Chapter 25
Autumn
We get back to the room late on Thursday, grimy from the camping trip, and Tucker lets me have the first shower.
We didn’t talk this morning about what happened the night before—not about him making me come and not about him refusing to let me make him come. We didn’t talk about it all day when we were making breakfast, breaking camp, and hiking out.
But I know I’m right. I know there are things he won’t let himself have.
Pleasure is one of them.
I might be the other.
I feel like I’m walking a tightrope with him and a misstep could be fatal.
But I don’t want to stop, either.
He brushes by me on the way to the shower.
“It would have been more efficient for us to shower together,” I point out.
He doesn’t answer, just keeps walking into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.
Maybe I’ve already made the fatal misstep. Maybe he has to punish himself now for what we did last night.
I force myself to push him out of my head, glancing around the hotel room for a distraction, and my eyes land on my phone, sitting idly on the bed.
It does the trick perfectly because it immediately hits me that goddamnit, I still don’t have content.
I have loads of footage from various random things I’ve captured, but it feels arid without my voice and face.
I have to pull it all together, add some soul and personality.
I set up my portable tripod and mess with the room lighting until I get it the way I want. I find the one spot in the room where everything lines up for decent-looking video. And I hit Record.
“My new boo and I traveled all the way to Rush Creek, Oregon, for my sister’s wedding to the love of her life! I’m so excited—”
A text comes through from Haru.
Hey, can we talk when you get a sec?
I swipe it up and away, out of the frame.
“This is a montage of the best moments so far from my sister’s pre-wedding festivities. She’s marrying the love of her life, Jane, and I am so—”
“Autumn. Stop.”
I look up. Tucker’s standing in the bathroom door, scowling at me. I hit the button to end the recording.
“Stop trying to say what you think you should feel, and say what you actually feel.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
His eyes snap to mine, and I realize what I’ve done. It’s an exact echo of his words to me last night.
We both know we were lying when we said it.
I turn away, but I can still feel his eyes on me. Can still feel the truth of what he said. Stop trying to say what you think you should feel, and say what you actually feel.
I force the words out. “I was engaged.”
When I look back at him, he’s gazing at me. Steady as they come. Watching. Waiting.
I think of him saying, Only to you. And I know what he means. Somehow we’ve made this space where we can both say the things we don’t say to anyone else. “It was six years ago. He ended it.”
Tucker doesn’t say, That was a long time ago, or, But you’re fine now, right? “Does that make it hard?” he asks instead. “To be happy for your sister?”
It’s the question no one has asked me, because no one can. Because I’ve never told anyone I was engaged.
But now Tucker knows, and he’s asked the one question that can carve me open.
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Hey.” He comes close, wrapping me up without asking first if he can. Big, warm, sturdy, unyielding. I think of Temple Grandin and the hug machine. Tucker could farm himself out. “Do you want to tell me about it?” he murmurs against my hair, voice a rumble.
“I don’t know. I’ve never told anyone.” My own voice is small, brittle.
“You never told your dad and your sister?”
He’s cracking open a door I’d kicked shut, and I can see all the things behind it, the furniture that’s been stacked to keep intruders out, ready to tumble through the open door like a dam breaking.
“Right after I got engaged, I went home because Dad had been pressuring me to make a visit for a long time, and I’d been super busy with my boyfriend and my job, and—I hadn’t had time.
Hadn’t made time. It was Summer’s senior year of high school, and Dad kept saying how she wanted to see me, she missed me so much—so I came home.
And I was going to tell them both about the engagement. But when I got there—”
I close my eyes, remembering. My dad’s face when he’d opened the door, how I’d mounted the stairs to find Summer curled up in bed, how long I talked to her and tried to coax her out of fetal position, how my fingers shook while I finally understood that this was bigger than me and dialed 911.
“My dad and my sister both struggle with depression,” I tell him. “My dad was really bad after my mom died, and my sister had issues on and off. I took care of them, got them meds. But this was—different. This wasn’t something I could…fix.
“We had her involuntarily committed, got her into inpatient, and then she was released and was in months of outpatient, and she was doing better, but—I didn’t feel like I could leave them alone.
So I took a leave of absence from my job and moved in for a while.
” I take a deep breath. “A month in, he broke the engagement off. Said I wasn’t in a position to make a commitment to him. ”
“He was a dick,” Tucker says vehemently. “He was a waste of human flesh and a sweaty jockstrap and—”
I can’t help smiling a little. “He was probably all those things, but I loved him. And I thought he loved me,” I say.
“So it hurt like—like nothing else has hurt before or since. And I guess now that I’m here, all this…
” I gesture, encompassing the whole hotel, all the festivities.
“It feels like a reminder of what I don’t have. ”
His eyes move gently over my face, so knowing. “Makes sense,” he says.
Two words. Two words, spoken by a man I’ve known only a few days. Spoken in signature Tucker grunt.
But it’s the first time someone has said anything like that to me. Your pain makes sense, given what happened to you.
My eyes fill. And overflow.
I hate crying. I brush the tears back, hard swipes with the backs of my hands.
“I’m the cheerful one,” I say. “I’m the sunshine-y one. I’m the one who holds it all together for everyone else.”
“I can see that,” he says, very quietly.
“I always look on the bright side,” I say. “I see the best in people and situations. No matter what’s going on, I can find a way to spin it so that it looks better.”
His eyes are steady on me. There’s sympathy but no pity. It feels like a warm blanket.
“And how’s that working out for you right now?” he asks.
“Not so great,” I admit.
“Autumn,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“C’mere.”
I could get used to this, his broad chest, his strong arms wrapping me up, the feel of his lips on my hair. The beating of his heart, strong and steady, under my cheek.
For a moment that’s all there is. The sweetness of comfort.
And then I become aware of other things.
The ridges of his abs against my belly, his erection making itself known between us, the acceleration of his heart, the speeding up of his breathing, and heat flushes down over me like a flood.
I lift my face, and without hesitation his mouth finds mine, long, languorous kisses.
He teases my lips apart for his tongue, then explores me with a thoroughness that leaves me gasping and breathless.
He drops to his knees and reaches for the waistband of my jeans. “May I?” he asks.
I can only nod. He strips me out of my jeans and underwear and eases me down on the bed, looping his arms under my thighs and drawing my center to his mouth. For a moment he just looks, taking me in.
“You’re so pink and pretty,” he says, one surprisingly nimble finger tracing delicate lines into my folds, distributing my wetness in a way that makes me feel hot all over. Then he lowers his face to me, his tongue taking one lap from core to clit and settling in to circle me over and over.
It doesn’t take long. He builds me up to panting and begging in a minute or two. I clutch his head, fingers in his hair, and I can feel his rough laugh against my delicate flesh.
“Tucker!”
“What do you want, pretty girl?” he asks. “You tell me.”
“Make me come,” I command.
“Bossy,” he says, but he returns to his task, one finger and then two crooking into my heat, his tongue circling until his lips take over, suckling me while a blaze of pleasure arrows from my core to my nipples to my clit and breaks me into pieces, calling his name.