The Touch of Bliss — A Sensual Reckoning (Muse of Shadow) by Caelyn Alba

 
    T H E   T O U C H  
O F   B L I S S
     
    Part One
     
    I CAN TASTE HER even through my tears. I can feel the
wetness of her on my lips, as I can feel my own wetness where my fingers trace
their way between my thighs.
    The tears are because everything changes tonight, and as deep
as I fall into the feel of her, this scares me. My breasts are soft against
hers, our upthrust nipples touching as I caress her with all of me, with all I
have, all I am. As hungrily as I embrace her, dropping slowly to my knees
before her, it scares me.
    “Tell me what you want,” she says…
     
    “What the fuck do you want, Lori?”
    The last thing D___ said to me before he left. I can still
remember the swearing, can still feel his anger.
    I’ve been thinking about that far too much. Replaying the scene
in my head as I do, thinking of all the things I should have said, only too
late.
    You want more than he can give you.
    So many times that I’d felt it, so many times that I’d thought it.
And all I could think about on the long drive out of the city was that if he
showed up right now, even as angry as I was, as hurt and lonely as he had left
me — I still didn’t know whether I’d be able to say it to him.
     
    He’d picked out the resort for our fifth anniversary, just as he
made the arrangements for most of our holidays. He liked to organize, he always
said. D___ liked to make sure everything was perfect. But even as he’d been
making his perfect plans, things at home had been getting less perfect for so
long now.
    We both knew it. We both saw it happening, watching it unfold over
what must have been a year of increasingly random and pointless fights. Both of
us were working far too many hours. Both of us were feeling like something had
changed. The seven-year-itch, my sister called it when I tried the one time to
talk to her about it, but I was never very good at talking.
    I was always better at listening, even when D___ had totally lost
it the weekend before.
    “You don’t know what I go through trying to keep you happy!” he
yelled. He yelled a lot of things that night, but that’s the one I remember.
Because I remember telling him that everything he did made me happy, even
though it was less true than it had been for months.
    “What do you want, Lori?”
    You want to feel like it was before. You want to feel new, but
you feel old in a way that you never expected this relationship, this life to
feel so soon…
    I was always better at listening. So I didn’t say anything. I
just listened to him talking about needing space, and I let him throw a beer
bottle that smashed the glass in the John Lysak print he’d bought us for our
first anniversary. I let him walk away.
    He’d picked out the resort because he liked everything to be
perfect, and it was. Except for the bit about him not being here with me, that
is. I’d never heard of the place before, had never driven the wine country back
roads that the GPS directed me along. It was the middle of nowhere, vineyards
in full leaf and tall stands of white pine rising to frame an impossibly blue
sky. I saw the glass gleam of the hotel’s floor-to-ceiling windows as I rounded
the final curve, and even from a distance, it was beautiful.
    More beautiful than you deserve.
     
    I don’t remember what I said to the concierge at the check-in
desk when he asked me if Mr. ____ was arriving later. The credit card still had
both our names on it, so that was all that really mattered in the end.
    My mind was a blur as I was passed off to a hostess for the full
introduction of the resort’s schedules and events, spa sessions and special
treatments, fireside patios and walking trails. A bellhop swept in to whisk my
bags up to the room. A trainer from the spa and wellness center smiled as she took
me on the tour that I wasn’t thinking quickly enough to beg off.
    BLISS is what they called the facilities, and the name with
its stylized font and all caps seemed terribly