha had sent to the room. They’d even left a note for the both of them on top of the bed, which read, “We love you both and we hope that you have an incredible honeymoon!” which she consequently smashed when Brandon laid her down on the comforter gently, peering into her eyes. Yes, his kisses had been so inviting, so warm, so attentive, that, in the moment she came up for air, she felt the tinge in her voice that almost begged him for it, she, a girl who’d waited almost twenty-four years of her life for this, he, who’d waited so patiently, who never rushed her, never forced her to do anything that she wasn’t prepared for.

But he certainly heard it in her voice then.

“Please,” she whispered into his face. “Keep going…”

“Are you sure,” he asked her quietly, kissing the tip of her nose.

Of course she was sure. She would push the tainted image of Brandon being with any other girl but her, and she would focus on the softness in his eyes. She ran a finger along his cheekbone, gently, slowly, coaxing him as she nodded her head. She took a deep breath as Brandon raised his body and pulled his white undershirt over his head. And he laid back down with her, laying his lips along her cheek, leaving soft, warm kisses. This was a good start, wasn’t it? She placed her hand on the back of his head, breathed slowly through her parted lips to stave off her beckoning trembling. Her limbs stiffened as his lips rolled to her neck, accompanied by a warm and hungry tongue, causing a strange sensation in a part of her body that she’d never felt before.

Brandon lifted his head momentarily, grinning down at her. “You’ve got to relax, baby…you’re not going to enjoy it if you don’t relax…”

So she took deeper breaths. She could do this, right? If Asha and Maya and Sid could do this, then so could she, right?

She pressed her fingers into his back as he laid his hand along the inside of one of her thighs.

“Relax, Natalie,” he told her, gently pushing her thigh outward.

Their lips met for a moment, lingeringly, and she sucked in her breath, pinching his hair between her fingers.

“I love you,” he said, calmly, as if he hoped that that would help.

It did. It reminded her of how they got there, if reminded her that he deserved her, and her body.

And her body started an awful shiver, the kind that made her bare breasts and her stomach and her thighs jiggle. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that she felt completely exposed, completely vulnerable, as Brandon’s pink lips explored every inch of her naked brown skin. She lay there with him in the darkness, running her fingers up and down his dampened back, pressing her fingers into the surface of his skin, biting her lip to a bloody pulp, silently anticipating the moment that this affair would take full flight. She became aware of every sensation around her, inside of her; the feeling of wetness and the warmth of his breath, and the feel of his hands probing her every inch, even those discreet places that she wasn’t even aware of. It seemed that nothing else mattered but his proximity, the feeling of how he moved near her, and touched her hear and touched her there…

And then his face loomed over hers in shadow, peace surrounding them, replacing the utter chaos that ran inside of her. She extended her hand toward his face, pressing her finger into his cheek, encouraging him to keep going, letting him know that she was okay. Lord, she’d waited for this forever, could recall each time she dreamed about it, fantasized this moment, knowing that she wanted Brandon to have her, and do with her as he so pleased…

She thrived under the disparity between his aggressiveness and bedroom knowledge, to her ignorance, to her rose-hued virtue, treating him as a teacher, with whom she desired a firm lesson…

It wasn’t until his hips began to narrow in on her inner thighs that she permitted herself to explore his body with her hands. She enjoyed the way his muscles flexed and pulled against her as he moved over her, she loved his moistened skin, his warmth, the feel of his heart beating rapidly against his chest, the hardness she felt against her thigh.

They kissed again, pressed their foreheads together, and he whispered, “Are you ready?”

Of course she was! Could he not feel that she was ready? Could he not see it in her eyes? Perhaps she’d hidden it so well for so long that she wasn’t sure how to express her craving. She’d spent several hours the night before with her bridesmaids in the hotel room (after the surprise male stripper), drunkenly discussing sex, with each of her ladies trying to explain to her how it was supposed to feel. None of them could tell her. They told her that the sensation couldn’t be explained with words; it could only be felt.

She had been preparing herself for this moment for weeks, perhaps starting with her trip to see her doctor in Decatur, explaining that she was getting married and wanted to start taking the Pill. She started swallowing a regular dosage a few days following the arrival of her first prescription.

Everything seemed and felt right for this moment…

She nodded slowly, focusing in on his eyes, wanting him to continue.

“I’ll take this slow,” Brandon whispered against her mouth.

She hoped he would. He’d told her once before that every girl he’d been with had all been sexually active, and that she’d be the first virgin that he’d ever slept with. She wasn’t sure how comfortable that made her feel, but she trusted his experience almost as much as she trusted him.

She closed her eyes tight, coached her mind to help relax her body and slow the rapid pace at which her heart beat, and take in the sensation with open arms. He was pushing against her, slowly, gingerly, the muscles in his buttocks, clenching between her, and she was sure that she scared him when she cried out suddenly in regards to the unexpected sting that she felt inside of her. He gazed down at her warily and whispered, “Are you alright?”

She wasn’t sure at that moment. This feeling was completely different, completely new, and she was certain that she’d never felt so close to Brandon before…

She nodded.

“Are you sure? I can stop…”

She nodded. Heck, they’d gotten this far, and his expedition to her inner workings was almost complete.

“Tal, I don’t want to hurt you…”

She knew that he didn’t. Why would he?

Natalie caught her breath, licked her lips and whispered, “Bran, just keep going…”

So, he did. He quietly worked his way inside, subtly flinching even if she made the slightest noise of discomfort. He didn’t move within her enough before she told him to stop, told him that it hurt too much…

“Maybe we should sleep on it,” she suggested quietly in the darkness as he slowly worked his way out of her.

Brandon rolled on his back, rested his arms behind his head and nodded. “Yea, you’re right,” he said. He then rolled his head over and looked at her. “How do you feel?”

“I feel…different…”

“Different, how?”

“I don’t know, I can’t explain it…”

“I’m sorry if it wasn’t what you thought it was going to be…”

“Brandy, please don’t apologize,” she assured him. “It wasn’t expecting perfection…besides, we have a long time to perfect it…and when we do…”

“I completely catch your drift…” He smiled. “I’m sorry if I hurt you…”

Natalie then raised her bare body, straddled his waist beneath thin white sheets and a glowing moon, and kissed his lips softly.

“Stop apologizing,” she whispered into him. “You did everything just right…”

And she kissed him again.

“And I have something to show you…”

“What’s that?”

She rolled off of him, onto her back, spread her legs, and directed his eyes toward the area. She pointed to the image of a white lily, perfectly inked on the inside of her left thigh.

Brandon’s eyes widened at the discovery, ran his fingers over it, whispered, “It’s like opening Pandora’s Box,” and pressed his lips against it softly…

SHE MEASURED HER HAPPINESS as being the moment that she stepped off of the ferryboat in Nevis, a quiet island in the southern West Indies, in the late afternoon, the sun, warm, golden, setting in the blue sky. They stepped onto the shore of Pinney’s Beach, her brown sandals wedged in the brown sand, the sea darkening by the fading sunlight, the breeze a strong one. They were directed to their room promptly following, a villa, with a small pool in the back overlooking the green fairway, a marble-laden lanai with two wicker chairs, banana leaf fans, a king-sized bed, a full-sized kitchen, and a large master bath with a deep-seated tub, encircled by a crowning of palm trees undulating under the gentle wind.