When he drew back to catch his breath, Brie felt her own breathing slowly returning to normal. Neither of them had stopped touching the other and as she stroked his chest, she felt his heart pounding under her hand. “Michael is this what lust feels like?”
He shook his head. “No, we are way past the stage of lust Brie, if what we felt was lust, we would have been in this bed all weekend doing all we’ve done and more and I would have gone home when Albert and the others left. Lust is something that burns out and dies all at the same time; it feels nothing but need and doesn’t care about the other person involved beyond what it can take.”
“You loved her very much…” Brie spoke as softly as he had spoken loudly. She knew she was young, but in his voice she had detected the same hurt, shame and feeling of betrayal she had felt with Greg.
A small smiled appeared in his eyes and on his mouth. “I was young and a fool. I saw a woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, in and out of bed. I wanted to give her all I had and make her happy. All she saw was a young man who was willing to fill her need for not only sex, but for the lifestyle and greed she craved. Every word she spoke to me, every endearment and caress was nothing more than her own form of lust for what she could take. One day I asked her to marry me, expecting her to tell me how much she loved me and how we’d live forever together. Instead she laughed at me, asked me why she should ever settle for one man when she could have any man in the world to keep her in the lavish style she was used to. She had lovers all over the world, men all as in her web as I was. Most of them were all much older than me, married, and willing to let her play her little games with younger men. Even while we were talking, the door to her bedroom opened and a man walked out who I knew all too well. So would you if you saw him on the news. He looked at me and rattled off a list of her lovers besides me, told me to check with my father if I didn’t believe him. That’s when I learned my father had known about her all along, but kept silent. When I asked him why, he told me it was a lesson all men needed in their lives that they needed to learn the difference between love and lust. To make it worse, I discovered my older brother had fallen into her trap five years earlier while he had been vising Paris.” He stroked her cheek and ran a fingertip along her lips.
“That’s why you went so off when you saw what Greg had done to me.”
Michael nodded. “To me what he had done was taking a beautiful young girl and destroy her just as much as I had been destroyed by that woman. Other men wouldn’t have cared, but I did and it made me think even more of you that you had suffered it all alone and still gone on with your life to a certain extent. I don’t think the grueling schedule you set for yourself for college was by chance either Brie, I think in your own way, you have purposely left yourself so little time for yourself that you subconsciously knew that even if you met someone you would have a reason not to let them in.”