Sleeping with Beauty (Seven Ways to Sin 2)

I apologized to her for my jealousy, about how sometimes I didn’t listen as well as I should. I promised her that when she woke up, things would be different. I told her about how proud I was of us, the seven—her seven—how we all had come together and acted like a team. I also told her that I was sad because it seemed like we were acting as two teams: the seven of us going one way and her going another.

I said to her that we would need to work on this. We would need to figure out how we could all work together as one like we had on the film. I told her I knew it was possible. I said that we just had to keep trying. I told her I would keep trying and that I would get better, and I asked her to keep trying, too.

“But first, you need to wake up, Bonita.”

I didn’t know if she heard anything I was saying. I didn’t know if her mind—conscious or subconscious—was registering any of my words or their meaning. It didn’t matter. I knew that I would tell her all this again when she woke up. My speech—clumsy and stammering—was like a rehearsal, a much-needed rehearsal.

I realized just how bad I was at sharing my feelings. My thoughts came out disorganized and confused, often contradictory. Or perhaps it was that these feelings were all so new to me. Either way, I was doing a terrible job expressing what I felt. Have words even been created to describe this?

I thought of what her father had told me over lunch, how I should have Bonita lie on the couch and practice my social psychology on her. I remembered laughing at the lunch table. But there, at Bonita’s bedside, I cried.

Well over three days, nearly one hundred hours since we started the treatment, and we were beginning to get discouraged. No one expressed any doubts, but I could see it on their faces. And I could feel doubt constricting my heart, too.

When it was my shift again, I told Bonita about the doubts I was experiencing. I admitted to her that I was not as strong as I’d thought, that I let on to be. I didn’t know if Bonita heard anything I was saying. I didn’t know if her mind—conscious or subconscious—was registering any of my words or their meaning. I decided that I would not tell her this again when she woke up.

Her lips were at the point of drying. I readied the dispenser and waited for the precise instant to administer the next drop.

I squeezed, and the drop fell from the dispenser and hit her lips, as they had done countless times over the last few days. However, this time, as the drop hit her lips, Bonita’s chest rose, and she gasped.

I froze, afraid my eyes and ears were deceiving me, afraid that if I moved, the sweet delusion of Bonita recovering would vanish.

Bonita raised an arm and put her hand to her mouth. Her eyelids fluttered open, and she turned her head to me.

“Bonita.” All the words I had rehearsed hundreds of times to say to her when she’d wake up, they were all forgotten. “Bonita, I love you.”

22

Bonita

I was bound and gagged, lying on the floor, watching the sunrise and its deadly rays come through the window. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, Noah’s face was inches from mine. My hands were free, and there was a fire on my lips.

Noah said, “Bonita, I love you.”

Had I not seen his lips move, I would have thought the words were being spoken directly into my mind and not to my ears.

I put my hands on Noah’s cheeks and pulled him to me.

I kissed him, and the fire on my lips spread to my chest. A wave of heat shot through my legs down to my toes, causing them to twitch. My hands fell from his cheeks and onto the collar of his shirt. I grabbed his shirt and twisted my hands into tight fists. I pulled him closer and kissed him deeper. Come here, Noah. Why are you so far away?

My legs kicked from side to side. I felt a surge of energy like I had never felt before. I pulled Noah onto me. I squeezed the muscles on his chest and arms. “Noah,” I said.

“Bonita,” he said.

I kissed him again until my need for breath had me reluctantly pull away. I took in a lungful of air. I rolled Noah onto the bed beside me. Then I jumped on top of him. I grabbed his hair. “Noah,” I said.

“Bonita,” he said.

I kissed him. The fire that coursed through my body heated my clothes. I thought they would burst into flames. I tore my shirt open. My nipples hardened as my breasts, freed from the confines of my shirt, met the cool air. I arched back and pulled Noah’s head to them.