Unwanted Heat

Kenzie

I feel heavy; I can’t breathe. It hurts to breathe; I try to open my mouth but I can’t. Something is holding my mouth shut. I open my eyes and try to scream. He is on top of me. Why is he in my room? Where is my mom? Why isn’t she here? I try to push him away, but I can’t move my hands. He’s holding them over my head; he is stronger than me. I scream against the hand covering my mouth. I try to kick him, but my legs are pinned down by his.

“Shut up, bitch!” he hisses in my ear. “Your mother can’t help you

-she’s passed out in our bed and there is no fucking waking her.”

I move my head back and forth, trying to get his hand off of my mouth. I’m struggling to breathe; he is on my chest, pushing me into the bed. He stinks: he smells like the bar I had to get my mom from the other night. When his leg pushes between mine, I know I need to get him off of me before something happens. I bite down on his hand as hard as I can.

“You fucking BITCH!!!!!!!” He screams and slaps me across the face.

“HELP!!!!!!!!!! GET OFF OF ME!!!!!!!!!” I scream as soon as I get a breath in.

“Baby… what are you doing?” My mom suddenly appears at the entrance to my bedroom. There’s just a sheet covering where the door should be-the door was missing when we moved into this shithole and no one has bothered to fix it since.

“This little bitch just bit me!” he finally releases my hands, and I immediately move away from him. I shrink into the corner of my bed, curling myself in a ball trying to get away from him.

“Come back to bed, sweetie, I’ll take care of you,” she glares at me, like I’m in trouble, even though I didn’t do anything wrong.

“She won’t be able to protect you all the time,” he slips his hand under my ass and squeezes it hard before laughing as he gets out of my bed.

I jump out of bed, run to the bathroom before falling to my knees in front of the toilet and throw up everything in my stomach. When I feel a man’s hand on my back, I jump and instinctively move closer to the wall, assuming he somehow found me.

“Kenzie? It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you,” I hear a soft voice tell me. It takes me a few minutes to work up the nerve to open my eyes; part of me fears that I’m going to wake up in the nightmare again.

“Nicholas?” I whisper when I finally do open my eyes and see him kneeling on the floor next to the toilet.

“I’m going to get you a washcloth and some water, okay?” he asks and I nod in response unable to find the right words to say. When I hear him slowly walk away, I lift my head and for the first time I realize I’m not in the bathroom that’s attached to my bedroom. My quick glance around the room confirms I’m in Nicholas’s bathroom which could only mean that I was in his bed… that I slept in his bedroom.

“Here you go,” he holds out the washcloth and a glass of water, careful not to touch me. “Can I get you anything else?”

I shake my head as I take a small drink of water. The water feels good on my sore throat and the washcloth helps my body cool. As my body finally begins to settle down, reality creeps back up on me. I haven’t had that nightmare in years; in fact, I haven’t even thought about that night in forever. I try to piece together what might have happened last night that triggered the nightmare for me. Something must have triggered it, why else would it suddenly appear after all these years? I can’t think of anything that happened at the club that would have caused it, except maybe the guy who tried to come on to Cara? But things seemed fine after that. I remember dancing with Nicholas afterwards…

“Are you okay, Kenzie?” his voice pulls me back to reality.Property © of NôvelDrama.Org.

“I… I think so.”

“If you give me your hand, I’ll help you up,” he offers his hand to me to help me off the cool bathroom floor which I cautiously take. “I’ll wait in the bedroom, if you want to use the bathroom.”

I nod and watch as he leaves the room. Using a washcloth, I wipe down the toilet, thankful that I was at least able to get everything into the toilet without further embarrassing myself in front of Nicholas. After I use the toilet and wash my hands, I realize I need to do something about my breath. I find some mouth wash on the sink and gargle several gulps of that before spitting it out. There’s only one toothbrush in the drawer, which I assume is Nicholas’s, but seeing as there is no other, I use it vowing to buy him a new one. I splash cold water on my face, and after spending way too long in the bathroom, I open the door to find him pacing his bedroom floor waiting for me.

“Are you okay?” he asks immediately.

“I’m fine, thank you,” my voice is much weaker than I intended it to be.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

“I had a nightmare.”

“I gathered that, but this one seemed different than the one you had before.”

“It was.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Not really,” I shrug and sigh heavily. I already bring so much baggage to this arrangement, I hate the idea of Nicholas knowing even more. What if he decides it’s too much? What if he decides he would rather have this arrangement with a girl who didn’t come with so much? He already knows I had an abusive ex and that I have no family that I want at my wedding, surely he knows there is more than I haven’t told him about my past. This baggage… this is the exact reason I knew I could never date again. It’s too much for anyone to deal with, especially for someone who needs the perfect woman by his side.

“Does… does it have something to do with what happened last night?”

“What happened last night?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not really. I’m trying to figure out why… why I would have this specific nightmare. I haven’t had it in years, but I can’t figure out what would have happened last night to trigger it. Did something happen? Is that why I was in your bed? Oh my… did we…?”

OH GOD! If we had sex I would have remembered, right? Tell me I didn’t drink so much last night that I can’t remember sleeping with Nicholas. Glancing down I realize I’m wearing a men’s T-shirt, one that I’ve never seen before and is too big for me. This all but confirms we had sex last night. I’ve wondered what it would be like to have him make love to me but… God I had hoped if it did ever happen I would have remembered it! Is it even possible to have sex with someone and not remember any part of it?

“Kenzie, Kenzie!” Nicholas pulls me from my worrying thoughts. “We didn’t.”

“We didn’t? You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” he chuckles. “We slept in the same bed, but nothing happened. Trust me, I prefer my women to be coherent when I… when we’re together.”

“Thank God,” I sigh and sit on the edge of the bed. The moment I see his eyes widen, I realize how awful my words sounded. “Oh… shit… Nicholas I didn’t mean-”

“No it’s fine-”

“No, I didn’t mean it to sound like it would be the worst thing ever if we had… slept together last night. I was… I was worried we had and that I wouldn’t be able to remember it.”

“So, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if we slept together?” his eye brows raise as if he is considering the possibility.

“I’m not saying that… I would just hope that if it… if we… that we both would remember it,” I can’t believe we’re actually having this conversation.

“I agree and just so you know, Kenzie, I would never have taken advantage of you last night.”

“I’m sorry, I thought-”

“No, it’s understandable why you would. I’m sure you weren’t expecting to wake up in my bed, wearing my shirt with me sleeping next to you.”

“Yeah… about that. Can you clue me in as to what happened last night and how I ended up in here?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

I search my memory, trying to pull the bits and pieces of last night to the front of my mind. Unfortunately, there is so much still coming through from the nightmare, that I’m having trouble deciphering between last night and many years ago.

“The elevator… the foyer… we were… kissing,” I blush saying the words. We did a lot more than kissing-we were practically making out like two horny teenagers if I’m remembering correctly.

“We were,” he chuckles, but seems relieved that I remembered that. “I think I’m the cause of your nightmare.”

“You? How could you have caused my nightmare?”

“I… Fuck, Kenzie…”

“We got off the elevator…”

“I wanted to… we were both into it… At least I thought you-”

“I was,” I assure him, not wanting him to feel guiltier than he already seems to feel.

I don’t want him to think that he misread something last night; I may have had a little too much to drink but he wasn’t acting alone on the dance floor, or when we came here last night. Just remembering how it felt to kiss him and to have his arms around me, raises my body temperature even now. Never did I think that he thought of me like that; we’ve had a few kisses here and there, but nothing that comes close to comparing it to last night.

The day he me horseback riding, the kiss we shared after that and when he proposed was… amazing but last night it was on a completely different level. Dancing together, being with him like that, just felt so right and… natural. It felt natural to have his arms around my waist, my back pressed to his chest and his lips on my neck. It was as if the contract didn’t exist between us and we were just a normal couple.

I thought it was just me, but when I felt Nicholas press against my ass, I knew I wasn’t the only one caught up in our dance. I expected it to end there; that he would pull back when we arrived back at the condo, but the moment we entered the elevator everything heated up between us again.

“I… you went to unbutton my shirt and your fingers brushed against my chest…” Nicholas pulls me from my heated memories of arriving home last night.

“Okay?” I’m not understanding what the issue is.

“I knew if you touched me, things would be over before they even started. I wanted you so much last night… but I wanted to take my time with you.” He blushes and looks away, something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him do before. “The last thing I wanted was to end things too quick, so I stopped you…”

“You held my hands,” reality and the nightmare are starting to make sense in my head now.

“Yes,” his eyes are on the floor, and he is shaking his head no almost as if he is trying to erase his actions.

“Nicholas…”

“I’m so sorry, Kenzie. I… I didn’t know-”

“Of course, you didn’t know-you have nothing to apologize for. You didn’t do anything wrong-”

“How can you say that?” his eyes finally meet mine, and I can see he is angry, but I don’t think for a second that his anger is directed at me.

“I fucking did that,” he gestures toward the bathroom, “to you! I… God, Kenzie, you scared the fucking shit out of me last night. I fucking did that to you!”

“Nicholas…”

He is back to pacing the floor of his bedroom and running his hands through his hair; he doesn’t even respond when I call his name. I watch him going back and forth, not sure what I should do. I know I need to tell him what happened and why I reacted the way I did, but I’m scared to. I’m scared that if I tell him he is going to decide it’s all too much.