Chapter 35
THIRTY-FIVE
“ Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience – or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope .”
~Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
A wicked grin grew wider on Elle’s face with each rhythmic tap of fat raindrops against the pane of the farmhouse windows.She looked over to Clayton asleep beside her on his stomach, his left-hand lay over her in a claiming gesture, as his head faced his side of the bed. His side. My side. The heat of his body next to her pulsed every wanton need awake.
Giddy anticipation jigged through her limbs as she lay in the still dark room listening to the rain and quiet hum of Clayton, or maybe Fitz’s, snores.Pulse racing, she waited for the chime of his church bells that had served as her alarm for the last few weeks. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she studied Clayton’s outlined form sleeping next to her. The navy comforter draped over his middle revealing the ridges of his muscular back. Her fingers itched to slink up his spine.Desire pooled in her core, spreading through her.
Clayton’s alarm screeched and he let out a muffled groan then searched blindly for his phone on the bedstand.With a grumble, he turned it off, then flipped toward Elle.
“Good Mo…oof.”Clayton’s good morning was interrupted by Elle pushing him to his back as she landed on top of him like a jungle cat.
Not a sweet little tabby but a ravenous panther. Straddling him, she crashed her mouth against his.
“Well, hello.” His raspy sleep-worn voice chuckled.
“It’s raining….so…”She drew the Team Paw Patrol shirt over her head, flinging it somewhere in the room.
“So, you want to macramé?”
“No.”Elle placed his hands on her aching breasts.
“Oh, you want to play chess?”His tease was a deep rumble as he rolled her hardening nipples with the pads of his fingers.
Her pelvic muscles tightened with want. “No.”With a sly smile, Elle took his hands and moved them to cup her backside.
“Oh, you want to make pancakes?”His brow cocked as he squeezed her ass.
“No.”Elle sighed, falling back on the bed, taking Clayton with her, his hard body settling between her open legs.
“I think you’ll have to tell me what you want, because I’m really at a loss here.”He smirked, rubbing the growing arousal beneath his black boxer briefs against her naked core.
“I want you.”Need crept up her body with each delicious movement of his erection against her.
“What do you want me to do?”He kissed her throat.
She bit her lower lip in carnal consideration, although she knew what she wanted him to do in exquisite detail.Those images flooded her dreams all night.Clayton’s roaming tongue trailing down her body, teasing licks down her center until feverishly devouring her.Her fingers threading through his short hair as he brought her to the edge and back over and over again.Nails digging into his shoulder as he inched inside of her, taunting her with the promise of even more pleasure before sinking fully into her.
“Be specific.”His hoarse murmur in her ear rippled through her entire body like a cresting wave.
“I want you to go down on me and then fuck me until I scream your name.”
“Good girl,” he growled before sealing his mouth to hers.
With a grunt of her name, Clayton collapsed atop of Elle. His orgasm shuddering through both of them.
“That…was…nice.”Elle’s voice was breathless and body limp with sated contentment.
“I do like…” He stopped, gulping needed air. “…when you ask for what you want.”He kissed her before pulling himself out of her and rolling onto his back.
Elle frowned at the loss of fullness.A blend of satisfying connection and instant grief at the end of sex with Clayton consumed her.Her body was deliciously sore and wrung out from but once their physical connection was broken, it craved that fullness to come back.
She wondered if it was normal to be so blissfully contented and longing in the same moment. Clayton’s tender strokes along her spine telegraphed that he felt the same way.After sex, he always held her tight, like a precious gift that he was afraid he’d misplace or lose.At first, she thought it may be his wanting to reassure her after all she had shared with him about the assault, but she noticed how his entire body relaxed with her touch just as hers did with his.
“Is that your kink?”Elle inquired, wrapping her leg over him in almost a claiming gesture. At least for the next few days, he was hers.
“My kink?”he said bemused.
“The thing you are into…you know, sexually?”She waved to their naked bodies as if he needed an image of “sexually.”
“Do you have a kink?”He traced her lips with the tip of his index finger.
She blushed.“I felt like I was into almost getting caught until we actually got caught by Jerome.”
He’d surprised them in Clayton’s office at lunchtime yesterday. Elle had, also uncharacteristically, been straddling a very enthusiastic Clayton’s lap. His shirt unbuttoned and her sweater tossed somewhere.
What was this man doing to her? All the right things.
“You didn’t have to work with him the rest of the day.The not-so-subtle comments he made.”A wincing laugh covered his features.
“Such as?”
“Patting my back each time he saw me at the reception area and saying, ‘Hope it’s not a hard day for you, big guy.’He did this so often that staff started to ask me if I was okay.”
She buried her face in his neck, trying to stifle the guffaw. It didn’t work.
“I’m sorry.”She pulled back with a pitying smile.“Well, if it’s any consolation, I think Jerome has cured me of that kink.”
“We’ll see.” Devilish defiance played in his challenging tone.
“Anyway, back to your kink.Do you like it when I tell you what I want?”
“I do.”He swiped along her jawline. “It’s very sexy.”
“You find it sexy to be told what to do?” she teased.
“Not like that.I’m not into being dominated.” His forehead creased. “I don’t know if it’s a kink, but to have you say what you want is very attractive.”
“Sounds like a kink to me.”
“No, not kink,”he insisted.“It is sexy, though, but it’s more…it’s important.”
Her brows knitted. “Important?”
“Of course.What you want is important to me because I…”he paused, his eyes cast to the ceiling. “Um…because you are important to me, and I want to know what you want.You bite your lip when you’re considering something you want to say.So often what you are thinking stays here.”He tapped her forehead.“As much of a turn on as it is to watch you bite this lip….” He grinned, brushing her bottom lip.“…it’s far sexier to have the words come.You don’t always say what you want, what you’re thinking.”
Elle bit her lower lip in contemplative frustration, then stopped after realizing she was doing exactly what he had just said. Part of her was indignant at his presumption that she wasn’t her own advocate, but she knew he was right. It was just like the afternoon in Boston when he told her he wished she saw herself through his eyes.
It was refreshing and a little perplexing that he always seemed to know her pages, her paragraphs of truth.She was his favorite book, after all.How often had she let the unspoken simmer within her instead of allowing those words to escape her lips?
“I know that for a long time your wants sat on the back burner second to what your mom wanted.You talk about me always taking care of everyone else, but you don’t see how you do the same thing. There’s a drive in you to protect your people, to make sure they have what you feel they need…. what you feel they want. Even if they don’t ask you to slay their dragons, you do. I just want you to be your own warrior. To kindly have a ‘Come to Jesus’ chat with yourself like you did with my dad.”
Elle’s face burned from the realization that Chris had told Clayton about their conversation when she not-so-subtly implied that he needed to show his son that he was proud of him by taking an active interest in Clayton’s career.
“Did your dad really call it a ‘Come to Jesus’ talk?”She cringed.
“He said you were sweetly persuasive.”
“When did he say that?”
“Last night at dinner.”
Clayton had met his dad for dinner prior to joining Elle at the Wine Down with their friends to celebrate Carmen and Mathew’s baby adoption announcement. He’d been so happy when she walked through the door that she simply lost herself in his joy not asking for details about his dinner.
“We had a long talk about a lot of things. Things that we both kept locked away from one another.”
“I didn’t mean to overstep. I wanted to help…to take care of you the way you take care of me and everyone else.”
“I know,” he murmured.
“Viet says I have a habit of blurting out things or acting without considering what someone truly wants.”
She closed her eyes, assigning the term “carelessly thoughtful” to herself. So blinded by wanting to help that she sometimes missed the entire picture. Not stopping to consider if what she’d deemed best was truly what someone wanted. How different she and Clayton are with this, him all patience, her all sword.
“I am really sorry. You trusted me with your feelings about your dad and I betrayed that.”A hard lump in her throat made the words wobble.
“I’m not upset.From how my dad described the conversation, you didn’t betray me.You never said to him, ‘Hey, your son says you’re being a dick,”His reassuring grin coaxed a small, relieved smile to her face.“You want to take care of your people and I love being one of your people.”
Love? She’d not let herself get lost in that thought.
“Sometimes we have to push the people we care about to ask for what they want.I am not mad, but maybe next time, use your sword to push me into asking for what I want…what I need instead.”
“Ok,” she croaked.
He kissed her.“No regrets.Yes, you maybe went about it differently, but in the end, it forced me and my dad to talk about things we hadn’t.To face what our relationship had become…to restart from an honest place.For me to see how it wasn’t just me.”
“What?”
“There’s more than one person in a relationship, so both play a part in its growing or withering.I didn’t realize that after I told my parents that I wasn’t going to go to medical school, that I stopped talking to my dad about school...or about anything important to me.I thought I was his great disappointment and that shaped our relationship.The reason Evan and my dad talked all the time was because Evan shared with my dad what he was doing.Same thing with Nat.It wasn’t that I was a great disappointment compared to my siblings, it was that they invited Dad into their lives.I hadn’t because I just assumed he wasn’t interested.For him, he felt rejected.Like I didn’t want his input.Like I didn’t want…him.Neither of us talked about it and just went on with this wall between us, based on very wrong assumptions of how the other felt.”
“Wow.” It was the silliest response to Clayton’s confession, but it was all she could muster.
“I know.”He kissed her forehead.“I can’t be angry with you for what you did because it broke that wall down.There are times we overstep for the people we care about, and you did a little, but I’m thankful you did.If you hadn’t, I don’t think my dad and I would have had the talk we had last night.”
“I’m glad you two talked.I am sorry, though.”Her earnest eyes tethered to his appreciative stare.
“Make me a promise.”His command was gentle and sweet.
“What?”
“I know you mean well, but next time, talk to me before you have a conversation that I should be having.I’m glad you did it, but next time talk to me before you pick up your sword. Also, be your own dragon slayer. Fight for yourself the way you fight for everyone else.Ask for what you want.”
“That’s two things.You said A promise.” A teasing smile quirked.
Despite the playful smirk, thoughtfulness shaded his gray eyes. “Well, then two.”
“I’ll try.”She agreed, her voice a whispered promise.
It was the second time he had asked her to promise him something this week.This one felt harder than pretending the days that ticked away weren’t doing so.Elle wasn’t sure if it was the second or third of her promises that felt harder.The second promise empty because after Saturday, would she have the opportunity to keep it?She would be gone.As much as she wanted to keep Clayton in her life, she knew she couldn’t.After Saturday, the best thing for Clayton would be to forget Elle.It would hurt, but she would need to use her sword to sever her hold on him, allowing him to find his true “Lizzie.” That future woman would be the keeper of his heart and he, the protector of hers.
The third promise pressed hard against Elle’s chest.At work she spoke up.She commanded.She demanded.She was a “boss bitch.”The professional wants within her slipped so easily from her lips.In her personal life, they were merely phantoms of the unsaid, bitten away before being allowed to come out of her mouth.
Long before her dad’s abandonment and mother’s falling apart, Elle had been groomed to keep her wants to herself. So much of her early life was defined by “No, Eleanor,” “Quiet, Eleanor, the grownups are talking,” or “Be a good girl, Eleanor.”These messages along with so many others made up so much of who Elle became. The commands given to her at six cemented the foundation of who she was at thirty-six.
“When do you have to be at the clinic?”She bit her lower lip.
“I’m on farm rotations today and my first appointment isn’t until later.”A knowing smile etched his features.
“Could we go to Cassie’s Corner Café for breakfast?”It was a small ask but it was an ask.
There were only a few more days for these small asks with Clayton.Only a few more days to share her tiny wants, leaving the big wants unspoken. The biggest of all, “Let me keep you.Let’s stay “us.” Some wants are too big. Some asks too much.
“Yes, but first…” He kissed down the column of her throat. “…I’m hungry for something else.”
Elle giggled, tilting her head giving him greater access to his target.