14. Chapter 14
Chapter 14
Riley
“M att, oh my god, I’m so sorry.” I yelled out of my open window while pulling into the driveway. He leaned against his car, legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles, a bouquet of flowers in his hands.
He smiled and pushed his glasses up with the back of his hand as he approached my door. I scrambled to unbuckle my seat belt, shut off the car, and open the door. The lack of sleep had caught up to me, leaving me shaky as I ran on nothing but caffeine and the adrenaline of the first day.
I was going to sleep so hard tonight.
I’d had after school care today on top of it being the first day of school and the parents of the last child had been running late. Then I ended up being caught in the worst of rush hour traffic on my way home.
He pulled my car door open and leaned down, holding out a hand for me. I let him help me out of my car only to be wrapped in a hug. My body melted into his, a wave of peace washing over me. We hadn’t seen each other in person since the district meeting, both of us doing our best to take this slow. We had agreed to celebrate the first day of school together tonight, something I had been looking forward to every day since I last saw him. I didn’t realize how much I had missed his touch.
I thought back to this morning, examining every detail of the way I felt. It was still the same. Safe, peaceful, nice. No burning desire.
“Hi,” he said against the top of my head.
I pulled back so I could look at him. “Hi.”
He cupped my cheek and rubbed his thumb against the corner of my mouth. I smiled into his touch, earning a smile from him that showed all his teeth. We stood there staring into each other’s eyes wrapped up in the moment. I wondered if he missed me as much as I missed him. Being back in the classroom today meant we were limited on how much we were able to respond to messages. The few minutes we had been able to spare had left me with butterflies for the rest of the day.
He gave me another squeeze and stepped back presenting the bouquet of yellow flowers. “I realized I never asked you what kind of flowers you like, but I saw these and they made me think of you.”
I took them from his hand, letting my fingers linger against his. “They’re beautiful. Honestly, I don’t really care what kind they are. I like all flowers.” Like was understating it, I loved flowers. I love being gifted them. I loved buying them for myself. I loved looking at the wildflowers that grew all over our area. I couldn’t think of a time anyone had given them to me just because.
He walked toward the passenger side of my car and retrieved my tote bag and then turned back to pull two grocery bags from his car. “I thought we could try out a recipe I found. You were up so late last night I didn’t know if you would feel up to going out tonight.”
I ran my eyes over him. His hair was messy and falling over his forehead, a mix of flat and puffy from him running his hands through it all day. He still wore his school polo tucked into a pair of grey trousers, meaning he went straight from school to the grocery store and then here. I had kept him up late last night but here he was thinking about me.
I blushed and stepped closer to him so I could kiss his cheek. The brush of my lips against his stubble covered skin made my cheeks blaze harder. “You better be careful; you’re going to spoil me.”
He pressed a finger to the bridge of his glasses and pushed them up. “I seem to recall you calling me hot and then offering to defend my honor today,” he laughed and started toward the front door. “I think you’re the one doing the spoiling.”
I rolled my eyes as I followed him. I hadn’t stopped thinking about how I called him hot at all today. The word kept turning itself over and over in my head. So no, I didn’t mean the word hot in the context that he was so attractive I felt this burning desire to have sex with him. It was more of a fact that I liked the way he looked, simple as that. “I was just stating a fact.”
He stepped behind me giving me room to unlock the door. “Is it the glasses? I didn’t know you would be this into them.” His breath felt hot against the back of my neck and ear. My fingers fumbled the key as the thought of him leaning forward just a little more to brush his lips against my skin crossed my mind. Still no burning desire.
This would all be so much easier if I felt that desire, right?
Calm down, Riley. This is only the third time you’ve seen this man in person. We’re taking things slow, stop with all the pressure.
I shrugged my shoulders. Oddly, glasses were the one thing all my exes had in common. I didn’t realize I had a type until that moment. “Why are they just now making an appearance?” I asked once I was able to push open the door.
“I ran out of contacts over the weekend and still need to find an optometrist around here.” He sat the grocery bags on the counter, his free hand now pushing up his glasses again. “Had to break out the back up glasses in the meantime.”
My shoulder rested against the kitchen doorway and I watched as he pulled ingredients from the bags.
“Riley,” he said without looking up from the grocery bags. His head turned to me after a beat of silence. “You’re too far away.”
I joined him at the counter and bumped my hip against his. “Is this better?” I tucked my hair behind my ears as I looked over the ingredients he had laid out. I remembered the flowers were still in my hand and turned to grab the empty vase from the table. “I should probably change before we start cooking.”
The heat of Matt’s gaze followed as I moved around the kitchen adding water to the vase with the flowers and returning it to the table. His hand caught my wrist, my dress fluttered against my legs as he spun me back around and pulled me tight against him. My eyes met his, registering how blown out his pupils were. His mouth tensed and his throat worked in a swallow.
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t think I can answer that question.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Rule number one.”
“ Mhmm, but it breaks other rules.”
I swallowed hard, redirecting my eyes to the floor as my heart started to race. I wanted to ask what rule his thoughts were breaking, but my brain felt full of static. More information might make it worse.
“I’m going to go change, okay?” I told him with a shaky voice as I kept my eyes on the floor.
He stepped back, loosening his grip on my wrist but not letting go. “Yeah, okay. I have a change of clothes in my car. I’m going to grab those.” He squeezed my wrist. “You look so pretty in that dress,” he said in a lowered voice as his hand slipped away.
My thoughts swirled making my chest tighten.
He said I looked pretty. He looked like he wanted to kiss me. He brought me flowers. He was thinking about breaking the rules. It was clear that Matt was light years ahead of where I was in our relationship. He had no idea that I was holding back because it terrified me that there wasn’t anything to hold back, not because I just wasn’t there yet.
He wanted to cook dinner together, something about coming home from work and doing something so simple felt so domestic. He was thinking about breaking the rules. Which rule?
What would it be like to come home to that smile every day, cook dinner with him every day? Would he always bring me flowers just because?
I made a mental note to ask him what he was thinking another time. Another time when we were past all these rules. That made my chest tighten more. I sat on my bed forcing myself to take a few deep breaths until the bands closing around my chest loosened.
I heard the front door open and close followed by the bathroom door closing. I took a few more deep breaths as I changed into leggings and an oversized t-shirt.
“So, chef, what are we making?” I asked once we both returned to the kitchen.
Matt had changed into a black T-shirt and jeans. He held up his phone to show me a recipe. I recognized the blog it was from; it was one of my favorites for PCOS friendly recipes. One of the hardest life changes I had made since my diagnosis was adjusting my diet. I had been so used to focusing on the typical diet trends that I had to completely relearn what healthy really meant, and the ways different foods affected my body.
“Pecan crusted salmon,” I read aloud. “I haven’t tried that one yet. Emery hates fish so she refuses to let me cook with it.”
While I have always been willing to try anything, Emery was always a picky eater. She was also the only one of the three of us with food allergies, which made everything worse growing up.
“Oh, I brought enough that we could share with her.”
I tapped my fingers against the sides of my thighs. My hands itched to reach for him, but I still felt on edge from his earlier comment. Not only had he thought of me, but he also thought of Emery. He must have remembered when I told him that we usually alternated nights cooking dinner. “I think she had other plans tonight.”
He narrowed his eyes toward me. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I nodded a little too hard. I pulled the scrunchie on my wrist off and busied my hands with tying back my hair.
“I freaked you out, didn’t I?” He laid his phone down on the counter but didn’t move any closer to me.
I turned toward the cabinet with the cutting board and pans to pull out what we would need. The weight of his gaze pressed down on me. “A little bit. I think I just need a few minutes to calm down.” My skin buzzed and my chest tightened again.
He moved closer to me. I stepped back, the counter digging into my hip. Touching him right now didn’t seem like a good idea, not while I wrestled with confusion from the way his touch made me feel. I should tell him that I’m demi. No, that felt more intimidating than telling him about my PCOS. Was it because telling him wouldn’t be out of looking for another excuse for things to not work between us? Yeah, that was it. The need to tell I was demi came from wanting to tell him how confused I felt about how quickly I was developing feelings for him. Sure, he made me feel safe and heard, but that was more vulnerability than I was ready for.
“Sorry, um,” I rubbed a hand over my face. “Can we just cook without any physical contact for a few minutes?” The bands around my chest tightened more. I pulled out my phone to find the recipe he had shown me so I could avoid looking at him.
“Yeah, that’s fine. Whatever you need.” There was an edge to his voice. Anger? Hurt? I wasn’t sure. It amazed me how it could feel like we had known each other our whole lives but at the same time we were strangers, still learning how to read each other.
“I just feel a little overwhelmed. It’s not that I don’t like when you touch me, because I really like it.” A nervous laugh escaped as I tried to find the right words. “Sometimes touch calms me down when I’m panicking, but sometimes it just makes me feel claustrophobic.”
He blinked at me like he couldn’t make sense of what I was saying. I couldn’t even make sense of what I was saying. All I knew was that if I let him touch me right that second, I was going to melt and give in only to spiral more because of it.
My thoughts spiraled back to thinking about everyday being like this. I knew if I gave in to letting his touch calm me, the thought of taking that leap would stop feeling so enormous. But once his touch was gone it would loom over me again.
Not yet, I’m not ready, I told myself.
“I’m sorry, I know it doesn’t make sense.” My scalp felt tight. I pulled the scrunchie from my hair and gathered it back up into a loser ponytail.
“What did I say about apologizing for how you feel?” He gave me a gentle smile. He pressed the buttons to set the oven temp to preheat.
“You can tell me I don’t have to all you want. It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to. It’s frustrating enough for me having to deal with my confusing brain, so I know it has to be frustrating for you.” I pounded the bag of pecans with a rolling pin to crush them up. “Can we change the subject?”
He moved to the sink to wash his hands. “Sure. I want to hear all about your first day of teaching, Miss Harrison. Start with why you let a group of six-year-olds have pirate swords.”
I laughed and told him about how the swords we made were related to the book we read during story time. The whole day was pirate themed as a way to get them all excited to be back at school. We used goldfish during math time, and I gave them each a gold coin for behaving during story time. We did ice breakers sharing what they did over the summer and chose pirate names. I was more grateful than I expected to be for the breaks PE, lunch, and recess gave me. Keeping twenty kids entertained and ready to learn was harder than I thought it would be.
Matt told me that he started the sixth grade band classes with a test to see what they knew about music, only to find that the majority of them knew nothing. He knew he would have to spend the first couple of weeks teaching them how to read music and about each of the instruments but didn’t realize how arduous the task would be. He gave the seventh and eighth graders benchmark tests to see where they were starting the year at. He knew there would be a few that didn’t pick up their instruments during the summer, but he wasn’t expecting it to be almost all of them. The amount of catching up he would need to do with all of them felt overwhelming. The eighth graders would be spending a day in October touring all the feeder elementary schools, something they did every year as a way to get the kids interested in joining the band once they were old enough, and they were already behind on being ready for that.
“I forgot how many kids take band class just because they have to choose between it or chorus,” he told me. It was a requirement our district had always had for middle schoolers to encourage the fine arts. Less than half would choose to continue on once they reached high school.
“If anyone can turn them into band nerds, it’s you,” I offered as encouragement.
He shook his head as he plated the food. “What makes you so sure of that?”
“The way you talk about it.” I smiled as I remembered the excitement and passion that had been all over his face when he first told me about why he taught it. “Middle schoolers may be cruel and act like they don’t like things, but they pick up on which teachers are genuine.”
He groaned. “Riley, they made fun of everything about me.”
I pushed the hair hanging over his forehead back. The tension in my body had loosened while we cooked and shared about our day. At some point we had slipped back into our casual touches without me thinking about it. “It’s just because you’re new. They’re going to test you just like you test them. They’ll warm up to you.”
He pushed his glasses up. “I think I failed today. I tried to act like they weren’t bothering me, but I know I was beet red all of class. I kept struggling to keep them focused and forgetting what I was trying to tell them.” He lifted the plates and carried them to the table. “This is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. I was so much better at being an assistant director.”
I pulled him into a hug, squeezing as hard as I could. “It’s a difficult age group, but it’ll get easier. You’re going to be their favorite teacher by Christmas break.”
***
Emery came home to a cleaned kitchen and us on the couch with some of his teaching materials spread across the coffee table. I had convinced him to teach me to read music while I pretended to be a bratty preteen constantly interrupting him.
“It smells like fish,” she said, wrinkling her nose and walking to the kitchen.
I looked over to the candle I had lit to cover the smell to make sure it still burned. The only noticeable smells in the room to me were the vanilla candle and Matt’s cologne. “There is no way you can smell it; we scrubbed everything down three times. Salmon doesn’t even have that strong of a smell.”
Matt gathered his things up. “You missed out. We were going to save you some, but it was so good we decided to split your portion.”
Emery stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. “Don’t forget I’m on your team, if you keep breaking the no fish rule I might change my mind.”
Matt laughed and pulled his backpack onto his shoulder. I followed him to the door for a quick hug. “Text me when you get home,” I told him.
“I will,” he replied with a kiss to my forehead.
“What is going on with you two?” Emery asked after I closed the door behind Matt.
I shrugged. “We’re still figuring it out.”
“What did you guys cook tonight?”
“That salmon recipe I’ve been telling you I want to try. He surprised me with it. I didn’t even tell him about it.”
“What I’m hearing is he researched recipes based on something you shared about yourself – since I know you showed me where that recipe was from - and came over here to cook dinner with you after you both had a long first day of school. The chemistry between the two of you is so strong I’m sure people a mile away could feel it. This place reeks of it.” She shook her head as she sat down on the couch, then patted the spot next to her for me to sit down. “I can’t figure out why he didn’t kiss you when he left. Is it because I’m here? I could have –“
“No, that’s not why,” I cut her off. “We haven’t kissed yet.”
She laughed. “That’s a joke, right? You two maintain constant physical contact like you’ve been together for years, but you haven’t kissed?”
My back pressed into the armrest as I pulled my knees up to my chest. “We were going to kiss on our first date, but then he stopped and said it wasn’t a good idea since we’d probably never see each other again. Then last week when we talked things over, we decided that maybe it would be best to wait until we knew where things were going with us.”
Emery stared at me.
“What?”
“What happened before he changed his mind?” She asked.
“I joked about how I had never kissed anyone until after they confessed their love for me. We were flirting back and forth, and he said something about if we kissed, he wouldn’t be able to stop.”
“Is that true, that you never kissed anyone other than your exes and not until after they confessed their love for you?” She drew her eyebrows together like the information didn’t make any sense to her.
I nodded and pulled my knees tighter against me.
“What about other things?” Emery and I discussed a lot about our lives, but sex was a topic we normally avoided.
“Things usually progressed pretty fast after their love confessions, even when they were still waiting on me to decide what I wanted.”
Her eyes narrowed and she rubbed a hand over her face. “Did you want things to progress that fast physically?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t not want it. I mean, I wanted it because they wanted it. But I always enjoyed things more after I figured out my feelings.” Truly, I hadn’t really wanted to, but went along with it because I didn’t want to upset them. I may not have been to the point of feeling that attraction to them yet but it had never stopped me from going along with things. Sure, it had hindered my enjoyment of the experience. Often I struggled to orgasm until I got to the point where our bond was strong enough to trigger my desire. But once the switch flipped my sex drive would go from nonexistent to always high, the change usually bringing up questions I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know how to explain it to them without making them feel bad.
I stared at Emery’s shocked face, eyes wide and mouth tight. Even though I hadn’t been ready to tell Matt about it earlier, thinking about this so much today had me wanting to tell someone. Emery seemed like a good start. This conversation seemed like a perfect opening to admit it. So what if she thought it was weird? It’s not something that her opinion on really mattered. “I’m demisexual,” I confessed. It wasn’t just the first time I had told anyone; it was the first time I had ever said the words out loud. It felt like a weight lifted off my shoulders to finally say.
Emery slapped a palm on her forehead. “Oh shit.” Her face tensed as I watched the wheels turning behind her eyes.
“I always felt like something was wrong with me because I didn’t experience the same things around dating that you and all my friends did growing up.”
Emery took her time processing the information, nodding slowly as she did. “I feel so stupid,” she finally said. “I’ve been pushing you into this and not even thinking about any of that. I’m so sorry, Riley.”
I stretched out my legs and tapped hers with my foot. “It’s okay, you didn’t know. You weren’t wrong that there’s something there between me and Matt.”
Emery smiled and wiggled her eyebrows. “Does that mean that you want to kiss him and all that?”
“I definitely want to kiss him, but I don’t know about everything else.” I pulled a throw blanket off the top of the couch and draped it over myself. “I think I may want to, but maybe not yet. I feel so much more comfortable and connected to him than I ever did with my exes, but it’s all so fast.”
“Sometimes things just click and happen fast. It doesn’t have to take years to build.”
I pulled my knees back up to my chest and pinched the throw between my fingers, rubbing them over the seam on the edge. Again I thought back to this morning when I called Matt hot. It had just sort of slipped out without me even thinking about it. In the past I had maybe used the word hot to describe any of my exes less than five times, and all those times had been prompted. I smiled to myself. Not only had it been so easy, but it had made me feel happy to say it, at least until I thought about it more and then freaked out.
A throw pillow smacked into me. “Hey!” I yelled.
“You are so lovesick already,” Emery said.
I threw the pillow back at her. “No, I’m not.”
“Do you remember the first time Milo told us about Jenna? You have the same look on your face that he did.”
This was all happening too fast. Within just a few days Matt was fitting into my life like he had always been here, making me feel things that have always taken years to build with anyone else. It made me feel like I had been wrong for all those years about my own identity.
It shouldn’t be this fast. It shouldn’t be this easy.
For the first time since that date back in June I started to think harder about everything Matt had said about his ex. He thought he was going to marry her; they had been together for ten years and he thought he had already found his happily ever after. I was the first person he’d try to date since her. He said he was all in with me, that he would be patient for as long as I needed. What if it’s all just him wanting to get married, not about how he feels about me?
“I’m right, and you know it. I’m placing a bet now that you’ll be engaged in less than a year,” Emery stated.
Tears started to sting my eyes. When it was just the two of us together things felt so real, so simple. There was nothing to question. Now, with the smell of him lingering on my clothes and my body craving to have his touch back, it all felt too good to be true.
“Riley, talk to me,” Emery’s voice broke through my thoughts.
“You don’t think it’s all too fast? It feels too fast.” I swiped the back of my hand under my eyes to catch the tears that were falling. With a sniffle and a deep breath, I launched into telling her everything I knew of Matt’s past then followed up with a word vomit of all my worries. Emery stood quietly from the couch and disappeared into the kitchen. A cabinet opened and I heard pots clank together, the sound of the refrigerator opening followed. I sighed and paused mid sentence while I waited for her. There was a thud that sounded like her moving the Kitchen Aid mixer to the counter.
My phone lit up with a message.
Matt
Thank you for letting me come over today.
Riley
Thank you for dinner. Cooking together was nice,
I enjoyed it too. Maybe it’s something we can do again?
I would like that. I’m going to hang out with my sister for a little while. Can I call you later? I promise I won’t keep you up so late tonight.
My phone was pulled from my hand and the throw blanket yanked off me. Emery tugged me off the couch. “Come help me,” she pleaded.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
She blinked at me and let out an exaggerated sigh. “We’re making cookies. You have big feelings we need to work through.” She shifted her hands to my shoulders and shook me. “And we still need to celebrate your first day as a teacher!”