Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
santos
Never, not once, could I think back to a time when I had Ever wrapped all around me, and his presence asphyxiated me.
Ever since León had cornered me in the kitchen, though, that itch was there, building up.
Ever had been leaning closer and closer, too.
Things were almost back to how they’d been for that couple blissful weeks after we started recording shit for that Dom of his.
I didn’t bring him up with Ever, just as I didn’t bring up anything about his group of friends unless it was him who shared.
Sure, he had just shown me the text he’d sent them and said that Erika agreed with his reasoning to get his shit together before engaging in something that could be dangerous, whatever that meant.
It hadn’t put me at ease, but it was fine.
He didn’t have to open up about all his shit.
I didn’t.
Besides, Ever’s parents would be coming anytime soon.
I couldn’t forget about it. It seemed vital that I was ready.
I couldn’t lose control when they were counting on me to do the opposite.
To be some sort of grounding talisman for Ever.
They liked me, yeah. Ever had said it in so many words. Those things could change, though.
I’d seen it firsthand with my own family.
With…
Nope.
Not going there.
I just ignored the itchiness and brought Ever closer to me.
We weren’t like this before. We didn’t just keep quiet and hope the other would know about the turmoil inside our heads.
I hated it.
I hated seeing how hurt he was. He pretended, but I could see the signs.
He’d been really into that online guy. I couldn’t say it made sense, but Ever had been this close to blurting out that he loved him.
I didn’t care if it was sub frenzy or any other new term he came up with.
It had hit him hard, and I was supposed to kiss it better, but no one had given me a handbook on how to actually do that, and the solution just wasn’t coming to me.
“Santos?”
“Hm?”
“We should leave the house.”
“Sure.” I propped up on one elbow so that I could see him better. Going back to sleeping in his bed, even with all the unsaid shit hanging above our heads, meant I was back to sleeping somewhat better. I wouldn’t say I was at a hundred percent, though. “Where do you wanna go?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. He kept making himself so small when he looked at me.
I couldn’t quite tell if it was all the hurt he wasn’t letting me carry for him, the submission thing, or something else, but it bothered me.
Ever deserved to shine. He definitely didn’t deserve having to look up at me as if I had any answers. “Where do you wanna go?”
“Half of the places I know must be closed or something by now.”
“Try.”
I shook my head. “Nah. You pick, babes.”
Open choices were turning out to be that level I couldn’t quite beat. Carlos had said it was normal. He’d shared plenty of funny anecdotes of his first couple of years as a civilian. I brushed those off.
It made me illogical, but I still didn’t care that others had gone through the same.
I was going through it, on top of everything else.
On top of ignoring the text message from Carlos’s friend that suggested we meet up for a drink.
I hated the sort of messages that pretended to be harmless but were anything but.
I knew I was on a deadline. The longer I didn’t acknowledge the invitation, the likelier it was that he and Carlos would run into one another, one of them would bring up my name, and the gossip circle would begin. I wanted to avoid that one at all costs.
I reckoned I could still take a couple of days without risking it too much.
Yeah, it could be a Saturday activity. By then, Ever’s parents should already be here, too, so it would look good if they saw me coming in and out of the house. They might want me to keep an eye on their son, but I highly doubted they wanted the kind of separation anxiety we were recreating here.
“I don’t have a nickname for you.”
He said it with the most adorable frown, too, which was not a thought that helped when I was trying to keep myself from clinging to him like a limpet. “Okay?”
I hardly thought calling him babes constituted a nickname, but if he wanted it that way, I could keep it exclusive to him. It wasn’t like there was a line of people out there begging for my time, or like I was interested in them.
“You call me Ever, or babes, or stuff, but I don’t do the same.”
“It’s fine.”
It wasn’t something I’d even realized until now, whatever that said about me. Even now, there wasn’t a gap, a shadowed crevice in our foundation because the truth had made it to the surface.
I knew I was solid with him, even when things were anything but. Even when things stood like they did right now, flimsy and unknown in a way that I would’ve never associated with him. With us.
“I’ll think of something,” he mumbled to himself before stretching.
He hadn’t gone back to the outfits I had seen on him the first few weeks after I arrived, but he wasn’t wearing oversized everything, either.
I chose to think of it as him healing. It came with the benefit that I could track the strip of skin that showed every time his shirts rode up when he lifted his arms over his head.
“We should still go out, though. There’s a Greek stand by the beach.
They only serve sandwiches, but they’re really good, and they don’t deliver here. María asked for me.”
Of course he got someone to ask.
“Okay. Car or bus?”
“Car?” He scrubbed a hand down his face. “I know I shouldn’t care, but I don’t want to deal with people.”
If that meant he wanted to dress up more—also known in my head as healing—I was not going to complain.
“Okay. The underground parking is still there?”
“Yep.”
“The sea breeze always hits so hard here,” I mused. Ever had thought of grabbing a beach towel before we left, and he had somehow spotted a bit of sand that wasn’t surrounded by a dozen screaming children throwing sand everywhere they could reach and beyond. “It’s weird.”
I inhaled deeply, imbuing myself with the rich, salty smell that meant I was home. The more it burned my nostrils, the more I relished in it.
“You gulped down your sandwich so fast!” Ever grumbled. He still had half of his clutched in his hand. “I don’t eat that slow.”
“You do.”
I’d throw hands if necessary. Unless he was angry eating, he was the kind of eater that made some servers confused because they wanted to bring out a second course, but it was a bad look to do that before everyone had finished their first dish.
“Whatever.” With the breeze, his hair kept getting in his face.
I noticed he sometimes wore a thin headband, but he hadn’t put it on today.
It made me want to pull him into my lap to shield him.
It was too Neanderthal, though. The kind of thing I shouldn’t do before we resolved all the obstacles that had been placed on the way to getting back to us.
To the two of us against the world. “I wish my parents weren’t coming. ”
“Why?”
I knew the basics, sure, but there had to be more to what we’d already discussed and his general feelings about them.
“Because they take over. I don’t like that. Not when things are like this.”
The sharp, short sentences didn’t take away from the itch to pull him close.
They deepened the open wound in my gut, though, the one that said those obstacles between us were going to do more harm than I’d first assumed.
“Ever…” I aborted the move of running a hand through my hair before the discomfort with the cut that wasn’t growing fast enough could make itself known.
Instead, I picked at a random wrinkle in the towel until I could get a grain of sand that had made it into the fabric.
Ever hated those. He hated even more that he had such a strong reaction to them. “Will you just come here?”
It didn’t say anything good about me, but I was too distracted if I didn’t have him here. Between my legs. Where I could wrap him up in my arms and pretend that nothing else existed.
Any sane person would’ve questioned the request. They would’ve glanced around and questioned what it would look like to all the strangers around us in this public place.
Ever just climbed between my legs after handing me his sandwich, and leaned his back against my chest like it was the most natural thing in the world.
For years, it had been.
For a few weeks after my arrival, it had been.
I hated that it had changed, that it felt like it had changed, rather.
I still curled my arm tight around his stomach after giving him his half-eaten sandwich back.
“I need you to promise something, and I know it sounds childish, but I just need it, okay?”
“Okay.”
Again, no hesitation. Just more tiny bites on the sandwich.
I took a whiff of his hair. He used one of those eco-friendly shampoos that came with minimal packaging and looked like a solid bar. It was supposed to smell like some wildflower I couldn’t identify.
“You can’t get angry or jump to conclusions I haven’t reached. Okay?”
I didn’t know which of those reactions I feared more.
“Okay.” He trembled then, twisting so that he could look up at me. “You and me, right?”
He was the only person in the world who wouldn’t make me find the line cringe. I clung to that feeling.
“Remember the woman I told you about? The one I took the fall for?”
“Yeah.”
His heart started beating faster, but he didn’t add anything else. Probably because he was keeping his word. The promise he’d just made.
I took a deep breath. Part of me wanted to close my eyes and bury myself in him. Another part was terrified of the image I’d see when I did it.
“I…I don’t think I wanted it. Sometimes I did, I think, I just…”
Ever whirled around right away. I didn’t think I’d finished talking, but I stopped the second his gaze connected with mine. A knot built in my throat, in my stomach. I wasn’t ready. I knew I hadn’t been ready, but I was desperate.
Desperate to bridge whatever gap had built between us.
If I had to expose myself raw for it, I would do it.
It was him and I. I had to make it work.
I had to push through whatever stood in front of us, and I knew he’d been beating himself up over not being there for me.
That part didn’t make sense for me yet, but maybe if he knew, he’d stop feeling that way, and we could…
No idea, actually.
Ever didn’t respond with words. Not that I knew what I’d want him to say.
He just cupped my face with both hands. My sight felt too blurry to see what he’d done with the sandwich.
He didn’t let me move anyway. He just held me there, and connected our foreheads together, and if I hadn’t been close to breaking before, I was now.
“Ever.” I was the one trembling now. The one that didn’t know up from down. “It’s not… I don’t know. Everything’s weird, and I don’t know if I’m… It has to be in my head, right? I was the one fucking her, the one coming, the one…”
He shushed me. “You can do all that without consenting.”
I glanced away. I was aware. I’d read the stories. It just didn’t apply to me, did it?
It couldn’t.
It couldn’t make the voices true.
My parents.
The men who had handled my discharge.
The men in my unit.
Every other man there who whispered and laughed too loud about conquests that made me want to throw up.
“I…”
My mouth opened to let out more words, but nothing came out.
I should’ve waited. Should’ve talked with a professional first. Should’ve had this conversation back in the villa instead of here, where everyone who walked by could see I was on the brink of…
“I love you.” The words didn’t make sense at first. “You know that, right? You and me against the world doesn’t change.”
“But.”
“No buts.” Fuck. My eyes stung so bad. Blinking fast didn’t help as much as I’d hoped it would.
Ever was still there, in front of me, eclipsing everything.
He was everything. “I love you. And I have a lot of feelings and thoughts on what I want to happen to that woman, but I don’t care about that now. ”
“You don’t?”
Ever shook his head. Fuck, he was fucking beautiful, and he was here, and the itchiness and the discomfort hadn’t gone away, but I couldn’t care about it when he was here. He was holding me. He was saying that he loved me.
It wasn’t the first time we’d uttered the words, but there was no way I was imagining a deeper meaning now.
“I care about you,” he sniffled, his turn to look away and blink fast. I clenched my fingers into fists in response to his vulnerability, the protector in me rising the way it always did when he looked in need of anything.
“And I know I don’t have the right things to say, because a love declaration or whatever is really not it, but I’m here for you.
Even if it’s in a quiet way that might suffocate you a bit from time to time. ”
The chuckle that came out was too wet. Too uncomfortable.
“You won’t tell anyone. Right?”
“Of course not. You and I.”
“Yeah.”
“But…Santos?”
Here we go.
“Yeah?”
Everyone had opinions. I knew that much.
Every time something came up in the news, there was never a single person around me who didn’t have a whole argument ready to go in one direction or the other.
Sometimes I wondered if it was less about the argument itself and more about hearing themselves talk.
With them, it was easier to withdraw. To shrug it all off and go on with my day.
I knew it wouldn’t be that way with Ever.
Nothing ever worked the same when it came to him. All barriers, all…everything. It disintegrated around him.
“I’m sorry. If I made it feel like…with Sir Ismael…”
“Don’t you fucking dare finish that sentence.”
“Okay, but…”
“No buts.” My strength seemed to come back to me in a burst, my hands moving so that I was the one holding on to his face. His stupidly beautiful face. “You are nothing like that. I’m not going to put you anywhere near that box. Ever. You hear me?”
After searching for something in my face, he bobbed his head rapidly.
I didn’t know what it was he found, or what it was that had him acquiescing, but he’d dropped it, and it was all that mattered.
It meant I could take a breath, and I could go back to ignoring the tremors running through my body.
The adrenaline. The mind fucks that wanted to take control when I wasn’t ready to battle them.
“We should come here more often.”
“Yeah?”
I forced myself to nod. “Yeah.”
Maybe next time I could keep it together and actually enjoy the beach. Remember the way it used to calm me when everything else around me had been chaos and uncertainty.