Aspen #3
“Aspen.” The rare use of my actual name snapped me to attention, like always. He stared down at me, looking suspicious. “Did something happen? You were fine this morning.”
“I’m fine now.”
“You seem weird.”
“I’m not,” I insisted. When he only continued to stare, waiting, I sucked in a deep breath, anxiety swirling in my stomach like a typhoon. “Look, maybe we should…”
He let out a tiny huff of laughter, before shifting his gaze up to the ceiling for a few seconds. “Oh my god, not this already. I thought even you’d last more than a couple weeks, Cupcake. You surprise me.”
“What?” I demanded, narrowing my eyes. He sounded exasperated but slightly amused, like I was the beloved family pet who’d just tracked in mud all over the clean floor, but was too cute to actually get mad at.
“You want to take a break, or back off, or get a little distance. Something like that, right?” He guessed.
“How’d you know that?” I blurted out, irritated by the fact that he’d seen right through me, and equally irritated by his amused reaction to it.
“I’ve been waiting and waiting for this, Cupcake,” he said. “I know you better than you think.”
“Whatever,” I responded, resisting the urge to cross my arms like a petulant child. He’d derailed everything, and now I didn’t even know what to say.
“Relax,” he urged, in that low, soft voice that he used when he was talking me off the ledge of self-imposed misery. He reached out, snapping my textbook closed and setting it aside so he could sit directly in front of me with our faces aligned. “Just talk to me for a minute.”
“Fine.” Like I had a choice anyway.
“Whatever happened today, whatever made you start thinking too much about us, just forget it for right now,” he said. “We don’t have to label it, and you don’t have to promise me anything. But I want you to just answer this one question honestly. Are you happier with me than you are without me?”
It was too easy to answer. So easy I didn’t want to say it. But it always felt impossible keeping my feelings inside when he was using that soothing tone on me, searching my face with those intensely blue eyes.
“Yeah.”
“That’s all that matters,” he said. “You don’t have to get freaked out, or back off, or whatever it is your brain is telling you to do, okay? We like being together, so we’re going to keep doing that. Nothing else makes sense.”
Of course it was just that fucking easy for him. He didn’t have to worry about being abandoned when I suddenly had better options open up.
“Aren’t you afraid one of us is going to get hurt?” I snapped, frustrated. He blinked, looking surprised, before his expression softened and his eyes darkened with intensity.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “So don’t hurt me.” When I didn’t say anything for a second, he went on. “Because I would never, ever hurt you. You know that, right?”
“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” I muttered, staring down at the bedspread.
He reached out, taking one of my hands in his, kneading my palm with his thumbs.
“I can’t control what happens around us,” he agreed. “But I know we don’t have to hurt each other if we don’t want to. And I don’t believe you want to hurt me, Aspen.”
“I don’t,” I whispered, the words coming out cracked and raspy.
It was almost worse, having him pull me out of the black clouds in my head.
If I stayed drowning in them, at least I was used to it.
When he treated me like this, like there was no part of me he couldn’t accept or deal with, it was kind of terrifying.
If I got used to it, and he was suddenly gone, I wouldn’t know how to deal.
He pulled my hand up to his lips, pressing a soft kiss to my palm. The contact was brief and totally innocent, but it sent heat and sensation racing up my arm to spiral through my whole body.
“Do you want to talk about whatever freaked you out today?”
“No.” I couldn’t talk about it even if I’d wanted to. I didn’t want to think about what might happen if I went against Faulkner’s gag order.
“But something did happen,” he determined.
I shrugged, shaking my head. “I don’t know. Not really.”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he said, and I exhaled, my breath shuddering out in a massive release of tension. “But it might help.”
“No,” I said. It wouldn’t help. But he’d shooed away my desire for distance and the instinct to protect myself, at least for the time being. Whether that would help me or hurt me in the long run, I wasn’t sure. “I’ll forget about it,” I promised, and a tiny grin perked up the corner of his mouth.
“So we’re good, then. No backing off. No taking a break. No getting away from me.”
He leaned in, so close that I was almost sure he was going to obliterate the boundaries I’d set at the beginning, and press his mouth onto mine.
But he tilted his head at the last second, gliding his lips over my jaw, and then down to my neck.
I swallowed hard, trying not to whimper as my pulse started rampaging inside me. He was way too good at this.
“No,” I promised.
“You can be so reasonable when you want to be,” he murmured against my skin, sending a shiver through me.
“And you can be so tolerable when you want to be,” I retorted. He chuckled, the vibrations traveling along his tongue and into my flesh, my abdominal muscles twitching as arousal sparked up in me, centered directly between my thighs.
“I’m sorry I got so upset, BB,” he whimpered, in his horrible impression of me. “It’s just that my brain gets so mixed up sometimes, and I need you to come make me all better.”
“I changed my mind,” I retorted dryly. “You’re barely tolerable.”
Maybe that line between love and hate really was as fine as he’d claimed it to be.
“Don’t worry, Cupcake,” he went on, ignoring my assertion, and only responding to the imaginary me. “I’ll make sure you forget all about those mean, nasty thoughts in your brain.”
Before I could ask how exactly he planned on doing that, he’d slipped down off the edge of the bed, kneeling against the mattress. Reaching out and grasping at my hips, he yanked me forward so my thighs were on either side of him.
My teeth dug down into my lower lip as he hooked his fingers into the waistband of the cotton shorts I’d changed into after coming home, tugging them down and discarding them before coming back between my legs, hoisting up my thighs to rest on his broad shoulders.
“Caelyx.”
“Yes?” He asked, his tongue sliding over my dick before he took it into his mouth, sucking me until I couldn’t hold back a moan.
“Never mind.”
Falling back onto the mattress to stare up at the ceiling, I let my fingers slip into the thick waves of his golden hair.
I didn’t know if I’d end up getting hurt.
But being with him felt so good, I didn’t want to let go of it.
For once, I wanted to believe that there was someone in the world that would put me first no matter what, that would do anything to keep from hurting me, and protect me from everything else in the world that wanted to.
And if Caelyx was claiming to be that person, at least for now, then I would try to believe him.