“No, don’t apologize. You’re right. I should get out of here. I should never have come.”

That remark aggravates me further. I’m not sure what she intends to trivialize with that comment: me or her feelings for me.

I move my body into the space that separates us and stare into her eyes. “Don’t leave. Not like this.”

“No, Alan. You were right. It’s better for us both if I go now.”

No. No. I don’t want to be right. Not about this.

I stare at her. “Why did you come here?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

What the fuck is she trying to do to me? We’re together for the first time in two years. Chrissie maneuvered it. Both my heart and my body are on fire for her, and all she did was drag me through a few minutes of incoherent verbal drivel. And now she wants to end this and leave me with another fucking undecipherable moment of us.

She can’t leave. Not yet. Not this way.

I lean in and kiss her, pouring all the love in my body for her into it. I press my hands to the base of her spine, holding her against me and deepening the contact in an alternating flow of lips and tongue, pressure and lightness.

My breathing speeds up as I wait for a response. Her body stiffens, but that’s all. Nothing more. I tell myself to step back. My hands and mouth continue to devour her.

Then, just when I’m about to end this, she moans, pressing her pelvis into me, and starts meeting the heated, hungry moves of my body. Her hands fist in my hair. Her tongue dances with mine, insistent and hungry. We fuck each other with our mouths. We shed our clothes, dropping to the floor and our bodies mold together, frantically searching.

I turn her until she’s straddling me. If this is the last fuck I’m ever going to know with her, I don’t want to miss a single moment of it flashing on her face. I wrap my arm around her slim waist, lift her, and then position her on my erection. I lie back as she lowers herself, taking me in her.

My breath escapes from my body. I don’t know how I’ve lived without this for two years. God, she feels so good. I can’t even count the number of women I’ve fucked since her. Not a single one of them could ever feel like Chrissie.

Mesmerized, I watch her slowly rise up, then sink back down hard onto me. Ragged pleasure dances across her face. Her head rolls as she moans. Again. Pausing at my tip in a manner I know well, then slamming down to fill herself with me again. She is so wet and tight around me. Her hands stroke my flesh as she effortlessly finds our rhythm and rides me. She grows harder and harder with each bounce. The tension in her builds. I grab her hips, pumping hard upward into her as she shouts my name incoherently through her orgasm.

I can’t hold back.

I explode inside her even though I don’t want this over yet. She’s limp in my hold as I thrust into her until I can’t go any longer.

She collapses on my chest, and I wrap my arms around her, burying my lips in her hair. Then I remember what I saw on her face as we fucked. I’ve wondered it a thousand times, why she walked out on me in Malibu. I finally have the answer and I don’t like it.

Chrissie never stopped loving me.

She couldn’t take the pain of loving me.

The way her eyes looked the entire time she rode me was an expression I saw a hundred times when we were together. Love…and pain.

She stares at me, overwhelmed by what we just did. She pulls away and starts gathering her clothes. I don’t try to stop her. And for the first time, I don’t know what to say to her. As great as this fuck was, it would have been better for us both if I had let her walk away.

Chapter 5

2013

“Does 2006 mean anything to you?”

I smile. “Not a thing.”

Miles makes a notation. I turn to stare out the airplane window.

“There are some quotes here that Jesse notated he wanted to use in the biography,” Miles says diligently, “but the contract specifies I have to get your permission before I include them in the draft I send to the publisher for approval. Can we go through the ones he wanted to use?”

This should be interesting.

I shrug. “Shoot.”

He sets papers neatly in front of him on the table. “OK, the first one is a quote from your manager, Brian Craig.”

Oh great. This should be fucking fantastic.

“He says, ‘For a man of such internal discipline, Alan Manzone has a disastrous weakness for addiction. While he was able to kick heroin at the age of twenty-six, his second major addiction he’s never been able to kick, not even after the rehab of two failed marriages.’”

Fuck you, Brian. Very funny. That was obnoxious.

I bite the inside of my cheek, and battle not to snap off the response forming in my head.

I can feel Miles staring at me. “Second addiction?”

Miles’s expression says it all. He’s thinking Brian is referring to women. That I’m a sex addict. No, you miserable cunt. Brian is talking about Chrissie. A cheap shot he just had to get in. Goddamn you, Brian, you are an asshole.

I stare him down and Miles flushes.

“Why would Jesse Harris have wanted to use that quote?”

I shrug. “You’d have to ask him.”

Miles’s eyes bug out. Fuck, that was a crass thing to say.

I grab a cigarette, strike the lighter and inhale deeply. I let the smoke curl slowly from my lips. “Next quote, please.”

Miles stares. “Do I have your permission to use that one or not?”

I take another long hit from my cigarette. “Use it. If Jesse wanted it, it’s in.”

There, I’ve surprised him. And to be honest I’ve surprised myself. Why did I give permission for that? Guilt over that night—no, don’t start thinking about that. The only thing I have going for me is I’ve managed for an entire year to stay away and not fuck up Chrissie’s life again.

I find Miles holding out a pen to me. I take it and initial the sheet, granting my approval for this hideous comment to be included, my own private apology to Jesse for what I did the night of his burial.

Images flash through my head like screenshots from a porno flick. All my blood concentrates in my cock in a way that is exclusively Chrissie’s. It was a fucking incredible night. It almost made up for the nine years Chrissie forced me to watch her married to Jesse. She was on fire, the burning scorch of grief. Twelve hours of frantic, violent fucking, unlike anything I have ever known with her. Shit, unlike anything I’ve ever known with any woman.

It was the wrong move. I shouldn’t have done it. But I knew it would happen the moment we’d returned from the long hours of Jesse’s memorial to find ourselves alone in Chrissie’s house. I had every intention of being the man I should be for her that day. But, fuck, it had been pulsing in my cock from the moment I’d stepped off the plane in Santa Barbara for the funeral. I’d gone to California to bury a friend. All I could think about was fucking his wife.

Disgusting. Maybe Linda is right, I do need therapy. I was good friends with Jesse. Necessity if I wanted to still have a place in Chrissie’s life after her marriage.

Pathetic?

Yes.

Manipulative?

Sure.

But it worked.

Chrissie and I remained friends, and I got to christen her widowhood. Fuck, I’m a prick. Jesse was a great guy. I liked him. I didn’t want to. Didn’t intend to. But I did. He deserved better than that from me on the night he was buried. Sure, I still fucking love Chrissie, but I’m very good at not violating the line with my ex-lovers. Especially when I like their husbands.

But I fucked up. I should have split the second Chrissie sent the kids off with Jesse’s family for the night. It just didn’t seem right to cut out on her.