Just A Woman (Marina: Part Two: Naughty Nookie Series) Read online

  The dynamic between us is changing. I’d have to be blind not to see it. And it’s mostly on my part. I can’t say it’s love, even though I think it is.

  To love is to be hurt and I’ve been hurt enough in my life. The question is do I break it off? Release myself from the eventual pain or do I endure what I know will come, when he realizes the sort of person I am, just to keep him with me for as long as I’m able?

  He pulls away from me and collapses at my side. His breathing is deep and I know he’s on the brink of sleep. For a second, he just lies there, a few inches of space separating the pair of us. I’m too whacked to even move, but I know he will. It’s impossible to be in the same bed and not have a part of us in some way connected.

  With a grunt as though even this small effort is draining him of every remaining drop of energy in his body, he tunnels his arm underneath my torso and drags me on to my side. He takes a few seconds to arrange me, lifting my leg so it’s riding his hip and touching his damp cock, moving my arm so it’s hugging his waist and then tucking my head against his chest, so the thick muscle cushions my skull.

  That done, I can sense the change in his body’s rhythms and know he’s no longer awake. I take the time to listen to the gentle breaths escaping him, to smell the delicious essence that permeates my nostrils… Man, musk, sex, aftershave… delicious.

  A little snore bursts out and I grin, but my amusement soon disappears. I tighten my hold on him and a sad smile creases my lips as he nuzzles his jaw against my hair in a subconscious reaction to my touch.

  He sleeps the slumber of the innocent. A deep, peaceful rest. But me? I just lie there, wondering when he’ll realize I’m nothing but trouble to the core. What awaits me in New York is a nightmare waiting to happen. I don’t have to sleep to be assailed with night terrors. My life is swirling down the drain and only this man can ground me.

  The distance between us is getting too much for me. I want him close; need to feel the security he gives me here, during our visits, on a constant basis. But to be together permanently is to open myself up to his rejection. Once he knows the real me, would there even be an us?

  I’ve lost a lot in my life, but I’ve struggled on. Could I survive losing Nate?

  No. I don’t think I could.

  One

  30th August 2013

  Northwest Mercy Hospital, Chicago

  I was different than the others at school. At Blue Ridge, the family ranch and haven to people with IQs as large as a muscleman’s body weight, everyone is different. Unique. We stand alone until we merge as a community, is a kind of unwritten lore among the commune. Our intelligence sets us apart and always will.

  For kids over the age of twelve, classes are held on site. But before that age, every child has to attend the local elementary school. It’s there we learn how unusual we really are. It’s not the nicest way to learn it either. Being teased before we even understand the word bully, because we can read, write and do seventh grade math at the age of five.

  Uniqueness and the unfairness of the world is an early life lesson. And maybe it’s a wise one. With our smarts, we are the future of technological, scientific and industrial developments.

  Under my distant leadership, the commune has already made Blue Ridge over twenty million dollars in new patents. Four million of that was earned this year by new discoveries, one of which being Nate’s new bionic hand.

  That money is poured back into the ranch. Be it the cattle operation or updating the laboratory equipment, paying for art supplies for the studios or new recording equipment for the musicians. Every cent revitalizes the commune, making it bigger and brighter.

  Success always an inch away.

  With such a head start, maybe we need to learn that people reject and abuse what they don’t and can’t understand. And it’s for that reason, Blue Ridge exists. We’re a delicate bunch. We have a sixty percent suicide risk; people are touchy, tetchy even. The atmosphere on Blue Ridge is tense and competitive. It isn’t Utopia for folks like us, but it’s the nearest we’ll ever get.

  It wasn’t an easy start, but then, it prepared me for an uneasy life.

  Married at seventeen, widowed at seventeen. Living in the Big Apple before I was legally an adult, founding what could only be called a safe house for abused prostitutes and then, creating an establishment where they could work free from the ever-present danger in that line of business: pimps and abusive clients.

  Then, getting on the wrong side of the Russian mafia. Their ire inducing them to torch my best friend’s apartment building and when that didn’t work and I didn’t give them what they wanted, they stormed into my hotel room and held my partner, Nathan, and I hostage until I finally conceded defeat: I handed over my client list. But they didn’t stop there.

  They shot Nathan. They pressed a gun to his belly and fired.

  The memory is one that will never leave me. I’ll always see it. It will always be in my mind’s eye. Another horror to add to the many I’ve experienced in my relatively short life. The sight of the blood... gushing, pouring free from Nate’s veins. His essence seeping out with every lost pint of the life-giving fluid... How will that ever leave me?

  If it didn’t seem self-piteous, I’d think I courted trouble. That destruction followed me, trailing along behind me as though I were a tropical hurricane. As is usually the way with massive storms, the dangers go, leaving the mess behind. I’ve done that way too often in my life.

  I abandoned the ranch as soon as I legally could. Eight months and six days after Jimmy’s death, I left all I knew to escape the horrors of being a widow before I left my teen years.

  When my father died, I didn’t return to the fold to take over as leader of Blue Ridge, as I should have done. It was my duty, yet, I handed it over to Uncle Sam. A more incompetent leader you’ll never find but legally able to act as guardian to the commune thanks to his surname.

  The man might dream about chemical formulae and he might be one of the foremost members of his field, but he’s a crappy people-person.

  I left the only place I can call home to wither away under the wrong man’s leadership.

  And the instant the mafia destroyed Mona’s apartment building, I fled New York.

  The three major calamities of my past have shown the truth of my nature. I leave the mess behind me for others to clean up.

  But I will not just give up on Nate. I won’t give up on us. To go, to leave him so I can wallow in my own self-hatred, my self-disgust at causing destruction wherever I go... No. It isn’t going to happen. He means too much to me to simply disappear from his life.

  Even if he’s the next person on the list to be ignoring me.

  But hey, ignoring is better than being dead.

  I can stand sulks, I can withstand his justifiable anger, but I won’t let my own sense of guilt push us apart.

  Rubbing my hands through my hair, I let my fingers linger at the base of my neck and begin to massage some of the tension away. I’m getting to hate my current view. The window of Nate’s private ward overlooks the car park. Beyond that, glass and concrete monuments to the Gods of Commercialism scrape the sky, cars pound the tarmac, and their beeps can be heard even from this subdued ward. In the distance, between the gray buildings and the bright blue skies loaded with virginal billowing clouds, the waters of Chicago harbor beckon.

  When I first landed in the city, I only expected to be here for a week. Tops. I dreaded the need to return to my home in Montana, the ranch that has been the homestead for many Denisons in its one-hundred and twenty year existence. But after coming to terms with the need to return, I guess it’s hard reconciling myself to still being here. I want to see Blue Ridge again and having been sequestered away in this ward for the last four weeks, it’s merely making me desire home all the more.

  That alone is a miracle, but maybe it’s all part and parcel of me coming to terms with the Marina of now rather than the child of the past.

  I’ve come to realize after
the many hours of solitude in this ward, that I’ve been a child for most of my life. I’ve played dress-up, played the role of an adult. It’s time for me to grow up, because this kid is dangerous. To her, rules are to be bent and if manipulation doesn’t work, then broken.

  Maybe that’s why destruction follows me? Sure, my troublemaker ways weren’t the cause of Jimmy’s leukemia. But I just had to fall in love with him, didn’t I? A boy who was an anomaly of the eugenics experiment that is Blue Ridge ranch. The son of genius parents yet with mid-level intelligence. He was a good kid, harmless, hard working. But to my parents, he might as well have been a drug dealer. Or a car-jacker. Being average was and still is a crime at the IQ Commune.

  My love for Jimmy was the pure, honest love that only two completely different teens can experience. I will cherish the memories, but I can’t help but question if my choice of the boy wasn’t so pure.

  With a sigh, I wrap my arms about my waist and grip my elbows. It’s either too hot or too cold in this room, the temperature is never comfortable. I don’t know if Nate’s messing with the temperature control simply to cause me discomfort or if it’s just crappy central air, but it along with the rest of the ward is starting to give me a case of cabin fever. I sleep here, wake up here, have my take-out meals delivered here, shower in the private bathroom and don’t talk to Nate here.

  Is it any wonder I’ve gone stir-crazy to the point that I’m questioning every aspect of my life?

  At the sound of the door opening, I turn to greet the only friendly faces I see around this place. The nurses. Nate’s face is glued to the television twenty-four-seven and the guys on staff are the only ones who’ll talk to me.

  “I’ve good news for you, Nate. And you too, Marina. You must be going crazy in this ward.” Betsy Granger is a slim, forty-year old brunette with a son in college, a daughter at high school and three Maltese dogs called Bitsy, Ella and Tigs. I know Jenna is head cheerleader and that Matt is studying Pure Math at Harvard. In fact, I can tell you a basic background of nearly every single nurse on this floor’s roster.

  My smile is filled with the gratitude and pleasure I feel at the sound of another voice. As well as the fact she has just picked up on the thoughts running through my mind. “You’ve no idea, Betsy.”

  Our eyes bridge and we share a look of complete understanding, before transferring our attention to the grouch on the bed. I make no bones about what I think of Nate’s behavior. I’m not the only one used to falling on childish ways, when I’m not happy about something.

  I deserve to be yelled at. Hated, even. But ignored? Sulked with? How the hell can we move past this if he won’t even talk to me?

  After two days in ICU, listening to the endless, reassuring beeps that told me Nate was clinging on to life, as soon as he awoke, if he’d have asked me to jump, I’d have asked how high. I scurried about, doing what I could for him. Topping up the water in his glass, feeding him when he was too out of it on pain meds to do it himself. I’ve shaved and bed-bathed him, brushed his hair. He wasn’t an invalid at the start, but he was so high on the cocktail of drugs they’d been feeding him, he couldn’t really do much for himself. I cared for him the best I could, because the Nate I know would detest having a stranger clean him. He’s way too proud for that. And I tried to spare him.

  I’ve done what I could and will continue to do my best, but budging the stubborn bastard out of his funk is not only getting me down, but it’s looking like a full-time occupation!

  That it’s one I’m willing to sign up for tells me that what I feel for Nate is as real as I thought it to be on the night of the shooting.

  I’m halfway to loving Nate. Maybe more than half. The idea of a world without the miserable son of a bitch is like torture to me.

  Betsy shakes her head at Nate’s disinterest in even her own proclamation of good news. She sighs, shoots a sympathetic look my way and murmurs, “Your file is as thick as my arm, and the doctors have a schedule they want you to keep with your own clinic, but Nate, you’re due for discharge today. Just like we predicted.”

  The swift whoosh of air escaping my lungs is one of relief. I’d asked Uncle Sam to make flight plans for this evening to take us back to Montana and it’s nice to know I didn’t ask him to waste his time. I can fly us back on the ranch’s small aircraft ̶ the one Nate used to fly to O’Hare. Probably another indignity he’s going to lie at my door.

  He might once have been a twenty-first century kind of guy, but after four years of being exposed to Sam, my uncle, he has turned chauvinist. Not in a derogatory way, because that would piss me right off. But Sam was born in an age where a gentleman did the heavy work and the women stayed at home. Genius, he might be but he’s a child of his generation. And Nate, after years of working close with Sam, has taken on the same traits. Opening doors for me, helping me out of cars, ordering my meal... if I didn’t find it charming, I’d have decked him.

  So my flying him to the ranch isn’t likely to go down well.

  It’s also a reason as to why this continued silence is a shock. His rudeness is totally unlike him and it’s a punishment in itself.

  “That’s great news! Isn’t it, Nate?” I turn to look at the man who has changed my life and see no visual reply. Just a bland stare at a quiz show. The sounds of the buzzers and the whine of the contestants’ voices whirl in my head, scratching my eardrums like the sound of nails scraping down a blackboard.

  Before I can explode and let his complete lack of answer urge me into the first explosion of anger at his childish sulking, Betsy beckons me with a hand and urges me into the hallway.

  “It isn’t too late for him to see a counselor. Patients with gunshot wounds aren’t as rare as I’d like, but in your circle...” She clears her throat.

  Yeah, I guess the average patient with a gunshot wound comes in off the streets and heads to a charity hospital. Not one that’s costing the ranch a small fortune. This place has a better interior decorator than the hotel Nate and I were staying in!

  “He won’t. You know I tried to persuade him.” My tired sigh is met by a gentle pat on the shoulder by Betsy. It’s strange, but she keeps on trying to mother me. I guess it’s sweet rather than strange.

  If she’s on shift, she sneaks in an extra plate of breakfast or lunch or dinner for me. When Nate’s blood pressure suddenly bottomed out, Betsy tucked me in a hug after we got the all clear that he was back on track. She’s been kind. More than.

  I’ve arranged for a bouquet of flowers to be delivered here for her. It’s the least I can do. Hell, it doesn’t feel like enough.

  I’m not the most tactile of people. As a kid, I learned not to be. But there have been times here, where I’ve really missed the easy affection Mona will bestow upon me, the one-armed hugs that Eddie will give me if we’re sharing a joke or whatever. Betsy has filled a hole I hadn’t really noticed existed until I’ve been separated from my friends. The women who I’ve always considered sisters, but who now, I’m only just starting to appreciate.

  Talk about the story of my life.

  “His silence is unusual, Marina. You’re lucky the doctors haven’t sent him up for a psych evaluation.”

  God, if anyone needs the psych evaluation it’s me! Nate’s the most rational and logical man I know.

  I snort at the idea of him needing to see a counselor. He told me once, that when he lost half his forearm after his ‘stay’ in Somalia, his medical team tried to make him see a psychiatrist. Their suggestion was ignored.

  If he didn’t go then, when he probably should have done, then he sure as hell won’t now.

  “There’s nothing wrong with Nate. Not in that sense, anyway. He’s pissed off at me. It’s not like he hasn’t spoken to the doctors. Only the nurses know he ignores me.” Tears gather in my throat. I know the blame for all of this lies on my shoulders, but I wish I could just press my lips to Nate’s. Revel in the realization that he’s alive and well. Celebrate his release from the hospital with him. Instead, I
’ll have to herd him out of here.

  I don’t even know if he’ll accept the fact we’ll be returning to the ranch together.

  “Yeah, well, Fran told them. It’s only because I said there was nothing to worry about that they backed off.”

  “Thanks,” I whisper.

  She shrugs. “If they’d really believed her, they’d have had him evaluated. My voice just nudged them in the right direction.”

  “Still. Thank you. If he’d had to go through that, he’d ignore me until the next Millennium.”

  Pulling her bottom lip between her teeth, Betsy studies me a second and on a sigh, asks, “I’m dying to know why he ignores you. Why he won’t talk if you’re in the room. I know it’s not my place to ask, but you know what they say. Curiosity killed the cat and only the answer brought it back.”

  In the bright overhead light, I could be anywhere in the world. There’s no scent of hospital. That turbo-charged essence of disinfectant and bleach is nowhere to be found. It just smells clean.

  Sleek slats of teak panel the walls and silver-embossed signs indicate which ward number is which and the general direction of certain departments. Low, black leather sofas with silver feet and matching armchairs are dotted about for patients’ relatives to use, when they’re asked out of their relatives’ ward.

  I hate hospitals. Have done ever since Jimmy died. The only reason I can stand it is because this place could be an office, or a hotel.

  Only the people in white coats with stethoscopes, nurses in scrubs and janitors with huge trolleys spoil the designer effect.

  It will be weird, but a good weird, to be out of here.

  My eyes dart to the large silver clock behind the neat and streamlined administration desk. As the minute hand ticks away, I ponder what to say. We or should I say I lied to the police about what happened that night. As far as I’m aware, considering I’m still here, Nate stuck to the story I spouted off to the officials. Something I told him about one night to make sure our tales were straight, and to which he’d shown a complete lack of disinterest... Either that or he pulled the amnesia card, when they interviewed him.