Miranda (15 page)

“Miranda,” he paused and looked into my eyes, “move away.”

I ignored him. I leaned in and kissed his forehead. His skin twitched as he felt my lips. Words were silenced. Sensations now dictated our course of action.

He stood near the edge of the bed. He held my face with his hands and kissed me. He kissed me and made his way with his eager tongue. He pulled me towards his chest and I felt his heart beating fast.

I didn’t close my eyes, maybe that way I could lose myself completely in his… seeing through them and beyond. If I were lucky, I’d be able to see as deep as his memories and experiences that made him who he was. Perhaps, if I continued gazing at the beautiful green, I would also discover why my body felt so trusting and at his mercy; or discover why I was allowing the kiss without trusting him.

I moved his lips away while keeping his eyes locked on mine. He waited for a response… perhaps a slap. My hormones betrayed me. I didn’t want to slap him, nor did I want to ask him to move away. I wanted to stay there, in those eyes in those arms. Every atom of my body wanted him, but I didn’t understand why. Eliezer Clausell, by all accounts, was the person I most hated in my life, but also, the one I most wanted at the moment.

The lines on his forehead relaxed; his breathing didn’t. My hands roamed over his torso. I reached down to his hips, to where the towel that covered his erection was tied. I undid the knot that kept the towel in its place. I closed my eyes.

Eliezer kissed me again–much more forcefully and aggressively than previously. He grabbed the cheeks of my rear, lifting me until his groin met mine. I clung to his body with arms and lips. He threw us down on the bed, placing his body on mine.

He, in full shameless nudity, showed clear signs of how much he wanted my body, my touch, my sex. With one yank, he pulled down my pants and my underwear. A button flew across the room. His heavy breathing was getting more out of control. I was tempted to stop watching him and to try to control mine, which was increasing in gasps. He removed my blouse–not with the care of a lover but with the eagerness of someone who’s been waiting a long time for this moment. He tore buttonholes and stitching. I didn’t care. My blouse was off. I helped him take off my bra.

I was nude before him. Eliezer was speechless: dominated by his agitated breathing. He gazed into my eyes, and for a few seconds I thought that he had regained his reason. I thought that, perhaps, damned reason had returned to me as well, that soon, the hate we felt for each other would overtake our desires.

None of that happened.

Eliezer traced the curves of my silhouette with his eyes. He grabbed some of my hair by running his fingers through it, and with it, pulled my head back. He kissed and kissed. He returned to my lips. I kissed and kissed.

Now, it was my turn. I took his face in my hands and licked his neck and then his firm pectorals. Eliezer pulled my hair again, forcing my torso to bend. My firm breasts were at his eye level. He kissed them hungrily with a calm fury, feeling how hot they were for him. I dug my nails into his back, sinking myself into the unbearable pain that he carried on it.

I let out a groan. Eliezer entered me. Short breaths escaped from his half-open mouth. The rhythm of his hips harmonized with mine.

Moving and reaching, longing each time to be deeper in my womb, Eliezer did not stop pressing against me, running his fingers through my hair, kissing the skin of my neck, my collarbone, the lips of the woman he criticized so much. I did not stop caressing his back, which was covered with the emotions that his paintings aroused day after day.

I was not right to surrender to Eliezer. The thought circled my head every time I tried to fill my lungs with the air I needed. When I could inhale it was his breath that provided the air that my mind so needed to understand what was happening.
Is that how an addict must feel when he falls, seduced by his addiction?
Perhaps that’s why the pleasure Eliezer awoke in me exceeded any other I had ever experienced with other men in the past.

Eliezer, while keeping the intense rhythm inside me, returned to exploring my breasts with his curious tongue. Sometimes he would look into my eyes, showing me his face contorted with pleasure, those eyes that would lose themselves in mine. Seeing him satisfy his needs with my body caused me to gasp, panting harder, moaning uncontrollably.

He increased the speed at which his hips moved. My breathing kept accelerating. I had to stop so as not to feel as if my heart were about to tear out of my chest. My womb stretched and stretched, enveloping his sex and receiving him completely.

I couldn’t stand nor prevent the unparalleled pleasure I felt come suddenly with no warning when my body exploded in orgasm. As Eliezer heard the first notes of my loud and gasping cry, he took my face in his hands, and in the middle of my climax, he was able to increase the strong, rough, and abrupt movements that caressed me from within. His eyes remained fixed on mine as I would alternate back and forth from reality with the rhythm of his penetrations. Drops of sweat caressed his forehead and fell to my breasts.

Still feeling the last waves of my long climax, I could sense that he was ready to experience his own, to lose himself in me. The aroma exuding from his pores became sweeter. The spasms I felt from deep inside my body down to my legs, to my torso, which would curve unwittingly, made me feel alive. Eliezer brought his breathing under control, closed his eyes, and sank his head between my breasts–the perfect spot to silence the sound coming out of his throat.

He moved away too soon, breaking the connection between bodies. We breathed… breathed the heavy air that flooded the room and nothing more.

A loud banging on the door and a deep voice rose above the silence.

“Open the door!”

Both hearts were shaken, but this time not with carnal desire. Our eyes met in astonishment.

Eliezer jumped out of bed and looked for the towel. The bedroom door had been open, and the main door of the cabin that faced the bed was also suddenly thrown wide open. On the other side of the doorway there were two men dressed in black and pointing their guns at us. Eliezer tied the towel around his hips and I grabbed the sheet and covered my damp body.

“What the hell are you doing Donovan?” Eliezer yelled.

It was Donovan, the head of security at Medika.
Swallow me, Earth!

There was silence in the cabin. Outside, the night was singing; the wind played with the leaves and flowers, a river wound around the rocks.

“I’m sorry, sir. Are you ok? I apologize.” Donovan did not know how to hide the embarrassment or how to undo the mistake he’d just made. “We lost track of you at the carnival and thought that something had happened to you. The GPS tracked your cell phone here. Is Ms. Wise with you?”

I reached out from under the sheet with my hand, waving it to convey my presence. Thank God I did not have to show my face, which had turned hotter than an oven at its highest temperature.

“Get out of here!” Eliezer ordered as he shut the door on their faces. When he recovered his breathing, he yelled again, “And prepare the jet!”

Eliezer returned. As he sat at the edge of the bed, he rubbed his face in his hands.

“We must go, Wise.”

I pulled the sheets away from my face. My voice trembled as I spoke.

“Where?”

“We must return,” he announced sternly. “And don’t worry about Donovan. I’ll take care of him.”

If you only knew that Donovan is the least of my worries.
What worried me the most was he, Eliezer Clausell, and it wasn’t exactly what happened between us, but what I had felt.
Is it possible to feel that way for someone whom you hate so much? Did I take some kind of drug like the kind they put in beers?
Although I wanted the latter to be true, because it would free me from a huge feeling of guilt, I shuddered at the thought of the sweet poison of his saliva on my mouth, on my breasts.

I really blew it.
Why didn’t I remember Norman’s instructions this time?

“I didn’t know that security would accompany us to Panama too!” I demanded, my voice having returned to normal.

“Did you think that I would go along with your rules?” He looked at me with his usual look. He was angry.

I decided not to push the issue. I wrapped myself in the sheet and went to take a shower. The lukewarm water would help me clear my thoughts, understand what had happened, and clean the traces of his body from mine. If I had been able to go down into the drain of the bath, I would have done so quite happily. I had a feeling that, from that moment on, things would go from bad to worse. I had served my most intimate treasure on a golden platter to the one who wanted to be my executioner.

“We can forget this,” I proposed as soon as I returned to the bedroom.

The lines that adorned his forehead displayed their usual intensity.

“What are you talking about, Miranda?”

“What just happened?”

He was quiet for a number of seconds. He reached for his cell phone. He turned on the screen and looked at me again.

“Nothing has happened here, Wise,” he raised an eyebrow expecting my agreement.

“Right. Nothing,” I confirmed, my hand trembling.

I walked toward the bed and discovered that he had folded my clothes and had organized them by placing one garment over another so that I could first take my underwear and then the rest.

I looked at him again and the Eliezer that I had known for a few minutes was gone. He was sitting on the other side of the bed, ignoring my semi-nude presence, and looking over his iPhone. He was wearing his father’s pants. I felt a tingling in my eyes and a slight pain in my throat. I took my clothing unwillingly and entered the bathroom.

“Can we go now?” he asked when I stepped out. The usual Eliezer was back.

I nodded, whether or not I was ready for what was awaiting me in the near future. The flight to San Juan wasn’t very long, but it would not be at all pleasant.

The SUV was waiting at the entrance of the cabin. Donovan was standing next to the passenger doors. He opened the doors to the SUV. I got in first. There were water bottles in the drink holders. I took one and finished it in one gulp.

An awkward silence prevailed during the trip. No one said anything. Not a single syllable. I put on my headphones and looked for one of my favorite songs,
The Ballad of Love and Hate
by The Avett Brothers. What an appropriate song!

There was no way to put my thoughts in order. In my mind there was only room for the image of Eliezer’s nude body. I wondered what he was thinking. Judging from his face, he wasn’t thinking anything. At least not about what had happened. Definitely, for him, nothing had happened.

To think we still had to make an even longer trip to Asia….

My head hurt from thinking so much about the unexpected events of that unfortunate night. There was no logical explanation to what had happened between us. Well, at least there was a reason for my behavior: lack of sex. Alex had been warning me about it for some time: “If you let your libido build up, you’ll end up with the first one who crosses your path, and you’ll regret it in the end.”

I had not confessed to my friend that I would receive frequent invitations for sex, but I preferred a less active sex life because I always went to great lengths to act within the limits of what was proper.

Even though they didn’t say it to my face, I knew that many people at Medika lived for the day when “Norman’s poor charity case” would make a mistake, so I was satisfied with merely fantasizing. It had been a good strategy. I could pleasure myself wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. With a lifestyle where I needed to go from place to place, it was better to get close to myself than to a different suitor in each country. That was never an option–neither as a woman, as a professional, nor as the lead representative of Medika.

How would I be able to look Eliezer in the eye again and still project confidence? Why did I have sex with a man that didn’t even respect me? He could have stopped me.
A man never stops a woman, Miranda…
that would have been Alex’s response to my argument. However, I didn’t understand one small detail. Why did he go along with my game if it’s obvious that I’m repugnant to him? Maybe he needed sex too. With such an unattractive personality, I doubt very much that women would feel suddenly attracted to him. Maybe they would sleep with him only once they found out how much money he had.

***

It was Sunday. To have less thinking to do, I went out for a jog. The fresh air would do me good. While on the track after minutes of jogging, someone was jogging at my side, and at my pace. It was not the first time some Casanova would try to woo me on the track, but this was not the time, nor the day for that.

I slowed down.

The person next to me did too.

I picked up the pace.

The other legs caught up.

¡Ugh! I stopped suddenly.

I took off my earphones and I looked at the person hounding me.

I must have been thinking about him so much that I attracted him...