The Nightlife: New York (The Nightlife Series) (10 page)

After another exhausting round of biting and orgasms, he
settled down to hold her tightly, spooned from behind with his abused cock fit
between her perfectly rounded ass cheeks and his mouth up against her ear.  He could
picture staying like this, with Michelle molded to his body, for eternity.  The
only reason he need move was to make love to her over and over again, and then
return to this very same embrace afterwards.  What a perfectly wonderful life,
lying in bed with Michelle, screwing like rabbits.  This was as good as it got.

* * * *

CHAPTER 11

They lay there for a time in the wonderful, magic afterglow
of awesome sex, Michelle spooned up against Aaron.  They were a good fit, his
build seemed to match her, just right.  She hated to do it and almost didn’t,
but she needed to know.  She needed to be certain he was truly hers with no
strings attached to his former life.  She interrupted their beautiful moment of
peace.

“
Mon chéri
,
I am waiting patiently to hear your story.  Tell me.”

She caught the smile splitting his face, he knew her well
enough to understand the limits of her patience had been reached.  Then he
laughed out loud, at her.

She flipped around to face him, her ferocity barely
contained.  She stared him down, daring him to break his promise.  Though a
smartass, she read his sense of obligation to keep his promise even though she’d
extorted it from him at a moment of vulnerability.

“Okay … um … … My father died … six years ago.  It was
probably the worst time of my life.”  A searing avalanche of his pain
accompanied his words.  His grief burned all the way through their psychic
bond.  She sat up, shying away, trying to shut down their connection.  No one
should have to share that kind of pain, so intense, so personal.

It was pointless.  She had stirred it up, and now the only
thing to do was accept his pain, ride it out to the other side.

After a moment of shock and a couple quick gasps, she dived
into his pain headfirst.  She wrapped her arms around his waist to hug him
close.  She had forced the issue, at the very least she could offer some meager
comfort.

He instantly calmed under her embrace.  And then his mind
opened wide to her as he spoke.  She could actually feel and experience his
memories; far more depth of imagery and emotion than could ever be communicated
by speech alone.  She flowed down into the pain-filled recesses of his memories––to
the time of his father’s funeral and an overwhelming sense of loss and grief. 
The pain was still there, strong as ever, suffocating.  She felt her own throat
constrict with it.  A pain she understood well, the loss of a father.  She
couldn’t help but think of her own father, in a time and place long removed
from here.  Her memory still carried its share of pain. 
Perhaps it’s something
you never really get over.  You just learn to live with it
.

His memories were most painful at the wake, standing in
front of his father’s coffin.  Aaron didn’t want to see the corpse in that
shiny box, all painted up by a mortuary makeup artist who’d never known his
father in life.  That wasn’t his father lying there, but the image branded into
his memory.  He couldn’t rid himself of the memory.  Aaron turned away quickly,
preferring to look at the collage assembled by the entry to the chapel.  The
collage held a much truer representation of his father, not that dead thing in
a box.  He spent a good amount of time staring at the photographs, trying to
overwrite the painted corpse image.

Michelle immediately noticed the telltale signs of family
resemblance.  Aaron had his father’s smile and other small details like the
shape of his jawline and set of his shoulders.  She recognized something in his
father’s face, a solemnity, a quiet strength that she’d seen glimpses of from
time to time in Aaron’s demeanor.  The kind of strength one doesn’t see at
first.  A subtle quality.

Some of the pictures sparked corresponding memories of the
times and places they were taken.  A picture of Aaron in his early teens
sitting next to his father holding up a fish triggered the memory of his father’s
voice urging him on.  His father, Lucas Pilan,
Luke
, encouraged him. “Give
her a fight.  Don’t let up.  Keep the rod solid in your hand.  Pull back,
steady … steady …  reel her in, slow and easy.”  Aaron was so excited and yet
afraid to lose the fish.  He didn’t even like fish, but he wanted this one for his
dad, who loved a good pan-fried trout with beer batter.

Focus shifted to another picture of his father in a hospital
bed, looking embarrassed but still smiling.  Aaron recalled how his dad maintained
his good humor to the very end, even as the chemotherapy treatments and medications
brought on recurring bouts of nausea, making him so tired that he slept through
most of the day.  Though his body was frail, Luke’s spirit held strong.  He’d
smiled and laughed constantly, as if the discomfort was merely a distraction.  At
times his father would say, “I’m catching an early retirement out of this one …
don’t you worry, it’s no big deal.  You can’t keep a good man down.”  He’d spout
off ridiculous things like this while bedridden, in extreme pain.  Aaron had often
wondered if it was the pain meds talking, or his father trying to smooth it
over, keeping up appearances for his family, or perhaps lying to himself.

Aaron recalled his problems in school.  How he was held back
in the tenth grade to repeat the year because he’d spent so much time with his
father in the hospital.  And then, again, he missed an entire month of school
after his father had died.  Ironically it wasn’t the cancer that killed his dad,
but the complications of internal bleeding after removing the tumor in surgery.

Another photo in the collage was Aaron at sixteen, just
before his father’s diagnosis of cancer.  He sat with both parents at his
birthday party; all three of them smiling with faces pressed together side by
side and cheek to cheek.  Aaron’s mother, Angela, was a slight woman of dark
brown hair, so dark, almost black, and sad brown eyes.  Aaron obviously inherited
something of Angela’s cheek bones and the sad tilt of her eyes.  They seemed
happy.  An average American family living day by day, blissfully unaware of how
death would irrevocably change their lives, robbing Aaron of all his joy for
years to come.

And then his mother had changed in the blink of an eye.  Almost
overnight his mother had disappeared, replaced with a complete stranger.  She began
dating all different kinds of men her friends introduced her to.  She never
warned Aaron of her intentions.  She just did it.  The extent to which she had
consulted Aaron about her desire to date and move on with her life had been an
off-hand comment about how
they both had to go on their lives
and
Luke
wouldn’t have wanted them to be lonely
.  Before he knew it, she was out on
Friday or Saturday nights until two-three-four in the morning.  Sometimes she
didn’t bother coming home till the next day.  Angela’s behavior immediately
after his father’s death seemed a horrible betrayal of everything he held
sacred.

They grew distant quickly.  Aaron wasn’t assertive enough to
let her know how he felt.  Long accustomed to the quiet, unobtrusive
temperaments of both Aaron and his father, Angela didn’t bother to ask what
Aaron thought.  Had she asked, it would’ve been purely courtesy.  Angela Pilan
had been bowling over her boys for years.  She’d always found a way to get
exactly what she wanted.  Luke hadn’t been the kind of man to set limits or
argue with his wife.  The Pilan men are long-suffering.  Luke had been happy
just to have Angela in his life.  He taught Aaron to go with the flow when it
came to the whims of his mother.

In going with the flow, Aaron withdrew from Angela.  He
found solace in his friends, Kyle and a couple other buddies.  His grand plans
for college and career were shelved for the day to day life of pursuing girls
and enjoying the teen social scene of parties, movies, and music.  It worked. 
Kept his mind off things at home he’d rather not deal with.  Aaron stopped
talking to his mother about anything he thought or felt.  About anything at
all.  She didn’t seem to notice.  Or perhaps she preferred it that way.  She
never tried to reconnect with her son.  Angela pursued the single’s lifestyle,
and Aaron took care of himself, rarely requiring anything from her.

Angela was busy making up for lost time, meeting new people,
making new friends, and jumping from boyfriend to boyfriend almost monthly. 
During their family years, when Luke was still alive, Angela had maintained the
habit of going to the local Catholic Church on Sundays.  After his death, all
pretenses were dropped.  Aaron wondered that maybe he’d never truly known his mother
all these years.  It was as if she’d been maintaining appearances for Luke’s
sake, and now the real Angela showed her face for the first time.

As he spent more and more time hanging out with Kyle, making
plans to get their own apartment, it seemed the life he’d once known with a
mother and a father was something experienced in a dream.

The final episode between him and this woman Angela, this
stranger he called mother, happened the day he met Charles Miller.  An
insurance salesman, Charles and Angela had hooked up three months prior. 
Somewhere during these three months, in which Aaron hadn’t known the man
existed, Charles and Angela had fallen in love and decided to marry.

This day was crisp and clear in Aaron’s mind, branded and
labeled as the day he lost whatever remaining sliver of the mother Angela had
once been to this stranger, Charles.  The man showed up at the house––the first
time Aaron had ever seen him.  Aaron realized right away his mother was serious
about her relationship with Charles.

He gave it an honest effort to talk with Charles, to accept
him into his life.  Aaron’s limited conversations with the man ranged over
sports and religion, subjects on which Aaron had little comment or interest.  Apparently,
Angela had been miraculously restored in her faith by the divine hand of
Charles Miller.  All the two of them ever did was preach Jesus and salvation. 
Aaron couldn’t run the opposite direction fast enough.  It was painfully
obvious they had no common ground to converse or build a relationship.  As it
turned out, it wasn’t necessary for Aaron to welcome Charles into their home.

After meeting Charles, and sharing a meal together as though
they were now a family, this strange woman inhabiting his mother’s body pulled Aaron
aside to talk with him privately.  She told him
you’re
nineteen years
old
, and
its time you moved out and became an adult
, and that
she
wanted to live her life with Charles
without
the weirdness of
another
male adult in the household
.  Aaron had listened to her in a daze of shock,
simply nodding at the proper moments to indicate understanding.  Understanding
was the furthest thing from his mind on this day.  He didn’t get it at all.  Where
was his mother?  Had she been invaded by body snatchers?  Had she become one of
those pod people?  Who was this woman telling him to leave the only home he’d
ever known?  How could she toss him out on the street like the spring-cleaning
trash?

He didn’t recall if he had spoken to Angela beyond his
dumbstruck nods of acknowledgement.  He was too numbed with shock.  He packed
his clothes and stuff and moved into Kyle’s apartment that very evening.  When
asked about it by Kyle and friends, Aaron answered simply, “It’s the right time.”

Until this very moment, lying in bed with Michelle’s
glorious naked body wrapped around him, Aaron never had a reason to look back
on the past.  It wasn’t necessary.

Delia had never cared about Aaron’s past, and Kyle had
seemed to understand in a silent agreement that there was nothing to discuss
regarding Aaron’s mother.  Aaron and Angela’s relationship degenerated to the
bare bones minimum of contact.  He spoke to her on the required holidays in the
American Christian custom.  They exchanged gifts through the mail at Christmas
and birthdays.  Beyond that, neither one existed to the other.

Aaron kept on rolling forward, avoiding the need to think
back and remember those bygone days when he’d once known what it was like to
have a family.  Those memories were too painful and always sparked resentment
towards his mother.  He blocked those memories away, trying his best to
forget.  There his memories stayed, buried in the riverbed of his life.  He
never found cause to dig into the soil and expose the past.  It was easy for
Aaron to fill the empty hours of his days with Kyle and Delia.  As long as he
kept busy, he had no time to brood on the past.

He lived his life cheerfully ignorant of the rest of the
world outside Kyle and Delia until the day the world put Michelle in his path. 
Fate had gifted him––or cursed him––with this new turn of events.  Aaron lay in
bed holding the most beautiful woman in the world, bearing his soul through
their mutual psychic bond, tears of blood streaming down his face from the
remembrance of grief, pain and frustration he’d suppressed for years.

Michelle now knew everything about him: his past, his pain,
his grief, his loneliness, and the little shoebox of a life he’d lived prior to
meeting her.  She was his confessional, his priest, his savior, his own
personal Jesus Christ, laying his demons to rest with her touch, presence, and
silent acceptance.

Purged of his sadness, allowing the memories to drift away
to return to the vault of things better forgotten, Michelle agreed through
silent psychic communication that this would never be spoken of again.  Happy,
limbs tangled together, they rested, content.  She felt the satisfaction of
problems resolved, demons conquered, and the comfort of a deeply rewarding
connection.  As dawn peeked over the horizon she drifted off to sleep like the
dead in his embrace.

* * * *