River: A Bad Boy Romance (16 page)

“Are you alright, Maddy?” River asks, his breathing hot and ragged, their bodies locked together as one.

“Never better”, Maddy manages to say, and opens herself up to him fully, while the tears continue to flow.

For the first time in her life, Maddy doesn't feel normal. Which is to say, that she doesn't feel like herself at all. She feels like the woman she always wanted to be, but never thought she was capable of becoming. In all of her adult life, Maddy has been searching for a moment like this, that for one reason or another, just didn't arrive.

Maddy grips the pillow, River's hips, anything at all in reach, as the waves of pleasure hit her harder than she imagined possible. In her handful of previous sexual experiences, Maddy was never exposed to anything like this, and certainly didn't ever come. She'd had what would probably be best described as conventional, purposeful sex, without passion or feeling, and so far away from the moment she was now sharing with River, that it would be unfair to call it sex at all. She had no idea it could feel this good, or that it had the power to make everything else in your life seem so completely insignificant in comparison.

River feels so incredible inside her, she doesn't want their moment to end. She doesn't want him ever not to be there. She has never felt this close to anyone in her life, and can't believe it's happening with the man who only this morning was a stranger, robbed the bank she wasn't meant to be in, and took her hostage.

It's closing in on them, little by little, beat by glorious beat. They come apart momentarily, and then together again, this time Maddy on top, to ride them home. She stretches her hands out across the muscles of his chest and arms, the contours of his perfect body, that make him look like a fallen angel. He places his hands on the soft peach-like skin of her bum, as she rocks back and forth, not so much pushing her as just following her rhythm closely, supporting her, and letting her know he's there.

She pushes into him, taking him as deeply as she can inside her, and then allows her hips to roll back, each thrust pushing them that little bit closer to heaven.

Her eyes sparkle at him, the almond flecks catching the moonlight that seeps in through the gauzed curtain, in a way that makes them look like as yet unclassified precious stones. She was beautiful to him fully clothed, a nervous bundle in the trunk of a stolen car, or outstretched on the dirty carpet of the floor of the bank he chose to rob, but now, fully revealed to him, literally and emotionally, she is a more majestic creature than any he can ever remember seeing. To him, she is perfect. Fragile, broken, haunted by the past in exactly the same way that he is, but perfect nonetheless, perfect in every way possible, and beautiful not in spite of what has happened to her, but because of it.

They are peaking together. It's something River has never experienced before, and certainly nothing Maddy has knowledge of either. It's as if they know each other inside out, know what it is they both want, and they can communicate it to each other without the need for speaking. As ridiculous as it sounds, it's almost as if they were destined to find each other, because this kind of unspoken bodily coordination is rare enough between couples that have been married for years, let alone two people who have literally just been thrown together.

Maddy presses her hands down onto his chest, and arches her back. It's coming, and there is nothing either one of them can do to stop it. They hold each other's gaze, ice cold blue and hazel flecks, while the truth and the fearlessness of that truth flies between them. After today, nothing will ever be the same again.

She can't help but scream. The sensation is so overwhelming, and the relief her body feels so magnificent, that she can't do anything else, but let it run through her. For a while she's swimming, or dancing perhaps, she isn't sure. Moving from one heartbeat of pleasure to the next, she's not quite anything really, apart from a bundled mess of tingles and electrical activity, just a feeling of happiness now, where the complexity of a life, and everything that came with it, used to exist instead. She feels like nothing more than a sensation, carried along by the force of her orgasm, like a feather swept along by the breeze, and nothing has ever felt better.

River kisses her neck, moving gradually towards her earlobe, and little by little, the feeling of his lips on her skin begins to bring her back down to earth. She purrs pleasurably, readjusts her head, and slides her hand down across the skin at the side of his torso. River isn't usually ticklish, but he moves quickly to stop her, his body notably more sensitive than usual. He's never experienced sex like it, and certainly never orgasmed quite so strongly. With Maddy convulsing on top of him, he almost matches her for duration, coming back down to earth only a few seconds before she does. If he believed heaven existed, he'd have thought he'd already found it.

Maddy buries herself in his chest like a cat getting ready to sleep, and River places his hand on her back to lock her safely inside his embrace. She finds his free hand with one of hers, and holding the same pose they did on the dance floor earlier, he turns her wrist over to the light, running his thumb again across the faint scar that remains there.

R
iver runs towards Lightning again, only he's not nine years old this time, he's twenty seven. The sky is blood red and hangs around him ominously, clouds as thick as gorse bush threatening to cover the whole world in rain. Lightning is there at the edge of the trail that runs towards his house, but his house is no longer where it should be, the bank sitting there instead, Buck Tavern soaking up the sun on a lounger just outside, laughing at a joke only he knows the punchline to.

“Lightning, hold up boy”, River says, and the horse looks to him but doesn't come. Instead, he turns sideways and begins to trot away. There is a hole the size of a trash can lid in his belly, out of which his intestines are falling slowly. River tries to run faster, but each step he takes does nothing to the distance between them, until eventually, almost suddenly, he's standing over the horse, who now lies dead in the grass in front of him. Desperate to get as close as he can to his beloved friend, River doesn't notice the pool of blood below him. He slips uncontrollably, and trying to balance his fall, he accidentally puts his arm through the dead beast's chest. Frightened, he pulls away, only to find himself in a different place entirely. He's in the bedroom he grew up in, a featureless shack of a room, with a metal frame bed, a collection of blankets instead of a mattress and holes in the wall where the plasterboard has come off and never been replaced. He looks at his hand, and then immediately forgets why it was important to do that. Something else is important here instead.

“Dad”, he calls, as he walks, somehow knowing exactly what he is meant to be doing, but unable to stop it, as though he's watching a film he's seen a thousand times before, and no matter how much he shouts at the telly to advise the hero within, there is absolutely no way to stop him. Outside of his bedroom, the rest of the house is derelict, apart from a room at the end of the original plot, where the wooden door swings and crashes against the frame, in a breeze he can see but can't feel.

He walks towards it, stepping through rubble and broken pieces of a former life, guided by something outside of his control. There is no reason for this room and his own to be standing, while the rest of the house lies in shatters around him, the dust of which has clearly settled a long time ago. The room he heads towards and can't stop himself from doing so, he recognises when he gets there. It's his father's.

“Dad”, he says again.

“Come in, son”, comes the response.

River pushes the door open, but stays on the outside. Inside, River's mother lies dead on the ground, her chest opened by a shotgun bullet, a rat licking at the still warm tissue at the edge of her wound. Her right eye has been closed up by a lump that has since turned purple, and there is blood pooling on the floor below her body, sweeping towards River as though attracted there magnetically. River moves into the room slowly, stepping through the blood in an attempt to see his father. He finds him sat on the chair next to the bed, a shotgun under his chin, one of the chambers still loaded.

“You made me do it, boy”, he says, but for some reason his father no longer has his own face. The shotgun is still held by his father's rough hands but now points instead to the horse's head sitting where his own was, moments before. This is his father's body with the head of Lightning.

'You should never have been born', his father says and before he can stop him, he pulls the trigger.

River wakes up screaming, sweat making his neck cold. He pulls himself upright and realises immediately that Maddy is already awake next to him, and might have been for a while. She looks at him with a mix of concern and fear.

“What happened?” she says, reaching out to touch his arm. River pulls away. He's embarrassed at showing her a vulnerability.

“Nothing”, River says. “Nothing happened. Go back to sleep.”

He gets up and goes to the bathroom, while Maddy watches him, unsure what she might say to him when he eventually comes back. River splashes cold water across his face, drying it again with a towel. He drinks some down, and then spits the rest out into the sink. Sometimes his dreams are so vivid he wonders whether they'll ever bleed out into his real life. He wonders too, how long he can keep running.

When he comes back into the room, and gets back into bed, Maddy pretends to already be asleep. Only when his breathing has settled, and she is sure he's almost drifted off again, does she slide a little closer and hug herself into him. River doesn't hug her back, but he's happy that this time he's not woken up alone.

M
isty morning light creeps in through a gap in the curtains, spilling pools of brightness across the otherwise darkened bed, shimmering like reflections on the top of a swimming pool, as the fabric dances in the cool morning breeze.

Claudia stirs, turns over to hug her husband, and finds the bed empty next to her. As she walks through the corridor, which is full of children's toys and dirty clothes in piles that need to be washed, she realises the children aren't even up yet, and wonders where Javier has gone. It's unusual for him to be up so early, even if it's a work day.

She takes a brief moment to check on her children, Miguel six, Connor four, and Elouise eighteen months, all still asleep, and all crowded into the same room that also somehow manages to find space for Miguel's wheelchair and the machine that keeps him alive, before heading to the place she expects to find her husband.

Javier is a loving father and a man that would do anything for his family. He has been screwed over by the United States government from the moment he stepped into the country and despite repeated attempts to 'make it' the only way he knows how, he has for a long time considered himself a failure. His eldest son, a sickly child from birth - something he blames on the lack of immediate treatment they received during complications in Claudia's pregnancy - has been a constant reminder to him of his inability to provide.

Working for Madeleine Parker has never provided him with enough money to afford the care Miguel needs, especially with Claudia still out of full time work. The three children should not be in the small bedroom that they are in and Miguel needs urgent medical attention and care if he is going to survive into adulthood. It is for those reasons that Javier has justified what he's doing. He doesn't care about the money, he only cares about giving his family the life that they deserve.

“Javi”, Claudia whispers softly, pronouncing the word in her husband's native tongue, when she doesn't find him where she usually does, hunched over the kitchen table with a large mug of coffee, sometimes with sugar, never with alcohol, pouring through the latest bills that have come in that month, deciding whether they can afford to pay the electricity and water, or buy better drugs for Miguel.

Instead, she finds him in the small utility room that doubles as the office space, an area in which Javier set up his computer and files all those years ago, when he was passionate about going self employed, in the days before Claudia's first miscarriage, when the future was bright and their lives seemed impossible to spoil.

That room has since taken on a new purpose, as the family have expanded, but Javier's computer and files still remain, looking out of place, amongst tools, hanging clothes and a washer drier, another reminder of what could have been.

“Javi, what are you doing?” Claudia says.

He hasn't noticed her arrive, and jumps a little at the sound of her voice. Immediately he clicks open a different window on the computer, hiding the one he was working on, unsure what she has already seen.

“You scared me, honey”, Javier says.

Claudia wraps her arms around his chest and kisses him on the top of the head. Bent over like this, you can see a new bump forming, where several others have already come and gone.

“Come back to bed, sweetie”, she says.

“I will baby, I promise”, Javier says, turning around to her. “I just need to do something for work, that's all.”

“Can't it wait for when you're actually in work baby?” Claudia says.

“I wish it could, honey”, Javier says. “It's a pitch for a new account, and if we get it, it could mean a huge bonus and a salary hike. It could make a big difference to our lives. A massive difference.”

Claudia looks at the cursor blinking on an empty word document. She's known her husband for long enough to know when he's hiding something, but trusts him to be doing whatever it is he can't tell her about, for the benefit of the whole family. He's never let them down before, and she knows he would never do anything to hurt them. What she saw of the document he was working on before trying to hide it however, didn't look to her like any kind of project pitch she has ever seen. If anything, it looked like something she's only ever seen on TV or in crime films, but decides, to give her husband the benefit of the doubt, to keep that observation to herself. If there was anyone more creative than Javier, she was yet to meet them, so it was perfectly possible, that what she saw was destined to form part of a role playing exercise, designed to stand out enough against the competition to secure them the job. That version of events, no matter how unlikely, is what she chooses to believe.