TCOT Absurd Assumption C25
Note: Here it is...the little chapter before the big final chapter.
Thank you to my beta, my friend, the wildly talented StartWriting whose insight placed just the right word/phrase where it was needed, and sent me in directions I hadn't thought of.
I am so glad this monkey is off my back. However, I'm developing an alarming urge to 'fix' TCOT Heartbroken Bride.
~ D
Perry Mason could count on one hand the number of times he had cried in his life.
The first time he remembered was at seven when his father died and the confusing funeral rituals, combined with his mother's catatonic grief and brother's smothering protectiveness and constant remonstrations to 'be a little man', had frightened him as much as the realization he would never see his father again. He had crawled into his parent's closet and sobbed among the suits hanging there, finding great solace in the darkness permeated with his father's cologne.
The second time was when he was over thirty and his mother had fallen gravely ill, and he hadn't been able to be with her when she passed away. To this day he wasn't quite sure if all of his tears had been for the gracious, wonderful woman who had been his mother, or if some of them were for the self-centered, petty woman Laura Cavanaugh had shown herself to be during the saddest period of his life.
The third time tears had overcome him was when, despite the best medical care in the world, a true miracle couldn't be saved.
He hadn't cried eight and six years ago when first Harvey Sayers, then Paul Drake died, both of them well south of sixty years old.
And he hadn't cried three years ago when the love of his life, the woman for whom he breathed, walked away from him.
But he cried now at sixty-three as he held the weeping, trembling woman he'd loved beyond all reason for almost half of his life, the woman who had never let go of one little bit of his heart. He cried at the profundity of his feelings for her; at how indescribable sex was with her; at how his heart, mind, and soul converged as a whole only in her presence. And if he had never known how to react to Della's tears, he was completely flummoxed by his own.
"I…the way you make me feel…when we…it's…" he couldn't finish his thought, let alone begin it.
When she realized the big, powerful man she had loved for more than half of her life was crying, Della wept harder, even as she kissed his tears away, cooing and shushing with each tender touch. They cried together, each whispering words only the other could possibly understand, the chasm of hurt beginning to heal itself.
Della sighed.
"My sentiments exactly," Perry's voice rumbled in her ear.
She was lying sprawled atop him in her usual post-coital position, one leg drawn up and across his hips to hold her in place, cheek pillowed against his broad chest, head tucked beneath the long line of his jaw. Their tears finally dried, she had been contentedly listening to the beating of his strong heart, the beloved music missing from her life for far too long.
"We shouldn't have done that." She sighed again.
"Ohhhh yes we should have."
He could feel Della's passion-plumped lips curve slowly into a sly smile against his heated skin.
"And furthermore, I think we should do it again. Not only in the very near future, but also on a fairly regular basis for the rest of our lives. What do you think?"
Della sat up then, grasping the sheet to cover her resplendent nudity. "You can forgive me just like that?" She expertly snapped her fingers.
"I hope I made it perfectly clear that I can. That I have." He propped himself up on his elbow. "There isn't anything you could do that I wouldn't forgive."
His rumble of a voice was a ripple she felt instead of heard, and she shivered at the power of it.
"Della, I have never loved anyone the way I love you. I've given my life to you, and I would give it for you. It will take so much more than a – a misunderstanding to overshadow what I feel for you."
"Would you have forgiven me if I actually had murdered Arthur Gordon?" Poisonous feelings of unworthiness and disappointment were proving difficult to set aside.
Perry had the temerity to laugh and she drew her brows together in a scowl. "Such a ferocious frown, my love, for no good reason. You have a temper, but you would never hurt anyone, and your capacity to forgive has always far exceeded mine. I know where you're headed with this, and don't think for a moment I'll let you get away with it."
"But Perry," she protested weakly, for good measure.
"But Perry, nothing," he said sternly, the rumble becoming almost a shock wave coursing jaggedly through her sensitized body. "I'm the one who let everything go to hell in a hand basket. I should have told you about meeting Max and Laura in DC, and I should have admitted it was Laura…about Kaitlynn…how she couldn't possibly be mine. But remembering how hurt you were when you found out about Maryann Baynum...if I couldn't understand why for the second time a woman was claiming her child was mine when it wasn't, how could I expect you to? You had been hurt enough and I wanted to protect you. So you see darling, I didn't give you the chance to forgive me."
"But I had already forgiven you," Della said, a bit bewildered by his admission. "Once I realized how nasty I had been to you, and how what I said made you think I wasn't ever coming back, I couldn't very well blame you for…finding someone else." She nudged his hip with a bare foot. "Did you have to find someone so soon, Perry? Really, it's insulting how quickly you moved on."
Della was no longer clutching the sheet to her body, and although the external guard was lowered, the internal guard had yet to be fully breached, her stubbornness every bit as strong as it had ever been, still protecting her from nothing but herself and the feelings she had never been able to escape. Perry reached out and trailed his fingers from her collar bone down between the most perfect breasts he had ever beheld, to her sweet, sweet navel.
"If I had admitted then who the woman was and why Kaitlynn couldn't be mine, we wouldn't have been apart the past three years. I'm not the one needing to forgive, my love, then or now. Can you forgive me, just like that?" His snap of the fingers wasn't as sharp as hers, but she had always been better at it than him anyway.
Before his eyes, Della emerged from behind all that stubbornness to lie down next to him, one slender arm gliding over his torso to embrace him. He was wrong, but she wouldn't argue with him. He had done nothing unforgivable. Almost from the day she had met him, Perry Mason had taught her with actions as well as words never to make assumptions; but when it was critical to everything they had been, were, and could be together, she had ignored that important lesson and made the most absurd assumption of all.
"I made an assumption too, you know," Perry went on, in no way able to know how eerily his words mirrored Della's thoughts. "I thought it truly was Hummel who came between us. I assumed you turned down all my proposals because deep in your heart you knew there was another man you could say yes to. I wanted to know, but I was too afraid to ask."
"Oh Perry," she breathed, half choking. "We're both intelligent people. How could we have been so stupid?"
Perry turned and gently placed her beneath him, where she belonged, where no other woman had ever or would ever fit so perfectly. She tasted like love and longing as his lips sought hers in a sultry kiss, her back arching toward him. Tears threatened again as his body reacted in ways only Della could make it react, sensations he had thought might be lost to him forever. He would spend the rest of his life reacquainting himself with every inch of her, pleasuring her as she had never been pleasured before.
"I don't want to over-analyze what happened, Della, while we sort everything out, like in the past," he whispered into her ear. "I want this. I want to be close to you, and not deny…"
"Lust?"
"I'll go with lust if you want, but I was going to say passion and desire, or plain old need. I need you, Della, I've always needed you. You fill up what's empty in me. Let's not deny what is right between us because other things are broken. Lust and desire and need will help us fix those broken things that much quicker. I want to come home, baby. I'm asking a lot of you after everything I've done, but I want to sleep with you and wake up with you while we sort everything out this time. We've wasted too much time due to my damn conservative disposition."
She snickered, wrapped in the warmth of their gloriously long history. He wasn't perfect, but he was perfect for her. Her hands, elegant, ladylike hands, slid from his chest downward and around to his backside in a most unladylike manner as she bent her legs and lifted them around his hips. He moaned at the movement, at how the shift in position brought his...lust...closer to her welcoming softness. "I need you, too, Perry Mason. I tried to deny it, but the past three years only showed how very much I need you."
His eyes darkened with emotion so primal it would have frightened her had she not recognized he was merely feeding off the licentious invitation evident in her own eyes. "No man has ever loved a woman more than I love you, Della Katherine Street," he said raggedly. "If nothing else, believe that."
Della barely breathed as Perry hungrily continued his rediscovery of her body, as she came alive beneath him, as her trust in him and immeasurable love for him emerged from its chrysalis shiny and new and achingly beautiful. His insistent mouth and hands were everywhere, adoring her, teasing her, pleasing her as no man ever had before him or since him. She strained toward him, almost levitating, as every cell of her body exploded in transcendent ecstasy, hysterically pleading, desperate for him not to stop, never to stop, oh please don't ever stop, writhing and sobbing as those long, capable fingers relentlessly ravished her.
The sound she made when he finally settled himself inside her incredible body again with infinite gentleness was still more musical than music, the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. That is until she made that other sound, that indescribable sound of their life together.