Lady in Red

  Copyright © 2015 E. V. King

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.

  ISBN: 1502310023

  ISBN 13: 9781502310026

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014917648

  CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

  North Charleston, South Carolina

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  “Nothing can drive one closer to his own insanity than a haunting memory refusing its own death.” —Darnella Ford

  Darling Milo,

  Today I can finally offer you what you have deserved all along and still do: my share of our truth. My words, these words, are long overdue. They might entail that we will be lost in this life once you’ve read them, that I might lose you. But I am willing to take my chances. It’s time to roll the dice. I am tired. Tired of hiding within. Tired of denying my nature. Most of all, I am tired of compromising. I am done fighting. Ready for full surrender, at last.

  I know our way is easily misunderstood. Easily considered as debauchery. But it is not. At all. Our way has everything in common with the unbridled magic of poetry. The screams and sighs. The violence and the brutal honesty. The purge of petty frustrations. And most of all, the hopes and dreams—an idyllic escape from the stifling tedium of the common life. Tears and bruises. Sweat and kisses. All building up to a sublime mixture of pleasure and pain, and constantly breaking limits and passing boundaries as an undeniable and relentless proof of devotion, admiration, and trust. A tribute to the fire. The real one. Because fire is nonnegotiable. It either is or it isn’t. Fire does not lie.

  Originally, I had something else prepared. That is, until yesterday. And so, I decided to write you this instead. Years I have spent enslaved to everything society considers normal; by obeying its values, I had deprived myself of my own. So here I turned my nights and silences, our flights and sighs into words. What to the outside world is unutterable, I wrote down. I made the winding wheel stand still to indulge in its original esprit of unruly temperaments. At the very least, we will have this as the place where we can live on, foolhardy and intense, for ages to come.

  Wherever you are and whomever you are with.

  Wherever I am and whomever I am with.

  Truly yours,

  E. V.

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part One

  Chapter One

  It’s seemingly a perfect summer’s day, although it’s only early April. Something so simple, yet so powerful, that it puts a smile on everybody’s face. That is how the day started for me as well. The noble bliss of the first sunlight carries a hint of an incomparable virginity. Lying on my half-finished project bench, I stare into the sky, considering the words that have been wrenching my insides unmistakably since yesterday.

  I cannot believe you wrote that about me. My princess. You should have told me about your feelings back then. How much is the age difference again?

  Another four sentences, twenty-seven words, and one message burned into my memory, destined to haunt me forever, a chunk on top of the heap of questions, thoughts, conclusions, and conclusions of those conclusions, in my labyrinthine gray matter. Actually, they do not mean anything. I mean, not really. Just stuff—stuff that I already knew or had caught myself thinking about before. His words came in response to an e-mail I had sent him. It contained some fragments lifted from an essay I had written years ago, while facing a deadline, and my preoccupied mind had seen no other option than to draw inspiration from our past as lovers.

  Why had I closed the door on this thing several years ago? Seven, to be exact. Seven years of ostrich politics as far as I was concerned. Head in the proverbial sand. Out of fear. Out of humility. Out of respect. Those seven years have flown by, but I am right back at the start, because of his words—all twenty-seven of them—bathing in treacherous modesty. My bad. I should have said nothing. Kept on saying nothing. Shut up, like I had decided was best back then. Stayed on my first thought. First thought, best thought. But no. That went out the window yesterday. However, despite it all, I had to admit I was somewhat relieved. Finally free of one particular demon from my past, I never even considered that its absence would be so easily, so quickly, filled with a new one. It had taken me seven godforsaken years to grow the balls I so desperately needed to admit to the simplest thing on earth. Yes, I was in love. Yes, I saw it happening, although it never really did, despite our differences—the age difference being the frontrunner, of course. And yes, it felt and tasted like pure magic. At least it did to me.

  All that time ago, a not-so-strange stranger swept me off my feet on a usual night out with the girls, a toast to a birthday involving several bottles of champagne. You know the drill: plastering on makeup for hours until it is just right, so that you are ready to meet a handsome stranger. That exact type of man or boy, however, never seems to be there at the same time you are. That night was the exception. That night would change me. That night would eventually leave a scar on my soul. But at the time, I wasn’t the least bit aware of how defining that day, that night, that trivial party, would be. That night would define me for all the days to come.

  The handsome man in question was seated with a friend, an acquaintance, an unimportant stranger, at a tiny table along the wall next to ours, and he immediately caught my eye. His eyes wandered over us as we walked up to our corner, a foursome of girls, of which I was the last in line. His eyes had fixed on mine, and I remember the shiver that tingled its way up the inside of my thighs, all the way up to my neck, and left me breathless.

  Almost imperceptibly, I gasped for air. To cool down. To calm down. To recover some stability. That was the very first time I hadn’t turned my eyes away out of shame, although my usual childish doubts were firing up in my brain in the moments after we locked eyes. Is something wrong? Did I stain my dress? Is my hair doing that frizzy thing again? Do I have some huge mascara stain happening all over my face? Secretly, I checked my reflection in the turned-off screen of my mobile phone and was surprised to find nothing tainted or out of place.

  Meanwhile the other girls were talking about him, the handsome stranger with the charming smile, the stranger whose name was known by everybody in the dim-lit bar. My mind drifted. Confused by that look, I just sat there, wondering how my friends could talk so much about him. My train of thought was brutally interrupted, though, as Mr. Handsome jumped over the back of the seat next to me. Who does that? I vividly remember that thought jumping into my mind. Well, he did, apparently. His charming smile and playful glance drew me in, and soon the background faded into nothingness. I don’t recall what he was talking about, what words rolled over his tongue into my ear, or the jokes he told, but I do recall his lips and their curvature, his eyes and their peculiar shade of iridescent blue, those cute little wrinkles that surrounded them…and how my lips tingled just by looking at his mouth as he spoke
to me. I felt like a trillion armies of tiny ants were marching around the edges of my mouth, drumming up a yearning to kiss him.

  When the night came to a close—my curfew was still happening back then—my mind kicked in and ruined it all in no time. Would you ever dare kiss him? Silly girl, are you out of your mind? Like that man would ever want that. You are just imagining stuff. You feel things that aren’t really there. Crap, I want this so badly. Should I? No, I shouldn’t. And just like that, I planted a sturdy kiss on his stubbly cheek, like the dumb little schoolgirl I was, and bolted.

  I felt nauseous. Inside my stomach, I felt a boulder of repressed desire bouncing up and down as I walked back to the car. I clasped the handle of the car door as if it were a life buoy. The tension cut off my air supply, and I could think only of saving myself, as if I had somehow known what would come. The delicious pain. The painful delight. When I drove out of the parking lot, I couldn’t quite believe it. In my rearview mirror, I saw him appear outside with a held-in pace, watching my car speed off. Shit. I should have turned off that noise inside my head. Missed the chance of a lifetime. The kiss of a lifetime.

  Ding. A text came through on my phone.

  I thought you would wait for me. Pity…

  My regained stability and breath were very short-lived. Once again, it felt like all my blood rushed to my lips with an unknown, almost violent intensity, and yet again, I was a helpless victim of this burning sensation. Apparently, it wasn’t all happening only in my head. Somewhere between dreaming away at the sight of his lips and the end of the evening, I must have given him my phone number, and thank the gods I had. The tension was ours; the yearning was ours and not mine alone. What a relief. I registered some white noise in the distance, but it was only Deb chatting away as she sat next to me.

  “Hello, Earth to Estelle. It is him, isn’t it?”

  I looked at her, astonished, and wondered if she had been there the whole time. She probably had been. It was her birthday, after all, that we’d been out celebrating.

  “I knew it, I knew it.” She yapped on. “I saw it happening. Well done! You see? You see that interesting people actually leave their houses. You spend way too much time with your nose between your stuffy books, you lucky bitch. I should have known. Why didn’t you go for it?”

  I nodded and turned my eyes to the road. All the time, I asked myself how she still had any breath left to continue, but continue she did.

  “Damn, girl. I would have so been in his car. He must know his stuff. Have you seen those hot women on his arm in the tabloids? Let me tell you, they are there for good reason. I am no fool. Not only is he a hot piece of ass, but he sure knows his way around. What did he send you, anyway? Will you reply? Well, no. Don’t. You’ll fuck it up. I’ll tell you what to say—at least that way you have a shot at keeping him interested.”

  Her babbling seemed to penetrate my thoughts from another world. What on Earth was she talking about? I didn’t want her advice; I was nothing like her. She was my opposite: an unmistakably confident specimen, bordering on arrogant, who always got what she wanted. She challenged me, dragged me out of my dustbox of a room, as she’d baptized it, and away from my escapist ways and my books and my movies. I admired her guts, the way she played out her beauty, and her openness, but I never wanted to be her. Moreover, she always crossed the line by miles and miles. That wasn’t me. I was calculated, safe, and maybe too rational at times. Until now, I thought. All the moving parts in my head just stopped. It was silent up there now. My breath just halted. Those eyes. Those lips. That stubble. Those words.

  I had replied to him in my usual, apologetic way, and I prepared for the eternal silence that would surely follow. Deb was giggling that night. Hard to forget. She loved stories you could tell and repeat on end, like gossip and unimportant stuff that may or may not have happened to other people.

  “Funny. I thought he liked dark, tall women. You know, the Brazilian-looking kind with honey-colored skin and long, black hair complementing their hateful doll faces, and their despicable huge tits and mosquito legs.”

  “What’s your point, Deb?” I asked.

  “Just, it’s funny, you know. Knowing all that, he comes and sits next to you all night and asks for your number. I mean… it’s weird, right? You’re blond and cute and all, but frankly a little inconspicuous.” Her magazine logic passed me by completely.

  I mumbled a forced “indeed” from time to time to please her. Deb didn’t seem to notice that I had once again retreated into my world of excessive thought. She also seemed to forget that not all truth is printed and not all that is printed is true. And she didn’t realize I had laid eyes on him years earlier.

  I was barely thirteen at the time, and so proud to go with my parents and actually live the race. I was no longer following the whole thing on television, dozing off to the rippling, monotonous voice of the commentator streaming into the room like an invisible but quite efficient narcotic. This time, it would be different. This time, I would be there. This time, I would live it. I had imagined it quite differently, had underestimated the speed and the highly contagious atmosphere among the cheering crowd. Now, I saw up close the pain of tenacity on the athletes’ faces. And when three men took the stage, I remember seeing the strain drawn out on their bodies in shimmers of sweat, the subtle, nervous tics around their knees and on their legs, and their happy yet worn-out faces.

  I wondered what and where the difference between men was made, what constituted one’s indisputable, yet inexplicable superiority as the entire race seemed constantly guided by sheer luck or the whims of circumstance; what made one wonderful set of muscle outshine the other equally perfect ones, and oddly effortlessly at that, victory written all over that glorious body, briefly surfacing in its beautiful complexion, its sublimity magnetically lingering in the air. I had missed it at first, probably because of the brownish veil of mud that covered the most important parts: three pairs of muscled legs that could tell the tale about blood, sweat, and tears shed. About pushing through the pain. About persisting. About character. The set of legs that belonged to sportsman number one particularly fascinated me. In my head, I could still see the image of his victory. It was embedded in there somewhere. His outstretched arms, his muddy legs, his tense face, his petrified fingers. From that moment on, he was my modern Milo, a hero whose sweat I could almost taste.

  That particular night of Deb’s birthday bash, more than half a decade later, it was Milo who had descended from his pedestal and, upon entering the human world, became a mortal himself by sitting next to me, talking to me, and looking at me. What do I make of this? I lay next to Deb between her girly, floral sheets. She was still going on and on and on about current events. In a whimsical moment of hubris, I thought maybe she might be right. Why not? Before rationality kicked in, I agreed to dinner with Milo the next day, which was really later that same day. With that last rash action, I fell asleep to the drumming sound of the confident torrent of words coming from next to me.

  Chapter Two

  What a nightmare I woke up to, the realization that I had a set date with a living demigod. Why not? Yes, I did remember my prizewinning rationalization for the stupidity world cup. What would I say? I had nothing to offer that man. Worse, what did I have to wear for such an occasion? Estelle, dear, ball out of the park on that one! The red dress I had worn the previous day was not an option—it smelled of bar and was already soaking up the entire stomach-turning bouquet of the hamper. Plus, I didn’t want him to think I was a bum in possession of only one piece of clothing. My other dress? I had no other dress. I wasn’t a dressy kind of girl yet. Jeans and shirt, then. Comfort. Playing it cool. Damn, even in my head it already sounded uncool. Fortunately, he wouldn’t be able to read the panic in my mind. The talking problem—to be dealt with later. Getting dressed was the first order of business. The kissing problem—unnecessary to worry about that. Never in a million years. You have rea
ched your destination. Why did GPS voices always sound so irritatingly friendly?

  I was dancing circles on the sidewalk near the place where we’d agreed to meet. Suddenly a strangely fearful calm came over me. His smiling face instantly commanded silence in my head.

  “Hey, buddy. How are you?”

  Without waiting for me to reply to his cheerful words, he enclosed me into his arms, a spontaneous hug of one and a half seconds. It proved to be enough to wake all the shivers and tingles of yesterday in one sharp blow. Guided by the arm he had so casually wrapped around my shoulder, I accompanied him to our destination for a potentially alarming activity: dinner. And, just like that, I couldn’t seem to remember why I had been so nervous in the first place. The rest of the evening just flew by, normally and calmly, and with a whole lot of laughter. We are, à l’aise, as the French so eloquently put it. Once more, he had become real, made of flesh and blood, human. For me, I had thought back then. However, I realize now that that godly impression was more in my mind than anything else.

  Milo walked me back to my car in the same gentle way as before. His arm burned my neck; his fingertips scorched my shoulder. He stopped and let his hand slide down my backbone. One glance had again been enough to kindle all the fire inside me and draw it to my lips. I remember casting my eyes down, but his hand crept skillfully along my jawbone, finally embracing my neck with determination. His lips. My lips. The fire. The desire. The tension. And then, quite suddenly, nothing at all. No thoughts. No noise. No people. No world. For just an instant, I was lost, burned, shattered. His slender fingers slipped tenderly down to stroke my collarbone. I opened my eyes and stared right into a set of dreamy blue eyes so filled with satisfaction they brought me into a state of complete serenity.