Falling Into Us (35 page)

I spun in place, and Becca’s hands were on my tie, pulling it free, her eyes fierce and determined, mouth open slightly. She fumbled with a button, then another, and then she growled and yanked it open. The first few buttons popped open, and then the rest tore free and clicked onto floor.

“Beck? What—?” I didn’t get a chance to speak.

She attacked me, kissing me a desperation I’d never felt from her before. My ruined dress shirt hit the floor, and then my wife-beater tank top was flying across the kitchen and my belt was snapping free and my pants were around my ankles.

“Make me feel s-sss-something.” She whispered it, her voice harsh and ragged in my ear. “Any-anything else.
Please.
”

I had no chance to reply. She had her dress off and then the rest of her undergarments before I could register what was happening, and then we were naked together and I was stumbling across the kitchen with Becca’s weight on me. She hung from my neck, her legs around my waist, her lips locked on mine. I groaned as she devoured me, biting my tongue, nipping my lips. Her fingers dug into my skin so ferociously I knew I’d have marks, and then she was reaching between us and guiding me into her, rising up with her thigh muscles leveraged on my hips, and then slamming down so hard the slap of flesh echoed in the tiny apartment. I stumbled again, and then spun in place to set her on the counter with her back against the peeling white paint of a cabinet.
   

“No, no. More. Need…more.” She thrust against me, and I pulled her airborne, staggering across the kitchen, and we slammed into the hallway wall. “Yes. Like-like this.”

I pushed gently against her, holding her against the wall and kissing her tenderly, trying to slow her. She growled in frustration, locked her arms around my neck, and lifted up, then slammed down with a satisfied moan, her lips leaving my mouth and stuttering across my cheek.

“Bed. P-please.” She was lifting up and lowering herself frantically, setting an impossible pace for me to keep while standing.

I carried us into our room and fell back against the bed. I didn’t have a chance to even straighten myself on the bed before she had her fingers twined in mine above my head, her hips sliding over mine. She rested her forehead against mine in a kind of desperate relief as she resumed her frantic grinding pace on top of me. Her breasts bounced against my skin, and her thighs whispered soft as silk against mine. She was gasping into my mouth, riding me with a furious, wild abandonment. This was both hot and kind of scary, because her eyes weren’t entirely her own. She was possessed, in a way. She was wild-eyed, ferocious, leaning back on me to sit up straight, lifting up with her thighs and sinking down on me relentlessly, her hands buried in her hair, breasts swaying and bouncing with each lift and fall of her body. God, she was so gloriously beautiful, and this angry goddess mood was something new, something I’d never seen in her before. She gave nothing to me. She took. I held her hips and let her ride me, gave her everything I had, not daring to speak, to whisper, to even breathe. She took all of me for her own, driving herself into an orgasmic frenzy, screaming through clenched teeth and then spitting an ululating moan with her head thrown back and her spine arched and her fucking glorious tits bouncing, and finally I lost myself in it, giving her more and more, harder and harder until she came a second time, and a third, because my baby could just keep coming and coming until she was too exhausted to move, and I think that was what she needed. I clenched my muscles and closed my eyes to block out the erotic sight of her body above me and focused on holding back even as I drove into her as hard as I could. She fell forward, planting her palms on my chest and grinding onto me in a new rhythm, not pulling out at all but grinding her clit against me and pushing herself over the edge yet again, mouth wide in a gasping shriek, eyes closed, brows raised, and yeah, I was watching her because I couldn’t help it, because Becca, such a giver in all things, was finally taking all of this for herself, because for some reason I couldn’t entirely fathom, she needed this, and so I would give it to her again and again until she was sated.

She rolled off me and onto her back, scrabbling at my arms and back to jerk me into place, grasping my ass and pulling me forward, shoving me into her and coiling her powerful legs around my backside and clenching me, pulling, pulling, thrusting with every muscle in her body against me. Her arms wrapped around my neck and she refused to let go, so I pressed my lips to her shoulder and planted my hands next to her ear and settled into a driving, almost punishing rhythm, hard and dirty and relentless, and she only cried out for more.
 

She took it, and clawed gouges into my shoulder when she came again, climaxing with a deafening scream. I’d held back for so long at this point that I ached for release, but she wasn’t done with me.
 

She pushed me away and turned onto her hands and knees, presenting her ass to me. God…
damn
. I didn’t know what it was about seeing her like that, but it was always my undoing. Something about her beautiful, taut ass presented to me, her sex-slick folds wet from our lovemaking, our fucking…it drove me wild. I plunged into her and she stuffed a pillow under her stomach, clutching the other pillow in her fists and rocking back into my every thrust, the slap of flesh a rhythmic echo in our apartment, and then she came again, and this time she clenched down extra hard with her vaginal muscles and I was buried deep and something in the way she moaned, something in the way she ground her ass against me and whispered my name was my undoing. I couldn’t hold back any longer then. I lost it, growling and pulling back and fucking into her so hard she whimpered, but it was a breathless “
yes!
” from her lips, and she rocked forward and crashed back into my next thrust, and then again, and then I was unleashing inside her, flood after flood, and she was clamped around me and spasming and crying out hoarsely and pressing her soft dark skin into me, not minding at all the way my hands clutched her hips with bruising power and jerked her against me with every spasmodic thrust of release.

She fell forward away from me with a sigh, rolling to her back, reaching up and jerking me roughly down to the bed. She found her spot, nestling in the crook of my left arm, her right leg thrown over mine, her hand resting low on my belly, her breathing whisking hot across my clavicle.

“Thank you, baby,” she whispered. “I n-n-needed it, just like that. I know it was…rough, but I nee-needed it.”

I chuckled. “Honey, I’m pretty sure that was the hottest sex we’ve ever had.”

She nodded. “I think s-so, t-too. I think I mi-might be able to slee—sleep now. I hope.” She was exhausted, wrung dry.

I held her tight and whispered to her over and over again how much I loved her. Eventually her breathing changed, and she was asleep.
 

She did dream, though. I held her through that, too.

FIFTEEN: The Aftermath

Jason

One month later

Becca wasn’t okay. For a while, I thought she was getting better. I thought she was coping. But then, about two weeks after Ben’s death—after his suicide—she seemed to start regressing. She never really got her fluency back entirely, but she was beginning the process of recovering it. She’d stutter less, block less, although she had gone back to sounding as if she was reading from a script.
 

Her entire family had basically shut down. Her mother and father had both taken extended leaves of absence from work, which, from what I’d learned about Mr. and Mrs. de Rosa over the years, was akin to the apocalypse. Ben’s death had rocked everyone, really. The entire community had been shocked. Ben was a fixture in the town, always around, always up to no good but nice to everyone. He’d kept the depths of his struggles secret from everyone, it seemed, and so his suicide had taken the community by storm. People who hadn’t really known or even liked Ben all that much were going to grief counseling. Parents had started taking a deeper interest in the mental and emotional health of their kids. Gradually, however, as weeks passed, things returned to normal. Her parents went back to work, and Kate continued at the hospital, seeing an OB/GYN regularly.
 

Except for Becca. She gradually began to speak less and less. It started with shortened responses, going from stutter-broken sentences to three- and four-word answers, and eventually to one-word answers. She was…listless. I would find her in bed at eight in the morning, a Kleenex crumpled in her fist, eyes open and staring into the middle distance. Becca hadn’t stayed in bed past 6 a.m. even once in the two years we’d been living together, whether it was Wednesday or Saturday, February or July. She’d been in the process of deciding on a school for after graduation when Ben killed himself. Now? She’d stopped cold. Stacks of acceptance letters sat unopened on her desk. Books for her senior-year classes were still stacked, unread, on her bookshelf. She was showing up for work, but that was it. She’d requested and gotten a change in position at the law firm, and was now filing paperwork and other duties that required little to no interaction with others.
 

I caught her on the way out the door once, her blouse mis-buttoned so drastically that two buttons showed at the bottom.
 

The following day, I got back from an early morning workout to find her still in bed, a half-hour late for work. She’d never, in the nearly five years we’d been together, ever once been late for anything.
 

She wasn’t speaking at all by that point.

I would speak to her, some normal interaction such as asking her if she knew where my watch was; she would walk away silently and return with the watch rather than telling me. “Yes” or “no” questions would be answered with a shake or nod of her head. Sometimes she would simply not answer. She would stare at me almost blankly, as if she hadn’t heard me.
 

I never once found her writing in her journal.

Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. I found her sitting on our bed, knees drawn up, Kleenex in one hand, her phone in the other. She was scrolling through her pictures frantically, her thumb swiping across the screen over and over again, and with each photograph she bypassed, her features grew more and more panicked.

I sank onto the bed beside her, sitting cross-legged with my hands on her knees. “Becca? Are you looking for a specific picture?” She nodded without looking at me. “Which one?”

She then did something I’d never seen her do: She signed. I’d heard her say once that when she was really young she used sign language if she couldn’t express herself in verbal speech, but she’d abandoned the use of sign language by fourth grade.
 

I didn’t know sign language, not even the alphabet. She’d formed an “L” with her right hand, starting near her forehead and drawing it downward to her right hand, which was held as if pointing at me, or a number one.
 

“I don’t…I don’t know sign language, baby.”

She just shook her head and kept scrolling. I tried to take the phone from her, but she jerked away from me, turning in place so she was facing away. I watched over her shoulder as she scrolled, picture after picture blurring past on the screen, snapped selfies, pics of her and me, her and Nell, random things. Then she reached the end of her photo album on the cell phone, the image bouncing but not swiping. She swiped at it repeatedly, as if unable to comprehend that it was the last picture. She moaned, a high-pitched whine in her throat, and slammed the phone down on the bed, but then immediately picked it up and tapped the blue and white Facebook icon, brought up her photo album in the Facebook app and began the process of frantically swiping through the pictures.

“Becca, honey, talk to me. What are you looking for?” She made the same sign, over and over again, L-shaped right hand brought down from her forehead to her pointing left hand. “I don’t know what that means, Beck. Please, talk to me.
Please
.”

She shook her head and kept going through her Facebook pictures. When she reached the end of those, she whimpered through clenched teeth and pressed the phone screen to her face, shoulders shaking. Then, with a burst of inspiration, she logged back into Facebook and brought up Kate’s profile page and found her pictures.
 

That’s when it registered. “Ben? You’re looking for pictures of Ben?” She nodded, rocking in place in time with her scrolling thumb.
 

Kate had taken down every single picture of Ben from her page. There wasn’t one, not a single photograph of Ben. Becca screamed out loud and threw the phone across the room, where it smashed against the wall, putting a hole in the drywall and cracking the screen.

I gathered her in my arms and pulled her against my chest. She thrashed in my grip, screaming, pounding on my chest hard enough to cause pain.
 

“I-I-I-I doh-don’t-don’t n-n-n-nnnn…don’t remem-mem-mem…remember what he luh-luh-luh-looks like. I don’t r-r-r-rem-rem-remember!” She shook in my arms, trembling violently.
 

That was the most she’d spoken in more than a week.

“We’ll find you a picture of him, okay? I’m sure your parents have one. We’ll get one. I’ll go there right now, if you want.”

“Everyone’s forgotten hi-hi-him,” she whispered. “Eev-eev-even Kate…and m-m-mmmm-me. Everyone. He’s guh-guh-gone, like he never w-w-wwww-wuh-was.”

“You remember him, honey. You do. You remember what he was like. You remember who he was.” I had her wrapped tightly in my arms, and she’d stilled, barely breathing now. “When my grandpa died, I had this same fear. I loved Grandpa so much. He was Mom’s dad, and he was my favorite person in the whole world. He lived up north, between Grayling and the Mackinaw Bridge. He had, like, twenty acres. He had horses and dirt bikes and all this awesome stuff. I’d go up there for weeks at a time during the summers, and he’d let me do whatever I wanted. We’d go hunting and fishing and four-wheeling, and I’d stay up till midnight every night. Then one day he died. All of a sudden, just gone. He had a heart attack and died, just like that. I cried for days. Dad kicked the shit out of me for crying, but I didn’t care. I loved Grandpa, and he was gone. Then, like a month after he’d died, I had this panic attack. I couldn’t remember what he looked like. I thought it meant I didn’t love him, or that I’d forgotten about him. It was the only time Dad was anything like helpful. He told me you
have
to forget what they look like. Otherwise, you can’t learn to live without them. Forgetting is your brain’s way of telling you it’s time to try and move on. Not forget who they were, just…keep living.”