Here it is, I hope you enjoy the last chapter to the K diaries. Listening to Shirley Horn's version of « The second time around » might greatly enhance your reading experience :)

Chapter 11 : « The second time around »

25th December 2012

This is no ordinary love. Maybe this is why we decided to put the lid back on. Close the door. Agree to loosen the ties there, wordlessly. Maybe that is what happened to us.

It is love that stains, that bleeds, that soars. Love that pushes us seated, barely buckled up on board a crazed sky high ride and dares us to keep our eyes open. Love that yanks on the already mended fabric of our hearts with no regard for our agglutinated fears. This is not foolish love, love that enchants us with stories, tales. This love looks at us square in the face, reaches and pulls our masks apart, and then tramples them on the floor right in front of us along with all of our reassuring artifice, leaving us naked and stunned.

I'm sitting here in our bedroom, where we are shooting our second take. Sitting here as snow crashes its softness outside the window, each flake a soothing balm on my raw senses. I'm sitting here, my skin streaked with the invisible tongue traced furrows you drew there. My skin spun, weaved into this ephemeral lace. Dizzy with the knowledge that «tears that taste of tears lose their taste for kissing »* . Sitting here with bruised, destroyed lips. Lips that kissed salty skin, collected warm creamy essence, swallowed whispers and cries, sought to quench the five month old sea wide thirst between us within the jet black to dark blue hues of one single sleepless night.

The warmth of our blue linen sheets you are still wrapped in is hard to leave behind when I wake up, and I quickly open the closet and slide into the plush cotton robe hanging there, to protect my naked skin from the bite of the cold air of the room, on this Christmas morning. A whiff of sandal wood greets me when I open the closet where I see that you've hung this new coat of yours, and I can't help running my fingers through the fabric, wondering what would have happened if I had reached out, touched your arm, on the many occasions you stood next to me wearing it. I'm here again. In your world. Your neatly folded perfect selection of clothes is sitting on the shelve next to the remaining robe. Not an item too much, I think, until I see the floral pattern of the silk scarf I got you last Spring, hung amongst the other garments. The sight tugs at my heart. It's still so early, there's a robin chirping and the morning light is still heavy with hues of blue. I have time. My handbag is sitting right there on the desk, right next to the stack of end of term reports i can't believe you brought. I tuck myself in the comfort of the green velvet armchair. I push the reports aside and, start writing as the memory of the rasp of your teeth on my skin, right before the bite you inflicted last night, stirs warmth in the pit of my belly. The mark here on my right hip, another piece of evidence : this is voracious, sprawling love. This is love that takes it all. Leaves me, drunk with you, lying on the floor, kissed to death. Puddled. This is love that hypnotizes you, sends you spinning , drowns you and then hangs you on my lips for rescue, drawing breath from our pulsing naked kiss, in full view of people whose opinion used to matter five distant minutes ago, before forever became self-evident.

None of the silky caresses of mature love for us. Shirley Horn's promise of love being «lovelier the second time around » sounds like a commercial meant to deceive, allure. A pathetic certainly doesn't feel like «a friendly home the second time you come ».

I'm stealing those minutes, the few minutes I have to myself. I'm writing as I would pinch myself out of delusion. I'm writing to make sure. To prove myself that you are indeed here, right behind me, sleeping in our borrowed bed. I'm writing to stop myself from going back to the source. To ensure that I let you sleep, recuperate. I'm writing to dissipate the loud call of your naked shoulder and offered neck. Remembering the the dark hues I saw when I woke up, just below your eyelashes, I hang on to harshly negotiated patience, through words traced by my fountain pen on the notebook pages, the gentle dance of the letters, traced by my fingers,

This is love that knocks us out with the slightest of touches. Love that borrows our life for small contractions of seconds and delivers it back to us, changed beyond recognition, its course grossly deviated by the earth shattering beating of butterfly wings. Almost nothing. Minute details. Just your lips on mine for a handful of seconds a few months ago. Just your hand crushed in mine in the shade of the ultrasound room, our eyes smashed on a screen larger than any one we've seen before, glued to the magic shown there. Our main protagonist. Schooling us already. Blowing on the fragile straw houses we call our lives. Just a flutter really. Distant heartbeats added to mine, pounding here, in my belly.

I am too overwhelmed by the spasms of the abject fear coursing in my veins like sticky lava to see it then. But this is all it takes, really. Almost nothing, for me to know. The slight quiver in your voice when you say « You might be fine », the cadence in your stride on the corridor of St Margaret's. The slip of your tongue when you forget to hide the counting «Twenty ….. how many weeks…. very unusual … » There is no politeness in your voice. No easiness in the cadence of your pace. No choice. I know then that this isn't a visit to a friend in need or to an ex lover. I recognize it. I know that you sit there, next to me, exactly the same way Richard sat, time and time again. You sit there unshielded. At the mercy of what might be said by a nurse, a doctor. Hoping not to be mutilated by words you cannot unhear. Just as unprotected as I am. Just as humbled. You sit there because you cannot be anywhere else, do anything else other than run when Beverly tells you. Yes, run probably, and get there as fast as you can, jumping lights, unseeing eyes on the road, mind exploding, a leaden lump in your stomach. You arrive at St Margaret's only minutes after I get there myself. It's all there in your voice, in the way you sit.

You've just moved in our bed, changed sides, and you are now facing me, the shift left your breasts uncovered. I like seeing you like this, bathed, flushed in us, in what we are.
I know that sleep is losing its grip. You are coming back to the surface. Little by little. I wonder what I will find in your eyes this morning. Will the thirst still be there? Will the pain be there too? Lingering?

I wonder when you started letting yourself love her exactly. Did it start right away? When I told you Greg and I had made a start? Did you try not to, but found that you were already counting? Wondering about this child that was maybe there, growing?

Or rather, did it start only when I told you I was pregnant? When I stood there, only letting you know in the form of a request for maternity leave? As if you hadn't been dying to find out for weeks. Or was it not knowing how I was? Is it that what hurt the most? Day after day wondering, and not being told? Having to wait till morning to know? Dreading friday nights where there would be no way to find out for two long days? Was it being reduced to taking stolen peaks of me during recess from your office windows and speculating? Was it seeing me? Seeing the bump show more and more and not being allowed to stretch your arm and caress the warmth, the fullness there? Was it having to be polite? Removed?

Was it counting the days and knowing that by now, I would have had it in my hands, the first ultra sound picture? Was it aching for this ; for the fuzzy black and white shape of her, printed on a piece of paper? For proof? Was it not being able to tell? Someone, Anyone? That there is this child that feels like it's yours growing inside my belly.
Or maybe it was not being able to do anything. Plan. Buy things. Draw budgets. You probably did. Knowing you. There's probably something you couldn't resist buying. Doing. Something you bought early on. A teddy bear maybe, or a music box.

I know something is probably really high on the list, though: when I kept thanking you for coming, for sitting next to me at St Margaret's. Each « thank you » obviously stung like a slap in your face. «Please…please don't thank me Kate. I just had to be there….» Your face ashen, elbows sagging, defeated. I was so blissfully unaware, swimming in a sea of gratitude, after the nurse said «You're fine, you're both fine ». I was floating, wanting to thank everyone I saw that day, the nurse, the patients in the waiting room, God. Wanting to tell them « My daughter is fine! My child is completely fine, gliding in my belly. » Absentmindedly driving the blade deeper yet by letting go of your hand and daring to apologize for holding it. I barely saw it. Barely paid attention. The nurse acknowledged your transparent love for this child more than I did.

But I knew that look. The same look as the one Richard held in his eyes for months. A very specific quality of sorrow. Someone who's being forbidden to love their child. Only this time, it wasn't the curse battering us mercilessly. This time there was a child to love. A child on its way to us. This time it was me. Preventing you. Stopping you. Keeping her to myself. «I wouldn't want to do this on my own.» Except I did. From the get go. Want her for myself. Just for me. I see it now. Hot liquid shame, flowing down my cheeks. A welcome release. I hope you don't wake up just yet. I don't want them to be the first thing you see on the first day of our second take.

I keep you for the end. I stock up first. On warmth, on smiles. On tight embraces and heartfelt thank yous, and light goodbyes; on the feel of the ray of sunshine on my hands flying on the keys as I play in the chapel. Winding my way amongst the happy crowd, I find you standing there next to the fireplace, affecting nonchalance, a glass of champagne in your hand, but your eyes tell me an other story. Our first words to each other have the cardboard taste of worn dialogues. It dawns on me that we've been watching each other from afar, for hours, like actors of a tragic pantomime stuck on the wrong set, and now we are dully delivering pre-scripted lines, distracted by the syrupy romantic finale being shot around us. Uttered aiming sideways, as if to get a better angle, your « yeah…how likely is that? » punctures a whole in my chest as surely as a sharp blade would have. You deliver it with eyes drenched in torrential thirst, it shoots out of your mouth like a stray line stolen from an otherwise vapid script. With eyes raking my pregnant belly, as if conjuring our daughter up as a witness of my cruel and unusual punishment towards you, you let each syllable in: « Have a merry Christmas too » spill out of your mouth in an explosion of purulent toxic hurt that wipes the smile right off my face. Your words bear the magic of a spell breaking kiss.

I turn my back on you and start taking steps towards the exit, fully aware of the gaping whole now lodged in my chest. I walk out knowing I am wounded. Bleeding drops of sorrow all the way home, enveloped in a thick numbing layer of silence all around, my car lights splitting the pitch darkness, licking the snow covered road side, my mind blasting in a deafening turmoil. By the time I reach the cottage, the sorrow has turned to full blown miraculous anger. How bloody exasperating can this get!

I push the door open, close it shut. There's no comfort in the smell of the vegetable curry I made yesterday, no joy in Monsoon's passionate brushes against the back of my legs. Shocked at the realization that I feel like a complete stranger in my own house, I lean on the entrance door, my coat still on. The entrance to my study is open and in darkness, I can still make out your unthrowable bouquet standing there on my desk, its mockery barring my way.

I stay there for some time. What sets me into motion is our daughter's sudden impatient kicks in my belly. I don't realize right away that I have let myself out of the cottage again and that I am now almost running to my car. I am back behind the wheel in seconds and it's not until I am almost at my destination, that I realize I am racing against myself. I want to get there before it's too late. Before I talk myself out of it. Before I decide to just cover the wound and move on. It's not a flash of lightning, or a suddenly clear vision that sends me bursting out of the cottage, heady elation shooting through my veins, having to coax my limbs into motion like a first year driver. It's a wave coming from the depth of myself. A ripple really at the beginning, a soaring awareness that finds it's way to me. By the time I step inside ballroom where the crowd has thinned out, I slide across the hardwood floor, engulfed in a wild surf that gently releases me to you before pulling out, hypnotized by my sudden appetite for boldness, realizing what is on my mind is nothing less than attempted robbery : stealing the stage. Letting all of our shame and fear, all the things that have caused us both to betray this love; convinced us both to sing along the malevolent song of small love, cautious love, love professed only behind close doors, shamed love; let it all be burnt to the ground, once and for all, here and now, dissolved under the diffused light of the chandelier of your mother's wedding reception. I'm here to give myself away, to dare us both out of the deceiving shadow, hand stretched open. To claim what we are to each other in center stage. To change the script.

When you don't put your hand in mine right away, after I ask « Do you want to dance? » my heart throbbing it s impossible rhythm in my ribcage, it feels like I am hanging on a cliff, contemplating a deadly fall, suspended.

But you do, you take my hand and we fall into this kiss. Our kiss.

You slide your hand in mine after our lips finally part, and lead the way, wordlessly, without looking back, your stride slower than intended. As if parting waters, you wade your way to our room amongst warm smiles, most people have long stopped watching us since this kiss, our kiss, bled into one song after the other. We are both silent, overwhelmed. You let the door close behind us and reach for the knot tying my dress in one single gesture, a loud pleading look in your eyes. I reach for your hands and tell you that we can wait. That we can take our time, that I'm not going anywhere, but I know looking at you that you can barely hear me. The dim light of the bedside lamp outlines the contours of your face as your lips are already lowering to grasp their first conquest, the patch of skin between my breasts. Your breath catches as you take a step back and simply take in the sight of me, your eyes caressing my belly, my chest and then, tears dancing in your eyes, you reach for the knot and pull the dress open. It feels like only seconds later, I'm caught, tightly fastened in your embrace, laid defenseless on the bed, braless, dress nowhere in sight, my breasts disappearing one after the other, in the warm cavity of your assaulting mouth. You seem intent on devouring fullness, a deafening thirst sends you feasting on my erect nipples, quenching an incandescent need that threatens to swallow me whole. I can see your fingers tremble as you place your hands on my belly and utter the first words since our very public kiss : « our daughter ». Your words ignite a massive warm swell inside of me. You leave a trail of of tears there, before pulling on the black lace of my knickers and sending them flying across the room. Hovering on top of me, a famished look in your eyes, you take a break from your slow fall into me, and rest you lips at the tip of my right hip, stalling, your fingers tasting the softness of my inner thighs. But as you dance your tongue on my skin, your ragged breath is the only warning that the teasing has turned on you, before I see the corner of your mouth lift, uncovering incisors that sink into my flesh, leeching a desperate cry out of my parched throat and drenching my body with a sharp shot of pure liquid lust. You tell me « I need you, Kate, I need to feel you, taste you. » There is no kindness in your gestures. They bear far too much urgency to afford it. You are everywhere after that, fingers between my thighs, caressing wet tender folds and then entering me roughly, your breath shouting in my ear, your tongue tracing burning patterns on my skin, drinking me, swallowing me. I'm swollen to the point of explosion, sent suspended in thin air, as I near the brink of release and then held in your eyes, and arms, as I cry my pleasure loud, loud, so loud in the silent night until I lay spent, in your arms, my naked body against your clad one.

At the turn of a caress across my cheek where you collect my grateful smile, you feed me pungent fingers. I take you in, swirling my tongue around your thrusting gift, your eyes gulping each one of my careful slurping licks. You paint my lips in saliva with the tip of your fingers and then draw your mouth close to mine resuming the sipping of the fresh welling lust we had licked dry minutes ago. As I ready my senses to take the long awaited trip across your skin, wishing I'd already freed you from your dress, you tell me « Kate...why does it feel like you and I just got married tonight? »

I just smile.

* "tears that taste of tears lose their taste for kissing" taken from the jazz standard "You don't know what love is"

Thank you so very much for reading and for your lovely reviews and private messages. Please keep them coming if you can, each one of them goes a very long way in my heart. This journey taken with the diaries has brought so much more than I ever thought possible but first and foremost the beautiful exchange with other tangofic writers, and I would like to particularly thank bspokebelle for her incredible and inspiring support and beta work as well as Shaloved for letting me borrow her bouquet. Thank you to all the amazing writers that keep me so inspired everyday.

For the music lovers, you'll find below a tracklist to the diaries.

Spring can really hang you up the most - Chet Baker
Blue in Green - Miles Davis
Try a little tenderness - Otis Redding
Eben Ne Andro Lontana - La Wally- Maria Callas
Wild is the Wind - Shirley Horn
Feeling Good - Nina Simone
Fly me to the moon - Franck Sinatra
The Kiss of Life - Sade
Cry me a river - Dinah Washington
Good Morning Heartache - Dinah Washington
Round Midnight - Carmen McRae
The Second Time around - Shirley Horn
You don't know what love is - Cassandra Wilson