Black Sheep Pt. 02

He was holding hands with her—Ishtar. I was never the sappy kind of guy who lost his marbles over a girl. But after meeting Ishtar I felt like she was casting some kind of spell over me. That was the only way I could explain the things she made me feel.

That was the only way things made sense anymore. That was absolutely the only way I could explain the sudden urge that I—a pacifist who didn't believe in violence at all, felt to punch my beloved brother in the face when I saw them together.

As soon as our eyes connected, Ishtar quickly looked away. Her throat looked to be working extra hard to swallow. She was using her free hand to find imaginary lint in her clothes. She always did that when she was either nervous or just angry but not in the mood to get into an argument. If only she would look at me...

"Henry?" said my brother. "Are you listening?"

I realised that I must I have zoned out and somehow that made Ishtar even more uncomfortable than she already was. Damn, I must have been staring at her. It was Christopher I answered, but it was to Ishtar I still looked, though that time I was somewhat tactical about it.

"Of course, I'll be there for your wedding, Christopher. How are you feeling today, Ishtar?"

"Much better, thank you," answered Ishtar, barely looking at me.

Christopher pulled out a chair for her and she sat down. Everyone erupted into a flurry of worry over her, with my mother asking several times whether Ishtar was sure she was okay, to which Ishtar answered, "I just need to check in with a doctor. Uncle Julian said it was probably exhaustion. I might have skipped a few meals yesterday."

"I think we can all agree Uncle Julian was immensely and uncharacteristically useful," said Avery.

"Yes, that was very fortunate," agreed my mother. "Christopher, you must take her to the doctor as soon as you're done here."

"There's really no need to fuss," protested Ishtar. "I really am okay. The doctor appointment is just a formality, to ease Christopher's mind." She looked at him when she spoke. They smiled at each other like love-sick puppies. I felt my throat go dry, and like someone had just punched me in my stomach.

I swallowed hard, forced my face into a smile and asked Christopher, "What time were you supposed to go for your meeting with Rush?"

"Some time after nine. I'll have to call him and postpone until after Ishtar's doctor appointment, though," he said.

That was the golden opportunity I was looking for. Ishtar and I needed to talk, to clear things up; and for that to happen we needed to be alone. I needed to know what kind of game she was playing with my brother. So I gladly grabbed the opportunity.

"I don't mind taking her to the doctor," I suggested.

Her head quickly snapped up and her eyes, filled with more malice than I could imagine coming from her, intensely bore into mine. "That won't be necessary," she said. "I can drive myself. Or I can postpone the appointment and go another time."

Without even knowing it, my mother helped along with my plan. "Oh no, dear, we can't have that. Henry will drive you."

If looks could kill, then Ishtar's would have killed me right on the spot. It looked like she was fighting some kind of internal battle. She clearly wanted to make sure that we were never even in the same room at the same time. She also seemed incredibly eager to fit in with my family, which is something that surprised me even more than her engagement.

Anyway, wanting to fit in meant that she had to make small concessions, else my family would start asking questions. That was good to know, I could use that later.

In the meantime she gave a false smile to me and said, "Thank you very much, Henry." She placed extra emphasis on my name.

"Your wish is my command." I couldn't help myself with that.

It was lucky that no one except Ishtar thought anything of the comment. She briefly closed her eyes as though in silent prayer, with her chest heaving; then opened her eyes and planted a kiss on Christopher's cheek. She discreetly looked back at me to see if I was watching. Seeing that I was, she smiled with satisfaction and went about eating her breakfast.

CHAPTER 2.2: ISHTAR

I was back upstairs and furiously stuffing my green cardigan into my handbag; that's when I felt him standing by the door, watching me.

I couldn't see him because my back was facing the door but I knew without a doubt that he was there. My heart started beating faster somehow, yet it also felt like it had stopped beating altogether. My anger rose at the same time that every part of me felt so emotionally weak—like even if I tried, I couldn't resist the things he still made me feel.

It was like my body couldn't decide what it wanted to feel—excited, irritated, or just indifferent. And at the same time, my head and heart couldn't get along long enough to decide how best to handle my dilemma. I had to control stuff like that. I couldn't go around losing my breath and/or temper every time he was around.

At first, when I woke up from my fainting spell and realised everything hadn't been a horrible dream, I hated him even more for forcing me into his lie. I hated him for forcing me to go on pretending that we never knew each other, as though I never meant anything to him. I guess I never did and I just overestimated my place in his life. So there was really no point in hating him.

It served me right for basically throwing myself at some random guy in a club simply because I liked his husky voice, the light stubble on his face, his deep-set brown eyes, the way his mouth looked like it was created for the sole purpose of eating pussy, and everything else that sent me acting like the slut I was the night I met him.

I deserved every ounce of heartache he brought my way and more. I could deal with that well enough. All I needed to do after that was make sure that my tryst with him all those years ago didn't ruin what Chrissy and I had.

"I'm ready when you are," he said, snapping me out of my reverie.

When I didn't say anything in return I felt his footsteps approaching me. He stopped right behind me, with his chest lightly grazing my back; it was close to the point where I could smell his masculine cologne and feel every exit of his breath. I closed my eyes to regain my brain's ability to think but it took a while. I didn't think it was possible but my heartrate went even higher, with my chest rapidly rising and falling.

I felt his head rest on my hair and his arms reach around me to softly grab my hands with his. He whispered, "Here, let me help you with that." I must have stopped packing my cardigan without even realising it, so he guided my hands with his until the task was done. Then he guided me again to close the zipper. "There. All done," he concluded.

His voice was probably his greatest weapon against me. Sometimes all he had had to do was say my name and my panties would already be on the floor, my legs and hands on the floor, and him plunging into me from behind.

Lexi—my best friend, understood perfectly when I told her about that because she had a thing for both Josh Hartnett and the guy who played Thor in those Avengers movies. Their voices drove her crazy and if I'm being honest, they kind of did the same thing for me.

Linc had that kind of voice—every word he whispered was like a secret lover's spell he deployed to make me submit to him. He could be talking about the most banal thing and it would still sound sensual. Not to mention that every time he looked at me I felt like he was undressing me with his eyes.

"Please don't do that," I said, hearing that my voice was a whisper as well.

"Do what?"

"What you're doing right now."

"What am I doing right now?"

I swallowed and finally decided that facing him was the best thing I could do. I was wrong on that. As soon as I turned around I found my heaving breasts lightly grazing his chest. He stared into my eyes for what felt like an eternity; he licked his lips and moved his eyes to my lips, where they lingered, then he moved down to my chest, then back up to my eyes again.

That's when I found my courage again. "Don't be a child, Linc. You know exactly what you're doing." I realised that I was still whispering, the way I used to whenever he made me beg when I wanted him to cum inside me, or when I wanted to touch my clit during anal. I had to work for it, earn it every time and he would reward me with...

Shit! So much for bravery.

Deciding to try again, I stepped away from him and stood all the way on the other side of the room. "You know exactly what you're doing," I said.

He had the audacity to actually look annoyed. "You're going to have to elaborate."

"You're playing your games again. Thinking you can just...just..." I was really struggling for words because I didn't want to come right out and say: 'Thinking you can just seduce me.' There was a chance that he wasn't even trying to do that. It was probably all in my head.

Instead of embarrassing myself with such a ridiculous accusation, I settled for, "Thinking you can just treat me like your play thing again. Gosh, I should have known as soon as I saw you that you would pull some kind of crap like this."

"Me?" he asked, squinting his eyes and shaking his head with what I deduced was disbelief. "You're the one going around with my brother. What the fuck are you doing here, Ishtar? Is this some kind of sick revenge game for you?"

"You think this is about you?" I huffed. "Despite what you've been told by every girl you've had in your bed, surely you know that the world doesn't actually revolve around you. Far from it."

"I don't believe you—"

"You see there's a sun somewhere near the centre of the galaxy and the planets go—"

"Oh come on! You know what I mean. I don't believe you just happened to meet my brother by sheer chance and then decided you were going to marry him. Come on, Ishtar, you don't even believe in marriage."

"That's exactly what happened. And I don't care what you believe. You don't know me, the same way I apparently never knew you."

"How did you do it? How did you find my brother? Did you get your little Troy to help you? You stalked me until you found my real name and decided you were going to torture my family—"

He had gone too far, I decided, and it was time to put him in his place. "You're the bastard that lied to me the whole time we were together. I didn't even know your name until twelve hours ago. And how dare you stand there and throw Troy in my face after what you did, how dare you make me out to be some kind of crazy ex-girlfriend. This isn't about you. Get over yourself."

Both of us were still whispering because we feared the servants might hear us. But those whispers were becoming harsher by the second. Every emotion of the past seven years was coming out in that moment. He wasn't holding back so I certainly wasn't going to.

"The whole thing with my name was really all your fault—" he started to say, but I interrupted him.

I laughed sarcastically because surely, he wasn't about to suggest that it was my fault he was a lying sack of shit. "How exactly did I make you lie to me?"

"Oh come on, Ishtar, you and I both know how we met. You expected any guy to actually believe half the stuff you told me that night?"

"It was all true, you idiot. And it turns out that between the two of us, you're still the prick."

He momentarily closed his eyes to gather his thoughts. When he opened them, it was to ask, "Are you going to tell my brother...about us?"

I gave another sarcastic laugh and shook my head. "You've forced us into this lie. If I tell him now he'll know we lied, it will hurt him. He'll think we meant something to each other. God, it will hurt him so much. So thank you for that, Linc, thank you for once again forcing yourself into my life with lies and then leaving me to clean the mess."

"I didn't mean to lie to him."

"Then why did you?"

"I don't know, okay." He looked to be genuinely distressed at that point, so I allowed him to finish gathering his thoughts so we could both make sense of the mess we made. "I just...I saw you there...and..." he looked to be experiencing the same dizzying spell I was. He closed his eyes and rubbed his hands against his temples. When he was done he asked, "What do we do now?"

"The best we can hope for is that you do what you do best—you disappear to the hole you crawled out of and never return."

"You can't banish me from my family. They're my family, not yours, Ishtar."

"From what I gathered you don't even want to be here."

I expected him to say something like: "I've changed my mind." But he didn't.

I thought I knew him and that I could predict him, but it seemed I couldn't even do that since the next thing he did was look at me longingly and ask, with his voice once again soft: "Are you in love with him?"

My mother had asked me the same question when I was home. The answer had come more easily with her. For some reason, and I don't know what it was, my words got stuck in my throat when Linc asked me.

All my bravery and anger was briefly suspended. The only thing I could think about was the true reason I was marrying Chrissy in the first place. I never thought I would ever have to face it but there it was—in front of me, my past.

When I found Linc in bed with my idiot friend Kim it took a long time to even go a single day without crying over him. But too much time passed and I still wasn't able to get over him. It didn't matter how many guys I fucked, I always saw Linc in all of them.

Lexi joked that my type was an unattainable fantasy since not a lot people could be as sexy as Linc. None of that mattered to me. Sometimes I would fuck a guy just because his name started with an 'L', or because he had brown eyes.

It was crazy time until I met Chrissy. Now that I think of it, that was screwed up too because the thing I liked the most about Chrissy's were his eyes, and I once I knew the truth about Linc's identity I realised that Chrissy's eyes reminded me of his brother's—not their colour but their shape and intensity. And even more screwed up was that over time Chrissy and I somehow conditioned ourselves into having the kind of sex life Linc and I once had.

I was submissive in bed, I loved getting treated like a slut, I loved to beg for dick, I loved getting fucked from behind, against the wall, and in public places. Those were things Linc loved and those were things most guys sometimes found weird, until I met Chrissy.

What if Linc was right? What if the whole thing with my pending marriage was about him? What if my parents were right too and I was one of those people who got married because they were too afraid to go into their thirties unmarried and childless?

Oh God, was I just using Chrissy to feel better about my denials and insecurities? That couldn't be true, right? It just wasn't true because I actually loved Chrissy. We were going to move to LA, he was going to work at one of the most respected law firms, I was going to complete my dissertation via correspondence, and we were going to be happy together.

I looked back at Linc convinced that I was going to be able to answer him. But I couldn't. He must have seen the uncertainty in my eyes. He slowly walked towards me and for some reason, I felt like I was fixed in space. When he reached me, he learned down and brushed his lips against my right ear. I felt my loins grow hotter and my pussy get soaked.

"You're wrong. I do know you. There isn't a hole in your body where I haven't been," Linc whispered to me. "I know every inch of you, I've tasted every part of you—even your sweet juice as you came into my mouth with a thousand shudders. My favorite part was when you screamed my name over and over until you forgot your own, when you got on your knees and took me whole in your mouth, when we fucked until sunrise and I came into every part of you, even your sweet ass. You loved every minute of it, I know. I loved every minute of it too.

"You're still the best I've ever had, and I know I'm still the best your sweet pussy has ever had. You belong to me, Ishtar. You're my little nymph. Play whatever game you're playing with my brother but we both know that soon you'll be back on your knees, begging me to fuck you every which way I can. I don't care if you think you love my brother, I know you love my cock even more. I see it every time you look at me, when you lose your breath without even realising it, like right now. Be assured that my dick still yearns for you too."

Then he stepped away and looked into my eyes. "I'll arrange for one of the servants to drive you to the doctor. We don't want to end up on the side of the road with you riding me like it's the end of the world. Not right now. You'll come to me when you're ready. Just don't take too long."

With those words, he left me standing where I was, in dire need of a cold shower. That's what I hated about him: one minute we would be fighting and the next we would be humping like two rabbits on heat.

But he was wrong that time. I was never going back to him. Ever. He might have been able to make me wet at the drop of a hat but that didn't mean I was going back to being his sex toy. He and I were done. And I was madly in love with Chrissy.