DITW 15-7: Acherontic Winges

This time when he wanted to spin her around, he couldn’t stop himself, putting his hand on her shoulder and making her face him. “Just fucking tell me, Kimmy.”

Kimmy turned up her palms, like she didn’t know what he wanted to hear or didn’t know how to tell him. Or maybe didn’t think any of this was his business. This made him the maddest.

She paused, mouth open as her brain searched for impossible words. “It’s nothing, Josh,” she said, looking away. “It’s nothing real.”

He shook his head, looking away as well, an acid coal beginning to singe the center of his chest. There it was. The finale.

No hope now, is there, Joshy?

Hope for what? 

He said, “I didn’t know what would happen when I came this weekend. Didn’t know if I should come at all. Not because I didn’t want to, but maybe you would scream at me for not coming already, for—”

“I’m not angry, Josh,” she said softly.

He ran his hand through his hair. “I know. I know you’re not.” He dropped his hand to his thigh. “I didn’t know that it would be like this. If I came this weekend, that it would be like, like this...” He gestured to the room and then toward her. “And that you’d ask me...”

“I just want you to know I want you in my life. I want you in Colleen’s life. I’m trying to welcome you.”

He looked up, he looked down, his heart wringing out in his chest like a swim towel, the sticky sap of heartache slithering through him like treacle. “Okay,” he said, admitting silently to himself now that this in-law apartment was an act of kindness. It wasn’t her fault she’d begun some other affair with an older man. I mean, he’d stayed away for, like, a year, so what did he expect? And he’d dated Karina—or at least gone out with her a few times in ways that friends didn’t do. But this all felt so unfair. So cold.

But not unfamiliar. Not unfamiliar at all.

It felt like all those old searing prongs felt when she’d last lied and betrayed him to his doom. Pulled the rug out from under him, suffocated him with it, rolled him up and pitched him off a deck into frigid lake water. All to get what she wanted. And now she had it all. If she kept her ex-husband in this apartment like a flower in the attic, then she would have everything.

“I’m welcome,” he admitted, hands out like he was surrendering. “But it’s not fair how you have everything.”

Kimmy wasn’t shocked or offended by his claim, saying only, “I don’t have everything, Josh. You’ve only been back in my life for an hour. There’s so much you don’t know.”

“So, tell me then. Tell me what I don’t see.”

Kimmy chewed her cheek, and the way she’d inclined her head and looked to the bedroom floor a meter away from his feet, he knew she didn’t want to talk about this.

“You have our daughter. You have our home. You have an amazing job. You travel. You have Sophie. You have Hyun as a helper. And you’re with a billionaire.”

Kimmy didn’t look up, but she stepped closer to him, eyes traveling to his chest, her hands reaching for him. She put her palms on him and it made his heart gallop in his chest. His temples throbbed.

“I do what I have to do,” she said, and looked up to meet his gaze. “But I love you. It’s you that I love, Josh.”

That hot coal flared like an ember in a breeze, and though he wanted to grit his teeth and spit vitriol, he held her upper arms. Forgot how fine she was, how wonderful her slender arms felt in his grip. Kimmy was close to tears again, and what he saw in those dark eyes was earnest communication. Like a silent voice begging for someone who held their fate to spare them. To not do what would be so easy for them to do.

And right there a hopeful spark lit a flare that illuminated some of the kinder aspects of his life with her. There were things about her he loved. And it wasn’t long ago. In fact, the time he’d spent hating her was very brief. The time he’d spent loving her was long. And it was good.

His hands stroked her upper arms, his neck swelled with the pounding blood. He felt wide awake and electrified. He felt like he could crush Kimmy if he wanted. Like a pop can. Or spiritually, too. He could walk out on her and she would think of him every day for the rest of her life and it would hurt her. She would think of him every day she looked in their daughter’s eyes and saw a piece of the man she’d ruined. He could kiss her. He could throw her on the bed in this dim bedroom. He could fuck her. He could bend her over and fuck her. His muscles were like cords; he could pick her up and toss her out the window she expected him to sit by while she cavorted with the father of his high school bully. He felt strong like the day he’d thrown the chair at Devlin.

He gripped her skinny arms tighter and yanked her close. It was she who kissed him. It was Kimmy’s mouth who sought out his. Not the other way around.

With their mouths together, their breaths intersecting and finding sympathetic pace, their bodies pressed, a lot of the good and true love they’d felt rang in his mind like a distant church bell. His hands stroked from her upper arms, down to circle her wrists. Kimmy melted against him, his kiss like a port-connection supplying her with power. The lightness of her body raced his heart. It felt wonderful to have her body sealed against his own. She was light and nimble and unique; he’d missed how it felt to hold her.

When he’d held Karina, the dissimilarity ached under his fingers; a foreign terrain daunting him with the demand for familiarity. But conversance required sacrifice and venture, and the journey seemed steep uphill. He’d not been up to the task. Not fit enough for travel.

Kimmy’s landscape was familiar. It was easy travel; touch was informal, unpretentious. And obliged. She was his to touch. Even if another man had entered her life, Kimmy was his by law and by surrender. Kimmy had said so herself on the altar the day they were married.

He broke their kiss, and Kimmy looked up with wounded eyes. He had trouble deciphering the source of her wounding. What would make those eyes hurt?

He said, “You want me to sit here in this room and watch out the window as your life moves on?”

“No, Josh,” she said, brow knitting.

“What do you see in him?”

Kimmy looked up and away, seeking to rest her cheek now on his chest again. To escape his questions. To deny him the truth. He wouldn’t let her hide, taking her shoulders and holding her in place.

“His money? His power? You like being in the paper?”

Kimmy stared back at him with dull, sober eyes. She said nothing, like a woman waiting out a storm. Just watching.

He tilted up his chin, almost sneering. “What else, Kimmy? Does he do bad things in bed?”

She winced, turned away a measure like his words disgusted her. He asked her, “Is that it?”

She shook her head no imperceptibly, but not enough he didn’t notice. It was a dismissal. Kimmy thought she was so much better than his petty grievances. Was that it?

“Tell me. What can a fifty-five year old man offer you? Money and power. You don’t think that’s it? What else? Does he have a big horse dick like his son?” He sneered again, disgusted by his own words, but loving the juxtaposition of his awful wife and her lover and now her lover’s father; sin upon sin. Sin with no end.

Kimmy closed her eyes and breathed. When she opened them again, quiet and stony, she said, “What if it’s all of those things?”

He let her shoulders go and made a satisfied sound in his throat. His wife’s depravity confirmed. She was the wicked woman he knew her to be.

But he hated her unbothered acceptance; her casual dismissal of his complaint, the arrogant establishment of how low she would go to get what she wanted.

He shook his head, showing her contempt and a dismissal of his own. If he was braver he would tell her in words. Tell her how she was nothing to him. Tell her how she was beneath him.

“You wanted to know, so now you know,” she said. “What are you going to do about it?”

“What’s there to do?” He jabbed his hands toward the bedroom window. “I guess I’ll sit here to make you happy. I’ll sit here and make your life complete. How does that sound to you?”

Kimmy looked down, put her hands out and touched his waist. “You don’t have to, Josh. It’s up to you.” She slipped her thumbs into the belt loops at his hips and pulled his pelvis into hers. She whispered, “You can always close the blinds.”

His jaw dropped, and he regarded her with awful reproach. He shook his head with comical disbelief, amazed at how she could coil and strike like a snake, when she’d been so sweet and innocent since he first arrived in her lair.

She tugged the belt loops again, instigating, bullying. Challenging him. “It’s up to you what you want to do.”

Their eyes met again. All the things he’d wanted to say to her in his darkest times tumbled on his tongue. It felt good to imagine saying them, but even the smallest actual utterance would put a barrier between them that maybe he couldn’t afford if he wanted to raise a child with her. But saying nothing felt like letting her win. Letting her get away with it.

He stood upright and strong, not backing down from her even though he bit his tongue.

She knew it, too. Smiling wanly, eyes hooded, lips pursing. “I know you hate me.”

“I wish I cared enough to hate you.”

She flashed him a degree-wider smile. “You care. You know you do.”

“Why do you want to torment me?”

She showed grave concern now. “I don’t, Josh. I don’t want to torment you. I want to love you and I want you to love me.” Her hands left his belt loops and pressed on his lower back, just above his ass. She stared into his eyes. The look was deep and probing.

She kissed him again and he let her, twisting his head on his neck to form a better seal against her plump lips. He pressed his pelvis into her. She was soft and receptive, hips moiling against him, locating his hardness, pressing into it. 

The kiss broke as her stomach squashed his rock hard erection, and she looked in his eyes with a hunger he hadn’t seen in over a year. He pressed his brow to her brow, both of them breathing heavy. Pure liquid hate rushed through his ears with a whoosh. Hate not for her but for his own weakness. His sexual reception to the worst his wife offered.

He shook his head no and stepped back. Kimmy was undeterred, untying her robe’s satin belt and letting the folds fall open. He kept shaking his head side to side, simple defiance against her inexorable progress. She tossed the robe to the bed. 

“You’ve been with him?” His voice was a low and mean rumble.

Kimmy showed no reaction to his question, cocking her head like a wise corvid, studying him, pursuing him, stepping into his personal ring, past his shields and armor and where she could sink her poisonous blade into where he was soft and squishy and most vulnerable. He looked away, turning his mouth corners down, like the sight of her disgusted him. She kissed his chin, kissed his neck. Her hand smoothed between his legs, long palm and fingers soaring over his aching denim bulge. He said, “What are you doing?”

“You’re my husband, Josh.” Her hand stroked up and down, squeezed. His knees jellied and the room swooned. He inhaled a sharp intake.

He turned his head farther but she kept kissing his neck and jaw. She said, “You think you’re just going to sit and look out the window?”

All sorts of freaky endeavors flashed in lurid porno clips; Devlin’s cock against his own cock, Kimmy taking Devlin deep inside her while he watched; an old man with white hair and a sagging scrotum under his decrepit horse cock pounding into her while Kimmy squawked in time with his thrusts.

Her hands came together at his waist and undid his belt. She was looking in his eyes. She said, “You’re my husband, Josh.”