Chapter 31
Blaise
I wake up groggy in the middle of the night, unsure of what’s pulled me out of my sleep when everyone in the house has an early day tomorrow except me.
My brain goes to the usual source of nighttime awakenings, and I slide my arm across the bed to snag Donovan and pull him in, hoping I’ll get lucky and he’s just looking for snuggles.
I thought we were past the overnight feedings, and I really don’t want to be stumbling to the kitchen on my bum ankle in the middle of the night.
There are three steps that have nearly taken me out a dozen times this week.
I reach out for Donovan, only for my hand to immediately smack into someone much larger towering over me.
I startle awake at that. I’m in a house of big beefy guys, and unless it’s Merrick, if they really want to pin me down and — I don’t know what they’d want to do if they pinned me down — I wouldn’t be able to fight them off.
Hands grab my shoulders and push me down, but they’re small hands. And the air smells sweet. It smells like Tilly.
Thank fuck.
Not even thank fuck that it’s not fucking Vedder pulling some shenanigans, but thank fuck Tilly’s in my bed.
She’s barely spoken to me this week. The vibe I got from her wasn’t like she hated me forever and I was going to be stuck living in a frat house seeing my kid every other weekend for the rest of my life, but it still made me nervous.
She was sad, and she said we’d talk when she got home, and she told me to give Donovan all the hugs and kisses, and she thanked me for visiting her dad.
But she didn’t want to talk to me too long.
She said because she was homesick and it just made her feel worse talking to me without seeing me, but it made me sick too.
I relax back down onto the bed and just appreciate this feeling of her back in my bed — our bed, regardless of which bed it actually is — with her body over mine, her knees straddling my hips, her hands on my shoulders.
Her lips covering mine.
I attempt to roll us, to get on top of her so I can spend the rest of the night just consuming her, but she stops me by pushing my shoulders more firmly into the bed.
“Right, yeah,” I murmur. “Fu—frig, Donovan’s right there.”
Except I reach for him and swear his side of the bed is empty.
Tilly giggles, and the sound goes right to my heart. My soul. “I put him in his playpen. Have you really had him in bed with you all week?”
“I made a wall with the big pillows,” I grumble.
She lays her hands around my cheeks and gives me another kiss. I have to dig my fingers into my blanket to keep from flipping her. She won’t be able to stop me this time.
“I saw. But you could have had this whole bed to yourself.”
“I did. I hated it.” I pop up on my elbows to steal a quick kiss. “I missed you. It was awful. Don’t make me sleep alone again.”
It’s too dark to see anything, but I can feel her smile against my cheek. “You know I can’t make that happen. I have to travel for work, and even when your games are at home, they put you up in that hotel the night before.”
“But when you’re not traveling and I don’t have a game?” I ask hopefully, desperate for her to just give me the words that I need here.
“I won’t make you sleep alone again,” she whispers.
“Thank you,” I gasp, unable to keep my cool in this moment, no matter how much I want to. Even the relief hurts. “Thank you, Tilly. You killed me this week. I love you so much.”
She draws her hands back down, smoothing them over my chest and wrapping them around me, lowering her head as she hugs me. “I love you, Blaise.”
With that, all the sound, all the static and screeching and chaos, quiets in my brain. Nothing bad, none of the pain or the uncertainty or the mess that still needs to be cleaned up, none of that matters. I hug her just as tightly as she hugs me. “You mean it?”
“Yeah, Blaise. I really do. And you’re really lucky I do.”
“Yep. Noted.” I snag her arms from around my waist so I can hold her hands in mine. I release a sigh of relief when I feel the braided band on her ring finger. I feel better asking her, “You’re going to marry me, right?”
She snickers. But she also says, “Yes, Blaise. You’re welcome.”
I can’t even take offense to that. If she said no, I’d have a hell of a time explaining to her that as of Thursday, we’re already married.
Technically, as of July Fourteenth of two years ago. Since I couldn’t set it as the day we met, I set it for exactly one year before. Emily Hess confirmed that the date was valid, and I didn’t question what she meant by that.
“We’re going to have another baby, too?”
“Yes, Blaise.”
There’s a ring of joy in her voice that sparks some concern in me, like I just accidentally asked for something that I don’t actually want.
“We’re gonna find a surrogate and a test tube and have a baby?”
I swear I hear her rolling her eyes. “Okay, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but yes. And in the meantime . . .”
She stretches over me, reaching to the nightstand. To steady her so she doesn’t fall, I grab her waist and then slide down to her butt.
She’s not wearing pants. Or panties.
I’m about to say fuck whatever she thought she was going to do and flip her and pound her right into the mattress, but then I hear the familiar crinkle of a condom packet.
Fuck, I love this woman.
And she wants to be on top. I’m so fucking down for that.
I scoot her forward onto my stomach, the familiar trail of dampness she leaves on my abs pulling me right back to our first night together as I shimmy out of my boxers.
She starts to slide back, but I take hold of her ass, just for a second. Just so I can say, “I loved you the moment I saw you.”
She laughs and says, “Because I was dressed all slutty,” like she thinks I’m joking.
“No, Tilly. I loved you. There was this girl who was hitting on me—”
“Because you were naked.”
I want to snap at her because I’m trying to be serious here, but I’m still at a deficit on apologies, so I let her have her sassy comments.
“Because I’m a god, yes. But I didn’t want anything to do with her because you were there.
I didn’t want to ruin your good night, either, by throwing myself on you, so I thought I’d just watch you to make sure you were okay. ”
“And I wasn’t,” she says, her tone lowering, her mirth evaporating.
“No, you weren’t. But I got to rescue you. From those men, and from anyone else who harassed you, and—”
“I never thanked you for all that money,” she whispered suddenly.
“I wanted to give you so much more.”
“No, it helped me so much. My medical debt, it’s . . . unending. But you gave me room to breathe.”
“But I wanted to give you so much more. And I was so worried about you. I-I should have asked why you were—fuck, I’m ruining the mood. We should fuck.”
She laughs silently, but I can feel it on my belly and in her thighs, thick in the grips of my hands.
I start to guide her back down, loving the way her ass bumps into my swelling cock, pushing it down just enough that the head nudges between her folds painfully, exquisitely slowly, dragging over every ripple and divot, pausing at her clit.
But then her thighs tighten onto my hips, and she rocks herself against me, riding me like a sex toy, taking what she wants out of me. Using me.
I’m hers to be used.
“Blaise?” she whispers hesitantly, and I have to hold back a curse because I’m feeling about to burst already, and I know that tone. I know she’s about to ask me something that’s going to piss me off and crush the vibe before we even get that damn condom on.
Which, shit, I’m definitely leaving a trail in her trail. Hopefully I can talk her into something better for birth control because I can’t get a vasectomy until the off-season.
“What, baby?” I ask as calmly as I can while I fight conflicting urges to plow into her right now and to text Doc Keltner and see if he’d green-light a vasectomy this week since I’m out anyway.
“You know that . . . that how I looked then, it was because of the cancer, right?”
“Oh, Trix.” Okay, I pushed her to this one.
I can fix this. I sit up, letting her pool in my lap so I can kiss her more gently.
“Baby, you were so beautiful then. I knew you were sick. That’s why I was so worried.
I can’t tell you how much I regret not getting your name so I could make sure you were okay. ”
“I’m never going to be that skinny again,” she says on a gust of air.
A gust I don’t understand. “No, of course not. You had cancer.”
“No. Blaise.” She takes me by the cheeks to get me to look at her, even though there’s nothing, not even the faintest silhouette.
I have blackout curtains. “Blaise, you didn’t know me before.
You have no idea what I looked like before.
So I know you’ve seen Joss just drop thirty pounds like nothing, but that’s never going to happen to me. My baby weight is just my weight.”
I stare at her — well, at the image of her that I’ve superimposed on the darkness — as I try to figure out what the hell she’s talking about.
Joss went from pregnant to not pregnant, same as Tilly did.
Did she lose even more weight afterward?
How the hell would I know that? Joss wears giant, mish-mashed dresses that an entire clown family could live under. Is Joss sick? Do I need to—
And then it hits me.
And I get mad.
“Woman, give me that stupid thing,” I snarl, snatching the condom out of her hand and tearing it open with my teeth, ending up with a mouthful of jelly because that was stupid, but I don’t care.
“Blaise!” Tilly cries out as I push her back enough to unroll it before plopping Tilly back into place and gripping my shaft to hold it at her entrance.
“Now sit on this goddamn cock!” I yell at her.
She resists. She’s going to kill me, I swear. So I thrust up just enough that I can reach up and grab her by the shoulders, slamming her down as far as she’ll go, filling her.