Chapter 37 Santos
THIRTY-SEVEN
santos
It wasn’t the first time I woke up all but rutting against Ever’s ass.
It wasn’t the first time, either, that I didn’t know what to do with it.
Did I grind against him until he woke up?
Did I wait until he woke up, or woke him up myself, and told him to suck my cock?
The indecision was starting to feel familiar. Gutting.
Enough that all desire to do anything about my morning wood had all but evaporated by the time Ever woke up, stretching like a cat before turning around to flop against my side.
“Hey,” he croaked.
That also felt gutting.
This week was the week of hell. I wasn’t even sure what was happening to me, or my body, or anything else, but I knew he wasn’t this inhibited in the mornings.
I knew that, two weeks ago, he looked at me with quiet desire, with the barely contained urge to purr and rub himself all over me.
Now, there was a quiet something, yeah, but I couldn’t be projecting all that hesitation.
Could I?
“Hey.” I cleared my throat. “Slept well?”
“Yeah.” He licked his lips. I didn’t think it was a conscious gesture or anything meant to tantalize or awaken anything in me. “Your therapist said I could come today, right?”
I answered with a nod.
It made me feel weird, but I was the one who had asked for this. There wasn’t any subterfuge when it was something I’d set in motion. Was there?
The appointment couldn’t come fast enough.
“Are you sure you’re up for it?”
“Sure.” Ever propped himself up on one elbow.
His hair was so fucking messy it was beyond anything that could be referred to as sexy bed hair, and it got on his face before he batted at it with one hand that proved he wasn’t as fully awake as his words would hint.
“I told you, I’ll do anything you ask me to. ”
“And I told you, no hyperboles.”
“It’s not one.” He yawned. “Well, I don’t think I’d kill someone for you, but I might be open to providing an alibi.”
“Ever.”
If anyone asked me, I’d say sounding stern had never been in my skillset, but I tried for him, and it had some sort of effect.
“Fine.” He pouted. I bet he would deny it if I said anything out loud, but I liked when he lowered his guard and acted more like this.
Pouting and fighting the urge to blurt out a laugh.
The way I’d had him before I got too in my head with comparisons and memories and shit that had no place here.
Shit that I’d been warned about when we started working on all that stuff in therapy, but I’d thought I had it, and now I didn’t, and everything was getting out of control.
Control I needed. Control I wanted to have, for once.
“Are we okay, though? I mean… Not to sound too…me, but you’re not making me go to therapy with you to break things off or anything, right? ”
Fuck.
Fuck.
“Ever.” His name was the first word I could push past my tongue. “What? No, I’d—”
I would never.
The whole point of taking him to therapy with me was to avoid that. But now he had that idea in his head, and I’d helped put it there, even if I’d done it indirectly.
“Ever,” I repeated. He wasn’t looking at me, probably so embarrassed it spoke of his courage that he hadn’t run for the hills and was still in bed.
The bed I didn’t want us to stop sharing.
Sleeping really was so much easier when he was there, even when shit didn’t feel all that perfect. “Will you look at me, babes? Please.”
The response wasn’t immediate, but I hadn’t expected it to be.
When he was struggling, he wasn’t the kind to be impulsive or lash out. Never had been. No, he got in his head, and he had to measure every single word, test every sound he could respond with in his head before he got back to the present.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I keep fucking up.”
“You don’t,” I promised.
I meant it, too. I wouldn’t lie and say I hadn’t uttered those words plenty of times, regardless of what I actually felt, simply because I couldn’t handle the idea of him punishing himself with guilt or anything else.
This time, though? I was the one who should be punishing himself. The one who wasn’t strong enough.
Fuck.
No, none of that talk.
“Come here.”
One novelty that came with this improved version of Ever, the one who wasn’t so afraid of being himself and showing the world what that meant, was that being tactile reached new heights.
Physicality had become a way to connect, to engage with the world, to understand it.
It had become a way for us to get back to who we were, and I’d been the one dismissing it, running away from it like it was going to burn me.
Like its absence didn’t feel ten times worse.
Fire was better than a complete lack of oxygen.
“Tell me what you need,” I whispered the command.
Barking out orders was not my style. It wasn’t us.
“Just…” Ever’s chin wobbled. He didn’t address it, and I pretended not to see it. It was safer for all of us. “Just you. Just… I just want the warmth back.”
“The warmth?”
Truthfully, there wasn’t a need to ask for clarification.
I knew what he meant. I knew it was one hundred percent of me that it had been missing, that anything had been different.
It didn’t matter that all the reading material my therapist had assigned me spoke of giving myself grace and allowing my brain time to process.
None of that held a candle to the pain in Ever’s eyes.
I had told her my relationship with him came first.
I meant it. I wasn’t going to jeopardize shit if it meant hurting him. If it meant losing him.
“It’s stupid.”
“It’s not,” I argued.
“Would you…” Ever swallowed. I waited him out. “Would you take off my cage?”
“You want me to?”
“I don’t want to wear it today.”
My eyes widened. He’d asked me to take it off before, of course.
He liked the idea of not having to deal with his dick at all, the fantasy of it being owned completely by whoever was in charge of it.
On a few rare days, he asked to have what we jokingly, or not so much so, called a proper orgasm.
It wasn’t the same as asking to take it off for an entire day.
It felt wrong, in a way I probably couldn’t verbalize because it would make no sense. I didn’t know enough about chastity and kinks and Ever’s headspaces for my opinion here to have any weight.
“How come?”
I couldn’t voice how or why I thought it was wrong, but I could check in. I could try to understand, to prove that I saw him, and I wanted him, and nothing of what made him who he was would put me out or make me think he wasn’t worth the hassle or whatever it was that he thought on any given day.
Ever turned around then. He’d been staying still too long, so it shouldn’t be a cause for concern, but he didn’t just move to a different position. He got his legs off the bed, and he sat with his back to me, while I had asked him a question.
All the alarms started going off in my head, the need to reach for him so strong I could feel it climbing up my throat along with my heartbeat.
My palms grew clammy.
“I don’t wanna have to deal with it today, is all.”
It so wasn’t all.
He was a terrible liar. He was aware that he was.
“Are you going to be for real?”
Ever groaned. His head hung low.
I waited. It was all I seemed to do. All I could think of doing.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked. He wasn’t turning back, but I could see him fight the urge to move around. The urge to leave. “Whatever I say, you’re going to think I’m out to trap you into doing something I don’t want.”
“I’m not,” I argued. It was instinctive, even if the words felt like a lie on my tongue. I had been doing that, struggling with the knowledge that he wouldn’t and the pit in my stomach that he could if he wanted to. “Come back here. Please.”
Ever hesitated. He hesitated, when he was usually the most touch-starved beautiful sight every time I asked him to get anywhere near. Every time I was within reach.
I was going to be sick.
I always felt a little sick the day I had a therapy appointment. Even more so when I had to wait because someone was running late or taking longer than planned.
Today, I already felt like I was going to hurl, and I hadn’t even had breakfast.
Fucking great.
“Why?”
I sighed.
“I just need to fix this. Please.”
It took more than a few seconds. I watched, completely still, as his throat bobbed up and down, his Adam’s apple protruding against his neck.
Eventually, he was facing me again, and I didn’t overthink it.
I just needed him. I needed him to understand that he was everything.
That I loved him, therapy or not, fucked up shit with Marian fucking Stuart or not.
I needed to draw strength from him, too, to soak in the suppleness of his lips, the barely there vanilla aftertaste from the gloss he’d worn last night.
The way his body gave in to mine, even when he wasn’t sure about this.
When he was expecting me to pull away and discard him, as if that had ever been within the realm of possibility.
It hadn’t. I knew it, but maybe he didn’t.
Maybe I had discarded him, not in any major way, but in the ways that mattered to him. To who we were.
“I love you.” The words were whispered against his parted lips.
Then again, against his flushed cheeks, against the whimper that fell off his lips before he buried himself against the crook of my neck.
Before tremors followed, and I wrapped my arms around him as tight as I could manage. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
I felt him shake his head, but I didn’t give him enough room to pull away. He’d have things to say, but I wasn’t ready for them. I didn’t want to keep talking. I just wanted to let our bodies…reconnect? Was that the right word?
I didn’t know.
He was the only thing that had ever made sense. The only person I’d ever felt safe around.
“You and me against the world,” I croaked out the words. The words that were supposed to be a silly, childish mantra without any meaning beyond those years in boarding school, but were way more than that. “I promise.”
“I still don’t want the cage on.”
“Why?”
“I want to feel you.” The words were muted against my chest, but I heard him nonetheless. “I like that there’s a barrier between me and the world, but not today.”
“Okay.” I breathed out. The guilt kept eating at me, but I couldn’t fight it when he was giving me a reason, just like I’d asked for. “Can I keep it safe for you?”
He looked up then. It had been the goal, partly. I didn’t let that awareness seep through me. The realization that I was doing just the thing I’d accused him—in my mind—of doing. Getting what I wanted by saying the thing that would get a reaction out of him.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I forced myself to smile. “I think I’ll like that.”
The smile might be forced, but the feeling that came with the words wasn’t.
I did want that power. The weight that came from being responsible for that part of him.
Maybe I couldn’t be the Dom he’d fantasized about all the years we’d been apart, to take all the responsibility from him, but I could do this.
I wanted to do it, to feel the tendrils of control, of power that came with it. To get drunk on it.
To have an excuse to ignore how everything had almost fallen apart already, and it felt like I was only starting to peel all the damage. All the shit I still didn’t have a name for. My therapist said it didn’t matter if I couldn’t name it so long as I could work through the feelings it provoked.
I wasn’t sure that was true.
I was sure I wanted Ever. Beneath my body. Where he belonged.
“Can I fuck you, babes?”
Ever’s breath stuttered. It wasn’t the best response I could’ve gotten, but he followed it up with a nod. Then, with more graceful movement than I would’ve expected from him, he dragged us both to a horizontal position on the bed. Kissed everywhere he could reach across my jawline.
“Mark me, Sir.”