Defiance (New Adult Romance) (Isaac & Maya) (33 page)

42

Maya

I’m completely exhausted when I get home, dropping my bag on the floor and my body on the couch. Why did I have to get a reputation for being so helpful? It’s like every single uncertain student on campus knows my name. I guess that’s what you get for trying so hard.

I’m almost glad that Isaac isn’t home yet because I am very much not in the mood right now, though I doubt he will be either after spending the day in the hospital. I can’t believe she had the nerve to have a stroke. I know that’s an insensitive, messed up thing to say, but I don’t care.

Just when I’m starting to wonder what’s taking him so long, I see movement in the corner of my eye. Is someone on the balcony? My heart start
s pounding until I see that the intruder has a familiar head of dark hair and incredibly defined forearms.

“What are doing out here, Isaac?” I ask.

He jerks and spins around, his eyes wide. “Holy shit. You scared me, I didn’t hear you come in,” he breathes.  “I’m just enjoying the spring that finally showed up before it turns into summer.” Isaac smiles at me as he strides over, wrapping his arms around my waist. “How goes the tutoring, my love?”

“It’s pretty brutal out there.”

“They can’t all be as brilliant as you are.”

“I just lucked out with the memory thing,” I laugh. “How goes the hospital visiting?”

“Well, that depends on how you look at it, I guess. Gloria is doing okay, physically, considering. Her speech is a little slurred and her right hand doesn’t work very well.”

“That sucks,” I reply, inwardly chastising the part of my psyche that takes a sick satisfaction in her suffering.

“She’ll be okay, but… it turns out she isn’t enjoying her rekindled love affair with my father after all,” he says, clenching his jaw. It drives me fucking crazy that he still worries about her.

“Oh. That’s not good for us either, is it?”

“No.” Isaac closes his eyes and he inhales deeply. Here it comes. “Maya, I think I should start staying over at her house for a while.”

“What?” I gasp, taking a step back. “Why?” But I don’t even have to ask. He wants to protect her from him. This is never going to end.

“It’s not what you think,” he replies, unable to look me in the eye at first. “Okay, it’s not
only
what you think.”

I try to keep the anger and revulsion off my face, but I’m failing, I can tell from the way he’s looking at me. Unwilling to make him feel even guiltier, I slide open the balcony door slightly as my lips start trembling, squeezing through a little gap that’s too small for him to follow me. Isaac stops me from closing the door in my retreat, forcing it open wider and following me inside.

“Maya, I—”

“Do what you want to do, I don’t care,” I snap. Did I seriously just pull that trick?

“Baby—”

“Just leave me alone. I’m tired and I’m going to bed.”

“It’s four in the afternoon.”

“What, now I can’t take a nap?”

“
Maya
,” he snarls, wrapping his fingers around my forearm. “Stop it. I’m trying to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to hear you explain why you have to do this for her.”

“It’s not for her, it’s for me.”

“Oh, my God. That is so much worse,”
I whisper, unable to stop myself from crying. I twist out of his grasp, an impossible task if he didn’t let me, and fly into my room. Our room. Somehow I manage to stop myself from locking him out.

Isaac is rather surprised that he’s able to open the bedroom door, tentatively stepping inside. “That isn’t what I meant. It’s not about her at all. Glory is fine, of course she’d come out of this unscathed.”

“Good for her.”

“And no, I don’t want to protect her.”

“That’s a fucking lie and you know it,” I growl.

“Well I’m fucking sorry about it. Excuse me for knowing exactly how horrible it is to have no choice but to fuck him,” he yells back. I gasp, clapping my hand over my mouth. Isaac never talks about it so literally. “Sorry, that was unfair.”

“It’s okay.” That sure as hell snapped me out of it. “Really, baby, it’s okay,” I exhale, stepping forward to squeeze his hand in mine.

“It’s not just her I want to keep from going through that,” he says raggedly. “It’s all of them. I want this to stop. And maybe I want my revenge, too. The idea of coming this far and watching him walk away… I can’t fucking let that happen.”

“Is there anything that you can do to make sure he doesn’t?” I ask.

“I’m not sure. And I am
really
fucking sick and tired of this subtle manipulation bullshit, I honestly don’t know if I have this in me. Glory thinks he’s close to… buying me that girl. He asked her if she was 100% sure about it last week. The idea is that if I’m there for her while she recovers, he’ll be that much more likely to ‘reward’ me. If I’m not there, then…”

“He’d be less likely to reward you,” I murmur.

“Yeah. And if he already got my
present
,” he says bitterly, “she will go to someone else and it will be my fault for not doing whatever I could do.”

“I don’t want you to carry that. I don’t want to carry it either.”

“It’s so messed up, Maya. If it wasn’t for you, I would have just fucking strangled him at this point and buried him in Glory’s yard.”

“Isaac…”

“I know. It’s just a fantasy. I just want this fucking done with. You’re about to graduate, my father is about to do something incredibly stupid and finally disappear. We are
so
close. And…”

“What?”

“I don’t know…” he whispers. “I’m not very proud of my past. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and it would feel good to know that I did something to make up for it.”

“Then you should.”

“Glory doesn’t need me to be there. She’s pretending that it’s worse than it is, that she can’t talk at all. It would make perfect sense for her to refuse to see him until she’s 100% back to normal. She is
not
the reason I want to do this. I promise, baby.”

“I know. I’m sorry I got like that.”

“You should react that way. You’re the only woman I’m supposed to protect. When this is over, I’m done with her. Completely, entirely done.”

“Isaac… you don’t have to cut her out of your life if you don’t want to.”

“Yes, I fucking do. I cannot keep doing this to you, I won’t. It kills me to see that look on your face, it’s fucking torture. I am
so
sorry, but this is the last time, Rookie, I swear.”

“How long?”

“I have no idea. Glory says she won’t be able to handle it for more than a month, though. She’ll probably take off after that, she wants a new life too. He’ll chase after her, but that’s her problem, not ours.”

That isn’t true and we both know it. Baron will always be our problem. If he doesn’t go away, we probably have to run. “Are you staying there tonight?” I ask.

“No. She goes home on Monday and a team of the best private nurses and physical therapists will be there waiting for her. I won’t have to touch her or take care of her at all, that’s not what this is about.”

“So we get the weekend?” I try to sound excited about it, but I’m not. I’ve been dreading a separation like this since I got him back, it’s like I knew it was coming all along.

“Hey. Come here,” he says, sitting down on the bed and pulling me into his lap. “It’s okay to be upset, Maya. I’m torn up about it, too. This fucking sucks.”

Coming home to Isaac has been so wonderful, a dream come true. I can’t believe it’s over. I choke out a sob into his shoulder, wrapping my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck, squeezing him as hard as I can. Too bad it won’t help me keep him. “I’m sorry,” I squeal.

“No, baby,
I’m
the one that’s sorry.” He holds me while I cry like he has so many times before, rocking me back and forth as he strokes my hair. “Maya,” he breathes, gently pulling me from his shoulder. “I will come home to you. I would never,
ever
do anything that would jeopardize our future. You know that right?”

“Of course I do.”

I shake my head back and forth and exhale, unwilling to ruin our last few days by indulging in a freak out. I can cry myself to sleep next week. Forcing my lips to curl upwards, I wrap my hands in his and kiss his face everywhere until I’m not faking the mischievous grin anymore. Isaac catches me by my hair as my lips dart across his, kissing me until I’m breathless.

We have a wonderfully lazy and snuggly weekend, full of awesome food and better sex. I try not to cry on Monday morning when I march off to school, but a few rogue teardrops betray me so he kisses them away and hugs me so hard I nearly pass out. It won’t be that long, I can feel it. At least I have all the time in the world to tutor now, I’m always the last one to leave school. Coming home to this empty house is unbearable.

43

Isaac

If I don’t fall asleep with Maya in my arms soon, I will lose my fucking mind. I can’t believe we’re going through this again, I miss her so much. We text and call constantly which makes the separation bearable, yet in some ways it’s worse because we’re used to being together all the time. It’s been over two weeks and I slip away to visit her occasionally, but the last time my father dropped by and I wasn’t here. I came back immediately, leaving Maya totally devastated, and now I’m too paranoid to leave this awful house again.

I hadn’t counted on seeing Dad so much when I agreed to do this. It’s nearly impossible not to beat his face in every time I see it. Glory refused to see him at all for the first few days, but I convinced her that would only make him come over more. One time he dropped by while Roger was here, which could have been a disaster, but I thought ahead and stole his keys to hide his car in the garage. I’m relatively sure that Roger and Glory had some kind of sexual contact that she probably isn’t ready for, because she looked a little flushed and breathless. It would also explain why she finally agreed to let my father see her. There’s nothing Glory enjoys more than making one guy jealous by spending time with another.

I don’t know if it’s the stroke or the stress, but I think Nigel was right about Glory’s impulse control being a potential problem for us. Either that, or the flirty, sexy routine is automatic for her when my father is around, even if she is confined to a hospital bed and presumably unable to speak. Perhaps he’s the poison that she’s most addicted to, I’m not sure she can help it. Dad is so happy and relieved to see her, it would be sweet if they weren’t so fucked up, but if she wants him to leave her alone, this isn’t the way to do it. Hopefully all that ‘I should have just been a normal step mother’ talk wasn’t an act and she’s not trying to make me jealous too. I’m not even sure if she has a choice in the matter, I think this is just the way she is.

If she is consciously trying to remind me of how much I used to be under her spell, it’s not working. I could give a shit. I am here for one reason and one reason only, to play the doting, loving son that’s always there when she needs me. That unfortunately involves me having daily phone conversations with my father to update him on her progress. I’m the only person other than the speech therapist that she’ll let hear her talk, not that the speech therapist is aware of her actual speaking capabilities. Dad thinks it’s wonderful that she trusts me enough to do that, he’s so grateful that I’m here. Hopefully, he understands that it’s a familial commitment and my presence isn’t worrying him that the sexual part of mine and Glory’s relationship could return.

That’s not why I’m here, I’m not his competition. I try to project that energy every time I have to see him or talk to him. I rage out afterward, it makes me so fucking sick. Literally. It was physically impossible to keep any food in my stomach until I finally broke down and started taking more Klonopin. I’m almost up to four grams a day now. I wonder if I’ll ever get off this twisted merry-go-round.

I tell Maya everything when I talk to her on the phone at night. If I didn’t, I would have tapped out by now. She feels awful for me, but I know the fact that I’m so miserable also makes her feel better in a way. If this was easy on me, she’d worry more. I’m fucked in the head too, I get a sick satisfaction out of her jealously over Glory. It’s always bothered me on some level that she could be so neutral about my sordid past with all those girls when the idea of Maya writhing beneath another man makes me feel like my head is going to explode, even if it happened years ago. At least we’re both messed up.

We are so fucking perfect for each other. I think about that constantly, my arms always feel empty now. Today, I needed every single ounce of willpower I had not to go see her. It still wasn’t enough, so I tapped my paranoia reserves as well, convincing myself that I couldn’t risk being followed there. I also couldn’t be noticeably absent from the important meeting that I needed to symbolically attend at the hotel lobby I’m barely working on that supposedly consumes all my time.

Paranoia worked in my favor, as it often has, which is probably why I can’t kick the habit. Dad was sitting there when I arrived. I almost puked all over the impeccably refinished original marble floor. He asked me to show him around and he was so impressed with the work. My father was proud of me. I used to fantasize about that almost as often as I would daydream about killing him. The reality of his prideful pat on the back wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I imagined it would be. I wonder if that means I don’t really want him dead, either.

Dad told me that I looked stressed and could use a break. He wouldn’t mind having Glory all to himself for the evening anyway. I jumped at the chance to get a few hours with Maya, telling him that stressed out didn’t quite cover it. I was exhausted.

Now Maya is resting peacefully with her head on my chest, her warm, naked body on top of mine. I can’t seem to let her hand go even though I know that I have to. I love the way her fingertips feel as they slide across my skin or into my hair, I crave it. I need to stay with her more than I need to breathe, but this is a critical moment. Coming back to Glory instead of staying out all night would be a very meaningful gesture.

Maya knows this, we discussed it right after she abandoned her students and right before I ripped her clothes off and made her scream for me. We only get a few hours. So when the alarm on her phone goes off, she picks her head up and grins instead of letting her true feeling show on her face. Her thick mane drags across my chest as she climbs off me, making me shiver.

“You need to trim this,” I say, flipping on my stomach and tugging the ends of her hair.

“I do?”

“Yeah. It’s so long that it covers too much of your butt now. It makes it hard to leer at you when you walk around naked.”

“Oh really,” she coos, glancing behind her as she divides her hair in half and flips it over her shoulders to expose her perfect ass. “Where did you like it best, Isaac?”

Half the blood in my body rushes to my dick. “Right here,” I rasp, tickling her about an inch above her tailbone. “It was perfect two months ago.” Still long enough to cover that tiny reminder of the awful bruise I put on her back, but I can’t say that out loud.

She knows anyway, the corner of her smile dropping for an instant. My own lips are drawn to the base of her spine, my hands wrapping around her hips as I fall to my knees to kiss it. I’ll never forget that horrible black mark I left on her, or how fucking incredible it felt when I put it there.

Maya murmurs something about me needing to go, so I rise to my feet and push my tongue into her mouth. That beautiful hair is covering her tits now, so I flip it behind her, wrapping my hand into the tangled mess and guiding her back down to the bed.

“You need to go, Isaac.” If she actually wanted me to leave, she wouldn’t have said my name like that.

“I need to fuck you again.”

“No,” she pouts. Maya says red when she really means it.

I smirk at her, my eyes flicking downwards. The love of my life and ultimate plaything bites her bottom lip and spreads her legs for me, I don’t even have to ask. She just knows how I want it, if I’d prefer to push her knees apart myself or watch her offer herself to me. She’s so gorgeous and she’s all mine.

For a moment, I get the rush of making her squirm and wait for me as my eyes savor the sight of this perfect little pussy that I own. It’s so wet and red and swollen from my visit. Her ass gapes open just a bit because I get to have that now too, whenever I want, and I always want every fucking part of her that I can get.

I drop my head between her legs and taste her, flicking her clit until I hear her make this desperate little moan. I want to give it to her, but it’ll feel better if I make her wait. She’s panting when I lift my face, just like she should be, her eyes begging me to dip back and finish her. But if I did that, I wouldn’t have the pleasure of hearing this whiny groan when I rise to my knees. If Maya doesn’t want me to tease her all the time, she needs to figure out how to stop being so fucking hot when I do.

I drive inside her harshly, pulling her hair back so she hopefully doesn’t notice that I wince. I’m raw and even though she’s wet and ready, it still fucking hurts for the first few seconds. It always does, I like to think that she doesn’t know how much, but if that were true she wouldn’t reach out for me every time to drag her fingers across my chest, or my hipbone, or my flank, or my face. Her fingertips leave a trail of warmth and soothe me, making my insides tingle and flop around. It’s usually distracting enough to overwhelm the pain.

Not this time. I thrust through it anyway, fucking her ruthlessly because she likes it and she’s so close. I feel her spasm around me and hear her make my favorite noises while I take what’s mine. It sounds like she’s singing sometimes, especially when she moans my name. It doesn’t make much sense, but I often crash after
her
first orgasm like I am right now, the maniac that lives inside me fading into the background. Somewhere in the middle of her satisfied breathing, the need to hold her becomes overwhelming and my fist in her hair unclenches to tickle the nape of her neck. My arms become even greedier than my dick and surround her, holding her so closely that it’s difficult for both of us to breathe.

But I need her more than I need air or anything else and she knows what I want like she always does. Her arms wrap around my neck as I bury my face into the soft crook where her neck meets her shoulder. It’s the most wonderful place in the world, her flesh is so firm against my lips and her hair is so soft on my forehead. She murmurs how much she loves me, her hot breath heating my ear as I cup the back of her head.

The need below my waist is screaming at me, the energy spiraling up from my groin and mingling with that sinking sensation in my stomach. My hand slides down around from the side of her waist and presses the base of her spine upwards to meet my thrusting. I know once I come I have to leave her, but I can’t stop myself, it’s uncontrollable. The only thing that can tame this monster between my legs is the slightest hesitation in Maya’s voice or in her breathing, but she’s using it against me now, luring me to finish by whispering my name and how much she wants me, how much she loves me.

The convulsions rock my body and I start grunting into her neck. It feels so fucking good, she’s so soft and slick and hot around me, but all the pleasure stays below my navel because the rest of me is falling into darkness. I have to leave her now. I don’t want to go, I can’t do it. I am supposed to be here, she’s supposed to stay in my arms, that’s what we were made for.

I choke out a sob into her shoulder as her fingers trace patterns in my hair. I miss her already.

“I’m staying,” I whisper.

“You can’t, baby.”

“Yes I fucking can!” I growl, falling out of her and further into this horrible pit where I used to be trapped before I got her back.

“Isaac,” she says, her lips dancing all over my face, making it easier to draw in air. “It’s midnight. And this is almost over, I can feel it.”

“I can’t,” I choke.

“It is, I promise. You know I wouldn’t promise you if I wasn’t sure, that’s how positive I am.” There’s no way she could really know, but Maya wouldn’t lie to me. “And I’m
so
tired. I have a big test tomorrow and I really need some sleep.”

“That’s just a better reason to stay so I can hold you,” I theorize. That’s not really true, our bodies don’t care how much rest she needs for tomorrow, they’ll keep each other up all night.

“Isaac…”

“Okay,” I breathe, keeping her with me as I sit up.

“You know I don’t
want
you to leave, right?” she squeaks, her little eyebrows pinching together as she rests her forehead on mine and clasps my hand. God, she’s so fucking adorable, I don’t know how she does it.

“Of course I do.” I press my trembling lips to hers. “I love you.”

We say that to each other a dozen times as we get dressed and during each embrace that we swear is the last one. It feels like my heart gets ripped out of my chest when I close the door behind me because I know she starts crying the moment I close it and I can’t go back in there to soothe her. I have to march off to that horrible house and see the two twisted people that made me.

I knew Dad would still be there, but that doesn’t stop my blood from boiling when I pull into the driveway. I hate my father so fucking much, it would consume me completely if my love for Maya wasn’t so overpowering. The bitter but minty taste lingers in my mouth from the relief I stuck under my tongue on the way over here. It makes me hate him even more, but if I don’t take it, I’ll kill him with my bare fucking hands the way I almost killed Luke.

After visiting my room to change clothes, I march toward Glory because that’s what a loving, doting son would do. She can rot too, for all I care. I might feel differently toward her in the morning, but right now I’m riding a wave of hatred and she’s at the crest right next to him. I swallow a bar of Xanax and chew up another one as I gently knock on her door. I can’t fucking help it, it’s just one of those nights.