Defiance (New Adult Romance) (Isaac & Maya) (27 page)

“So what will you do?”

“What all retired rich women do,” she chuckles. “Go live on a beach somewhere warm and beautiful with a big pile of money and a young hot guy to spend it on, I guess. Maybe I’ll become a full time philanthropist to keep busy. Foreigners are a lot more forgiving of people like me, especially when we have deep pockets.”

“You won’t lose everything then.”

“If the only reason I’ve worked this hard was wealth, I’d have been sitting on that beach for a decade now. Respect is everything, Isaac. You have enough money to live comfortably behind whatever white picket fence you choose, yet you’re still trying to make something of yourself. I’m sure you understand what this will do to me, but you also know better than anyone how much I deserve it.”

“When this is over, we are even, Glory. It’s done.”

“I know that you’re done with me, Isaac,” she murmurs, staring off into the distance.

“I’m not. I want to be, but I’m not. You’re family. I don’t know if I can be around you, but I don’t want you to disappear from my life, either.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“I wish that I wanted nothing to do with you, I won’t lie, but… that’s not how I feel.”

Her eyes light up until she remembers that my feelings aren’t her only obstacle. “What about Maya?”

“She’s obviously very happy that I’m not going to prison, so maybe you two will be even, too. I don’t know. It depends.”

“On what?” she asks.

“If you have it in you to stop yourself from insulting her by throwing our past in her face. Or coming onto me, even if she’s not around.”

Glory nods slowly, but I can tell that pissed her off. Definitely not a good sign. “Does she know about your mom, about what I did?”

“Yes, she does. I went home and freaked out about it.”

“In front of her?”

“Of course.”

“She didn’t…”

“What?” I laugh. “Run away? Get turned off at a sign of weakness?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“No, she just held me and skipped class.”

She tries to hide her disgust and keep from cringing, but she can’t stop herself. “Nothing changed at all? Even in bed?”

“She’s seen me cry before, Glor. It just made us closer. That’s what love is.”

“Huh.” Glory shrugs. “Well, I still wouldn’t make a habit of it, Isaac. You don’t want too much of that in her head whenever she looks at you. Like I said, I compartmentalize. Not all women can do that.”

I know Gloria is as fucked in the head as they come and doesn’t know anything about love, but she does know quite a bit about sex and female desire. I’m suddenly very self-conscious, even though I doubt Maya really looks at me differently. Maybe she does have a tipping point that I’m unaware of, maybe there is a limit to how much weakness she can handle.

“Let me know if anything changes, Glory. Or if you need something. Within reason, of course.”

“Of course,” she replies.

“I’ll let myself out then.”

“Isaac…” she whispers as I turn to leave.

I spin back around to face her, but she doesn’t say anything else. She’s just standing there unsure, her hand straining toward me but with her arm tight against her side. So I smile at her reassuringly and nod. Sometimes you don’t need to say anything, not when you know someone this well. She grins back, timid at first, until the excitement and relief widen her lips. We haven’t reconciled yet, but we’re not estranged anymore, either.

“Take care of yourself… Mom,” I say, almost teasing.

Rolling her eyes, she shakes her head dismissively and scoffs, but she’s not at all angry like she usually is. Maybe she’s finally starting to understand that’s all there is left between us now. “I always do. Tell Maya I said hello.”

“We’re not quite there yet, Glor,” I laugh.

I can’t tell her that we might never be, not while she’s still in the middle of this. And I’m not sure if I should tell Maya that I came here, even though she deserves to know. Maybe once she’s done with school. I’m certainly not telling her that I’ll be arrested until I’m sure that’s actually happening.

How many secrets is it okay to keep? And what’s the difference between a secret and lie anyway? It doesn’t really matter because I think I’m at my limit for both. Too bad that’s not a good enough reason to burden her.

36

Maya

Something has obviously been bothering Isaac for almost a week now, but he won’t talk about it. At first I didn’t ask him, thinking it would be better if he just opened up on his own. When the patient approach didn’t yield results, I asked him directly, which was somehow even less effective. I know I shouldn’t push him. He’ll talk to me when he wants to talk. That would be fine under normal circumstances for a regular couple, but that simply isn’t our lives. If something is wrong, it can be an apocalyptic scenario involving prison, murder, modern day slavery, or hell, even all of the above.

It’s impossible to ignore how antsy he is, the way that thumb is always tapping against his thigh, the tension in his shoulders and his jaw. The only thing I can think to do is be extra sweet and cuddly, but that just leads to Isaac’s favorite distraction. Sex. He says it’s just a side effect from coming off the benzos, but it’s not. I know he’s taking more lately, which technically crosses into lying territory, but I can’t bring myself to call him on it.

I don’t know what to do. Isaac has been jumping on me the minute I walk through the door for a long time now, but it’s not the same. We used to just get it out of our systems and move on with our evening, but now we never get to the best part of the night when we talk about our day over dinner and cuddle in front of the TV. I miss seeing him curled up on the couch, reading, occasionally glancing up to see if I’m done with my homework. I miss the carefree kisses and laughter every morning before I went to school. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m the one that’s being distracted, not him. This isn’t too much energy, extra horny sex. It’s definitely keep-her-orgasming-so-she-isn’t-asking-questions sex.

Of course, it’s frigging fantastic because it’s still Isaac sex. Plus, if he does need to take his mind off everything and he’d like to use my body to do it, I’m more than happy to let him. Which is why I’m squirting and squirming right now, laid on my side with one leg dangling off the bed and the other stretched in the air with his hand wrapped around my ankle.

His fingers have been glued to my clit for more than an hour, but he isn’t in a teasing mood. The naughty things he keeps whispering make me blush and writhe like they always do, but they almost sound forced, like he’s performing or saying what he thinks I want to hear instead of the ultimate aphrodisiac, what he really wants. Even Isaac can’t fake that intoxicating hunger in his voice.

I let myself get lost in it anyway, my entire body relaxed and compliant as he does whatever he needs to do, regardless of his motivations. But then I hear a strange choking sound on the end of yet another dirty sentence. The hand holding my ankle tightens as his breathing gets faster, and his fingers are too rough.

“Hey…” I whisper.

“Hold still,” he answers harshly, bucking into me.

“Isaac, stop.” It just makes him go harder and I don’t want to say red, that always upsets him. “Baby, are you okay?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer. It’s dark and his head is down when I look up to check his expression, but his breaths are rapid and much too shallow. “Isaac,” I say firmly as I reach down and pull his hand away, locking my fingers with his. “Don’t make me say it.”

He stills inside of me, resting his cheek on my heel for a moment before kissing my ankle as he withdraws and slowly guides my leg down. I sit upright and start to ask him what’s wrong, but he bolts out of the bedroom before I can get a word out. My hips aching, I follow him, but he’s not in the living room. I find him on the kitchen floor, huddled naked in front of the cabinets.

“Isaac…” I murmur, crouching next to him and kissing his knee. “Baby, what is it? You can tell me.”

“You don’t disappear when I fuck you like that, do you?” he says softly. The little kid voice. Uh oh.

“No.” Okay, that’s a little bit of a white lie because sometimes I do and he knows it, his wide eyes looking up from under his brow. “Never enough not to notice if something is wrong.”

“I don’t want to do that with you. I don’t even know where the line is.”

“I don’t either,” I reply honestly.

His face contorts as my thumb grazes his hairline. He keeps it together for a few seconds while I trace my fingers on his scalp, but then he draws in a hitched breath, the tears in his eyes overflowing. I kiss them away as I scoot closer, gently pushing his knee down from his chest so that I can crawl into his lap. It’s the close
st I can get to holding him. Choking out a sob, he wraps his arms around my waist and pulls me closer, burying his face into my neck.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, trying to pull himself together but he can’t, breaking down again with his forehead pressed against my breastbone.

“Baby, it’s okay,” I assure him as his crying reverberates through my body.

“No, it’s not. I’m supposed to be the strong one.”

“Isaac, that’s not how it has to be all the time. We can take turns.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I typically don’t enjoy freaking the hell out either, but there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s why it’s called freaking out,” I say, making him chuckle a little bit between the sobs. “Isaac, please.
Please
just tell me what’s going on. I can’t take this anymore.”

He lifts his face, his jaw still trembling. “I’ve been keeping a lot from you, Maya. That no secrets thing didn’t work out very well.”

“I know.”

“I tried, I couldn’t help it.”

I attempt to tell him that it’s alright, but like most of Isaac’s confessions, he starts talking a mile a minute. He tells me how worried he is about me and how he tries not to see me as fragile and easy to break, but he can’t. And he’s terrified that I’ll become a shut in and he’ll let me because he misses the bubble so much, he wants to crawl back in and disappear as much as I do.

My heart breaks for him as he blubbers on about going to see his friend Sloane for the last time. How he’ll never see her again, how she meant so much to him, how fucking torn up he is that she did what she did, that she thought he was capable of all the things his father does, like everybody else. It doesn’t matter that she’s sorry or that she didn’t have a choice, she threw him to the wolves and left him for dead. All she cared about was the money and the girls, like everybody else he fucking knows.

Then he starts raging about details of the investigation that I was completely unaware of. It won’t be over until his father buys some impoverished, hopeless virgin from a foreign country. She’ll be ripped away from her family, or maybe traded for food or protection because they don’t have a choice, and she’ll end up here, thrown into his fucked up life, terrified and confused. He’ll have to see her face to face, maybe even show up in front of his father and act like he wants to own her like a dog. He’ll get hauled away and locked up, they say it’s not for real, but we’ll still be torn from each other. It will be in the news everything will fall apart, his brothers will be pariahs even though they didn’t do anything, and he’ll be exposed for being the piece of shit that he is. The whole world will see, we’ll never get away from it.

And he saw Glory, which I swear I find neither surprising nor devastating, but he can’t believe me, he’s so guilty, sobbing and begging forgiveness. He couldn’t stop himself, he listened to his father basically rape her and she’s so used to it that she doesn’t even care.

“I don’t want that to be us!” he wails. “I don’t want you to freeze up and go somewhere else in your head until I’m done with you and then just pretend that everything is okay. That shit is not okay!”

“Isaac, baby, slow down,” I say, clinging to him as he clenches his fists and resists the urge to run away. “That will never, ever be us. It won’t. I promise, if it ever even starts to get like that, I’ll stop it.”

“No, you won’t!” he yells. “Because you’re the way you are, and I’m what I am. We both like it and there’s nothing we can fucking do about it.”

“Isaac, stop it!” I demand, grabbing his wrist. “That is not us. Calm down.”

He sniffles and looks so insecure and lost. I was wrong. That helpless little kid with big frightened green eyes that reveal his battered heart, the boy that doesn’t have a place in the world and always finds himself on the outside looking in, this broken, hopeless, lonely Isaac will always be here. He’ll always reach out for me, he’ll always need me. And I love him, so, so much, it’s overwhelming, it melts me and shocks me every single time.

“She said I was a reflection of him,” he whispers. “That’s what everybody thinks, even Jace sometimes. I know you see it, too. You know me better than anyone.”

“That is not true,” I say, but he’s not convinced. “It’s not, I swear.”

“Maya… I just want you to know… down the line, when this is all over,
if
it’s ever fucking over… I don’t expect you to have my children,” he croaks.

“What?”

“They don’t have to be mine, like, genetically. We can figure something out, like a sperm donor or something.”

“Holy shit, Isaac…”
Where the fuck did this one come from?

“I don’t know if you’ve thought that far ahead, but I do, all the time, and it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t want to lose you over that when we can find another way,” he murmurs, unable to look at me.

“Why on earth would you think that?”

“Because… I mean maybe it would be better that way. How the hell could we ever tell them where they came from? I don’t want to do that to anybody else, especially not your kids. And what if… what if they’re like him? I’m not, but what if they are? What if there’s nothing we can do about it? If that’s just what happens when monsters create you and you never should have been born to begin with?”

I can’t imagine a world without him in it, the very idea is utterly terrifying. “Isaac, I’ve never thought twice about having your babies for a second. I won’t force you to father them, but… I want them. Not for a while, but when we go down that road, of course I want them to be yours.”

His eyes light up for a fleeting instant, but then his face hardens as he slips away again. “You might feel differently once they’re actually inside of you,” he says.

“No, I won’t.”

“Well, you don’t have to go through with it if you do. We can get rid of it. I’ll still love you, I won’t leave and I won’t be angry.”

“Isaac… where the hell is this coming from?” I ask, my face chasing his as he refuses to look at me. “What aren’t you telling me?”

He wants to say it so much, but he can’t. I link my hands with his tightly, pulling them to my lips and kissing the scarred skin that covers his knuckles. “That’s what Glory did,” he whispers.
Holy. Shit.
“And I did leave. I was
so
angry, but I was very young. I understand why now. I’m glad it worked out that way, too. Life never would have led me to you if it had gone the other way.”

“Oh.” I can’t hide the pain from the realization that I won’t be the first woman that he gets excited about having his baby and he sees the hurt on my face, cursing himself. “Well, it’s a good thing that I’m not her, Isaac. Because that’s not what I’ll do.” I shake off the shock and the sting. I’ll be the first woman to actually have them, I’ll be the one he tells to stay sleeping in the middle of the night when they cry. It doesn’t change anything.

“I am so sorry, Maya. I should have kept that one to myself.”

“No more keeping things to yourself, Isaac. Seriously. That’s how we end up naked and crying on the kitchen floor, completely terrifying our cat,” I say, glancing across the apartment to AJ’s bright eyes peering at us from under the couch.

“Fuck,” he breathes, following my gaze. He shakes his head, almost laughing as he kisses the back of my hand. “It’s just hard for me. You’re still in school and—”

“School is basically done. I’ve turned in my thesis and could get through finals in my sleep. I’m fine.”

He starts to speak, then hesitates, so I lean forward and nudge his head with mine. “It feels wrong to abandon Glory. I can’t cut her off. Maybe down the line, we could find a way to—”

“No,” I interrupt him. “My own jealousy aside, you can’t be around her, Isaac. You just can’t, look what it does to you. You’ll never let go of the past if you keep spending time with her. Every time you see her, you’ll know she’s seeing him in you, and you start to see it too. It’s not there.”

“She knows that I’m not like him, Maya.”

“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t want you to be.”

He nods, but still looks skeptical. “I just feel so guilty. She’s done so many horrible things to me, to you, and I still just feel so fucking guilty.”

“I know. You don’t even want to see her, you feel obligated. And that makes sense, she’s also done a lot for you, for both of us. I can’t get that angry or jealous if I think about her either,
because she stepped up and did the right thing instead of saving her own ass. I had to forgive her, too.”

“Really?”

“Yes. But it doesn’t change the fact that she is poison. I don’t say that lightly, Isaac. I know you’re attached to the maternal aspects of your relationship, not the sexual. My mother is also a crazy, toxic person. I know what it’s like, believe me.”