Chapter 23 #2
Dean is staring at Briar with his mouth hanging open as if he’s taking in the sight of her, surprised as to why her face is covered with his cum.
“Holy shit,” he whispers to himself.
After a moment, Briar mumbles sweetly, “Could you maybe get me a towel?”
“Oh, fuck, yeah…shit, sorry,” he stutters, jumping from the bed and rushing to the bathroom.
A moment later, he returns with a washcloth that he’s dampened in the sink. With delicate care, he wipes her face clean.
“God, that was a lot. I’m so sorry,” he stammers.
She giggles in response. “It’s okay.”
Slowly, I ease out from behind her, and she immediately moves to her back, extending her legs in the air, as she often does. A little still slips out, but I don’t wipe it away. I take pride in the way she looks, with my seed dripping from her as if it were more than her body could hold.
After taking the washcloth to the bathroom, Dean returns and pauses in the doorway, staring at her with a confused look on his face. “What are you doing?” he asks.
She smiles up at the ceiling. “It’s just something I do to make sure everything gets where it needs to go.”
“Does that help?” he asks.
“Probably not,” she replies with a shrug. “But I do it anyway.”
Dean picks up his underwear from the floor and quickly slides them up his legs. I do the same with my own. I’m grateful for the way Dean seems to fill the silence when I’m too stunned to speak.
I still can’t believe we did that. And yet, these two are just carrying on as if it were another regular Friday night.
“How are you feeling?” he asks her as he sits on the bed next to her.
“Great,” she replies nonchalantly. “That was fun.”
Fun? Did she literally call that fun, as if we just finished playing a board game? I Eiffel Towered my wife with a twenty-six-year-old male prostitute, and she called it fun.
“And how about you, big boy?” Dean asks, looking at me.
“What kind of question is that?” I ask with offense.
“A pretty normal aftercare question,” he replies.
“Yeah, but why would anything be wrong with me?”
“Just answer the question,” Briar says to me in a scolding tone.
“I’m fine,” I reply with far too much aggression, making the sentiment much less convincing.
“Uh-oh, you don’t sound fine,” Dean says, and it grates on my nerves.
But I am fine , I think to myself. Aren’t I? That was the hottest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. I loved it. I definitely want to do it again.
But I have to admit—there is a hint of something inside me that says I’m not entirely fine . I just wish I knew what it was so that maybe I could express it to them.
“If Briar’s fine, then I’m fine,” I say, hoping it will be enough.
Immediately, Dean shakes his head. “No. That’s not how you answer that question.”
“What do you want me to say?” I argue, feeling myself getting heated. “I’m not hurt. That was great. I loved it. I’m fine.”
“You just seem tense, that’s all,” he replies.
“Are you dealing with a little guilt?” Briar asks softly.
“No,” I reply immediately, without hesitation.
And I’m not. I can tell that it’s not guilt.
But maybe a little…regret?
“It’s okay,” Dean says, putting up his hands. “It’s normal to have a lot of conflicting feelings after an intense sexual scene that maybe you can’t quite define.”
“Well, don’t you want to talk about them?” Briar asks.
“Not really,” I reply immediately.
“It might help to define them,” she pushes.
“What if I don’t want to define them?” I fight back.
“Caleb, stop,” she argues. “We’re doing this to help each other, remember? Because shoving down feelings and pretending they don’t exist and hoping that they go away is how we got into that fight in the first place.”
She climbs onto her knees and crawls toward me. Taking my hand, she looks into my eyes. “I felt closer to you tonight than I have felt with you in a very long time. Did you feel that too?” she asks.
The softness in her voice shatters me inside.
“Yes,” I reply emphatically. I saw my wife in a new light tonight, and I think I’ve fallen even more in love with her.
“Are you afraid that you’ve hurt me?” she asks.
“No,” I reply. “I trust you. I know you would tell me if I did.”
“I would,” she says with certainty. “Are you afraid this hurts our marriage?” she tries again.
“No,” I say. “But…” The word comes out of my mouth before I even know what I’m about to say. It’s just there, this but .
Her eyebrows perk up in interest as she waits.
“But it changes it, doesn’t it?” I say. And there it is. The change . The not good, but not bad change.
“You don’t like change,” she says as if she knows my mind better than I do, and maybe she does.
I don’t like change. I hate change. At the slightest hint of change, I turn silent, guarded, and irritable.
I know this about myself. Briar knows this even more. With a tight smile on her face, she strokes her hand down my bearded cheek. As she stares at me, we have a conversation with our eyes that words can’t convey. She settles me, eases my worries, confirms my fears.
From across the room, Dean’s voice chimes in. “I don’t understand what’s changed.”
And I don’t know how to answer that because I don’t know either.
I just know that something has changed or something is about to change. I feel it. She feels it. And tonight confirmed it.
It’s not a change in her or me or Dean, but a change in us .