CHAPTER 12
Sampson
Everything I told Nina is true. I’ve never admitted to anyone that I can’t orgasm by myself, or until I know that I’ve made my partner wild.
I think it’s some holdover from my knight phase in high school, or the product of being brought up by two people who stressed respect, and the value of giving more than getting.
Or maybe it’s just the same need to give more than I get to justify my own existence.
But it’s like serving Thanksgiving dinner at the shelter before finding my way to my own comfortable meal. What started as my parents forcing me to act for others became a necessary balance.
But the first time I ever tell anyone about my physical problem, it’s to Nina, my nemesis…
and now something so much more. Which is probably bad.
We’re too new, too used to being enemies, even if we hated each other for the stupidest of reasons.
The enmity turned to passion. I get that.
I should have even expected it, given how I’ve always been attracted to her.
But now it feels like there’s a possibility of even more, but this détente, forged in explosions of bliss, is still tenuous. I don’t want to ruin that potential.
I wish we’d been more adult back then. I wish I’d cornered her to talk about my feelings.
We could have built a relationship from innocence, one that moved slowly and steadily into passion.
We don’t have the foundation I’m afraid we’ll need.
There are no memories to glue us together during tough times, except for bad ones.
Maybe I’m fooling myself to think I can build something lasting with her. I can’t build on what doesn’t exist.
As if in agreement with my thoughts, she rolls out of my embrace, leaving only empty space behind where her warm body still lingers as a ghost. “I’m starving. Do you have anything to eat?”
Funny, I only notice the emptiness in my stomach once she points to it. I guess my heart is too full. “Nothing I’m in the mood to put together. However, there’s an excellent French restaurant that just opened up two blocks from here. We can walk.”
She’s busy kneeling on the ground, trying to recover her clothing to hide her naked body from me, now that I’m not slavering over it. I look over the edge. She looks up to meet my gaze.
“I only have casual clothes. French sounds expen…not-casual.”
Expensive, is what she was going to say. But that’s not a big issue for me. “You’ll be fine. It’s a bistro. People go in jeans.”
She nods and bites her bottom lip.
I’ve never discussed finances with anyone I’ve fucked. But Nina’s different. Even without a firm foundation of good memories, we have something sticky between us. I can’t discount that. Plus, I trust her.
“Look, I think we should lay a few things out right up front.”
“Like the fact that you’re living with a woman?”
“What?” I’m about to talk finances, my inability to let a woman pay a dinner check, and she’s… on a different path.
She rises to her feet, clutching her clothing in front of her, blocking all the best bits from my view.
“You don’t have to deny it for my sake. I recognized the signs before I slept with you, which should have made me run in the opposite direction, and almost did, but…
” She shrugs. “I’m a bad person, I guess. ”
“Nina…”
“In the interest of honesty,” she says, interrupting me, “is it serious with her?” Her voice cracks and she swallows before she adds, “Am I breaking up something that means something to her? Or is it casual?”
“Is what serious with whom?” I spring from the bed and land right in front of her. And damned if my dick doesn’t spring right up with me. Too tall for where she’s kneeling. Being tall has its disadvantages.
I turn away and grab my jeans, shrugging into them so I can have a reasonable conversation without begging for a blow job.
Great. Now I’m thinking about her lips wrapped around my dick.
I sink onto the bed and run my hands through my hair.
“Okay. Slowly. From the top. Until yesterday, I’ve dated.
A lot, but that’s all it’s ever been. Dates and fucking.
I’m always honest right up front about what I want and don’t want out of each relationship I jump into, and by relationship, I mean anything from a shared meal, miniature golf game—at which I look ridiculous, by the way, in case you were wondering—movie, or even just a casual fuck.
Friendship to… well, to whatever we mutually agree it’s going to be, which hasn’t ever been that serious before, if I’m honest. There have been a few women I thought of as potentially something more, but not in the last year or so.
So, if you’re thinking I’ve got a romantic entanglement with someone right now, you’re wrong.
There’s no woman in my life at the moment except you.
” I pause, but what the heck? She already knows I adore her.
I told her so. “And I’m hoping you’ll stay in my life for a while. ”
A while. I’m hedging. And here I thought I was brave.
She shakes her head. “Nope. Not buying it, Sampson. You have flower arrangements, and fancy flatware, and this.” She holds up her hand, from which dangles a silver bell on a fine silver chain. “Doesn’t look like your kind of accessory.”
She reaches out her hand. I hold out my palm to accept the necklace before I string it back over the switch on the lamp that sits on the bedside table.
“It was my mother’s,” I say softly. “She always wore it. When I was little, she told me that the sound of chimes wards off evil. Even though it clearly didn’t work in her case, since she was killed in an accident, I keep it on the lamp next to my bed.
I don’t know how it slipped to the floor, but thank you.
I’d hate to have vacuumed it up and lost it. ”
“Oh.” Nina’s mouth rounds. “I’m so sorry.”
I nod. “As for the flower arrangements, it’s a hobby of mine. Working with flowers relaxes me.”
“Wait, you arrange flowers?”
I shrug. “Everyone needs to create something beautiful, whether it’s affection or flowers or paintings or pancakes. What’s your outlet?”
For a moment, she just kneels there looking at me like I’ve grown an extra three heads, and not the good kind, before she rises to her feet, and then sinks down beside me in one fluid motion. Her mouth opens, but instead of saying anything, she begins to cry.
And I’m undone. I lift her onto my lap, her legs spread to wrap around my waist, and I hug her close against me, whispering meaningless sounds. “Hey, it’s okay, whatever it is, I’ll help. I’ll fix it. It’s okay, Jelly Bean. I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.”
There’s a promise in those words that I hear. I don’t know if she does. All I know is that it feels right, holding her, keeping her safe.
Five minutes or fifty minutes later, she squirms on my lap, and reaches for the tissue box. I grab a few for her, and she blows her nose like a stevedore, not that I’ve ever heard a stevedore blow, but still. It’s a loud sound for such a little person.
“I’m sorry, Sampson. You must think I’m completely unhinged. What do men usually say about women who end up crying at the end of sex?”
I push her hair back behind her ear and stroke the tear streaks from her cheeks.
Holding her steady so she has to meet my gaze, I say, “I don’t know about men in general, but this man, with this woman, says he hopes the sex and the relationship aren’t at an end.
This man says to this woman that he very much hopes she’ll stick around to find out what they maybe can be together. Tears included.”
And she starts crying again, but this time she’s also kissing me, everywhere she can reach. When she tries to throw me back on the bed, she fails, so I lie down for her, and let her squiggle all over me, sobbing and kissing and licking and petting.
I still don’t know why she’s crying, but the knowing can wait.
The restaurant can wait.
Everything can wait. Everything but her.