As much as he still feared it, Victor adored being intimate with his new wife. Their lives were simple, yet bountiful in its own right, and their existences were peaceful, lovely, and adoring.
But Victor had a secret, one he considered to be terribly detrimental to his comfortable lack of dramatic predicaments.
It was a night like any other night; the stars scintillated in the sky as he came home from working at his father's fishing company to have the familiar yet luscious lips of Victoria pressed into his own as he walked in the door. He would drop his belongings and leave them at his side as he quickly slid his arms around her waist, massaging her skin in gentle yet needy motions.
But among the fires of passion coursing through his body, he also felt the sting of guilt.
He kissed her fervently, listening intently to the labored breath seething gently from her lungs in such soft quiet breaths, delicate in all their feminine beauty and only managed to further stir his urges of latria, of a love he could not bear to divulge in words and could only treat her like the queen she was through his actions.
Through his touches, his moans, his careful subconscious deductions as to where she was the most sensitive, he divided his loverly attentions fully and graciously upon the plane of her voluptuous body, warm and soft, and all his.
They carried on to their small bedroom, diminutive yet perfect for the simplicity of their interludes, doing their marital activities justice as just a sacred place of privacy and sultry seclusion. Victor saw the somberness of the last evening light spilling into his bedroom out of the corner of his sight, and a pang of emotional turmoil rattled through the winding staircase of his spine, painful and a hideous disruption to the passion their caressed bodies had so blissfully manifested.
Azure twilight was the color of her skin.
"...Victor?" Came his chosen lover's whisper.
Victor didn't answer her soft call immediately. He looked back down at her, the slender sleeve of her dress slipped down to the tender bicep of her arm, the tops of the hills of her angelic breasts just slightly in view, the blush upon her cheeks so obviously a delectable kiss of a red rose's cherubic stroke, her legs parted in a svelte 'v' of separation to accommodate him, probably aching to be wrapped and finally locked around his own lissome body. He licked his lips, half in display of his rising voracious appetite for her flesh, half in consideration, conflictual upheaval making his face flicker as a thousand thoughts raced through his mind.
Are you watching?
"Victor?" She said again, this time with more presence, more feeling. "Is something on your mind darling?" So genuinely concerned.
Yes. I cannot stop thinking about her.
"No, of course not." He bent down and kissed her gingerly on the lips, pacing himself, for they would be brutally bruised from consistently colliding in due time.
And yet as old love kept resurfacing, he trekked on through their lovemaking session, catching each bead of honey sweat that fell from his wife's thick brunette hair, descending like a dark russet waterfall across the paleness of her sweet skin. He wished he could say he was lost in the sensations, lost in the love that he felt with her, idolized the beauty which lay before him for the taking again and again until they grew old together. And yet he felt lost within himself, braving the storm of pleasure with his wife despite not all of his notions being cast behind his untruthful stare solely about the seraph he had so easily captured in his bed that night.
I wish I could stop thinking about her.
"Oh Victor..." She sighed heavily, her eyelashes brushing the tops of her contoured cheekbones as she closed her eyes tight, blinded by her fervor for her husband, and oblivious to the thwarted expression disgracing Victor's face.
He wanted to cry, she was so beautiful.
So beautiful, they were both so beautiful.
Their motions, once awkward movements of newlywed discomfort, were now fluid, perhaps even graceful as their experience and comfort between each other reached new heights every time they became one. But as previously stated, Victor had a terrible secret, and he knew that he would forever be cursed by the prospect of what ifs and strange, possibly even grotesque possibilities.
So close, so close now. They were both breathing hard, both of them desperate to reach their peaks, to find that glorious serendipity that two lovers achieve when their union reaches the height of spiritual reckoning.
So close.
Victoria.
Victoria.
Please Victoria.
Please...Emily.
Emily!
EMILY!
"...VICTORIA!"
Their intensity ended in a blast of heat and lovelorn secrecy. She clung to him, her fingernails carving crescent moon shapes into the pallid surface of his flesh, and he clutched her, riding out the last tremors of his ardency buried in the crook of her swan neck, face screwed up in ecstasy.
And relief.
Thank god I didn't say her name.
They both fell to their sides, separating their unification to cool their writhing lust from the warmth they had created solely from their bodies and flaming avidity for each other. Victoria's hand laid itself on his chest, circling random spots across his breastbone and making the bumps of goose flesh rise to the occasion. She said nothing, but emitted salving tones of satisfaction like that of a dove at dawn. And for this, he was glad. He never had anything to say at the end of their lovemaking, for it was dangerous ground upon which he always came so close to treading.
The memory of his other love ascending to the heavens where her ghost could rest in grapevines and blossoms and every other symbol of blessed concord haunted him so, to the point where it was detrimental to his happiness. And yet, he kept his guilt and conflicted feelings behind a shamefully clandestine veil of concealment. His love for his wife was real, but so was it for Emily, the spirit whose eyes he could almost feel burning into his back watching as the man who freed her left her bereft and cold in the next realm where her touch just couldn't transcend. She would always remain a powerful source behind the trembles of his sensuality, and a wraith representing his heart torn in two.
Rhythmic puffs of air against his cheek, hot and gentle, was a sign that Victoria had fallen asleep. He looked down at the top of her head, his heart aching terribly, but disregarding his guilty conscience he wrapped his arms around her anyway. His eyes did not close from exhaustion from some time as he pondered his private oath he made to himself to never speak of Emily in front of Victoria again, lest he risk his life of surreptitious perfection. He felt imprisoned, his own means of mental incarceration forever engrained within the confines of his mind, and he said farewell to his sovereign mind now inhabited by his unavowed transgression. A man of two woman's adoration he was, and so it would remain despite the truth of Emily's soul being freed from her decaying shell.
Oh Emily...the price of your freedom was indeed my own.