Page 79 of Inevitable Secrets

Taylor pushed her heel into Derrick’s ass, signaling she needed more from him, and he complied. He pulled back then hastened his pace with each movement of his hips all as he watched Taylor’s hand. He looked up when he felt Taylor stiffen, her breathing coming out faster, and shorter.

“Come on baby, let go,” Derrick coaxed as he kissed her and swallowed Taylor’s cries of release. And continued kissing her so she could collect his own.

Twenty-Four

Taylor woke earlythe next morning grateful that she had a husband who was up to the challenge to exhaust her with sex so she could pass out cold. Now it was just before five in the morning, much too early to get ready for work, but going back to sleep was proving unattainable.

She looked over at Derrick and considered waking him, to have him do what he does so well and get her back to sleep his way. But as tempting as that was, he was so deep in sleep she just could not do that to him. He was still recovering from his gunshot wounds—he still needed more rest than he would admit.

Taylor's mind drifted to the journals she had left behind last night, and before she knew it she had silently slipped out of bed and made her way to the office.

She found them stacked in different piles across the desks when she entered the room. Before each pile was a handwritten note. She picked up the one closest to her.Seems to be most recent books, lots of gibberish.

Each note seemed to be trying to attach a date and timeline to its stack of journals. At the first stack Taylor found a longer note.

Taylor-

I attempted with Mr. Lowsley to get these journals in chronological order. I hope you find something in them that puts this all to bed for you.

-Dr. X. Mellon

Taylor started in the middle, flipping through, but nothing caught her eye. She kept paging through, occasionally stopping to admire some of Cedric’s drawings, but when she caught herself she would move on. She looked through each and every book in the stacks until she had made her way to the last pile. These were the works that showed the troubled and broken Cedric she had lived with. The drawings were amateurish for a grade-schooler—there were arrows and thoughts crossed out. Any words written were in shaky writing, not resembling his penmanship from his earlier entries.

One of the words caught Taylor’s eye—Decree. She looked over the page that Cedric had written it on, where the word was written and circled. She started to look at the other things on the page. A sketch, not really a drawing, was there, the words “board members” and then “assets” were crossed off.

Taylor flipped back a couple of pages, and she found her name on one, again in the scribbled font, but also crossed off.

“Found you,” Derrick said from behind her with sleep still in his voice and Taylo

r jumped, dropping the journal on the ground. “Sorry,” he said, cupping her cheek and kissing her, “what are you doing?”

“I couldn’t sleep. Look at this,” she said, showing Derrick what she had found. “Does it look like a weird checklist to you?”

Derrick tilted his head. “I guess,” he said, unconvinced.

Taylor huffed, “I just want an aha moment, you know.”

He nodded. “Well, maybe you can have that with your outfit choice for today,” he said. “Time for work.”

“It’s early,” Tay said.

“It’s after seven,” Derrick said, yawning.

“Wow,” Taylor said, glancing at his watch. Time flew when you were trying to decipher crazy.

* * *

Taylor wasin her office hours later trying desperately to read over the contract before her, but instead it just bled into the drawings that she had pored over that morning. She had flipped page after page and looked at picture after picture. After a while she realized none of it was making any sense to her, and she wasn’t sure if it was exhaustion or Cedric’s own representation.

She needed to just let things be, give Henry time with what little information they had. But knowing that and keeping her mind on task were two very different things.

There was a knocking on her desk that brought her out of her fog, and Taylor looked up to find Todd before her, his knuckles resting on her desktop.

“You all right?” he asked her.

“Yes,” Taylor said straightening herself. “Yes, I’m fine,” she answered confidently. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, I had to knock on the desk to get your attention when you didn’t respond to my calling your name four times,” he answered, “so I thought you seemed a little off. I came to see if you had any questions about that contract before the meeting this afternoon.”

---