19. Sex Is The Small Part #3
“This doesn’t have to change anything,” she said into the quiet.
“It already did.”
Her eyes came up.
“You matter more than I planned for. More than I let myself want you to. I don’t know what to do with that.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
“Are you getting it somewhere else?”
My head came up. “No. Not since you walked onto that football field.”
She blinked.
I cleared my throat. “I didn't realize I'd stopped. I just didn't have a reason to start. There hasn't been anyone since then.”
“I haven't either,” she said. “Since Malik.”
I'd known. I had put it together in pieces over the time we'd known each other. The things she'd said, the things she hadn't, the way her body moved away from certain conversations. I hadn’t let myself think about it directly. But I had known.
Hearing her say it out loud was different.
She hadn't let a man near her since the one who'd shredded her, and that door had been shut ever since. Now she was thinking about opening it. Now I knew for sure I’d made the right call to stop things.
It mattered too much to let it happen half-ready on a couch.
She didn't deserve a mechanical transaction, a man showing up for the physical release. She deserved the whole thing.
“I gave everything I could to that marriage,” she said. “And when it came apart I didn’t recognize the woman left standing there. I don’t know if I’ve got it in me to be that wrong about something again. So I can’t sit here and tell you I’m one-hundred percent ready. I don’t know if I am.”
There was a fear under mine I couldn’t put on the table either, with my father’s name on it. It got as far as my throat. She was watching my face, and nodded as if I’d said it.
“But… I do want it,” she said quietly. “I’m afraid of it, but I want it anyway. I haven’t wanted anything in a long time, and I want this.” Her eyes came back to mine. “I feel more at home and safer with you than I have with anybody. Ever. I don’t know what to do with that one either.”
I held still and let her say all of it.
“The part that scares me most isn’t me though, it’s Micah.” Her voice dropped. “He loves you, Julian. Like a kid who decided you’re his. If we do this and it falls apart, I don’t just lose a friend. He loses you. And I’ve already handed that boy one loss I couldn’t do a thing to stop.”
“I wouldn't do that to him. To Micah,” I said. “I don’t know where this goes between you and me. I can’t predict that. But I can tell you I wouldn't do to him what was done to my siblings. I wouldn't disappear on a child who let me in. If this doesn't work, I wouldn't make him pay for it.”
She breathed out and nodded. “Julian?”
“Hmm?”
“It happened to you too.”
“What happened?”
“You said you wouldn’t do what was done to your siblings. I’m saying it was done to you too.”
“I was nineteen. An adult, Alyssa.”
“Barely. And you still nee—”
“Let’s not talk about that right now. It’s not the point.”
She studied my face. “Okay. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for.”
“Listen, maybe we shouldn’t decide about all this tonight. Not all wound up with our bodies voting one direction.”
“Yeah. We don’t have to have it figured out tonight.”
“So we sit with it. See if it still looks like this when we’re not—” She gestured between us, at the wreck of the both of us.
She moved to climb off my lap, and I caught her hips and kept her there one more second, just to feel it, and gave her a look that made her go still.
“For the record, though.” My voice dropped. “When we do decide, it’s not happening like this.”
“Like what?”
“Hushed. Half-dressed on a couch with one ear cocked toward the hallway.” I let my thumb drag once, slow, across her hip.
“I’m laying you out somewhere. I’m taking my time with you.
And you are not going to have to keep quiet for anybody.
” I brought my mouth to her ear. “Because you’re going to scream.
And I plan on pulling every sound out of you. ”
I framed her face and kissed her goodnight.
Then she walked me to the door on legs that weren't steady.
“Night, Lyss.”
“Night.”
I got to my place and lay in the dark running it all back, circling the same question. How much more of her could I have and still keep my feet under me? How far in could I let myself go and still climb back out, if it came to that?
I knew that crossing this line with her was me signing my name to a promise that I would not become the next man who broke her. And I knew myself. The second I signed that promise, I'd mean it. I'd mean it the way I meant everything I signed. That was my fear.
It wasn't sex. It was knowing that crossing this line meant agreeing, on purpose, to fall further into this thing.
More to lose. A woman. A kid. All of it consciously held, instead of accidentally held.
And if I lost her? If she got sick, if she walked away, if a car came down the wrong street, I was not going to be a man who put on a clean shirt the next morning and went to work.
I would be a man who slept on the floor next to a bed he couldn't bring himself to touch.