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Trust corroded
MIA
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I GRAB MY CELL.
I want to be in bed when I hear his voice the first time, under the covers, cozy and warm.
My stomach keeps dipping and fluttering.
And I’m still shamefully wet. It’s like this ravenous beast took hold of me. I’m pulsing and throbbing and so hot and empty. And it’s so much easier to focus on my body than to think about what I’m really doing and what it means.
What am I doing?
Not overthinking this.
I crawl onto the bed on wobbly knees, with shaky hands, my fingers sinking into the hot pink roses on my blue bedspread. I’ve never been so turned on. Not once in my whole life.
Stranger keeps on teaching me new things about myself.
I let the image of him play in my mind. A stranger with eyes that cut right through me. This mysterious man who sees me more clearly than anyone ever has, even though he’s never even met me.
I can see it perfectly. A darkened room, a warm bed. I picture him lying on his back. I’d straddle his thighs. He’d come inside me, hard with a grunt. I can practically see his eyes clenching, his mouth tightening. But I wouldn’t have come. Not yet. He’d withhold it on purpose, toy with me, keep me on the edge, make me so stupid with desire I’d do anything for him.
Our eyes would lock. His dark and unreadable. I see it, like a dream so real I can feel his breath tickling over my breasts. He would slide two fingers inside me, rub them over my lips, smearing them around my face, defiling me, violating me.
He likes it like that. I know he does.
And apparently so do I.
In my mind, his eyes flare. The taste of him, of me, of us fills my mouth.
My phone rings.
Oh god. It’s him. Can I do this?
This is another one of those turning points. I could ignore him. I don’t have to answer.
I could block him.
It’s a number from upstate New York. Oh no, he’s not even that far away. How did we not talk about that already?
I roll onto my back and pick up the phone.
“Stranger?” My voice comes out breathy and pathetic. I’m so nervous my hands are shaking.
“Mia.”
His voice vibrates through my ears, so palpable my neck arches. I’ve wondered about it, worried about it. What if it’s falsetto? What if he stutters? What if he has some horrid accent? What if he’s one of those people who ends every sentence with a question mark?
I should probably say something smart or funny.
I know so much about this man—but so much is still unknown. And that has my throat tightening. My eyes well up. I cover them with my hands.
“Hey.”
Who am I?
I am a woman who talks to strangers online when by all laws of humanity, she should be planning her wedding to another man. I am a woman with sex fantasies. A woman who isn’t sure about what she wants from her future anymore. A woman who isn’t sure she knows who she even wants to be.
All my life, I’ve known what my future looked like. The husband, the house, the kids. But somehow I ended up writing sexy books. Somehow I ended up talking to this weird internet Stranger. And somehow, he’s all I think about, all I care about.
Why?
When did I become this person? When did Jer become the other man?
“Did you get in bed?” His voice is not falsetto. It’s rich and deep and just a little gritty. And he doesn’t have an accent, a lisp, or a stutter. He just sounds sexier than hell.
I let out a frustrated laugh. “How did you know?”
He laughs, and the sound is beautiful. A low chuffing, like a cross between a throaty groan and a breathy sigh. I picture him smiling.
Ten minutes ago, all I wanted was to hear his voice, now I want to see him smile. I want to know the shape of each and every tooth. “Just a guess. I picture you with flowers.”
He knows me so well. I’m constantly surprised in moments like these.
“My bedspread has pink flowers. Where are you?”
“In my kitchen. Sitting at a barstool. Overlooking the hills in my picture. Tell me about your panties.”
“Absolutely not.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I refuse to have our first conversation be like that.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I need to get used to your voice. I’m nervous.”
“Cute.”
“Just talk.”
“No, Mia. I don’t just talk. You’ll have to ask me a question.”
“You’re kind of a jerk.”
“Surprised?”
“No.” I chew on my lip. “Tell me about the hill.”
“My mountain? It’s in my picture. You’ve seen it.”
“Yes.”
I tug down the covers and crawl under them, rest my head on a pillow.
“It’s in my backyard. That’s where we hike.”
“Why?”
“Gogo likes it.”
I smile.
“And you? Do you like it?”
There’s a pause, like maybe he’s thinking. I’m not sure. And then he starts talking. “Yeah. My dad was a hiker. Used to take us with him. My brother and me. Whole summer sometimes. Just the three of us. Hiking reminds me of him. He’s dead now. Been dead a long time.”
I close my eyes, and try to imagine his face, try to picture what he’s doing, and I can’t. He comes up almost blank. It doesn’t really matter. He’s real, this man. And it’s surreal to hear him talk.
“I’m sorry.” I feel stupid saying it, but it’s what people say.
“He took us all over the place.”
“Does James hike with you?”
“He used to.” Another long pause. “He can’t hike anymore.”
Oh. I squeeze the bedspread, wondering if it happened while he was in the Marines. “How badly was he injured?”
There’s a noise in the background, like he’s tapping his foot, or a hand or something. “His unit took an RPG to a rear wheel of their transport truck. Fired from an apartment complex. He lost both legs.”
My heart clenches. That’s why he lives with him. Stranger takes care of him. “I’m sorry, Stranger.”
He makes a noise that both acknowledges and rejects my words. “You don’t have to say that Mia. You didn’t hurt him.”
“I know.”
“New subject,” he says.
“Send me a picture of you,” I blurt.
“Right now?”
“Yes, right now. One where I can see your eyes. One where you’re smiling.”
“I don’t smile.”
“Bad teeth?”
“No.”
“Irritable bowels?”
He laughs, I think more from surprise than anything else.
“You know, you can’t laugh without smiling. So you just smiled.”
“Alright. I’ll send a picture. Take one of yourself. Right now. I want to see you, just as you are.”
I lift my phone, switch it to the camera screen, spend a few seconds slithering on the bed to get a flattering angle. The light is bad. I’ve looked better, but my hair is all spread out over a flowery pillow and I look like a woman in desperate need of a few orgasms. I shrug, make my mirror face.
Click.
Before I can think about it, I send it to him.
His comes back to me a second later. He’s kind of frowning at the camera, but I can see his eyes. Finally. They’re hazel, slightly angled up at the corner. He looks a little amused, his kitchen behind him. A stainless-steel range, a wood table in the distance, spartan, no-nonsense. It makes me sad for some reason.
“You have good eyes,” I say. They are a rich amber, green and gold swirling together. Thick brows. A Roman nose. And those cheekbones.
Oh no.
He just got way hotter.
That dimple. That perfect dimple. And in the edge of the photo is just the tiniest flash of a biceps at the bottom of a simple white cotton tee. A very, very nice biceps, covered in bold colorful swirling tattoos.
I swallow. “Why can’t you be ugly? Or scrawny. It would make it so much easier.”
He’s quiet for a minute. I picture him staring at my picture.
“You’re pretty.”
I’m used to men telling me I’m pretty, but for some reason, the simplicity of his tone makes me feel like he doesn’t just mean my face. He means me, the me he’s gotten to know in these months of frenetic messaging.
“Tell me more about those hills,” I say.
And he does.
He tells me about a trail he takes, the flowers that come out in the spring, and the deer, foxes, blue jays he sees, the wineries he passes. I ask questions, little ones, enough so he doesn’t start to worry that we lost our connection, enough to let him know I’m there, and I’m listening. He talks about Gogo and how she has her favorite trails.
He’s chattier than I imagined. I’m glad he can’t see me, because I’d look ridiculous just smiling, my face half buried into my pillow, hanging on his every gravelly-voiced word.
Stranger tells me about this wild encounter he once had, how he turned on a trail and stumbled into an old couple—with white hair—he says that part like it’s the most important part, having wild sex against a tree.
“What did you do?”
“I left them to it. Backed right up. What was I supposed to do, clap? Watch? What would you have done?”
I spend the whole time laughing or smiling, and so happy. He’s real. I’m not sure I’ve been so happy in my whole life except as a child, during summer evenings at the boardwalk, on roller-coasters under a sunny sky.
And finally, after a while, he goes quiet. “Tell me about your fiancé.”
The question comes out of nowhere or maybe everywhere. If Stranger feels even half of what I do—he must be desperate to know about Jeremy.
I groan. “Can we talk about something else?”
“He’s off limits?”
“No. It’s just... I feel guilty.”
“About talking to me?”
About dropping my panties for you, about thinking about you in my every waking second and half my sleeping ones. “About all of this.”
I’m so afraid he’ll downplay it. Say what? We’re just friends.
But he doesn’t. “I get that. This is... unusual.”
I hold my breath, wait for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t, so I ask, “for you? I’ve never done this before.”
“Neither have I.”
“You don’t meet women online all the time?”
“No. And this is months of buildup. If this is too much, if it’s too awkward, we can stop.”
I pluck at the covers.
“Do you want to stop?” he asks.
I don’t know. “I don’t think so. I’m just confused. I don’t know what I want. We’re supposed to get married in February. A white wedding. But instead of planning it, I spend all my time talking to you.”
“Should I apologize for that?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. It’s just... He runs a business. He works constantly. He’s tired and overworked,” I say lamely. I don’t want to think about Jer, with his gentle hooded eyes, his slender frame, his nervous habit of chewing on his thumbnail. “He’s a good man. He’s kind.”
Stranger doesn’t say anything. The silence builds.
“Are you kind, Stranger?”
“I can be. But no. In general, I’m not a kind man.”
“That scares me. You scare me. You don’t just make up your stories during walks in the woods.”
“No.”
“Where do you get them?”
“I don’t want to lie to you. Tell me something nice. Tell me about your family.”
I do. Maybe it’s willful ignorance, but I let him keep his secrets, and I blabber. Just talk. I don’t even know how long. At some point my phone’s battery gets down to a thin red bar, and I’m embarrassed. I just blabbed his ear off. He’s a good listener. “Can I tell you a secret, Stranger?”
“You can say anything. I’ll listen.”
My eyes burn. My throat tightens. “I don’t know if I want to marry my fiancé.”
There’s a long pause. The words are there, like great big, looming smears in the air. I want to take them back. Sweep them away.
“Because of me?”
“No. Sort of. Not because I want you, but because I always had this little nugget of doubt. And it’s like I can see now how it could be if I were with a different man. A man who talked to me. Who listened like I had something worth saying. Not you, but maybe someone like you.”
“But not me?”
My face crumples. “I don’t know. I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.” My voice rises. “I didn’t even know I liked cum buckets. I just thought I wrote that weird stuff, and then you sometimes say things offhand and it’s like... it strikes a chord. It resonates, and I realize I’ve been wanting something my whole life and I don’t have it. It’s like there’s been this hole, and you’re filling it up. But I don’t even know you.”
I said it. The silent fear that’s been building, that I’ve been alone my whole life, just found the perfect person who could complete me, and I’m going to lose him. That he isn’t real, doesn’t feel the same way, is just some painful, hateful dream.
The silence hurts.
My heart thunders, and my throat tightens.
I imagine him replaying my words, analyzing them, picking them apart. He has a talent for that.
There’s a soft wet click, like he just opened his mouth. “I’m just a man, Mia.”
But can I trust you? Can I trust you not to break my heart? What do you want from me? What’s in it for you? What will happen when this fizzles out, when you’re gone and I’m alone again? It wasn’t so bad before, I didn’t see that I was alone, but now I know, and how will I handle that? The questions build, inflating and filling the room around me with unspoken menace, making the silence almost smother me.
“Are you married?” I finally ask.
“If I were, I wouldn’t be talking to you.”
I flinch.
He draws in the kind of breath people do when they’re working up to saying something big. “I know this is weird for you. I just like talking to you. I think about you a lot.”
I scoff, all tear-clogged and wet. “About fucking me. It’s not the same thing at all.”
“Not just that. I find myself thinking about you at random times. Walking through the woods, I see something and I wonder what you’d say. I wonder what it would be like if you were with me. Sometimes it’s sexual. Other times it’s not.”
“Like... what?” I know where this is going. I’m not dumb. I can’t pretend I don’t know, but it’s just... I want it to go there, need something more. Even knowing this is wrong, I crave it.
“I’m curious about you.”
I wait. I don’t even breathe, just squeeze my eyes shut and fear-hope what’s about to come out of his mouth, in his deep, sexy, gritty, velvety, powerful voice.
“How you smell. How you move. How your skin feels. How your tongue tastes.”
I make that whimper. It’s completely involuntary. In the back of my throat.
His words linger on my skin like an incantation. He has magic, this man. And he’s working it on me, enthralling me. “I imagine just being with you,” he says. “Interacting. Do you ever think about me?”
“Far too often.”
“What do you think about?”
“I want to smell your neck.” I wince after saying it. His answer was so much better.
He laughs. “My neck?”
“Yeah. Like, right behind your ear. I want to touch it with my nose, breathe you in.”
He’s quiet.
I scrunch up my face and force myself to press on. “I kinda maybe just a little bit, have thought about sitting on your lap, feeling the heat of your body, touching your hands, feeling you breathe. Just, you know, to know you’re real.”
“I’m real. What do you think we’d do if we met?”
It’s my turn to awkward-laugh. “A lot of things. That’s why we can’t ever meet.”
“Never?” His voice is so incredulous that I can’t help but laugh again.
“I’m engaged. And this is... insane.”
“I think,” he says in his slow and measured voice. “It would be sad if I never got to look you in the eyes.”
I laugh in spite of myself. “Are you just telling me what I want to hear?”
“No.”
“Yes. I don’t trust you, Stranger Lowe.”
“That’s because you’re smart.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I want you.”
I swear my heart skips a few beats. Maybe a hundred. I don’t know. “Why?”
There’s a long pause. So long I start to worry that I’ve made him uncomfortable, stretched this out to be more than it is.
“I don’t know, Mia. This means something to me. This... whatever it is. It feels important somehow. Like we’re building toward something. Something real.”
My throat is tight. It’s been months of this strange dance, where we shift around the meaning of things, ignore what’s right in front of us, pretend this is okay, what we’re doing. That it doesn’t matter. I’m terrified that he’s an illusion, a catfish from the bottom of the swamp, that he’s destroying my life for fun. For so long, I’ve been so afraid that he’s nothing but a liar, a con man who says whatever I need to hear. Maybe he is.
“I don’t know what to think. I’m engaged. To a good man. And this is...” I close my eyes, accept it, own it, acknowledge it, stare my own darkness in the face. “This is emotional infidelity, what I’m doing. It’s wrong.”
He lets out a long, protracted sigh and I stare at his face on my phone. I try to imagine his brows furrowed, his sexy perfect lips tight with frustration. “Look, Mia. I’m the kind of guy who goes after what he wants. I don’t back off. But I will. If you want me to, I’ll go away, leave you alone.”
His voice echoes in my ear. I burrow under the covers. Goosebumps rise over my skin. “You never do what I expect.”
“Do you want me to go away?”
“No.”
“My neck smells like soap.”
My lips stretch into a wide grin.
“We will meet, Mia. You’ll like me.”
“Even though you’re a jerk.”
“I wouldn’t be a jerk to you.”
My eyes well up all over again. This is a roller-coaster, a big one, the upside down kind, where you lose your stomach, and for a second you think you might die, but then the world turns over again and you’re so insanely joyous to be alive. It’s a high, talking to him like this. I’m off kilter. The world is shifting. And I want it to keep right on shifting. I want it all to crumble.
“I should go,” I say. “My phone is dying.”
“Let’s talk again soon, pretty Mia. And next time, you’re going to tell me about your panties.”