Undertow

by Alessandra Torre

The heart is stubborn. It holds onto love despite what sense and emotion tells it. And it is often, in the battle of those three, the most brilliant of all.

I hate society’s notion that there is something wrong with sex. Something wrong with a woman who loves sex. I’ve loved sex for as long as I can remember.

There is no point in staying to see them leave. I saw everything I needed in that brief moment. The look in his eyes … she is not a fling. Not an escort who he hires for events. That was the look of love.

They both own my heart now, an equal division fought over by two sets of blue eyes.

This is Paul’s worry, that one day he’ll return and I will be gone. He’s afraid I will choose Stewart and not him. He doesn’t mind sharing, but losing me terrifies him.

I understand that you may hate me. That you may curse me for my greed. But if I’m okay with it, and they’re okay with it, how is it anyone else’s right to judge me?

While Stewart wants me to have a second man to keep me off the streets, to keep me from being lonely, to keep me in his life—Paul accepts that I have a second man because it was what he signed up for. He’d rather have half of me than none of me.

“I don’t like it,” he muttered, running a hand through his hair, biting his bottom lip with a look of raw need that had me gripping the paperback in my hand a little tighter. “But … I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. If it’s what you want … what you need, I’ll give it a try.”

Our lives took on a seamless union, thanks to the separation of my two worlds. They don’t meet. They don’t talk. They don’t ask questions about each other. The separation was, and still is, the key that keeps this whole production running.

But often, it is the forbidden that is the hottest, and the depraved that is the most arousing.

Whatever the emotion, whatever her temperature that day, there is always sex in those eyes. It floats off her skin, gleams in her eyes, and is in every move of her delicious body. This woman cannot exist without sex. It is her food, her body-sustaining air.

She cannot contain it, and doesn’t even try. She embraces it, owns it, loves it. She does not fuck out of insecurity or to get something or someone. She fucks because she loves it and loves through it.

In his life, work is first, and I’m second. I am okay with that standing, just as he’s okay with the fact that I will not make our relationship exclusive as long as I have that second-place ranking.

Paul prefers to not discuss the existence of Stewart. While Stewart approaches their shared split of my time as he would a business merger—coolly and unemotionally—it

What do you do when you discover a secret? Do you have a responsibility to share it? Or is the responsibility in the keeping of the secret?

She is the only feeling that exists in my body, the only feeling that isn’t tied to greed or competition or ego. She is my light, and I haven’t realized it until now, when it is so close to being extinguished.

The real world takes your cheery little smile and turns you in a dark cloud of reality. It drowns you in bills and expectations and adds pound after pound of reality on your shoulders until you’re struggling under the weight of it all.”

How many women who I love are you going to hurt with that casual attitude that lets everything important slip through the cracks?

Harsh

She doesn’t belong to either of you.

Who would she pick, if she was awake right now?”

I still pine for my ex-husband, who’s happy as a pig in shit with his new wife.

One of my nanas favorite lines “happy as a pig in shit” 😂😂😂

“You can’t start a relationship with a secret.

“I just want him to be happy,” I whisper. “I hate the thought of him being alone.”

this man’s eyes… they see into my soul. They know every bit of me, and accept it all.