Another man's wife. There was never going to be any justification for that. Ever. Not the neglect, the pulling away, the distracted life, the loss of interest. Even the infidelities. She was still married to him and her reasons why were her own weight to bear, but that didn't make his involvement excusable. It wasn't.
He had never been so controlled by his physical impulses. Before her. Now his physicality seemed to rule every part of his life, awake, asleep, alone, in crowds. She didn't even need to be in the room for him to be dragged under by a body memory, reeling in the recollected impact of the consummation of a moment between them. If she was in his proximity, it became an unbearable urge to touch, to lick, to hold.
It was a kind of torture meted out by the black hooded inquisitor of his own heart and brain. In the fire, out of the flames, into the ice bath, out of the freeze. His skin sloughing off in sheets, his bones broken on the wheel, his brains leaking out of his ears, and his veins opening. He was disemboweled, open to her but also to anyone who stopped long enough to look. Flayed, his skin on a hook. And yet, no one seemed to see how he had been turned inside out. For her.
He loved to kiss. He had known this about himself since he'd been a lad. But it was too visceral; the need to crawl inside another person's body. Almost repulsive. And he'd held this yearning back. Tamped it down into the roots of his molars where it ached, the abscess of desire. It had been measurable years since he had mouth kissed a woman, so when he kissed her, in the first frantic moments, he infected himself. His blood blooming with a love sickness.
He kissed her passionately, quietly, covertly, slyly, close lipped, open mouthed, counting each of her teeth with the tip of his tongue, slowly, quickly. He could be raptured with just their praying mouths touching.
If it had been any other man, any other woman, he would have taken what he wanted. Simply and completely. Finish what he had begun. Lay down ultimatums, draw a line in the sand, dare him to cross it and then walk away. With her. The primitive male, the male animal. Mine. Mine. Mine.
On a rainy afternoon, his bed their shelter, she slowed him down and broke him open. Their couplings had been frenzied, overwrought. Against walls, on counter tops, in bathrooms, and alleys. Even in her car and that had been so reminiscent of purchased sex that he swore never again. They became master thieves, stolen moments, the physical heist and no one wanted to be left holding the bag. It was, after all, empty. But that day, everyone was safe, the boys, Jackson, Gemma, Samcro. Everyone save him. The perfect storm.
They found each other in the gale, their lives whipping to shreds around them.
His house was damp and unlit, the power had gone out. He heard the front doorknob rattle. Standing in the hallway, jeans slung low on his hips, barefooted, smoking a cigarette, nursing a whiskey, watching the door swing in and thinking it could be anyone but wanting it to be her. Willing it to be her. Needing it to be her in the way that he needed the air to be oxygen. She stepped inside, shaking the rain from her black hair, looking through the smoke and grey light to where he was now leaning against the wall.
They were still giddy in love. Smiling, trembling towards one another.
She locked the door, he stubbed out the cigarette, handed her the whiskey which she finished. Then she held out her hand, he took it, and she led him down the hallway, into his room. She opened the window, let the rain wet the tattered flags acting curtain. She turned back, undressing herself, clothes pooling at her feet. Her body was exquisite. Something he couldn't believe was being offered to him, the solid flesh an oblation, the act of him loving her akin to the sacrificial knife.
She responded so shamelessly to his body that she ignited him with virile strength, masculine power. The flame to her tinder. A glance, a touch, the caress of her mouth, the entanglement of her limbs with his, the bending of her spine into the arching shape with which she gave herself entirely, baring her neck.
The sky became darker, the clouds filling, then tearing and breaking, lightning and thunder, and her hands on his shoulders, urging him down to the bed. The pushing and pulling. His hands on her face, he needed her mouth on his mouth. She wanted control and he wanted to give it to her.
The rent clouds poured out the weight of their abundance.
She wrapped him in her arms, she rocked him against her breasts. She coaxed him to follow her to heights and depths he had never traveled before. She answered his need to have her lips on his, she breathed for him.
He brought a shaking hand up to his face, covering his eyes. He was weeping. She rolled onto her side, pulling him with her, reaching for the bedding, wrapping them in chilled sheets that warmed quickly with the heat they had generated. She hushed him gently but he could not stop. He had to let go of the shape that defined him, she had somehow erased those hard lines. Dissolution beckoned.
They lay with their hearts beating against one another, the separation of rib and flesh only inches thick between them.
"This-" he began but his voice broke and he silenced himself with grief.
"I know," she whispered into the dark, her secret voice in his ear.
"I wish-"
"Me, too."
Days passed becoming weeks. He knew soon he could count the months.
Instead of trying to return to that edge of oblivion she had taken him, smoking and drinking himself back, he worked his body to exhaustion. He ran for blocks, he lifted weights that had become rusty in his spare room, he pulverized his food in an old blender, he could not eat anything solid, could not swallow.
He sat beside the boy King and found he could breathe again. Realized he could hold the other man's gaze without the bitter taste of shame and guilt and hatred rising like bile in the back of his throat. He immersed himself back into a life that he had been on the verge of leaving. And not alone.
But all that was over now. Some days he felt as though they had escaped unscathed. The murder, suicide, rampage of destruction, had been avoided. Level heads prevailing and all of that. The potential for injury, the weapon of their joined bodies, the battlefield of which they were drawing the lines, the duel at dawn, all of it foregone. But not forgotten.
No one had to forgive or be forgiven.
And at night, alone in his bed, a wounded thing. He had been opened groin to sternum, the soft insides of his body quivering, his blood cooling, his heart exposed. That organ re-learning how to beat in time.