The coffee had obviously gone cold.
It’d been twelve hours since he’d fucked her over. For the last time, she assured herself. She’d sat in her bed for the first three, staring at the ornate dresser, at the seemingly innocent looking plastic tub of scented moisturiser, all the remnant elements of her first sexual experiences, all the pieces of evidence that he’d actually been there, flesh and blood pulsing in this very room, that she’d not been inciting some wayward daydream, or all night and then this morning early daytime dream.
She’d ran her hands across her toned abdomen, marvelling at the aching muscles inside her, where he’d been hours before, and she’d felt floods of tears pool in puddles at the base of her neck, not caring to wipe them away, or even put on her robe.
She’d given him her body, her soul, to go along with the heart that she’d longed ago emotionally carved his name into. She’d finally made love with the man of her dreams, her fantasies, her protector. The man she’d been crazy in love with for most of her life. She’d been making love, while he’d popped over for a fuck.
To assuage the most basic of needs – lust. A need that had no room in the rabbit hole of Wonderland that was her rampant love for him.
She realised then, how pathetic this was, how useless it was to be in love with a man who ran from you. How pathetic it really was for her to flounder in puddles of her own fucking tears because, for whatever reason, he’d rejected her. Again.
She was twenty years old, she had a career, a future. If that didn’t include Jayden Caine, she could live with that. Just about. Or she hoped so ... No. She would not doubt herself, the only stable presence in her own life, she would not let him rule that, take her own strength from her. She’d worked too bloody hard for it!
And her steely resolve had her launching the offensive tub of moisturiser at the antique replica dressing table, the mirror reverberating until it reflected nothing more than the surface of the wood, at close range. In about twenty fractured pieces.
She stripped the sheets from the bed in a rage, dragging them, piled a foot and a half over her line of sight, into the large kitchen waste bin, still bare ass naked with a red blush across the seat of her behind.
Finally, she donned her white fluffy robe, marching around her lounge intent on scrubbing every last piece of Jayden from her apartment.
By two in the afternoon, she had set up an easel in front of the large picturesque window in the lounge area (she’d dragged her desk into a discreet corner, piled canvases upon it, and resolved to forget it was anything but storage for a future masterpiece), and it was there that she sat, with angry strokes of blazing colour across the piece in front of her, at ten o clock in the evening, more than eight hours later, when there was a furious thumping at her front door.
Obviously it was him. She’d expected him.
“So there are things in this life that you give enough of a shit about to come back for,” she remarked, with a sarcastic tone she’d never used with him before, a malice running through her words that would never have reared its head earlier in their relationship. But then again, he’d never fucked her and fucked off before, running from the flat like his ass was on fire, and she was a can of petrol waiting to get too close.
“On the hook,” she said, flippantly pointing to his beloved jacket, where she’d hung it on the clothes peg next to her front door, refusing for the first time in her life to succumb to that feeling of belonging that washed over her whenever she thought of the domesticity of such actions.
“Baby,” he started towards her, his voice was slurred slightly and she turned towards him still sporting the icy expression that she’d been perfected for the last three years, bleeding inside for him to drop to his knees, to beg her, to apologise, while simultaneously hoping he’d disappear off the face of the planet in a pillar of smoke, “Oh God, Babe, Tor, I’m so ... I’m fucking sorry ...”
“No!” she could have stamped her foot. So sudden was his reaction that she wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t. “You don’t get to talk to me right now, Jayden, or ever, not about this. You’ll take your jacket, and you’ll leave.”
Her body was rigid, coiled up with tension, her face set in a steel resolve that shook him to his core. It stopped him dead in his tracks. “I hurt you, didn’t I?” He strode toward her purposefully, grasping her shoulders in his hands, terror winding through them when she didn’t soften, didn’t react to his touch. ”Shit, Tor, why would you not say anything? I’d never ... oh FUCK!!!” He was screaming into the palms of his hands, running his palms over his face, his fingers through his hair, how the fuck could he have not seen this coming? Jesus, she’d been a virgin not twelve hours before, and he’s bending her over the dresser like she’s just some slut he’s stumbled across spanking her, for God’s sake, what was he thinking? ... Guilt, and anger just roared through his blood, how could he have been so fucking stupid? This was Vittoria Casey! The girl was some modern day fairy tale princess; she should have been locked up in an ivory tower, sleeping for 100 years, not getting her ass spanked from a piece of shit lowlife like him!
“You didn’t hurt me, Jayden,” she wasn’t even looking at him, she was looking through him, like he was a fucking nobody, like she hadn’t just given him every dream he’d ever had on a plate, every fucking apple in The Garden of Eden.
“You didn’t hurt me, “ she repeated, “But we can’t do this again. I can’t take it. When I visit Nate, I don’t want you around, say whatever you need to, to get out of it, but don’t be there. Fresh start. I can’t see you again.”
No. Fucking. Way. He gaped at her, the drunken haze he’d stumbled in with after a day filled with Jamesons and Marlboro Reds, in the roughest shit hole pub he could find. She could not be serious. She didn’t mean a word of it. No way.
He looked around the room, fingers laced at his hair, pulling it from the roots so that it stood on end in a hundred different angles, every piece of furniture sparkled with a new lease of life, except the desk. That little canvas of fantasies was huddled in a corner, piled high with random bits of art paraphernalia, relegated to being nothing more than a shelf for stock, a canvas of angry colour was in its place at the window, and he watched her close her eyes in shame when he looked back at her.
She was ashamed.
Twenty four hours he’d been back in her life. Twenty four hours and he’d spanked her, made love to her like he never had any other woman, ran out on her, and left her hanging her head in shame. If he’d ever needed proof that he was no good for her, it was right here.
“Please Jay,” she started, “I just ... I can’t anymore, okay? This is too much bullshit, one minute you’re pulling some hot moves, then you’re meant to be my guardian angel, then you’re not there at all, then you’re pulling some jealousy bullshit, hot moves are back, I can’t cope! You can’t mess with my head like this. I don’t ...” she sighed, shaking her head, and pulling her shoulders back again, “Please Jay, just, I know you don’t feel that way about me, not like I do you, but have enough respect for me to listen. To leave.”
She felt like Oliver bloody Twist with a bowl, Please Sir, leave me with whatever scraps of affection I can keep hold of in my memories, let me have the space to not compare every man I meet to you...Pathetic.
She’d never seen that look in Jay’s eyes, never seen him look so ... guilty. There was something else there, shimmering in the crystalline depths, but before she could even begin to work it out, he was back to his legendary restraint. Shutters down, calculations in process.
“We started something else last night, Vittoria,” she knew he heard her sharp intake of breath at what she was now thinking of as her sex name, God, how dare he? “You’re thinking you can wipe me out, but that ships sailed babe. Last night, I made you mine in the most complete way I could, I took something from you that no man will ever get,”
“Big woo, Shannon lost her virginity to Rory Thompkins in the shed at the bottom of her dad’s garden, where he keeps her brother’s moped, do you think she’s pining every time she looks over? So I was a virgin, GET OVER IT!”
“Don’t interrupt me,” his voice didn’t change, it was still that headmaster’s voice, laced with authority, which just served to piss her off further, “And I’m not talking about your virginity. You’ve always been mine, and that was always made for me, but I’m talking about the craving ... the need. That wasn’t sex last night, babe, that was a lifetime of foreplay reaching a climax, and you’ll need it, you’ll crave me, and I won’t be leaving you here so you can fuck off to that goon from last night to satisfy it. It won’t work, anyway, because you belong to me,” he ran a proprietary hand down the front of her crumpled apron, skating over the tips of her breast, and the quivering muscles in her abdomen, “and your body knows it, even if you are trying to wipe me out completely. He won’t do, nobody else ever will for you, because you’ll wake up screaming my name into your pillow in the middle of the night, with your thighs clenching on empty space,” he brought his lips to her ear, his breath shifting the fine strands of her hair that had fallen in front of them, “Wishing I was between them.”
She wrenched her head away from his hand, “Go, Jayden.”
Before he could say another word, she’d walked away, back to her bedroom. To lock the doors and change the sheets again.