“I do, too,” she admitted.
I hushed her with my lips as my hand worked the buttons of her jeans. I pushed them down far enough to get my fingers where they wanted to be, then proceeded to make her cry my name out over and over before I finally offered mercy.
I entered her slowly, pulled back, and entered her again. She surrounded me, engulfed me, and made me whole as I came apart inside of her.
All in all, it was a pretty good wedding night.
*****
The
usual quiet morning in my uncle’s household was interrupted with an early arrival to Sunday dinner. The voices, though the volume was low enough not to wake anyone upstairs, were heated and very familiar. I stopped my descent down the stairs and dropped my ass onto a step, unsure of what to do next.
I was supposed to be out of the house before this happened.
“He’s been here for days?” Douglass growled in a barely hushed voice. “My son has been here at your house for days, and you don’t even tell me? Seriously, Michael?”
“You aren’t going to help any of this if you go off on a tirade,” Michael responded with considerably more calm. “That certainly never helped in the past.”
“Nice,” he muttered back. “I don’t need that thrown in my face.”
Leaning out slightly to peer down the winding staircase, I could see both of them standing in the foyer, blocking my escape. My father was in tan pants and a light blue polo shirt, and he paced back and forth over the marble floor looking like he was in the rough, searching for lost golf balls.
“I’m not throwing it in your face,” Michael said, “but I am reminding you why you need to calm the fuck down. He’s upstairs, and this isn’t an executive meeting.”
“I know, I know,” Douglass mumbled. “I’m sorry, you’re right.”
They both walked off to the right and out of my view. As much as I knew no good could come of it, I quietly walked the rest of the way down the stairs and toward the entrance to the kitchen. I could hear them both drop down on the stools at the breakfast bar, and my father took several long breaths before he started talking again.
“How does he look?” he asked. “Is he okay? I mean, is he in trouble or anything?”
“He looks…okay,” Michael said.
“That doesn’t sound good.”
I shifted to the other side of the door, and I could see their dim reflections in a large landscape painting in the foyer. Michael’s hands gripped a coffee cup as he spoke.
“He called from the same area where the police picked him up the first time.”
“Shit—at that nasty warehouse? Where they found him with that dead girl?”
A brief flash, a vague memory of police cars, sirens, an ambulance, and the pale, expressionless face of a woman whose name I didn’t know flashed through my head. I blinked rapidly, but there was nothing else to the memory. There was nothing else except mental fog and heroin-induced apathy.
“That place was torn down years ago,” Michael said. “But he wasn’t far from the area.”
“Is he…is he doped up again?”
“No…no,” Michael said quietly. “He said he was tempted, but he wasn’t high when I found him.”
“Jesus Christ,” my father whispered. He gripped at his hair for a moment as he leaned his elbows on the bar. “I thought we were past that. I thought that trainer said she was going to keep him clean.”
“He’s all right, Douglass. He’s safe and he’s here. Be thankful for that.”
“I can’t believe you kept this from me,” Douglass said. “When we agreed you would keep tabs on him, this wasn’t what we discussed. Did your PI even know what was happening?”
“I was planning on telling you over dinner tonight,” Michael said. “The PI’s reports come to me weekly, and the last one informed me he was no longer in his apartment. He lost track of Liam for a couple of days, and by the time he figured it out, Liam was here.”
Another long sigh.