Chapter Seventeen
Gabe
We lay on the small cot in the corner of the office that served as my bed most nights. Aubrey’s naked body was warm against mine under the blanket. I wore my boxer briefs since the weight of her head on my chest already felt too close to cheating on our deal.
She needed it. That had been an intense round of sex, and aftercare was an important part of the experience.
But that was all our deal was: me helping her experience good sex. She got to be naked afterward because it was what she wanted. Me being naked with her would be what I wanted, and that wasn’t what this was about.
She played with the hair on my forearm. “How’d you know I’d like it?” she asked, glancing up at my face. Freckles almost too faint to see danced across her nose.
“Wall sex?”
“Well, yeah. But also the other thing.”
“You mean the being watched thing?”
She nodded, a touch of pink rising to her cheeks.
I kissed the top of her head. “Just a feeling. Exhibitionism’s a pretty common fantasy.”
“I’m not sure I’d want to do it for real,” she said as if thinking it through. “Like, I liked when you said those things and feeling the risk of it a little, but I think someone actually watching would make me uncomfortable more than anything.”
I shrugged. “So it’ll stay a fantasy. They don’t always have to come true. That’s what makes them fun.”
She shifted to see my face easier, her leg hooking over mine. “Do you have one?”
“Sure.” Like hers, it would only ever exist in my imagination. It was better for everyone that way.
“Will you tell me?”
I thought of telling her a different one. Something closer to what she probably expected. A threesome or bondage or something.
She sensed my hesitation. “What’s wrong? Is it really weird?”
I traced the lavender stem tattooed on her arm. “I don’t know. Maybe to some people.” I’d never cared much whether it was.
She gazed at me, waiting. Stripped naked of more than her clothes, and she’d shed those layers with me.
I blew out a breath. “I like to imagine fucking my pregnant wife.” It wasn’t a breeding thing or like I wanted to fuck every pregnant woman I saw.
I wanted to fuck my wife. The woman I’d committed myself to in all ways who was offering up her body through tremendous change to bring our child into the world.
Bringing her body comfort during that stage?
Bringing her pleasure? It was the most erotic thing I could imagine.
Only I didn’t have a wife, and I never would.
I didn’t even have a fucking bed.
Anything I had to offer a woman was strictly physical. I could fuck against a wall, haul her on my shoulders to eat her pussy, and rip off her panties with my bare hands, but I couldn’t promise more than that. If I did, there was no guarantee I’d keep it.
The truth was, I didn’t know how to commit myself to someone the way my parents had committed to each other.
I didn’t know how to fit my life together with another person’s.
I’d never had to try. Never had to consider how leaving for camp might affect a partner, or even a pet.
Never had to think of anyone else when making decisions.
And the one time I had needed to, I’d failed.
My mom had fucking cancer, and I chose to stay for a fight.
It shouldn’t have mattered that it was the final fight of the only professional tournament of its kind, and winning would have made me the kind of money only 1 percent of boxers ever earned.
It shouldn’t have mattered I had peaked at exactly the right time, over ten years into my career, and was on the precipice of everything I’d worked for paying off.
It shouldn’t have mattered that everyone had confidence the surgery would be easy and she had at least another year before things got bad.
No justification should have been enough. The only decision I should have made was to drop everything and go be with my mom.
Instead, I’d welcomed the justifications. Slathered them on my face like Vaseline so any objections from my conscience would slide right off.
It was my nature to be selfish, and at this point, chances were it was too late to change. Even Evan didn’t think I could.
He’d managed to avoid me 90 percent of the time I stopped by Dad’s, content not to have me in his life at all if it meant not putting up with my disappointment. I didn’t want it to be true, but it was better for everyone to accept it was.
I could have a wife, a kid, a family—but only in my fantasies, where they’d never be at risk of me letting them down.
The reminder rang through me like the bell at the end of a losing round as I met Aubrey’s gaze. I wanted her safe from me most of all. My arm tightened around her.
“You want kids?” she asked softly, maybe sensing the shift in my mood.
I tensed, not expecting that to be what she asked in response. Hating that my first instinct was to crack myself open further and let her all the way inside.
I needed to do the opposite. To reinforce my crumbling walls that were the only way I knew to protect her.
“Used to,” I muttered like it’d been a simple matter of changing my mind. So simple it wasn’t worth discussing.
I must have sold it because she didn’t ask anything more. Just lay with me, existing. Letting me have this piece of her I shouldn’t be allowed to have.
“A part of me always wondered why my parents had me,” she said after a while. A murmured confession in a forgotten gym. The steam pipes clinked around us, keeping our words safe.
I studied her with drawn brows. “Why?”
Her shoulder dragged against my chest in a shrug. “It mostly felt like I was in the way of the life they wanted. And when they left me with my grandma, it felt like proof I was right.”
I couldn’t think of how anyone’s life would be better without her in it. She shivered beneath the blanket, and I squeezed her close. “They did us all a favor,” I told her. “You belonged here with us.” I’d known that much since I was twelve, though I’d never been more grateful for it than I was now.
“One thing I know is if I ever become a mom, I want to be the kind yours was.”
Just imagining it pinched my chest. She would be an incredible mom.
The kind who showed up for soccer matches and cheered her ass off no matter if her kid was the star player or the one sitting near the sideline picking grass.
She’d probably invent her own games with them on car rides that would become inside jokes.
She’d bake them the best snacks and know how to make anything better just by being there when they needed her.
They’d be the luckiest kid in the world.
Hers and someone else’s.
Thinking it was like dunking my head into the coldest ice bath.
He’d be someone she ended up with after this thing with us was over. Whose wedding I’d attend as her friend, sitting next to my dad in the front pew as I watched her promise her life to another man.
The same way I’d watch her date him and fall in love. Watch her bring him to game nights so he could get to know our family as her family. Watch her touch him and smile at him and track him with her eyes as he walked across the room.
Watch from the sidelines as he raised her kids, knowing he wasn’t good enough for her. Knowing no one was.
Especially not me.
The sting of it burrowed under my skin, and I restrained my hand from stroking her belly as a different kind of longing took hold.
Not mine to want.
“You’ll cook them way better dinners,” I joked, mouth dry.
She snorted. “Yeah, but my flower arrangements still need work.”
I ran my hand over the pink roses running beneath her collarbone and over her left shoulder. “These were my mom’s favorite,” I said, studying the careful shading.
“I know,” she said, nearly a whisper. “I got them for her.”
I swallowed the emotion from my throat. “And the lilies?” I traced my thumb to the center of her chest where orange and pink petals mirrored the roses, climbing her other shoulder.
“For Nana. Her name was Lily.”
“Do they make you feel closer to them?”
Our voices were quiet, blanketed in whatever bubble we’d created.
“A little. Kind of like I always have them with me, even in a small way, you know?”
I wanted to know and didn’t. Wanted my mom to still be with me, comforting me and offering her strength, even when it was the last thing I deserved.
Selfish.
“Do you think they are?” I asked anyway. “Still with us?”
She twirled her touch across the bare skin of my chest. I wanted to lift her fingers to my lips one by one. Then bring her mouth to mine for a single soft kiss. I flattened my palm over her rose tattoos instead.
She tilted her head. “I guess I believe love is a connection that goes beyond the physical, and I know I still love them even though they’re no longer here.
I like to think their love is still here too.
That it isn’t the kind of thing that fades just because their bodies are gone.
And as long as our love for each other is still here, a piece of them is too. ”
I hoped she was right. That my mom’s love still wrapped around Evan and my dad and Aubrey. That she lived on in the best parts of them.
And because of the selfish bastard I was, I hoped I got to be around to witness it. That through them, I could keep a part of her too.