Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Quinn
Not that I had anything to compare it to, but that did not go the way I expected, meeting my first…I didn’t want to say boyfriend—I didn’t have permission for that word—but lover wasn’t enough for how I felt. Anyway, meeting Ferris’s mom was overwhelming in the strangest way.
I was still reeling a bit from the fact that she was the kind lady at the coffee shop who had made my entire day feel better when I was entirely upside down. I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. He was so much like her.
She was terrifying at first, but then her presence was so calming. In fact, it was enough that I was half-tempted to just blurt out that I was falling in love with her son. But Ferris hadn’t relaxed the entire time we were there, which stopped me in my tracks.
It didn’t take long for me to gather most of his stuff, and she fussed over me and my bum knee as I walked everything out to the car like I was her son.
Like I mattered.
“Mrs. Redding,” I started, but she held up a hand.
“Manisha. I would invite you to call me Auntie, but I think in this case that would be…strange for you.”
My heart did something complicated. Did she know?
She must know. I waited a beat to see if she was going to call me out on falling for her son, but when she didn’t, I let out a breath.
“Manisha,” I tried out, and she smiled encouragingly.
“I just want to say thank you. And that I’m sorry this was sprung on you. ”
“Listen, I know you’re taking care of him,” she said, hovering beside the car as I put the last bag in the back seat, “but who’s taking care of you?”
I laughed and shrugged, a little startled by the question. “I’m pretty good at taking care of myself.”
She looked at me for a long moment. “Your parents are gone, aren’t they?”
“Ferris told you?”
She chuckled and shook her head. “I can tell. My husband was just like you. His parents died a few years after we got married. Except he had siblings to take care of. You don’t even have that, do you?”
I really didn’t want to get into my tragic backstory because, really, it didn’t feel that tragic. It was lonely, but I was a content person. The only reason I was feeling any of it now was because Ferris made my life fuller than I thought it could be.
And he was—maybe, probably—temporary.
“I promise I’m okay. Your son is good company.”
Manisha hummed and looked over her shoulder. When her gaze returned to mine, I could see there was something in her eyes. Something she was holding back.
“He’s an easy person to care about, but I’m sure you’ve noticed that there are things important to him that most people don’t understand. Even I don’t understand them most of the time.”
“Yeah. It’s not that hard though. He’s very good at being vocal about what he needs.”
She laughed softly. “He’s always been, from the moment he started speaking. Do you know what his first words were?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
“Duck in the water.” Manisha smiled and looked down at her feet.
“He was four years old. We were at a park to feed the ducks, but we couldn’t find them.
It was one of his favorite things. I think he liked the way the duck bills sounded when they ate the seeds after we threw them into the pond.
I’d given up looking, but Ferris was…determined.
I was getting ready to leave, and he touched my hand, then pointed and said his first words. ”
“Did you cry?”
“Not until I got home. I didn’t want to scare him.
I think most people would have wanted their sons to say ‘I love you, Mommy’ or something like that, you know?
” She shrugged, her breath edging on a sigh.
“But I didn’t. His words told me he’d been paying attention this whole time.
He understood. He was just waiting until he was ready to be heard. ”
Something twisted in my chest because he was still like that. So much. I didn’t know him that well, but I could already see that.
“I promise to take good care of him.”
Manisha took my hand and squeezed. “I know you will.”
For whatever reason, those words hung on my shoulder like a weight—powerful, but comfortable. For the first time in my life, I trusted myself not to fuck it all up.
Ferris didn’t say anything on the ride home, and I thought about his mom’s words. He waits until he’s ready to be heard. It was instinct to fill the silence, and I didn’t think Ferris would have minded if I blabbered on about whatever was in my head.
But the quiet was nice too. He let me hold his hand and stroke a touch over his knuckles, and he was smiling by the time we pulled into my parking spot and headed in.
The door shut firmly behind us, and the entryway was a little warm from the hints of humidity letting us both know summer was on the way. His stuff was still in the car, but Ferris didn’t seem like he was in a huge hurry to bring it all in.
Maybe the weight of moving in here was hanging off his shoulders too.
He reached into his pocket and pulled something out. A folded bit of paper…was it a swan?
“Did you make that?”
“Mm?” He frowned, then looked up at me. “Oh. No, Eli did. He does this a lot when he’s anxious.
Like the way I crochet. He leaves them all over the house, but I think someone collects them because they’re never there by morning.
” He stroked his thumb over the swan’s wing. “I think my friends like me.”
Reaching out, I grazed a touch over his jaw and waited for his eyes to flicker up to what I was pretty sure was his favorite spot on my face: the dip in my chin. “Your friends definitely like you.”
“In high school, jocks like them would put me in lockers and trip me down the stairs. Why are they so different now?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. I was a jock in high school.
A bit of a loner, but I managed to fly under most people’s radars.
I had crushes and did some dating. I had a core group of friends that I called my own.
Friends that occasionally popped up on social media, especially after my name started hitting sports news headlines during hockey season.
But no one ever left a lasting impression on me. Not until that life was long gone.
“I wish I had answers for you.”
He nodded. “I wish the world made my kind of sense more often.” He sagged forward, letting his forehead press against the center of my chest. “This okay?”
I wrapped one hand around the back of the neck and pressed until he groaned and shuddered with relief. “It’s always okay. But we should probably pick a bedroom for you.”
“Not yours?” He looked up at me, pulling back slightly.
My breath stuttered in my chest. “Of course you can sleep in my bed. But your mom wants to come by, and she’ll want to see your room. So, unless you’re ready to tell her the truth…”
He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t like lying to her. It feels shitty. But I also don’t want her to know.” He went quiet for a beat, then asked, “When I’m feeling alone, can I sleep with you?”
“Yes.”
His lips quirked into a smile. “I’m feeling kind of alone right now.”
I couldn’t help my laugh. “Come on. We can get some of your things put away, and then I have an idea I think can help with that.”
He was sobbing into the pillow, body writhing as best he could with a mostly immobile leg. It was all I could do to keep his hips from flying off the bed as I buried my tongue in his ass.
“Quinn, Quinn, please,” he said. I thought he said. His words were slurred and thick and muffled by the pillow, so it was hard to be sure. But I wanted him to be losing it on my name. I wanted him to be so profoundly aware that it was me doing this to him.
I hummed as I tongue-fucked him harder, deeper, my hand drifting between his legs and gently tracing his balls before taking his dick in my hand.
It took four hard pulls to get him off, but I felt it when he stiffened.
He spasmed around me, fucked his ass back against my face, then collapsed as he spilled.
His whole body trembled as he attempted to catch his breath, and then he began to squirm, and I knew it was from the mess beneath him.
This time, I’d had the foresight to put a towel down, so it only took a moment to whisk it out from under him, use the dry corner of it to wipe him clean, then toss it toward my laundry basket.
Ferris rolled against me, pressing his face hard into the center of my chest as he breathed in deep, then breathed out. “Hnng.”
“Too much?”
He clearly wasn’t ready for words. He shook his head, froze, then shrugged.
Pressing four fingertips against his back, I traced solid lines across his spine until he pulled his head back, ready to speak.
“I don’t think I can do that again for a while.
Not…not often. It…there was…I feel…” He clenched his jaw and let out a frustrated whine. “Sorry.”
Tracing around his lips with two fingers, I shook my head. “I understand you.”
He swallowed heavily, then lay back down against me. “I’m not used to that.”
“Being understood?”
He nodded. “Sometimes I wonder if people are lying when they don’t get me. Sometimes I’m afraid people want to push me into communicating their way so they can have power over me.”
“Sounds like you’ve been through that before.”
He rubbed his nose over my pec as I dug fingers into his hair to hold him close. “Therapists, when I was little. I had some bad ones that used to punish me when I couldn’t be, you know, like everyone else.”
I held him a bit tighter, fighting off that old hockey-murder feeling I used to get when someone wronged one of my teammates. There was nothing more satisfying than watching them hit the ice after I smashed them into the boards.
But I couldn’t do that in the real world.
“I think most people gave up on me when I refused to be what they wanted me to be. The guys in Kappa, they’re not so bad. Some of them have been bad, but my friends aren’t.”
“The ones I met today?”