Chapter 28
WE LOUNGE IN BED, clean and sated and languid with pleasure.
I’m reclining against the headboard in my robe, and shorts-clad Ian, who, evidently, has zero qualms with raiding his brother’s clean laundry, lies on his back between my legs in a pair of basketball shorts.
His head’s against my lower abdomen, the weight and heat of him combatting my pain.
I rake my nails through his hair, and he shivers, squirming against me pleasantly.
He squeezes my calves. “You’ve completely changed my opinion of those claws of yours,” he says. “I had no idea they could be so fun.”
I harumph, stilling my hand. “Decorative doesn’t exclude functionality.” He chuckles at this, and I feel the vibration of it against my inner thighs. Delightful.
He reaches back for my hand, moving it over his scalp. I smile and resume scratching.
We sit in silence for a few moments, me, enjoying the feel of his thick hair between my fingers, and him interrupting the quiet with the occasional grunt of pleasure.
It’s so…calm. I’m still aware of the unpleasantness in my abdomen, but I’m not as anxious about the days ahead as I had been.
There’s a story structure activity I still need to find resources for, and the gym’s newsletter could use a final going-over before I send it off…
and tell Ian that Firehouse now has a newsletter.
I also need to confirm a time to do a run-through with Diego on his next livestream for Built Box.
He floated a gimmick to them based on an idea from Mark, which could get… improv-y.
But I don’t feel the need to get to work on any of these. I am at peace. Content. Lazy, even, beyond the sedative influence of post-release bliss. I feel physically lighter, the stunning slab of man currently employing me as a chaise notwithstanding. I have been relieved.
A swell of gratitude rises in my chest. I lean over to kiss Ian on the forehead. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He beams up at me. “Are you thanking me for anything specific?”
I’m not sure where to begin, but I settle on “Earlier.”
He waggles his brows. “For introducing you to the taste of colors?”
I laugh, lying back. “Well, that, sure.” He rolls over, still cradled between my legs, and rests his chin on my stomach.
“But for backing off when you did. I couldn’t even identify that I needed it.
And I don’t know that I’d have asked you to ease off if I had.
” I frown. “So dumb. You’re you; it’s not like you’d get shitty once I told you I wasn’t up for sex. ”
“I’m glad you know that,” he says, his eyes firmly on mine. “I don’t want you to feel like you can’t tell me stuff like that. Or… anything,” he adds.
A guilty pang goes off in my chest, so sharp and thorny that I’m tempted to lay it all out for him: my eye, the MS, the creeping dread that keeps me up nights after a day I haven’t run myself ragged. The hopelessness I feel knowing that this life I’ve found is temporary…
“Ellie?” he asks.
I shake my head. Coward. “Cramp.”
He makes a sympathetic noise and sits up, repositioning himself so he’s draped over my left thigh, propped on his elbow. He reaches into my robe and rubs his free hand over my belly. It does soothe the cramping, but my guilt skyrockets.
“Having a hard time asking for something,” he says. “I get that. I can’t ask for help ever.”
I smirk. “You don’t say.”
His small smile is self-deprecating. “I’m just sorry you don’t feel comfortable asking for what you need.”
“It’s not you—”
“I know. You…” He frowns. “You mentioned that Cole was weird about that.”
“Yeah. I got into the habit of…” I grit my teeth.
Shit. Every formulation of what I’m about to say sounds so demeaning.
But it’s what I have. “I’d try to work around it, initiate sex, even when I didn’t want to.
To, I dunno, have sex credit banked for when he’d want it while I was having a flare-up and would turn him down? I know it’s stupid—”
“What’s stupid is that he’d try to fuck you while you were in pain.”
I blink. There’s a dark edge to his words that I’ve never heard from him before. It isn’t scary, just surprising. And for me.
“It’s pretty deep-seated,” I explain. “The endometriosis symptoms started in college. Just painful stretches around my period. I’d refuse sex with any guy I was dating. It became a deal-breaker pretty quickly. But with Cole, I thought I had someone who would stick around anyway.”
A bittersweet nostalgia sweeps over me. “He was really supportive early on. It was like we were trying to crack the case together. He’d come with me to doctors’ appointments, helped me research.
But naming what was happening to me didn’t do anything to fix it.
The pain was still there. Treatment options are limited, and they only do so much, anyway.
There’s still unpredictable, sudden pain regardless of where I am in my cycle, just blinding. ”
Ian lets out a sympathetic sound, his hand still smoothing over me.
“So much of my relief was having something specific to point to; any symptom mitigation was gravy. For Cole…” I shrug.
“Nothing changed as far as what we could do, physically. But it did take away something that we had in common. After so long, it was like the mystery of it was all we had. Once that was resolved, we didn’t have anything to align against. And we started to drift. Those cracks I mentioned.”
“Which I was a dick about,” he says, plainly.
“It was a dick move,” I agree. “There’s more to the condition than just pain.
The scar tissue, especially in cases as severe as mine, can make getting pregnant difficult.
Or impossible. There are surgeries to, ah, clear the path, but it’s not likely that anything would happen without major intervention.
So,” I manage, and force a smile. “That was in the background, too. Just one more thing I couldn’t provide. ”
“You don’t know—”
“I’m not willing to hope,” I say, with enough iron that Ian stiffens. Seconds pass, the silence getting heavier, and my heart rate climbs. I feel a spiral coming on, like the panic in the bathroom, that I’ve fucked things up by being difficult, by asserting, and—
Ian squeezes my hip. “Okay. So.” He gifts me a half smile. “You were drifting?”
I nod, grateful for the out. “I felt guilty because he’d already stuck by me through so much, and that was around the time that I decided to leave teaching and pursue my own business.
I had a lot of guilt about that, too, having to take so much time to build up my backlist of lesson plans and try to get the word out.
That’s when I really started compensating.
I did everything around the apartment. Prioritized his interests, his plans and activities. ”
Despite the bummer of the recall, I can’t help laughing. “That’s my villain origin story! I’d already been type A, but trying to prove to my boyfriend that I was worth keeping around turned me into a controlling nightmare.”
Ian scowls, his hand going still. “Ellie, you’re hardly a nightmare.”
“Ah! I’ve fooled you,” I say, laughing again, but it had been nice to hear.
“You’re inflexible when it comes to the Ellie Knows Best angle,” he says, hand beneath the robe shifting to hold on to my hip. “But it’s only annoying because you’re right so often.”
“My cross to bear,” I say.
Ian smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Did he ever ask? If you were okay?”
“What? Like, with sex or with anything?”
He frowns. “Sex, but, shit, I’d hope anyone’s partner would ask how their day was.”
“He would. But even that wore us down. At a certain point, ‘How are you?’ became indistinguishable from ‘Can I fuck you?’ Which was exhausting. For both of us, I’m sure.”
I worry my bottom lip. “So I’d initiate. Even when…” I grit my teeth, bracing for the admission. “Even when there was a degree of pain. More than a degree. And he could assume I was okay because why would I have gotten the ball rolling if I wasn’t?”
Ian’s eyes are dark. “He still should have asked.”
I shrug. “And I should have been honest. By the end, I suspected he knew and was waiting for me to say something. Calling my bluff.”
Which only made me hate him. And myself.
I run my nails up and down the length of Ian’s forearm, zigzagging a trail in the dark hair. “It ruptured something. I couldn’t trust him. And I’d given him reason not to trust me.”
I frown, realizing the truth in what I’ve said. I’d never considered the damage that had done to my relationship with Cole, certainly not my role in it. But the same way that relationships don’t just happen to people, their endings don’t, either. Both take effort. Or neglect.
“Is all this why you said you were sad? In the bathroom, that first night,” he clarifies. “You said you were a lot of things, but mostly—”
“Sad. And scared.” Another pang of guilt skitters across my conscience ahead of the half-truth I know I’m going to share, but it’s already more than I’ve ever admitted to before. I can almost convince myself it’s enough.
“I’d done everything I thought that I could do to make up for what I couldn’t provide, and it wasn’t enough. Not even for someone who, as my friends loved to assure me, had long since stopped deserving the effort. It wasn’t super encouraging as far as future success.”
Ian rumbles thoughtfully, an almost-smile teasing the corner of his mouth. “How did you know what he wanted? Did you ever ask?”
“I don’t ask,” I say, wryly, painfully aware of the irony. “I know best, remember? If I had to ask, then I wouldn’t know everything. Can’t have that.”
“Hmm. No, you’re right.” The corner of his mouth quirks again. “You,” he says, pointedly, “can’t have that.”
I grimace. “Damn. Maybe I haven’t fooled you after all,” I say, and he chuckles.
“I think I’m making strides, accepting a certain degree of fallibility,” I continue, feigning pique.
Kind of. “You were right that I needed to actually find out what the guys wanted, instead of imposing my standards, even if my standards are impeccable. So thank you for that.”
“You’re welcome. Since you’re being so gracious, I’ll admit that you’ve gotten me to accept help—”
“More than what I’ve offered, personally?”
“I’m in talks. So thank you for that,” he says, and smiles. Withdrawing his hand from beneath my robe, he eases himself up my torso until we’re face-to-face, one leg between mine.
I run my hand over his shoulder, following the shape of the resting muscle so obvious under his warm skin. “So, may I ask, is there anything I can help you with right now?”
“Honestly, I’m content. I have been since we got out of the shower. Which is strange for me. There’s always something I’m stressing over.”
“Right? Me too! No intrusive thoughts—” Mostly.
“Well, that’s great news.” His eyes roam my face for a few heartbeats before meeting my eyes again. His brows twitch down for a second, and his voice is more serious than I expect when he asks, “Do you think you can do something for me?”
“Sure?” I ask, curious.
He draws his lower lip in between his teeth and I have the very real urge to lean in and do the same.
“I’m not going to lie. The idea of sex with you is amazing,” he says, and my body responds with a combination of delight and anxiety that would probably knock me over if I weren’t already lying down.
“But I want you to let me know when is good for you. For my part”—he clears his throat, chin raised slightly as he continues—“I do have experience being careful with partners.” I arch a brow, and he shrugs.
His expression is equal parts abashed and shameless as he says, “I’m not a small man, Hayes. ”
While our shower earlier had been more than perfunctory, there is something endearing about him feeling compelled to make clear what that cock sock had more than promised. “Your dad have a conversation with you about that, too?”
“I will neither confirm nor deny any such thing,” he says, and I laugh. He grins. “For now, we can figure things out. I think we’ve proven that—”
I run my finger over his chin, tracing the rise and fall in the deep cleft. “Are you saying that you’re content to shoot off in your shorts?”
“So, not that part, but I have faith in us to come up with alternatives. But I don’t want you to have those same worries. Not with us.”
I still my finger. Us.
“And I know that I’m going to ask how you are, because I’d like to know how you are. In general. That matters to me.”
“Okay.” My throat closes in around the word.
“I’m going to leave it to you. I trust you,” he says, driving another bolt of guilt through my heart, “to tell me when you’re good to go. Really good to go.”
I nod, trying to acknowledge my guilt as the totally justified discomfort it is, but also feeling my attention drift to the erection pulsing against my thigh.
I give in to the pull of the latter. “At the moment, you feel particularly good to go. And I’d like to do something about that. So I’m going to ask if you’d like some help.”
The man’s pupils dilate like I’ve given them a command. But he sounds convincingly cool when he says, “You’re really asking?”
I slide my hand down the ridges and planes of his torso, lingering as I try to recall the vocabulary he used in the bathroom. “Pectorals,” I muse, raking my nails over his chest, then light my fingertips along his side. His body tenses. “External obliques.”
Lower still, I trace the channel above his hip bone. “What was this one?”
It takes him a moment to reply. “Inguinal ligament,” he pants.
“Ah!” Continuing downward, I hold my palm to his lower abdomen, edging below the waistband of the borrowed shorts, my fingers spread in a V to either side of the base of his penis. I press firmly, and the thickness of him pulses against my wrist. “Bulbospongiosus, was it?”
His “mm-hmm” is strained.
I grip his shaft and smile; not a small man at all. “Anything in particular you’d like?”
“You know best,” he says, sucking the words in between gritted teeth.
“You may be right about that.” I use my free hand to nudge him onto his back. Keeping him firmly in hand, I straddle his legs, leaning in to kiss him fiercely. I nip at his lower lip. “Let’s find out together.”