Chapter Thirteen #2
It seems to go on forever. We move together, slowly building up friction but keeping his sweaty flesh pinned beneath me as tightly as I can.
Cade isn’t quite as loud or as active as he usually is, but he’s still making choked, bitten-off noises that drive me crazy.
He sounds raw and desperate, and by the time his fingers tighten in my hair and he pulses hot cum into my mouth, he’s whispering the word “please” over and over into the quiet room.
I swallow most of his release, but there’s still cum on my tongue as I climb back up his body and push it into his soft, open mouth.
Cade reaches for my cock with his busted hand, then reconsiders and reaches with the other, but I bat him away.
I’m laying so much of my weight onto his body that I have to squeeze my own hand between us to fist my cock, but I’m so turned on from making him come that I’m almost there myself.
I push the waistband of my sweats and boxers down, grinding down once to drag my erection through the dark hair trailing down from his belly button.
Then I press us together—forehead to forehead, hips to hips—and jerk myself just a few times before spilling all over his stomach with a gasp.
We’re both breathless as I collapse next to him, and he doesn’t fuss when I drag him into my arms. I refuse to let him go, but it’s cold in here, so I manage to only semi-awkwardly catch the edge of the comforter with my foot and drag it up until I can reach it, finally wrapping it around both of us until we’re totally cocooned.
Cade still isn’t saying anything, but his nose finds the underside of my jaw like a bloodhound, and he presses his hot, swollen face into me so hard that it has to hurt. I run my hand up and down his bare back, ignoring the cum that’s getting transferred from his chest to mine.
I hear something mumbled, but his face is buried too deeply in my neck for me to make out the words. When I pull back he chases me, so I awkwardly tilt my chin down to try to see him better.
“What did you say?”
Cade coughs a little and lets a half-inch of space slip between his lips and my skin.
“I said I like it better when you’re shirtless. You should be shirtless all the time. It should actually be illegal for you to wear a shirt. I’m going to start a petition. All the neighbors will sign, I know they all have the hots for you. Especially that biker dude at the end of the street.”
I can’t help but smile, as the little ramble sounds much more like my Cade than the silence I’ve been getting all day.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I say, because I don’t want to get into this tense conversation about my body again. Not when it feels like his mood is finally lightening. “How do you feel?”
Cade stiffens, and for a second I think he’s about to stonewall me, but then he relaxes into a stretch, loosely caged in by my arms. His spine curves like a cat’s, and some more of the tension seems to slip away as he settles back against me, running his fingertips through my chest hair.
“I’m okay. Just sore. And embarrassed, I guess.”
His voice is still raspy, which makes me instinctively want to worry, but I push the urge down. I thread my fingers through the hair at the back of his head, holding him so I can press a kiss against his forehead while I work out what to say next.
Saying the right thing isn’t my greatest strength. But I know I have this overwhelming urge to keep him safe right now, even though the thing that seems to be threatening him the most is his own anger.
“Do you want to talk to your dad?”
Cade freezes, stiffening against me, and there’s a long pause while he tries to find his answer.
“Why would I?”
It’s hard to explain. I’m not even sure why I said it, but it feels necessary.
I buy myself time by shuffling down in the bed, turning on my side until we’re nose to nose, just like we were before I derailed us with a blowjob. My hands twine around his waist so I’m still holding him against me, but I look him in the eye when I finally speak.
“I think all of this happened because of a misunderstanding. We could go talk to him. You could come out to him for real. See what he says. Even if he’s a dick about it, at least you’ll know where you stand. There won’t be room for… interpretation. In the heat of the moment.”
Cade’s frowning at me, and I can see the fight already swelling up in him. He doesn’t pull away from me, but there’s tension in his raspy voice when he answers me.
“Maybe it was a misunderstanding. Maybe not. I get it, I overreacted. I shouldn’t have gone that far. But he made me so fucking mad, and that was always going to happen. I just need to learn to control myself better when he pisses me off. I get it, I know.”
My therapist is big on ‘naming’ emotions.
She stares at me, flinty-eyed through the Zoom window, waiting with endless patience until I finally come up with whatever word she was waiting for to describe how I was feeling at a particular time.
It’s exhausting, and seems impossible to get right most of the time.
But right now, as I look at Cade from the outside in, I start to see her point.
“Were you really angry? Or were you scared?”
He stiffens, staring at me, and I see it again. That fear. The same fear I’m pretty sure was driving him that night.
He barely starts to pull away from me before I hold him tighter.
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t run away from me. I’m not making you do anything, I’m just asking.”
“What the fuck am I supposed to say to him?”
He’s obviously pissy, but he’s not trying to get away from me, which is as much as I can hope for, I guess.
“I don’t know. Tell him you’re bi. Tell him we’re together. Tell him you’re sorry you fucking attacked him but you were scared he’d disapprove.”
Cade snorts. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what that man thinks. He barely has two brain cells to rub together and has treated everyone in his life like a punching bag. His opinion is worthless to me.”
I try not to audibly sigh, but I’m not really successful. I push that same loose curl off his forehead again before I speak.
“I think we both know that’s not true.”
The silence that sits between us is heavy, and I stay very still, waiting to see how Cade’s going to react. When the seconds pass and he still doesn’t say anything, I panic and keep going.
“I’m not trying to be a dick. I spent my entire life trying to make my dad happy, and he didn’t do a damn thing to deserve it.
You know this. You’ve told me a million times that it’s okay, and I shouldn’t be mad at myself, because parents fuck you up and your brain is always still kind of a little kid when you deal with them.
Why is it okay for me, but you have to be totally above it all?
You’re just what? Over it? Magically healed from all his abuse and what that does to you? ”
“He didn’t abuse me,” he says, like a reflex. I ignore it, because we both know it’s a lie but there’s no point in fighting about it.
“Whatever you want to call it. He’s a piece of shit. That doesn’t mean you can’t want him to approve of you. If anything, it probably makes you more desperate to please him. On some level. It’s an instinct.”
Cade is silent a little while longer, but at least he’s not getting angry.
“I should never have let you go to therapy. You were already scary smart, now you’re all insightful and shit as well. Unbelievable.”
The better corner of his mouth tugs up in a smile, but the humor feels forced.
“Come on, Cade,” I whisper. “Can you be honest about something, for once? I feel like all you ever do is run around telling everyone how fine you are.”
For just a second, I think I have him. I think he might talk to me. It’s becoming more and more glaringly obvious how overdue this conversation is. Instead, he locks up. I see him tense, and his expression shutters as he pulls away from me.
“Fine. If you want me to talk to him, I’ll talk to him. Just talk. But afterwards, when he’s still a piece of shit and it hasn’t made a damn bit of difference except opening ourselves up to his cheap-ass ridicule, I’m going to say ‘I told you so’.”
He’s pulling himself off the bed, his movements jerky with anger and obviously painful as he winces through getting dressed.
I try to follow him, but he moves away from me, making a point of digging around in the drawer for some underwear and then putting it on without my help, even though it looks awkward.
“Cade, that’s not what I meant. I’m not trying to force you to do anything, I just thought it might help.”
“Sure. And I’m going to do it, to show you it won’t. Let’s go. We’re burning daylight, and if we leave it any later he’ll probably be unconscious, if he isn’t already.”
Cade has officially draped himself in a flinty resolve. I’m pretty sure this is all my fault for taking us down this path, but it’s too late to go back now. As I quietly get dressed to follow him, all I can do is cross my fingers that his dad really is trying to be better, like he said.