Forever After Read online

  He pressed his aroused parts into my pelvis and I could feel his need to tear my clothes off, rip apart my panties and throw my body into a position where he could just take me. Or maybe that was me wishing for those things. I think it was both of us. But we restrained ourselves, trying to keep our pact. Although our pact didn’t include anything other than penetration, so . . .

  I whispered with steamy breath into his ear while I reached down to touch him. “I can’t wait to feel you inside me.” He let out a groan of pleasure and agony.

  “Don’t do that to me or you’ll be in trouble.”

  “Yes. Punish me. I deserve to be punished.”

  His laugh sounded more like a primal growl.

  We agreed we would only kiss and play around the edges. So we kissed. The most intimate act of love two people can exchange. Certainly kissing is way more intimate than sex. Up until now, it was something I’d avoided during sex. Now here I was, enjoying every moment of Grant’s sweet breath, every brush of stubble from his face. I couldn’t get enough of his kiss. Forty-five minutes had passed and all we’d done was kiss—and play around the edges.

  My face hurt. My cheeks were red and whisker-burned. My lips were swollen and I was a girly mess who needed a cold shower. Grant looked hot and bothered. His hair was a tangled nest and there was an uncomfortable bulge in his pants that needed to be taken care of.

  “I’d better go before we both cave. Why are we doing this pact thing again? And what time is it?” I asked.

  He clenched his teeth together then reluctantly pulled me up and into his arms. “It’s late. I have no idea why we’re keeping this pact. When will I see you again?”

  “This week, Wednesday?” I grinned.

  “Same time?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you get here first, let yourself in.”

  He walked me to the door, groping and teasing me from behind with frustrated grunts of desire. His hands and lips were begging me not to leave. My heart was begging me not to leave.

  …

  On my way to u, u fn hottie.

  Chapter 3

  Forever After-Grant

  The roads were blustery and the icy wind deadly. The windows of Grant’s car were fogged. This is a normal winter for us, a normal Friday night with a babysitter that had taken over so we could use our season tickets. I didn’t care much about hockey, but I did care about spending time alone with my husband whenever we had the chance. Plus, I had more questions. I pulled my laptop out from the backpack between my feet.

  C.J.: Honey, since we’re not doing anything for the next hour I thought we could knock out a few more of my questions.

  He doesn’t look thrilled.

  Grant: Sure.

  C.J.: Okay, question number one. If you could shape shift into any animal what animal would it be?

  He takes a few moments and thinks about it as he spits dill pickle sunflower seeds into a cup.

  Grant: A falcon.

  C.J.: A falcon? That’s so random. Why a falcon?

  Grant: Why not? Don’t you think flight is amazing?

  C.J.: [shrugging] I guess.

  Grant: Did you know flight has evolved separately several times throughout history? I know when I’m about to get an evolutionary biology lesson and this is definitely it. Ground birds who couldn’t fly but who could hop and had wings eventually started to glide short distances. Over time their bones got lighter, their wings longer and gliding turned into flying.

  It actually is fascinating.

  C.J.: What’s more fascinating to me is the adaptations of the octopus. That book I’m reading is so good.

  Grant: Don’t tell me about it. I want to read it too.

  We’re discussing The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

  C.J.: You should get the paperback so we can read it together and discuss it in the hot tub.

  The hot tub is our thing too.

  Grant: That’s a great idea. Let’s have a hot tub date when we get back tonight.

  C.J.: Okay but can I just tell you one thing about the octopuses? Please. ‘Cause I don’t think you’ll really read it. You have too many unread books you’re still trying to finish.

  It’s true of both him and me. In this way we are the same.

  Grant: Okay fine tell me.

  C.J.: It’s just super interesting how intelligent they are. The author is talking about this one octopus that carries two empty coconut shells as it walks stiff legged across the ocean floor. When it needs to hide it puts the halves back together then slips inside. They use tools!

  Grant: Okay don’t tell me anymore. I want to read it.

  C.J.: But just let me tell you one more thing. Please? ‘Cause you won’t actually read it anytime soon so by the time you do, you might forget what I’m telling you. He sighs and looks at me like he knows I’m right. But if there is anything I don’t like it’s spoilers, so I’ll concede. Fine I won’t tell you. Back to my questions. What do you want me to do with your body when you die if you go before me? I know we’ve talked about it, but best we figure this out and get it on paper.

  Grant: Well I certainly don’t want to be a rotting corpse in the ground. Hey do you think that cemetery in Maui has flooded yet?

  Grant is the king of bouncing the ball from topic to topic, but I never mind. Of course I know which cemetery he is referring to.

  C.J.: Flooded yes. Bodies floating that need to be relocated? I guess we’ll find out soon. I can’t wait to go to Hawaii.

  Grant: Me either. Speaking of, would you be okay if I flew to the Big Island for one night to do a manta dive? It’s a night dive where you scuba dive with the manta rays.

  C.J.: Of course I’ll be okay. But are those like the ray Steve Irwin got stabbed in the heart by and died?

  Grant: No, those were stingrays. These are mantas, much larger, no stingers. You should look it up. They are really amazing. Okay, I’m going to try to book it then.

  C.J.: How come you didn’t answer my question? If you die on this night dive, what am I supposed to do with your body?

  Grant: Hmm . . . I suppose cremate me.

  C.J.: That’s boring.

  Grant: Well since you’re so smart, what do you want me to do with your body when you die? His voice goes monotone and get’s all creepy. Maybe it’ll happen sooner than later.

  I ignore the insinuation. It’s a joke we’ve worn out on each other. The product of watching too many episodes of Dateline where it’s always the spouse who did it.

  C.J.: Unlike you, I actually have thought this through. I don’t want to be burned but I suppose it’s the most eco-friendly thing to do so, do that. Just make sure I’m dead, promise? Then I either want you to contact that company that turns ashes into reefs or that other place that puts your ashes in a tree pot of some sort. Your body’s nutrients grow the tree. Have you seen that?

  Grant: No. It sounds cool. Kinda morbid though. Would I plant the tree in the backyard then? Oh wait I know! I’ll plant you out at our favorite hiking spot by the river. You know what we should do? We should have our ashes mixed together then have someone go sprinkle them on our trail and in the river. We can also have some saved and buried so our kids will have a place they can go. Right?

  No matter how morbid it sounds I take it as very romantic.

  C.J.: I’m not sure it’s legal. Can you spread someone’s ashes in a state park?

  Grant: Probably not but no one will know.

  C.J.: Okay so whoever dies first gets cremated. Then those ashes are saved until the other person dies. Our designated mixer will combine our ashes together and spread them where we want them and then bury some too.

  Grant: Yes.

  C.J.: Count me in. You should put that in our will.

  Grant: I will. But you’ll put it in that book too?

  C.J.: Yes. But what if we die together in a plane crash and there are no ashes to mix?

  I wink. This is plan B. If we’re both still alive and ready to go, we’ll go together. />
  Grant: Well, if we do that then our ashes will definitely be mixed together anyway.

  C.J.: Good point. I like that. Speaking of death, if you wanted to commit the perfect murder and get away with it, how would you do it?

  He shoots up in his seat looking thrilled that I’ve asked this question.

  Grant: I’ve been meaning to tell you but keep forgetting that I have the perfect ending to your suspense novel.

  C.J.: How could you? You don’t even know what it’s about and it’s more horror. I’m not working on it right anyway. It’s more something that I thought about out loud to you once.

  Grant: I know. I just don’t think you should do the whole castration thing. It seems a little grotesque.

  C.J.: Of course it does. You’re a guy. My readers are female. They’ll appreciate it within the context.

  Grant: I have something better. It’s the perfect murder. So you’d have to have a female character who kills her husband or boyfriend, whatever. Make her a really good swimmer. The Olympic type. In the end, when she kills him, she takes him on a cruise ship—

  C.J.: This is not original. It will need to be original. But I’m not writing it anyway.

  Grant: Just wait. He shushes me then pokes me on the thigh. I flick his finger away aiming for his fingernail. Let me finish. I don’t know about the rest of the story, you can make that original. I’m just saying you should use this ending.

  C.J.: Great, just what I wanted. Someone to come up with a clever ending but not have a clue about the 200 pages that set it up. It’s okay, go on. I’ll just do all the hard work.

  Grant: Just listen, I said. So she takes him on a cruise. And she’s going to push him over the edge right? She knows that to get away with it, she has to fall in the water with him or it’ll look suspicious. But she can swim so it’s not really an issue.

  C.J.: Honey, can I just—

  Grant: So they both go into the water and she can swim around him without getting tired for hours, maybe days. She could taunt or torture him even, right? Right. When he’s so weak and she’s still not tired, she drowns him. She needs the satisfaction of killing him because of whatever happened before. In the 200 pages you haven’t thought of. Are you following me?

  C.J.: Yes.

  Grant: Here’s the best part. She has to survive out there for a while until rescue comes, so she’ll need a flotation device. What if she takes off his belt, blows air into his mouth and holds his nose shut like she’s doing CPR until his lungs are full. If she ties his belt tight around his neck to prevent the air from escaping, his body will float for days!

  I can almost feel his heart racing at this miracle ending he’s concocted. It’s sweet that he wants to help me write stories and this is indeed original, but I can’t resist the temptation to poke holes in his creation.

  C.J.: It’s . . . grotesque. Clever, but grotesque. I have a few questions though. How long can she stay in the water before she becomes hypothermic? And, IF she makes it through the night, what happens when the sun comes up? She’ll fry out there. Wouldn’t the dead body attract sharks? What about the bloated gas and rotting corpse smell? How does she get past that?

  Grant: The gasses released by the dead tissue would bloat the body and just make it float better. She’d just have to tolerate the smell.

  C.J.: But what if the body’s tissue gets so rotten, thin and wrinkled, it punctures and rips open and all the gasses leak out and water floods in and sinks his body? Or what happens if rescue does show up and she’s clinging to his dead body with his belt around his neck? Doesn’t that look suspicious?

  Grant: Maybe she pushes him under when she sees them coming or she could just tell them he drowned and she did what she had to do to survive. Honey, you should use it. My face looks unsure about this plot. What? You don’t think it’s good? Well what do you have that’s better if you’re so smart then?

  I laugh.

  He laughs.

  C.J.: Honey it’s brilliant, it is. You’re brilliant. I lean over to kiss him. He flicks me away with his wrist, he knows I’m patronizing him now. You brought the tickets, right?

  Grant: Of course. I set them on the back seat. They’re back there somewhere.

  C.J.: Why would you set them on the back seat? Why not like, in the glove box or your wallet? Why not just give them to me?

  I look in the back seat of his car and realize that we must have looked homeless to any passersby. College students who’ve just loaded up their whole life into their cars have less things packed into a back seat than this. I turn on the camera on my phone and take a video as he’s searching for the buried tickets.

  C.J.: Honey. This is bad. It’s getting worse as you get older.

  Grant: How can you say that? No it’s not, it’s getting better.

  C.J.: This is not better than the canoe or your office or boxes of receipts. You might think you’re more organized ‘cause you live with me but if I died, I’d worry for our kids.

  Grant: I told you they were here!

  He holds up two green and white game tickets and mumbles something as he stuffs things back in the car so he can shut the back door. I wrestle to get on my winter gear then walk to the front of the car where he is waiting for me with an outstretched arm. His thick glove covers my whole hand.

  He leads me along as we trot across the parking lot and into the giant hockey arena. It’s the same arena we’ve gone to each winter for the last few years. The arena where he eats nachos and I have Bavarian almonds and we drink lager beer together.

  For the next two hours I make smart-ass remarks or drift off into my own thoughts and ideas for my next book while he watches the game. I always pretend to care about who wins. I stand and cheer when the fireworks and loud buzzers prompt, we high five, and bump our hips together to the music. At the intermission we watch the kiss cam wondering when it will be our turn. Because when our time does come, we have a plan. Instead of kissing each other—which is boring and predictable—we’re each going to turn to the person on the other side and kiss them.

  On the ride home, I pull my pants and panties down to my ankles just to see what he does. We may or may not have found an abandoned country road. Or we might just have laughed at how neither of us was really in the mood and that it’s just fun to do shit like that to get a reaction.

  Chapter 4

  “EVERYTHING, EVEN HERSELF, WAS NOW UNBEARABLE TO HER.”

  ―GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, MADAME BOVARY

  Unloveable

  AFFAIRYTALE-Deleted Scene

  I had to get healthy and prepare myself for a real relationship. One in which I was a whole person. But I struggled to get past the feeling that I couldn’t let love in and truly feel it. I didn’t even know what such a creature looked like. Every relationship I’d been a part of consisted of two dysfunctional half people fused into a great, big dysfunction.

  I was sure I could find the answers in a book.

  I devoured an ocean of self-help books. Receiving Love, Passionate Marriage, The Five Love Languages, Getting the Love you Want, Love and Respect. Just to be thorough I re-read The Four Agreements, The Secret, The Power of Intention and finally Eat Pray Love, For Women Only and Codependent No More, for a second time.

  What I learned was that I had married my father and become my mother. My vagina needed an eyes-open orgasm, and that I didn’t want Levi to wash my car because I needed him to cook dinner with me instead. I found out that somewhere along the way I had become completely and utterly unlovable. Apparently I was not the only one afflicted. Volumes had been written.

  I had no idea why I felt this way. In truth, it didn’t matter. The important thing was that I needed to figure out how to reverse my disease. I needed to learn how to let love in.

  If you continue to reject his love, he will give up and stop loving you.

  I reminded myself every day that I was good enough to be loved by him and others. Every time anyone did something kind to me I would stop what I was doing, try to absorb wh
at they were saying and let it in. I also made a list of all of the things I was doing that kept love at arm’s length. Including but not limited to:

  Self-loathing

  Self-deprecation

  Body-dysmorphic disorder (self-diagnosed)

  Failure to get past humiliating and regretful events

  Lack of self-confidence

  Low-self esteem

  Chronic depression

  Injury and pain

  Loneliness

  Friendlessness

  Self-imposed isolationism

  The day I uncovered perceptions and traits about myself that were holding me back was another day toward becoming loveable. It was as if identifying them was somehow the first step to dissolving them. Soon after, I made another pivotal decision. One that began to shift the earth around me, moving the missing pieces of myself to slowly align and make me whole.

  I would stop reacting based on what I was feeling and start using logic and reason instead. In short, I was no longer going to trust my feelings. They had let me down, steered me off course, and created anguish I didn’t need.

  The feelings that I speak of are not the gut reactions you might get when you realize someone is following you and you’re in danger. What I was no longer going to allow was making decisions based on fear or anger. The feelings that often seemed to dictate which direction I would follow. Especially fear. That asshole. I was going to start living in the here and now. The one with a solid floor and four walls I could feel, see, smell and touch. I worked every day to not be ruled by those two jerk offs again. Respectfully, I understood their purpose but I no longer allowed those stooges to drive the car.

  Some days I did better than others, but in a short amount of time my work began to pay off. I started to experience life more fully—the good and the bad. Instead of believing what I felt in a fleeting moment, I’d force myself to stop and ask where is the evidence?