Chapter 5 #2
A shack behind my house held all my woodworking tools.
It was one of the first structures I’d completed after we bought the property, since I was going to need it to help build everything else.
One entire wall was dedicated to my selection of high-quality timber.
It took me a moment to search through the selection and find a few pieces of the same walnut wood that the porch was made from.
After building multiple structures, including two full houses, and a lifetime dabbling with woodworking, meaning that I didn’t even need to think about what I was doing, my hands worked automatically, bringing the selected wood pieces over to the miter saw so I could cut them down to the exact size I needed.
“Brody?”
Ellis stood in the doorway to the workshop, halfway hidden around the frame as he peered inside. “Should you be doing that?”
“What?” I looked at him, confused as I switched on the miter saw. “Yeah. I should fix the railing as soon as possible. It won’t take long, and it’ll bother me if leave it for later.”
I placed the first piece of wood on the miter saw but was stopped when Ellis rushed inside and grabbed my wrist. “I don’t think you should be doing that.”
“Excuse me?”
Okay. Now I was starting to get upset. I’d built every structure on this property. Working with wood was literally my job.
Why was he questioning me?
My anger must have been clear on my face, because Ellis rushed to keep talking, never letting go of my wrist.
“I- I’m sure you’re very good at this stuff. But, um, maybe not right now.”
“What are you talking about?”
Tugging at me, Ellis tried to pull me away from the miter saw. “It’s just… your hands.”
“What about them?”
I looked down where Ellis was now holding both my wrists. My hands were shaking.
At first, I thought there was something wrong with my vision, but after blinking a few times I realized that, no, I wasn’t seeing things wrong.
My hands really were shaking. The walnut branch I held rattled against the table of the miter saw, completely unsteady.
If I tried cutting it, I probably just end up sawing my hand in half instead.
I let go of the wood and it tumbled from my shaking fingers as I hunched down on the floor. I gripped my hands to my chest.
“Fuck. I just… fuck.” No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make the shaking stop.
Ellis carefully knelt in front of me. “It’s okay. You’re allowed to be upset.”
“No. That’s not…”
I shook my head against the pain that was building between my temples.
The buzz of the still running miter saw echoed painfully inside my skull and I slammed my fist against the power button to turn it off.
I understood why Magnus had broken my porch railing.
It felt good to hit something, and I slammed my fist against the button a few more times before Ellis stopped me and held both my hands in his own.
“Your friend’s missing. Of course you’re upset. And… your other friend, Magnus, is just upset, too. I’m sure he didn’t mean what he said.”
“What would you know about it?”
Ellis’s face fell, and I immediately regretted my words.
“You’re right. I don’t know anything, do I. I’m probably wrong. I?—”
“No,” I interrupted him. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.
You’re right. Magnus is just upset. Of course he is.
We’ve never been this helpless before. There was always an enemy we could fight, or a scheme we could unravel.
Even when we had no idea what was going on, we could always keep moving forward.
Now… now there’s just nothing. God! Even if I wanted to go looking for Creed myself, I can’t.
I don’t even know what country he might be in. ”
The shaking in my hands increased, until my whole body trembled. All my thoughts were replaced with a loud buzzing sound, as if I’d turned the miter saw back on. Yet the saw remained silent. It was just my own brain going haywire.
Dropping my head into my hands, I pressed my hands to my ears trying to block everything out.
“Magnus is right. I am useless. Creed’s going to die, and I’m just sitting here.”
Arms wrapped around me. I didn’t register the sensation at first, and when I did, I was too overwhelmed to question it. The arms held me just tight enough to help me feel grounded without smothering me, and I instinctively leaned into the embrace.
“It’s okay,” Ellis said over and over. “It’s okay. It’s going to be fine.”
I barely heard him.
My chest hurt.
I couldn’t breathe.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that I was hyperventilating, but I couldn’t think straight enough to realize what it meant or what I should do about it.
A tug on the front of my shirt pulled me forward, and before I knew what was happening, lips pressed against mine.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been kissed, and I reacted to the sensation instinctively.
Our mouths molded together, moving slowly, and soon, the pleasant friction and wet slide of a tongue against my lips was all I could think about.
The kiss didn’t last long. After only a few moments, Ellis pulled back and looked at me with a sheepish expression.
“Sorry. You were hyperventilating and I… I didn’t know how to make you stop.”
I merely blinked a few times, my thoughts as sluggish as if I’d gone days without sleep.
“You didn’t know… So, you chose to kiss me?”
“I know, it was dumb,” Ellis babbled, rocking back on his heels as he retreated from me even more. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I just?—”
I cut him off and grabbed his shirt to keep him from getting any farther away.
“It was a good choice.”
Then, I pulled him forward and kissed him again, this time putting more force behind the action. His previous kiss had been chaste. A virgin on their first date could have stirred up more heat.
I aimed to show him what a kiss should really be like.
He gasped when I pressed against him, giving me the perfect opportunity to slip my tongue between his lips and deepen the kiss. I paused for a moment, waiting to see if he would protest, but after he got over his shock, he grabbed onto my shoulders and pulled us closer together.
In a move so smooth it was as if we’d practiced it, we moved together so Ellis was lying on the floor of the workshop, and I was kneeling over him. The kiss never broke, never even paused, and once I had him under me, I took full advantage of my new position.
I found his wrists with my hands, pinning them to the floor as I ravaged his mouth. He made the most wonderful sounds, gasping and moaning in response to everything I did. I slipped one of my legs between his, making him writhe when I rubbed my thigh against the prominent bulge of his arousal.
“Stop, stop,” Ellis gasped when he turned his head to wrench himself away from the kiss.
I froze.
“What’s wrong?”
“I… I…” He was panting so hard he could barely get the words out, and his former olive complexion was bright red. “I’m about to… um, you know.”
Glancing down, I saw the way his whole body trembled like a rubber band stretched to its limit. His arousal strained against his pants so desperately, I feared the zipper would burst.
Dipping my head down, I let my lips trail against his neck. “Sensitive?”
He whined deep in his throat and nodded.
Laughing under my breath, I nipped the skin right over his pulse point and watched him squirm.
Curiosity gripped me.
Was this sensitivity a result of his memory loss, or had he always been like this?
Even if his mind didn’t recall his past sexual experiences, surely his body would still remember. Or maybe it really was an example of mind over matter. His brain couldn’t recall any previous experiences, so his body reacted the same as a virgin.
Wait…
Following that line of thinking, could Ellis even consent?
Without memories to draw from, he may not even understand what he was agreeing to.
“Please.” Ellis tugged at my shoulders. “Please, don’t stop.”
While wracked with indecision, I’d completely stopped moving. Ellis desperately writhed against me, wrapping one leg around my hips to bring our bodies closer.
Rather than listen to his demands, I sat up enough to look directly into his eyes.
“Please, what? What do you want?”
With his wrists still pinned to the floor, he shook his head back and forth. “I don’t know. You. I just… want you.”
“No.” By moving his arms higher above his head, I was able to hold both his wrists in one hand. This left me a hand free to grip his chin and force him to look directly at me. “I need you to tell me specifically. What do you want?”
His other leg hooked around my hips as well, giving him leverage to grind against me.
“F… fuck me. Please.”
His voice was small, and his face burned so brightly with embarrassment that it was practically a beacon in the night. Yet, his words were still unmistakably clear and there was no hesitation in his eyes.
Fuck it. I sighed to myself.
How could I deny such a direct invitation?
“All right.” I pressed a quick kiss to his lips. “But not here.”
Even if he wasn’t truly a virgin, without his memories it wasn’t that different. I’d be damned if I let his first remembered sexual experience happen on the dirty floor of my workshop.
Climbing to my feet, I took Ellis by the hand and guided him out of the workshop and inside the back door to my house.
He followed me eagerly, clinging to my guiding hand as if afraid I would suddenly disappear.
The distance from my workshop to my bedroom wasn’t very long, but it still gave me enough time to think, and I didn’t like where my thoughts were going.
This was a bad idea. For so many reasons.
Forget about the ethical dilemma of sleeping with someone suffering from amnesia.
This wasn’t the time to get distracted by my own desires.
Creed was missing, Magnus was upset, and we still had a whole mystery of a cult and an unidentified dead body to solve.