Conviction Read online

  “Follow me,” I said, leading him into my bedroom.

  As we walked, I reached around and unhooked my bra, then shimmied out of the yoga pants I’d put on. I turned to face him and watched his face, the way his eyes widened ever so slightly.

  “Let’s get that shirt off of you,” I said. “And the rest of the stuff, too.”

  His fingers fumbled with the buttons, so I helped. His arms were covered in tattoos, but his torso was smooth, a perfect plane of long, lean muscles. I ran my fingertips across his abdomen and felt the muscles tense under my touch. His hands were on my shoulders, but started to move down slowly toward my breasts. I kissed him, and this time he returned the kiss with force, his hands massaged my breasts in a quietly assured way, as though he knew what he was doing felt good.

  His cock was hard and pressed against me, clamoring for attention. I licked the palm of my hand and then wrapped it around his cock. I slid it up and down over and over, felt him get bigger and harder, and then I let go and reached down, cupped his balls and gave them a squeeze. He groaned softly against my ear and I nudged him back onto the bed.

  I was on birth control, and I’d just been tested for STDs last month and gotten a clean bill of health. I would have told him that if he asked, but he didn’t, and I lowered my hips slowly onto him, one hand on his chest to help keep my balance.

  He inhaled sharply as his cock slid all the way in, his eyes squeezed shut. I sat there for a moment, enjoying how he felt inside of me, rocking my hips a little, but not really moving. I, too, let my eyes fall closed and breathed slowly, feeling the way he fit perfectly inside of me. It didn’t always feel like this. Sex mostly always felt good, but some guys felt better than others.

  I began to move, at first just swinging my pelvis back and forth, then side to side. Some people say the G-spot’s a myth, but that’s just because they’ve never been able to find it before. When I moved my hips back, the head of his cock hit it just in the right spot, and if I squeezed my pelvic floor muscles right as it happened, the most incredible feeling radiated through my entire body. It was a tingling electricity, a current that could only be activated by a particular movement, in a particular place.

  Ollie’s eyes flew open. “What was that?” he asked. “What’s that thing you’re doing?”

  I continued to rock and squeeze and let myself be carried away on that current of pleasure. “Oh, just exercising my pelvic floor muscles,” I said. “Also known as Kegels.”

  “Whatever it is, don’t stop. I think that might be the best feeling I’ve ever felt.”

  I smiled. “You feel pretty good yourself, there.”

  And so I kept moving my hips and getting his cock pressed right up against that spot inside of me, squeezing my muscles around him. Suddenly, though, he grabbed my hips.

  “Whoa,” he said. “Slow down. No, stop. Just, hold still. Right there. Don’t move.”

  He took several deep breaths, trying to regain control before he reached that point of no return. I held perfectly still, knowing that even the slightest movement at this point could send him over the edge.

  After almost a minute, he exhaled loudly and then used his hands, which he’d kept on my hips, to get me moving again. I went slowly at first, thinking that maybe I’d torture him—just a little—but it just started to feel too good. And the faster I went, the better it felt, this feeling that seemed to originate from my very core and then expand outward. It was as if my whole body was turning to warm honey, melting into him. His grip tightened on my hips, his jaw clenched, little moaning sounds escaped from both of our mouths. My whole body tensed, my muscles clenched around him as we both came—the first time I had ever simultaneously climaxed with someone.

  We lay there for a while. I was starting to drift off to sleep when I felt him moving next to me. I opened my eyes all the way.

  “I’d love to stay,” he said, “but I’ve got to be up real early tomorrow morning to have the horses ready and everything.”

  “I understand,” I said, though I was feeling, for probably the first time, disappointed that a guy wasn’t going to stay longer.

  “Trust me—I’d be more than happy to just stay in this bed until the sun rises and then do that all over again.” He pushed himself up, and I watched, transfixed at the smooth muscles in his torso.

  We kissed again before he left and I walked him to the door, where I stood and watched until he drove away. After he left, I didn’t think I’d be able to fall asleep for a while, but I felt drowsy and went back to bed, snuggling up with the pillow his head had just been lying on. What the hell was wrong with me? I was usually more than happy to have my own bed all to myself, but I felt an intense longing for him, despite the fact he hadn’t been gone even half an hour yet. I yawned, and hugged the pillow close as I fell asleep.

  It’s the same guy with the blurred out face and I the fear flares inside of me as he approaches. There’s nowhere to run and I know that even if there was, I wouldn’t be able to outrun him. Still, I tell him to stop, to stay away. He’s about twenty feet away, and then all of a sudden, he’s right there in front of me, as though he were able to move at super speed. His hands are around my neck and that same feeling of helplessness washes over me.

  But I still try to move, and to my surprise, it works. My hands actually grab his wrists, and though I can’t get them to budge, my fingernails dig into his flesh. I lash out with my leg, catching him right in the groin, one of the few areas of the body that you can’t condition, and therefore, are always vulnerable to attack. He doubles over instantly, releasing my neck and falling back. I stand over him, knowing how easy it would be to just stomp on his face. Before I can do anything, though, the blur that was covering his face envelopes his entire body and then he disappears. Gone, like he was an image on a screen that someone just turned off.

  I woke up still curled up with the pillow. Someone was knocking at the door.

  I pushed the sheet back and slipped out of bed, pulling on a t-shirt and a pair of yoga pants, the dream lingering with me as I walked out of the bedroom.

  “Just a second,” I said as I went down the hallway.

  It was Allison, carrying a carafe of coffee.

  “I’m coming in,” she said. In she came, and she set the coffee down on the table and got two mugs from the cupboard. “Nigel took the kids to their swimming lessons, so I’ve got the morning free. Well, I’m supposed to be cleaning the refrigerator out but that can wait. I’d honestly rather pluck my eyebrows out with tweezers than deal with that refrigerator.”

  “That sounds pleasant.” I stifled a yawn with the back of my hand. “Thanks for bringing coffee, though.”

  “Well, I happened to be up last night putting Emma back to bed and I looked out the window and saw a man leaving the house. What were you doing last night? Rather, who were you doing? And, please don’t scoff at how pathetic this sounds, but I seriously need some excitement in my life. Remember that weekend that Nigel’s mom took the kids? That we were supposed to have date night?”

  I nodded as I took a sip of the coffee. “I remember.”

  “Yes, well, the evening culminated with sex—which he initiated—and I fell asleep. I fucking fell asleep. Was it because I was tired? No. Or not tired enough to fall asleep, who am I kidding, I’m always tired, but the reason I fell asleep was because it was the same old shit it’s always been! Good old missionary position. Which means me lying down with my head on my pillow. Who can blame me for falling asleep?”

  “Why didn’t you just climb on top of him? Ride him like a cowgirl. That’s what I did.”

  Allison smiled. “I’m no cowgirl.”

  “I’m not either.”

  “Oh, yes you are. You might not ride horses but you certainly ride plenty of other things. And Nigel’s so all about doing it missionary because he thinks he got me to squirt once when I came. It was actually pee, because my bladder control is completely shot since having kids, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him b
ecause he was so proud of himself. I mean, can’t guys tell the difference?”

  I laughed. “Are you honestly asking me that question? Most guys don’t even know what a clit is.”

  Allison sighed. “You’re right. Anyway, since that whole thing happened, he’s been determined to try to get it to happen again, but seems to think it can only happen if we do it in that same position.”

  “Just pee on him again. Hop on him and pee, and then he’ll think it’s only that position.”

  “Yeah, except I can’t now, for some reason. It’s like I’m getting stage fright or something. Or I just can’t pee on command. I also don’t want to pee on my husband; I’m not into that sort of thing.”

  “Some people are.”

  “Yeah, well, not me. I’m not proud of the fact that I can’t even sneeze without peeing myself a little.”

  “Kegels,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Do Kegels and you won’t have that problem anymore.”

  “I don’t even know what Kegels are.”

  “You could ask Ollie,” I said with a grin.

  Her eyes widened. ““You slept with him? That was him leaving here last night? How was it? I thought you said you weren’t attracted to him like that!”

  “I didn’t think I was,” I said, which wasn’t totally true. If I’d been honest with myself, I probably was attracted to him the moment he walked through the restaurant door and sat down at the counter, but after realizing who he was, I’d tried to deny those feelings. “And besides, he liked it.” I smiled, thinking back to that expression on his face. “He liked it a lot.”

  “Oh, I bet he did. But don’t try to kid yourself that you were just ‘doing it for him.’ This wasn’t a mercy fuck.”

  “I’m not saying it was! No one as hot as he is would ever need a mercy fuck.”

  “So, what now?”

  I knew why she was asking. In the past, every guy I’d ever slept with was immediately discarded of after that first night together. There had been no repeats. I probably deserved the reputation that I might have had around town, except I didn’t see it as a bad thing, because I was in control of it. This wasn’t me going out and sleeping with guys for the attention, for a self-esteem boost. It had, in fact, happened a few times that I’d been rebuffed, and I hadn’t felt a thing.

  “We’re just going to have to see how it goes,” I said. “I have an appointment with Dr. Mike later today. I’ll bring it up with him. See what he thinks.”

  At my appointment with Dr. Mike, I decided to start sitting on the couch, facing him, instead of lying down. “You seem to be in rather high spirits,” Dr. Mike said.

  I smiled. “I do feel pretty good.”

  “Any reason in particular?”

  “Well . . . yes. Or no. I don’t know. I slept with someone and I actually want to see this person again.” Sometimes it felt weird to talk with Dr. Mike about this shit, like he was another of my girlfriends, the way Allison was. But I had a question for him, and I wanted his professional opinion. “Just because I’d originally started hanging out with someone because I felt I needed to make something up to them—and then happened to sleep with them—that doesn’t make it a mercy fuck, does it?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “A mercy fuck?”

  “Yeah, where you sleep with someone you might not normally do it with because you feel like you owe it to them.”

  “Who are we talking about here?”

  I bit my lip and looked up at the ceiling. There was no point in keeping any of this from Dr. Mike, I knew this, yet there was still a part of me that felt like I shouldn’t tell him. “I slept with Ollie.”

  His expression didn’t change. He made a mark on his notepad, like he was checking a box off or something. I had a sudden urge to reach over and yank the pad away from him and see what was written there.

  “I slept with Ollie,” I said, “and he didn’t spend the night, he ended up leaving, and I fell asleep and I had a dream. Notice how I’m not calling it a nightmare? It started off like one, but this time, I was actually able to do something about it. Usually I can’t control my limbs no matter how hard I try. This time I was actually able to fight back. That’s got to mean something. Right?”

  “There’re often multiple interpretations for dreams.”

  I sighed. “Did you know you rarely ever give me a straightforward answer?”

  “Is that why you’re here? For me to give you answers?”

  “No. But it’d be nice, on in a while. To have that validation.”

  “I’m curious why you feel you need this validation to begin with.”

  “Doesn’t everyone want to feel validated at some point? I mean, to feel valid? I don’t think it’s that far-fetched.” I picked at a loose thread on one of the couch pillows. Sometimes Dr. Mike made me feel like I was being completely unreasonable. Or was I just . . . what did he call it? Projecting?

  “I’ll be honest with you, Wren. When you first started coming here, it seemed to me that you wanted validation for why you were sleeping with all these different men.”

  “Okay, but to be fair, you make it sound like I was sleeping with all these guys at the same time. Which I wasn’t.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Um, yeah, it does. I’m not a two-timer.”

  “Is it possible to cheat on someone if you’re not dating them?”

  “Well . . . sort of. I think there are a lot of people out there who wouldn’t even agree to go out on a first date with someone if they thought they were sleeping with someone else.”

  “I imagine you’re right. Unless it’s just casual dating, most people are hoping for the relationship to be something more—if it all works out.”

  “Right.”

  Neither of us said anything for a moment, as if he were waiting for me to have some sort of eureka moment, which wasn’t going to happen. If he was trying to impart some sort of great wisdom on me in the most obtuse way he could, it had failed. “I just feel like it’s different with Ollie,” I said finally. “Different in a way that it hasn’t been with anyone else. But is that because of our history together, or because I honestly feel that way? I mean, if I were to meet him at the restaurant or run into him at a bar one night, would I still feel this way?”

  “Now you’re asking questions no one can answer.”

  “And there is one other thing,” I said.

  “What would that be?”

  “I had the chance to tell him who I was. We went swimming, and it was really nice, we were just floating in the water next to each other, and he told me how he’d been in prison. That would’ve been the perfect time for me to tell him that I knew he had, and the reason why I knew he had was because I was partially responsible for him going there. But . . . I didn’t. Do you think that was stupid?”

  “First off, you were not partially responsible for him going to prison.”

  “Well, I certainly feel like I am. And even if I didn’t feel that way, what if he did?”

  “You can’t control how someone is going to feel about something.”

  “I know. But I really like him. Something . . . something is different with him.”

  14.

  Ollie

  I’d had a dream that didn’t involve prison.

  For the first time in a long time, I woke up and didn’t feel like my heart was in my throat, didn’t feel like I was about to jump out of my own skin. The dream was still perfectly clear in my mind, as though it were really an episode of a TV show, playing again on repeat. It had been a perfectly realistic dream, a slice of life that could actually happen.

  I was somewhere near the ocean.

  Which meant I was somewhere far from where I was now. I’d never seen the ocean before, had never smelled the salt air or heard the seagulls calling from overhead. Even so, I could remember all that from my dream, plus the way the warm sand felt between my toes, the sound of the waves as they rolled up the beach, then back again.

&
nbsp; I was on a beach somewhere, in a town where no one knew me.

  And because I was there and no one knew who I was, there was no guilt, no pitying or angry looks, no one who had any clue about what I’d done or where I’d been.

  It was a good feeling.

  In fact, it was a feeling that stayed with me throughout the day, as I tacked up Bebop, when I rode him out to wrangle the other horses into the corral for their morning feed, when I sat in the quiet of the barn later, cleaning the saddles and bridles, when I left the ranch to stop by Paula’s.

  “Well now, there you are,” Paula said. She was sitting on the front porch in one of the rocking chairs, sipping on a glass of lemonade. “I was thinking you’d forgotten about me. Wouldn’t have blamed you if you did. Guess Wren gave you the message.”

  “She did,” I said. “And I didn’t forget about you. I’ve just been busy. Been meaning to get over here, though. How have you been?”

  She clinked the ice around in her glass. “Same as always. You know, you don’t have to keep coming out here like this. You really don’t.”

  But I did. “I promised Jackson I would.”

  “How’s he going to know if you stop?”

  “Do you not want me to?” Even if she didn’t, I’d still stop by every once in a while. He’d have a way of knowing. And I had given him my word.

  She shrugged. “I suppose it’s nice to have the company. Even though you’re not here because you actually want to be. That’s the thing that’s kind of bugging me—you’re not out here because you want to be. You’re out here because you made a promise to my husband and if you stop, you’re afraid something bad’s going to happen.” She snorted. “It won’t, you know. I’m not sure who you think he is, but he’s not a gang member or anything. He doesn’t have all these dangerous connections or nothing.”

  “I don’t think he does,” I said, though that wasn’t entirely true. In prison, Jackson was one of those men everyone respected. Not just because he was big and strong, but because that’s just how it was. I’d never questioned it, and had assumed it was, in part, because he had connections.