Chapter 39
CHAPTER 39
S HANNON
When the blindfold comes off, I’m stunned by what I see. Troy and I are standing in an old industrial-style building, an earthy smell in the air. The room we’re in houses shelves of pottery and several stations set up with pottery wheels. The pottery pieces sitting on the shelves are in various stages of completion. There are some finished and absolutely stunning pieces, including some gorgeous mugs. Memories of our honeymoon pottery class move to the forefront of my mind.
Troy wraps his strong arms around my waist and draws me close to him, my back against his front. He says nothing yet, giving me time to take it all in.
“Are we here to buy a new mug?”
“Nope, not in the traditional sense.” His mouth is close to my ear when he speaks, and a shiver runs through me.
“Explain, please.” My voice is hushed, and I continue to look around the room, taking it all in.
“We’re here to make new mugs together. We’ll keep the old one that’s left, but these will represent new beginnings. Fresh starts.”
I twist my body until I’m facing him and look up at him. My eyes are moist, tears ready to fall. Not in a sad way. No, I’m immensely touched by the gesture and overcome with emotion.
“Thank you.” I stand on my tiptoes and kiss his lips, lingering. A faint groan emanates from him, and I chuckle.
He pulls back. “What? Dr. Linden’s ‘no sex until you’ve done the emotional work’ rule is killing me. You don’t have any idea how difficult it is not to take it further when I love you so much, and you’re so gorgeous.”
I catch myself about to roll my eyes but stop. “Well, those couch make-out sessions after the kids are asleep don’t help with that any. Do you think we should stop them?” The teasing tone in my voice is obvious.
He cups my face with one hand and brushes his thumb along my temple area, achingly slow and intimate. “Chiclet, if we stop them, I might die.”
I laugh out loud. “That’s a little bit dramatic, isn’t it?” I smile at him.
The sound of a throat clearing draws our attention, and I pull away from Troy and then turn around to see a middle-aged female with beautiful laugh lines on the sides of her eyes and her hair thrown up in a messy ponytail. She’s wearing well-worn clothes and an apron.
“I take it you’re here for the class today?” The woman smiles warmly.
“We are,” Troy says.
“Perfect. I’m Grace, and I’ll be the instructor for your lessons. Let’s get you two set up at the station. Follow me, and I’m guessing since there are two of you, you’re the Willsons. Is that correct?”
I smile, then look over at Troy. “That we most definitely are. I’m Shannon, and this is my husband, Troy.”
“Lovely to meet you both.”
While we follow her to our assigned station, it strikes me how close we came to not being the Willsons anymore. I’m slightly nauseated at the thought.
When we sit down at the pottery wheel, Troy tells me he has scheduled us for three classes—enough to make us a new set of mugs. When we did our first classes all those years ago, we had separate pottery wheels, and we each made one mug, but it’s different this time.
“I had the option to have us each do it separately or do what’s called ‘couples wheel throwing,’ and I opted for that. I want this to be something we make together as a united effort. Every time we drink out of these mugs for the rest of our lives, I’ll always remember that they were made after we survived the hardest time of my life and that they were made together.”
I stare at Troy, unable to speak. I’ve always known he loves me, but his efforts to communicate more are obvious. It touches my heart that this man is working so hard to come out of his comfort zone so we stay healthy.
“That’s a beautiful idea. I love it, and I love you.”
As the class gets underway, there are only three students besides Troy and me. They’re all here by themselves, two women and one man. I catch all of them watching us intermittently over the next couple of hours as Troy and I work our wheel together.
There are moments when our hands are on the wheel at the same time that I swear I’ve never felt something so intimate. Both emotionally and physically. My frustration is at an all-time high with Dr. Linden’s strong suggestion that we shouldn’t have sex right now. I get her rationale, but it’s killing me.
By the end of the class, I’m relaxed, turned on because my husband can somehow make anything sexy, and I’m at peace. Troy cleans up the area around our station, and I take our tools to the sink to clean them. A woman joins me at the sink, and as we’re rinsing our tools, I can sense that maybe she wants to say something to me.
“Hi. I’m Shannon,” I say.
I’m trying to open the door, in case she wants to talk, and I’m also trying to open myself up to make more friends. The woman smiles at me, and when she does, I see something in her eyes—deep fatigue maybe—that reminds me of how my eyes used to look when I looked in the mirror. When I got to the point where I thought I wanted out of my marriage because of everything life was throwing at me.
“Hi. I’m Delilah. Nice to meet you.”
I smile at her, and we both continue working on our cleanup. We’re silent for another thirty seconds or so, and I figure maybe she doesn’t want to talk after all, but then she speaks.
“Your husband seems amazing that he would come to something like this with you. Sorry if it seemed like I was staring in class sometimes. I promise I wasn’t checking him out,” she says. “I honestly was just so stunned to see what it looks like when a couple is doing something like this, something with so much potential for connection, and I was a little bit in awe.” I glance over and smile at her.
“Okay, so this might be too much information, and if it is, I’m sorry. Tell me to shut up. But it hasn’t always been like this. Only a month or so ago, we were on the verge of a divorce, like we had a court date set and everything divorce. This is part of resetting our relationship and trying to get back what we had. No, actually, what we had was wonderful, but we’re trying to grow beyond that.”
I glance down at both of our hands, and the tools are clean, so I turn off the water and pass her a couple of paper towels as I take some of my own, and we dry our tools. I don’t miss that her eyes are a little misty. When our tools are dry, we both toss our paper towels, and I’m about to head back over to where Troy is. Something stops me.
“Delilah, this may be totally off, and if it is, mark me down as the crazy lady you met in pottery class, but you have a look in your eyes that I had months ago. I want to tell you that it can get better, a lot better. I know I literally just met you here at the sink, but if you ever want to chat, let me know, and maybe we can get coffee sometime.”
Delilah looks up at me, and a lone tear streaks down her cheek. She wipes it away and nods at me, giving me the slightest hint of a smile. I smile back, pat her on her shoulder, and walk back to Troy. When I get there, I wrap my arms around him, and he doesn’t hesitate to wrap me up in a tight hug.
“Hold me for a second, please.”
He doesn’t answer, but his grip on me tightens, and he kisses me on top of my head.
We hold hands across the console on the way home. It’s a forty-minute drive to the pottery studio since it’s on the edge of the nearest big city. I’m not complaining because it’s more minutes I get with him one-on-one.
“Do you wanna talk about what happened at the sink?”
I chuckle. “That might be the weirdest sentence ever said on a date, taken out of context, of course.” Troy laughs as well, and I love hearing the joyful sound as it rolls out of him. “I met somebody. Her name is Delilah. I suspect she’s going through a rough time. When she introduced herself, I saw the same look in her eyes I used to have when I was deep in my depression and filled with sadness. Talking to her made me so grateful that Shyley and my mom intervened—because that’s sort of what it was, an actual intervention—and set me on the path to getting help. I wasn’t in a place to work on our marriage back then. I had to work hard to get to a place where I was becoming emotionally and mentally healthy myself. So, it was gratitude for where we landed, and I needed to be in your arms.”
“I wish I had been strong enough to help you. I’m sorry for that, Shannon.” Troy’s voice is rough with emotion, and I squeeze his hand tighter.
“Don’t be sorry for that. I honestly don’t think I would have heard it from you. I believe that it was absolutely meant to be Shyley and my mom.”
Troy watches the road carefully as he drives us home. “You have an amazing family, that’s for sure.”
“You have an amazing family, too, Troy.” Silence ensues.
He gives me a quick glance, and then his eyes are immediately back on the road, but I see the confusion they hold. His biological father died a few days after we returned from Pennsylvania, and his mother died years ago. He has no siblings.
“They’re not just my family, Troy. They’re your family, too. My parents see you as their son as much as they do Jack and Ben. You’re a brother to my sisters, and you’re a brother and a friend to Jack and Ben. You have an amazing family, too.”
Troy doesn’t respond, but I notice him biting at his lower lip, and I suspect he’s holding in his emotions. We spend the rest of the ride home in silence, holding hands.
It’s comfortable and it’s perfect.
When we get back to the house, Troy walks me in. It’s late, a little after nine. I work in the morning but Troy’s off, so he’ll be back here first thing in the morning to help get the kids off to school.
“Do you want to stay for a little while? We could watch an episode or two of our show.”
He agrees, and we end up snuggled on the couch, as we watch TV. We get through one episode and are nearing the end of the second. Every one of my nerve endings is on high alert as we’ve spent the last twenty-five minutes in each other’s arms, and Troy has got me so worked up that I almost can’t stand it.
He hasn’t done anything to cross Dr. Linden’s line. He’s taken these minutes together to slowly explore my body with his fingertips and sometimes with a flat palm against my skin. He comes so close to places that I’m dying for him to touch. He brushes the underside of my breasts but never touches them. He slides his open palm up my outer thigh and into my sleep shorts, moving to my hip and spending time there caressing my skin with the rough part of his thumb before he slides the hand down toward my inner thigh. The edge of his thumb brushes against my core, and I squirm. He knows exactly what he’s doing, technically following the rules while coming as close to breaking them as he can. I pause the TV and look up at him.
“You’re killing me here.”
“Do you want me to stop?” He knows it’s a meaningless question because he’s fully aware I don’t want him to stop.
“No. I want more.” My words are a plea.
A low moan escapes him at my words. “Tell me?”
I swallow past the nervous lump that is suddenly in my throat. Usually, Troy’s the vocal one in the bedroom. What the heck, I’ll try it. It’s a fresh start...
“I want your hands on me, everywhere. The parts you haven’t touched. I want your fingers in me, your mouth on me, your cock filling me.”
Troy’s eyes widen, and his breathing picks up.
“Jesus Christ, you’re so fucking sexy,” he growls. “When we have our therapy appointment tomorrow, we’re telling Dr. Linden that it’s time. I’m dying to fuck my wife. I’m desperate to make love to my wife with my hands and my mouth and my cock.”
“Not to kill the mood, but you’re not going to say it to her like that, are you?” I release a giggle.
“No, chiclet, but I’ll get us the okay. We’re there emotionally, but I don’t want to mess anything up for us, so if she insists?—”
“I think we’re there emotionally, too.” I tilt my head up and kiss him on the lips. It turns into more than a simple peck as he pulls my lower lip into his teeth, and I open my mouth, inviting him in. I don’t know how long we lay like that, kissing and caressing but avoiding the parts we both really want to touch. “I know we can’t have sex, but she didn’t explicitly say we can’t touch each other there , did she?”
At this point, I’m practically lying on top of Troy, my back to his front, and I move my body to try to get his hand closer to my core.
He’s quiet for several seconds, and then his hand that’s on my inner thigh inches up toward my center. “No, I don’t think she did.”
He moves his hand over my pussy and hovers there, barely touching me. A question.
“Yes, please.”
He buries his face in my hair, kissing my head. His finger touches me, sliding through my wetness, finding my clit almost instantly. I nearly come off the couch with how good it is after the slow burn he’s delivered. I try to lay still, but I can’t help it. I writhe with pleasure on top of him as he works me.
At first, when he moves off my clit, I let out a grunt of dissatisfaction. But when he moves that finger down and slides it into me, I’m no longer frustrated. God, I miss the feeling of being filled with him. He must know this is what I need right now because he spends the next couple of minutes fucking me with two fingers, and then he slows down and caresses my G spot until I’m nearly levitating.
“That’s it. Are you gonna come for me? Are you gonna come hard on my hand?”
I can’t even answer him. I simply give him some semblance of a response in the form of a purring noise that comes from my mouth. He manages to free his other hand enough that he can reach me, and while he pumps in and out of me with two fingers of one hand, he uses the pad of his thumb on the other to rub my clit. It only takes seconds, and my body is rupturing with exquisite sensations. Pleasure consumes me. He’s barely moving the finger on my clit as I ride out my orgasm. He keeps his fingers in me, waiting because this is how well this man knows my body. He knows that after I come so hard like that, I need to stay filled with part of him. So, he waits while I come down.
When I finally settle, I look up at him, my eyes getting heavy. Intense relaxation comes over me after the rocking orgasm, making me sleepy.
“Can I reciprocate?”
Right now, even drowsy, I want nothing more than to take his hard cock in my mouth.
“Not tonight. If you touch my cock, there’s no way I’ll be able to keep myself from dragging you up to that bedroom and fucking you all night.”
His words. God, his words always do it to me. I’m not happy about the lack of ability to please him. But I get it.
“Ugh.” That’s all I can manage to get out.
I reposition myself, turn so we’re facing each other, and lean down to kiss him. I love kissing this man. I always have. We get lost in each other. When we break the kiss, I lay my head on his shoulder, and he wraps his arms around me.
I don’t want him to go. I know he doesn’t want to go. But we want to bring him home right. Right for our marriage and for our kids.
After several minutes, lying on the couch, embracing, Troy whispers, “I should probably head home.”
“This is your home.” My response is almost immediate.
“You know what I mean, babe.”
“Yeah, but we?—”
“Mom? Dad? What are you doing?”
Oliver’s voice startles us, and we jump, scrambling to a seated position. We’re like two teenagers caught making out by their parents. Standing at the foot of the couch, Oliver holds Chelsea’s hand.
“Chelsea needed water, so she woke me up, and I’m getting her some.” My sweet boy. He’s just like his dad, always wanting to take care of everybody. “What’s happening? Are you back in love?” Even in the dim light, hope sparkles in his eyes.
Chelsea rubs at her sleepy eyes with her fists. “Of course they are, Owlie. Don’t you see their heart eyes all the time? Now, can we get my water?”
Troy and I say nothing. We watch in silence as our six-year-old leads our ten-year-old to the kitchen. Before they step out of the room, I overhear Oliver asking his little sister, “So, what are heart eyes?”