Chapter 20
Joss
When Gabe returns to bed after his typical early-morning wander, curls around me, and guides his cock into me, it soothes the ache of a particularly rough Round One.
I hum in pleasure as he slides one arm beneath my waist to reach around and lazily circle my clit while the other hand massages my breast. My thoughts go silken, like if I tried to grasp one, it would slide from my hold.
“You love having your pussy plugged up by my cock, don’t you?” His voice is deep and rough, barely human.
My response is another hum and a squirm of my ass deeper into the seat of his lap.
“That’s it. Take it all the way in, leave no space.” He bottoms out, hits the sensitive upper wall, backs out only an inch or so before nudging at it again. “Is that the spot? If I come right there, will I fill you here?” His hand lowers from my breast to my belly, below my navel. He spreads his hand wide and digs into the soft flesh there.
In the twilight of my sleep- and lust-fogged mind, his meaning is clear. But the delicate dance I’ve played with him ever since he told me about his vasectomy wounds me, the sting that much more poignant since he started talking like this in these ethereal half-asleep rounds. “Yes,” I moan.
“Will you grow here? Will you get bigger and bigger?”
“Yes! Come inside me, Gabe.”
“Yeah? You want that? You want the whole world to know you let me fuck you raw over and over? That I pumped my cum into you so many times I took root here?”
That part of me that knows only instincts, that id, that voice that’s forced to be silent in polite society but quietly waits for the most base, primal moment to speak, wails a desperate “Yes!” I want it so badly, and I can be nothing less than honest now even if he doesn’t mean it, if it’s his way of talking kinky.
His hands draw away from me, but his cock continues to pump rhythmically in that scant inch, driving himself ever forward to make good on his promise. A hand on my shoulder pushes me back onto the mattress, and even the twist in my spine, the lock he’s got on my position feels good.
He looms over me, a Viking warrior with his giant body, his rosy complexion, his copper beard, and takes hold of my breast, more roughly this time. “These are gonna get big and firm and sore, and you’re going to love that too, aren’t you?”
I toss my head back, pushing into his hand, wanting to ache everywhere.
“Fuck, baby. They’ll leak just as much as your pussy, won’t they? You’re going to make the biggest mess every time we fuck, and I bet you’ll beg for it again . . . and again . . . and again.”
He punctuates it with a hard thrust each time. Tears pool in my eyes, but all I can say is, “More.”
He laughs, darkly and knowingly. Possessively. “As many as you want, Joss. I’ll keep you full forever if that’s what you need. Is that what you need?”
My spine begins to rebel, my entire body driven to take from him the one thing only he can give me, mindless to the fact he’s made sure he can’t. I reach between my legs, ignoring my own pleasure to grab hold of his balls. “Now, give it to me now.”
He groans long and low, his head dropping down, his crown of copper hair dusting over my chest, making even the least sensitive spots go electric. Still, he manages to say, “What do you want me to do?”
He may be able to talk pretty and deep and playful, but I’m little more than an animal rutting. The best I can say is, “Give me a baby!”
He flips me onto my stomach and brings us on our knees long enough for him to get a few hard thrusts in before he leans his whole weight into my ass to go as deep as he can, making sure I can feel every hot, liquid jet blasting against my inner seal. And before either of us has a chance to cool down, he puts me back on my side, a hand on my clit and his mouth on my nipple.
He’s so tightly curled around me there’s no escape. His suckling is bruising, sure to leave both an ache and a dark, lasting mark as he forces me to come more, even as my pussy milks his cock for every drop until it softens within me, sealing everything inside.
It’s the perfect moment, this fantasy that he means everything he just said, he wants everything I want, far too soon for our relationship, but we’re both old enough for it. Stable and comfortable, too. I don’t begrudge Tilly for what she’s got, not when it’s an inconvenient miracle, but it’s going to be a struggle for her. If the impossible happened tonight and if Gabe really did mean the words he said, it would be the happiest of surprises.
I hold that fantasy.
I cleave to it.
And then Gabe makes a sound so faint I would have missed the distress in it if he didn’t also flop onto his back and groan in frustration at the ceiling.
I roll over into him. “Are you okay?”
“No. Yes. No. Fuck.” He sits up, moving way too fast for this hour, only to slump forward. “I know. My sister told me.”
“You know what?”
“About you. About . . . about him.”
A chill settles over me as I put space between us. The way he says that? The rejection is swift and heavy.
And painful.
I tell myself to hold my tongue, to accept the rejection as I have countless times, but I’m raw. He made me raw for this exact moment.
“So, what? This was a goodbye fuck?” I seethe. “Fuck Miss Alabama one last time before you kick her to the curb?”
“What? Shit, no! Fuck, I’m doing this wrong. I’m—”
He reaches for me, but I skitter out of his reach, backing myself in the corner, immediately feeling naked and exposed in a way I’ve never felt with him before, not even in that bathroom at the gala. I squat down and wrap my arms around myself to cover up as I best as I can.
I’ve spent years humiliated by the fact that I had no idea what my husband was doing directly below my feet as I mindlessly went about my days. None of the accusations that I knew could match the fact that I didn’t know. But none of the humiliation has ever been as acute as the string of Gabe’s semen leaking out of me onto the floor. It’s enough to knock the stupidest, most indulgent sob out of me.
Gabe is on me in a blink of an eye, scooping me up and holding me in his arms. “I know you’re innocent, I swear. I promise you, if anything, you’re even more amazing than you were already. It was just a lot, and I don’t understand a bunch of it. There were so many articles, and none of the time lines make sense, and you were missing from so much of it, and—fuck. I shouldn’t have sprung this on you now. Forgive me?”
I hiccup like a toddler and hug him tightly, burying my face in his shoulder as my teeth grind. A shiver races up my spine. “Don’t scare me like that, okay?”
“Never again. Let’s get you tucked back in and talk about it in the morning.”
“I’d rather talk about it now, if it’s all the same.”
“It is wild how small this is.”
Gabe chuckles softly as he gets two giant mugs out of the cupboard.
I tug at the hem of his jersey. It seemed like a fun idea when I picked it from his closet before he scooped me up and carried me to the kitchen, a neutral area for me to explain about Brian. I have the jersey Cora got me, of course, but that doesn’t smell like Gabe. He’s never worn that. He would never fit into it. So when I saw this hanging in there, I expected it to be a tent and then didn’t pay attention when he pulled it out.
On me, it’s a comfortable but very short and slim-fit dress. Long enough to cover my butt but nothing left to the imagination. And he sat me down atop the island, so there’s nothing but my thankfully full-coverage panties between my flesh and the cold marble surface.
“There’s no way you fit into this. This has to be Merrick’s. He’s tiny.”
“Don’t you ever say that to his face,” Gabe warns me, but he laughs as he says it. “And nope, that’s my number. That’s my name. That’s last year’s away jersey.”
I tug it out from my chest. There’s a bit of extra space, and if I was Cora, I’d be able to quantify it better, but I don’t make garments. I would call this a ladies’ large. And not a busty ladies’ large. “How on earth did you get it on?”
The electric kettle beeps, and Gabe pours a cup for each of us. Mine is chamomile mint tea. Gabe’s hot chocolate bomb fizzes and pops open in an explosion of rainbow mini-marshmallows.
“I have a guy for that,” Gabe says as he pours too much honey into my tea, not that I would ever correct it.
“You have . . . a guy?”
“Yep.” He grabs a couple ice cubes from the freezer and tosses them into my tea. “Between the jerseys and the shoulder pads, you can, you know, get trapped.”
I do my best to hide my smirk, but my lip is twitching. “Does everybody have a guy?”
“Well, no. Not everyone. And it’s not like it’s my guy. He helps Jennings, too. And Thompson. Rydell Thompson, not Donnie Thompson. I think Bodley.”
I bite my lip. “What’s his name?”
“It’s Steve. He’s—you’re making fun of me, aren’t you?”
It’s enough to break me. Laughter bubbles out of me, and only Gabe shimmying between my legs and kissing me gets me to stop. “You’re going to wake the entire house, and then you’re gonna have to tell Rydell you were laughing at him. Now here, drink this.”
He stays in my space as I sip my tea, his hands absently wandering under the hem of the jersey but not going too far. It’s just touch. Just contact. I savor my sip for a moment longer than I need to before I say, “I was 20 years old when I met Brian Edgars. He was 32. In retrospect, I should have known something was up then, but what girl ever realizes she’s being groomed until after the fact?”
Gabe hums, just a single note, and then those hands travel further up the jersey. To my waist, to pull me closer.
This is good. This is safe. In his arms, I don’t have to be scared of the story.
“He seemed amazing. He was kind and understanding and so incredibly smart. You expect someone like him to be controlling, but he wasn’t. Not in any obvious way. I was still in college, and he encouraged me to finish. He liked that I was a pageant contestant but also a business major, said it proved that I was motivated. He was finishing up his residency and planning to start his own practice. Said he’d need someone who could run the administrative side of the practice. That could be me.
“I ate it up. Every word of it. My mom had died the year before. Scholarship money from the pageants was the only thing that kept me in school, and my grades were slipping because I was working so much to cover expenses. Brian helped with all that.”
Gabe smiles reassuringly. “I don’t know how anyone in that situation could have been thinking clearly enough to see someone like that for what he was.”
I want to point out that he has no idea what Brian was, but he would have gotten only the absolute worst of it from those news articles. Instead, I take the moment to breathe in his scent. We both need a shower, but his musk blended with the sandalwood in his bodywash is a comfort.
“I married him straight out of college. I finished in May, moved to Wilmington in June, married in July, bought the house in August. He gifted it to me. He told me since I owned the house free and clear but his practice was in it, I could trust he’d never leave me, and I actually thought it was romantic. Turned out, that’s the only reason it survived the civil suits. I . . .” I shake my head. “I don’t know why he gifted me the house. I don’t know why he did anything. One day, life was normal, happy, perfect, exactly what I thought I wanted, and the next day, one of his patients is dead. And it was awful, right, but he’s a surgeon. An oral surgeon, but his patients are still getting anesthesia; it’s always a risk. I must have spent a week terrified that he was going to lose his license, and what was going to happen then?
“And then they did the autopsy. She was fourteen years old. A flautist, and she was getting corrective surgery for her jaw and was scared she wouldn’t be able to play anymore. They discovered she’d been raped. Brian raped her while she was sedated. According to him, she came to in the middle of it, so he, um, he gave her more anesthetic. Too much more.”
“Come here,” Gabe murmurs even though I’m already pressed against him, but he sinks enough that I can throw my arms around him and dry my damp eyes on his shoulder as he kisses my neck. “You didn’t do it. You didn’t hurt that girl. You didn’t know.”
“I should have!” I sniffle to clear my thoughts. “She wasn’t the only victim. No one knows how many there were. Four that we know of. They all came forward while we were waiting for the trial. He was charged with assault and second-degree murder for the one girl, but it was taking forever to start. There were both criminal and civil trials happening, and since they went with second-degree, he was able to make bail. He was still living at home, sharing a bed with me. I didn’t believe his lies, that he was at fault for the girl’s death but not the assaults, he’d just made a terrible mistake, but I . . . I . . .”
I let it happen because I didn’t have a choice.
“It must have been terrifying for you,” Gabe says, but he has to think I’m one of those women who believe their criminal husbands are innocent to the point of embarrassing themselves.
“One of the girls who came forward, she was sixteen, and she wasn’t a virgin. But she swore she didn’t know how she could have been pregnant, that she hadn’t been active at the time. Everyone thought she was lying. The other kids bullied her. Her parents thought they could force her to admit who the father was if they pushed hard enough. No one believed her that she truly didn’t know — because she was raped by my husband and had no idea. They put the kid up for adoption when they were born. I tried to take the baby in, but my lawyers wouldn’t let me. Said it would look bad if I embraced anything related to Brian. But it was a baby. They needed someone who would have loved and protected them, and that could have been me. I could have—!”
I cut myself off once I realize I’ve gotten hysterical. I couldn’t get any information about that baby. I didn’t have any right to it. They weren’t mine, no genetic relation, only a horrific connection. I don’t even know if it was a girl or a boy or if the adopted parents are local or not. I still think about them frequently, whenever I see a kid about that age who looks at all like Brian. I’ve lost nights of sleep wondering if Keira Allore’s friend is the one who had the kid, if that’s why she hates me so much.
And now I’m blabbering about how much I wanted that kid to Gabe. Not only am I spilling the nightmare of Brian’s crimes out on him, I’m bordering on forcing the baby conversation on him.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper as evenly as I can, fiercely swiping more tears away. “It’s . . . never mind, it’s dumb.”
Gabe kisses my forehead and says, “I’ve seen your nursery.”
“Shit.” I shouldn’t be surprised about it. He’s been over there enough that he probably didn’t realize when I told him not to go in there, I meant it was off-limits. And off-limits purely because of my own insanity that refuses to let go of the past or even have this one critical conversation with him.
“You wanted to adopt that baby so badly you set up your home to welcome them.”
My brain shuts down at that, at the idea that I would have done something like that, that the truth of why I really wanted to adopt that baby wasn’t so incredibly pathetic. I peel away from him, and he lets me. He even looks hopeful, like we’ve gotten over the worst of it and I’ll be happy for his support and understanding here.
I grab my cup and hold it between my hands, a crucial barrier.
“A lot of people didn’t believe me that I didn’t know, that I wasn’t in on it in some way. I was working in the office, I set up appointments, I knew these girls. And he liked to brag about how I was a pageant queen, and you know there’s all kinds of nasty stuff behind the scenes there.” I take a sip of my tea, frown down at it, and wrinkle my nose. The first couple of sips were fine, but this one’s off. Probably my rapidly souring mood. “They think we’re all nasty in the pageant world. That’s why Emily Hess tried to get me removed from the fundraiser. Why Keira Allore hates me so much.”
“I’m going to talk to them,” Gabe insists for the millionth time.
“You won’t. They’re entitled to their feelings, and they’re not hurting me.”
“You were crushed!”
I look him in the eye, needing him to see me and not his idea of me or the world around me. Not what a perfect world should be like but what it actually is. “Gabe, I lost everything in the civil suits. Everything except that house. I didn’t have anything going into the marriage. I narrowly avoided bankruptcy. And on the day the judge decided that everything was done properly so the house could not be seized, I was leaving the courthouse, and someone threw a rock at me. I don’t think they meant to seriously hurt—Gabe!” I shriek as he backs out of my space, only to punch a hole through the drywall next to the fridge.
He stands there for several seconds, taking deep breaths and staring hard at where his fist has just vanished, before he reclaims it from the void between the studs. “Are they in jail now?”
I shrug. “I don’t know who did it. I was knocked out and—stop!” I whimper as he puts yet another hole in that wall.
“This was six years ago, yeah? And you were leaving a courthouse, where you’ve got cops and security guards and reporters and cameras and—”
“Nobody was covering it that day. The newsworthy stuff was over. It was just me.” I draw my feet up onto the counter to rest my cheek on my knees and vanish. Gabe comes back to me, but the way I turn my face away from him is enough to halt his footfalls. “I woke up in an ambulance. Whether anyone saw it or not, no one cared. You have no idea how much they hated me during the trial. I was paraded in front of everyone. I was the one trying to keep the money, you know? I think that day at the courthouse, that was my penance. The rock hit me in the forehead, and I fell down the stairs and was knocked unconscious. They got me to the hospital as quick as they could, but that night, I delivered and lost my baby.”
I accept Gabe’s embrace this time, not that I think I could push him away, but I don’t need it. Honestly, I’m just cold.
“The nursery?” he asks.
“I had a son. Aiden James Page. Was supposed to be Aiden Brian Edgars, but I couldn’t name him that, and the doctor who was so kind to me when no one else was, who let me hold him and didn’t insist on life support when we all knew he wasn’t going to make it, his name was James.” The numbness allows me to speak clearly even as it reminds me why I should never have agreed to go out with Gabe in the first place, why the world outside my walls, even the world on my lawn, is so awful. “His heart beat for an hour, but he never opened his eyes. Never cried, never suckled. He lay there in my arms sleeping, but he was pink, and he was warm, and he breathed in and out, sleeping like any baby, and I took him home in—” my voice cracks, my jaw aches, my sinuses burn— “I took him home in an urn, and he’s—”
“Stop, stop, stop,” Gabe begs, his own voice unsteady, his hold on me so tight he might be trying to silence me by forcing the air out of me. “You can stop.”
I can’t, though.
“He’s been in his room ever since.”