47. Rhodes
47
Rhodes
I can see why Granny would want to take a nap in this bed. It’s delicious in how the mattress forms around your body. Not too soft, not concrete-hard.
Just right .
I stretch my arms above my head, open an eye, and peer to the side to find Paige not quite as I left her the night before. It would be rather uncomfortable to sleep with her legs over my shoulders and her hands gripping handfuls of my hair, but I wouldn’t complain. Not a peep.
This morning, she’s upright, leaning against the headboard with her knees pulled up and flipping through pages. At least this is what I can see through my squint.
“Paige?”
She hums in response but stays focused on whatever she’s looking at.
The alarm clock on my bedside table says it’s five a.m. This isn’t a surprise to me since my alarm goes off nearly every morning at this time. My body is clearly used to waking without much prodding. I don’t have set work hours, but I like to make it to the gym early before the after-school drop-off rush happens.
But seeing Paige awake at this time is odd.
The woman rarely sees what the sky looks like before eight.
Turning on the bedside lamp, I squint even harder when I look at her. “You’re awake.”
“I never went to sleep.”
That explains that. “Why not? Did you have a nightmare? Upset stomach?”
Paige loves her sleep and has never had a problem knocking out, even after a three-shot espresso at five in the evening. Me? I probably wouldn’t sleep for a week.
She stretches out her legs under the comforter. My journal is propped upright and open on her lap as she taps the top of a pen to her chin. “I was reading.”
“Reading my journal?”
She lets the back of the journal fall to her thighs. “Well, yeah. I had a lot to catch up on—therapy, polo shirts, Jim and Agnes. And I was curious.”
I sober a little, blinking rapidly as I angle my head to get a better look at her face. “But it isn’t that long.”
“You have more entries than mine does.”
She’s got me there, but it’s only because I wrote every thought down. That journal was my companion. I wrote in it every time I thought about texting her, which happened to be a lot. But it became something of a release for me. It felt good putting my thoughts to paper, and even better when I realized it was helping me process.
She drops the pen in the open spine. “I reread it a few times.”
Okay …
“And I made notes, or responses, rather. See.” She turns my journal around to show me her meandering words, circling my entries as she flips through the pages. “I hope you don’t mind. I just…”
Pushing to sit, I lean back against the headboard and peer down at my journal when she hands it to me. Every page has notes with her responses to every part of this week I put on the page.
Now that she’s read them, I feel…lighter. The therapy of writing down my thoughts and feelings was made whole just by knowing my words were acknowledged somehow. I don’t need to know what she said in response, just that she did.
I run my thumb over the blue ink from her pen. “I love you, Paige.”
She pulls the journal from my hands slowly, then straddles my lap, cupping my face in her hands. “You said that a few times in your journal, too.”
“I did,” I confirm, tracing circles around her hip bones.
She presses her forehead to mine. “I love you so much, I can’t even stand it. I almost woke you up at two, three, and four a.m. to tell you. But it’s not like this is a huge revelation; just too good to keep inside.”
I smile at this, letting my thumbs massage the skin under the hem of her pajama shorts.
“Maybe it’s because we were friends before, we had a foundation or something like that, but once I realized—once I let myself love you—I couldn’t stop it. It hit hard and so fast,” she says, bowing over my chest to reach my lips and tenderly kissing me.
I run my hands up her ribs. “I know what you mean.”
She kisses me softly at first, then harder, tilting my head up even more to deepen it. My head is spinning as I think about the years I spent hiding. I held my love inside, and it ate away at me. It was meant for more than me, and I get that now.
“Is this how you’ve always felt?” she asks, rolling her hips over mine and making it nearly impossible to think straight.
I roll her to her back and tug her shorts down, shaking my head. “No, because my love had a direction—it’s always been you—but it wasn’t until you felt it too that it became a living thing. It makes it so much better.” My last few words dim to a whisper.
Her eyes roll back when my fingers trace the sensitive bundle of nerves between her legs, and I can’t help but kiss her exposed neck. I pepper kisses along her collarbone and lower until she grabs the sides of my face and traces my jaw, watching me as I continue to touch her.
There’s a new light in her eyes I hadn’t noticed until this moment. It’s realization mixed with awareness and so much love. She’s read my thoughts, my love for her on paper, and this time, she was ready for them. It makes her look different in the way a woman who is loved looks at a man who will never stop loving her.
Our lips find one another, pressing softly at first before sinking into the comfort of feeling, touching, and opening. Her body is new but familiar as I explore the soft skin below her belly button and lower. When her muscles contract, and she clenches around my fingers, her mouth is forced open as she pants through her orgasm. The way she roughly shoves my boxers down and easily rolls one of the many condoms over me with light fingers has me aching for something harder.
I sink into her body as she curls legs and arms around me, and I can’t help but thank love for this. It held on through dark times and even darker moments. It wouldn’t let me go, and when I stopped trying to control it, love showed me exactly what it was capable of doing.
Paige grabs my face in her hands again as I slowly pump into her lithe body, one hand on her low back to angle her hips up even more, the other bracing my weight over her. We move and breathe together, syncing our sounds of pleasure to the beat of our hearts.
She’s settling into my bones, my heart, my life, my forever.