Chapter 21 #2
I drop my head and breathe very deliberately through my nose. “Fucking hell.” I’m trying to have a serious conversation but my dick is hard and I feel like a total, horned-up, hopeless piece of shit.
Then her cool, soft fingers are on my face, cupping it gently, tilting it up.
I lift my eyes to hers. See something that looks like tenderness there.
“Walker. I'm an adult. I know what I want. At least respect my ability to decide for myself, even if you don't respect the decision.”
“I do respect it.” I turn my face slightly into her palm without thinking. “But I'm afraid I'll hurt you.”
“I'm not afraid of getting hurt.”
“I will.” The word comes out cracked, but absolute. Because it's the one thing I'm sure of. “Sadie, I will. That's not self-pity talking. I have a history, and the history doesn't lie. Messy breakups, a failed marriage… it’s fucking baggage, baby, and I don’t want to bring it to your door.”
“I don’t think you will hurt me,” she interrupts gently.
“But I already know the ending will hurt. We're from different worlds. This is all temporary. Yes, it will hurt when it ends. But I can survive pain. I have before. And in the meantime…” She holds my gaze. “Isn’t it better to have loved and lost than never have loved at all?”
Love.
Love fucking hurts. Just like the song says. Just like the hundred songs I've written about that very subject.
You'd think I'd be an expert by now, and yet sitting here with her, I feel like I'm wading into water so deep I can't find the bottom. She might be the virgin, but it's never felt like this before for me either. Not even close. It’s terrifying.
I lean forward and rest my forehead against hers.
She doesn't pull away. Her hand is still curved against my jaw, her thumb tracing a slow line along my cheekbone, and I close my eyes and let myself have five full seconds of just…
this. Her warmth and softness, the sound of her breathing evening out.
At last, I say, “I can't be another person in your life who takes something from you.”
A silence. Her fingertips move in that soft, absent way against my face, like she's thinking.
“Maybe,” she says, “you should consider what you'd be giving me instead.”
“I know what I'd be giving you.” My voice is low.
Ragged. “A broken man who's already peaked.
Who's too damaged to do anything but drag you down.
You've got your whole life ahead of you. A bright future.” I exhale.
“I wrote my last good song years ago and I haven't been able to finish one since.
I couldn't even play for you tonight when you asked me to.
I'm not the man I was, Sadie. I don't know if that man's coming back. You deserve better than that.”
She makes a sound, soft, almost wounded, and then she's pulling me in, guiding my head down to rest against her chest. Her heartbeat is steady under my ear, and she smells like that lotion she uses at night, and her fingers come up to my hair and I think: I could stay here.
I could just stay right here and not move for the rest of my life and that would be fine by me.
“Oh, Walker,” she murmurs. “You're so wrong, it's not even funny.”
I breathe her in. Trail my fingers slowly along her ribcage, feeling the warmth of her through the thin fabric. Savor the softness of her breasts beneath my cheek. The scent of her skin.
“You think that,” I tell her, “because you're young and inexperienced and don't know any better.”
The hand in my hair stops moving.
I know before I've even lifted my head that I've said the wrong thing. The worst possible thing.
I curse myself, but I don't take it back. Because as much as I hate that I said something to hurt her, I need her to understand that it’s also true.
When I lift my head and look at her, her eyes are unfocused, like she’s thinking deep about something.
“You know what the really frustrating thing is?” she asks.
“It’s not even that it’s a bullshit excuse, which it is, by the way.
It's that you actually believe it. That I’m some delicate, untouched princess with stars in her eyes and not a fingerprint on her, and therefore I don’t know what I’m talking about.
You've convinced yourself that what I feel, what I know, is just…” She pauses, chooses her next word carefully. “Naivety. Like I'm a child.”
“That's not what I meant.”
“Isn't it?” She finally looks at me. Her eyes are sharp. “I’m twenty four. Not fifteen. And I’ve been through plenty.”
She holds my gaze for another moment. Then she reaches over, picks up her book, and leans back against the headboard in a way that closes the conversation as decisively as a slammed door.
“Night, Walker.”
Just like that, I've been dismissed.
From the guest room in my own house, by my own employee.
Except that's a fucking joke.
Because there’s no ‘just’ anything about Sadie. She waltzed into my life, into my home, and reoriented my entire world around her.
She’s not an employee.
She’s the queen of this house.
Long may she reign.