Page 20 of Not Yet Yours
With one final thrust, Liam’s body goes rigid, and his face contorts as he whispers my name onto my lips, and he spurts his warm seed inside of me once more.
Afterward, he slips out of me and rolls over but instead of lying beside me, he takes me with him, and we lay on our sides facing each other, clinging to each other as we pant for air and try to get control of ourselves.
It’s a long time before I feel normal again and when I do, I open my eyes to see Liam beside me with his eyes still closed. I move my face closer to his and run my lips over his. I feel him smile and then his eyes open.
“Are you ok?” he asks me sleepily.
“Better than ok,” I say. “That was… I don’t know. I don’t even have the words.”
Liam huffs out a quiet laugh and his eyes close again and this time, he keeps them closed. He pulls me closer to him and his breathing becomes deep and even as he falls asleep.
I lay awake long after that, my mind in turmoil. I have never felt so conflicted, and I hate it. I like to keep things simple, black and white. I don’t like all these shades of gray. I don’t like the way Liam fell asleep holding me because it means something more than just sex, but I also love the way Liam fell asleep holding me because I felt so warm and comfortable, and it just felt right. And that’s what scares me. I have to put a stop to this before it can go any further, because if I don’t, I am going to end up getting attached to Liam and then he will see the real me and once that happens, I will lose him for good and I can’t handle getting my heart broken as a result of something I never should have allowed to happen in the first place.
Chapter Eleven
Harriet
As I lay awake, my mind tormenting me with thoughts of being abandoned by Liam and then the inevitable moment when he tells Max the truth about me and she too turns her back on me leaving me with no one, I can’t help but go back in my mind to a time and place I promised myself I had left behind. Usually, I can avoid letting my mind go back there, but right now, I’m feeling particularly vulnerable and when I feel that way, that’s when the memories come flooding back in and take me unaware.
It’s funny though, because when this happens, my memories don’t feel like memories. I don’t feel like I’m in the memory as such. It feels more like a movie in which I’m the star, but I’m also the audience watching it all play out rather than living it. I know that makes no sense, but I’m sure a therapist would have a field day with it. They’d call it something fancy like dissociative remembering and say it was a defense mechanism. Maybe it is, but if so, it’s not a very good one because even though I am watching the memory rather than reliving it, all those old feelings still come flooding back, harder and stronger than ever before.
I try to fall asleep but that isn’t happening. I try counting, not to lull me to sleep because I know that won’t work, but to try and keep my mind focused on something so that it can’t slip back in time. It doesn’t work though, and I soon find myself watching myself, as a little girl, as my life begins to fall apart around me.
Tiny Harriet stood on the landing, clutching a banister spindle tightly in each fist, her face peering through the gap between them, her green eyes wide and bright in the moonlight that came in from the window opposite her. She was supposed to be in bed, asleep. She had been until a few minutes ago when she had been woken up by the sound of shouting.
Even at her age – a mere five years old – Harriet knew that the sound of shouting after bedtime wasn’t good. It always seemed to be that on the nights when there was shouting, her mom had one of her accidents, banging her face off a cupboard door, or falling down the stairs. Harriet thought the shouting must distract her and make her clumsy.
The living room door slammed open, and Harriet quickly took a step back into the shadows. She had never eavesdropped like this before, but she instinctively knew she wasn’t meant to be seeing or hearing this, and that if she was caught, she would be in big trouble. She wondered if being yelled at would make her clumsy too. She hoped not, but she wasn’t going to risk it.
“Just fuck off Selena, ok,” Thomas, Harriet’s dad shouted.
Her mom was named Selena and Harriet knew fuck was a bad word, not a word someone should be saying to her mom. She wanted to go down there and yell at her dad, to tell him that word wasn’t allowed, but she was too afraid to move, and she stood there in the shadows, out of sight of her yelling parents, and took it all in.
“That’s real nice,” Selena shouted back. “I turn you down once and that’s it, I’m to fuck off!”
Thomas turned quickly back around to face Selena and the argument continued at the bottom of the stairs. Thomas’s voice was loud enough now to bring tears of fear to Harriet’s eyes, but still, she stayed and listened. She wanted so badly to run back to her bedroom, dive into her bed, and pull the blankets up over her head. She could pretend this had never happened, that it had just been a snippet of a bad dream. But she couldn’t move. It was as though her feet were glued to the carpet beneath them and she was forced to stay in place, a silent and unwilling witness to the fight going on below her.
“It’s not just once though, is it?” Thomas demanded. “Do you know how many times we have fucked since Harriet was born? No? Well, I do. Twice. Twice in five fucking years.”
“I’m very sorry that me squeezing a watermelon through something the size of a tangerine and tearing myself open was an inconvenience to you,” Selena threw back.
“It’s not that and you know it. When that happened, I was sympathetic, and I gave you as long as you needed to heal. I promised to be gentle with you, to stop whenever you wanted me to, but you wouldn’t let me near you. It was like Harriet ruined you on her way into the world and you were determined to take me down with you,” Thomas snapped.
“For God’s sake Thomas, don’t you understand how hard it is to have a newborn baby? To be up and down doing night feeds and changing diapers and soothing cries? No, of course, you don’t because you sat back and let me do all of that, didn’t you?” Selena said.
“You were the one who wanted a baby,” Thomas shouted. “I warned you I wanted no part in sleepless nights and dirty diapers.”
“And not once did I ask you for help. All I asked was that you not put anything extra on me,” Selena said.
“You can dress it up any way you want to, but Harriet coming along ruined everything,” Thomas yelled.
Harriet stepped out from the protective shadows, tears in her eyes, “Daddy?”
Thomas and Selena both turned sheepishly toward Harriet. Selena’s mouth opens and closes but she doesn’t say anything.
Thomas glares at Harriet but instead of yelling as did to Selena, he says, “You have ruined everything. Our life, our marriage, and the peace in this house. No one will ever love you. No one will ever want to be around you. You are like a black cloud hovering over everyone around you. You need to learn to mind your business and shut up like one of your precious little dolls or mark my words little girl you will always be miserable and lonely just like you have made your mother and me.”
Thomas turned then to look at Selena. “I'm done with this shit. You wanted her, now you can be stuck with her.”