Chapter 28
28
Essie
A ll this time.
All this fucking time .
What was I supposed to do with that information? I couldn’t process it. Couldn’t begin to understand what it meant for us then, and what it meant for us now. His chest heaved as he watched me, waiting, his expression a little unsure. My body was strung taut, demanding the release he had repeatedly denied me, and I…I couldn’t think. Only feel.
My fingertips traced the familiar lines of the tattoo. The sharp peaks of the cupid’s bow. The full lower lip that dipped into a pout. My mouth. My kiss.
On this man.
My god, this man. My best friend. My husband. I was so deeply in love with him that I couldn’t find the beginning or the end of it. It had simply always been a part of me, and even when I tried to cut him out, I hadn’t been able to.
And now I knew that I had been a part of him, too.
All this fucking time.
“Please fuck me, husband.” It was half command, half plea.
With a groan of relief, he ran the fat crown of his dick up and down my slit, pressing it hard against my clit with each pass. Teasing me until I was soaking wet again. Pushing in an inch, both of us watching my body stretch for him, before pulling it back out.
My desperation grew. “ Please , Brax. I can’t take any more.”
He chuckled darkly. “Yes, you can.”
Sweat glistened on his forehead and a muscle ticked in his jaw. I wasn’t the only one he was torturing. That might have made me feel better, if I wasn’t out of my damn mind with lust.
“You want me to fuck you, wife?” he rasped.
“Yes,” I begged.
For a moment, I thought he might refuse me again and I would be forced to murder him. Shoot flames out of my eyeballs and incinerate him on the spot, until there was nothing left but a pile of ash.
Maybe he sensed that I had really and truly come to the end of my rope, because this time he slid inside me all the way to the hilt, until his pelvis met mine.
And then he moved. Slowly .
So fucking slowly.
Apparently, he wasn’t done torturing me, after all.
I could feel every part of him stuffed inside of me. Every ridge, every vein, every time he pulsed when I squeezed my internal muscles around his thick cock. The slow, relentless thrusts turned me wild. I wrapped my legs around his hips, dug my heels into his ass. Scratched my nails down his veined forearms.
On and on, the pressure built.
I lifted my hips to meet his thrusts, trying to convince him to go faster. He responded and snapped his hips forward faster and harder. Kissed me hard on the mouth. His hips slammed roughly against mine with a slapping noise before he eased off again, returning to the slow, deep thrusts.
“Brax!” I sobbed. “Please.”
His hips stilled, his chest heaving, perspiration dotting his muscular torso. His eyes found mine with a laser-like intensity that felt magnetic. I couldn’t look away if I wanted to.
I didn’t want to. I never wanted to.
“Tell me you’re mine, Essie.” He bent forward, capturing my left hand. His thumb rubbed the metal band. “Say it.”
I didn’t hesitate, even though it hurt to say it out loud. “I’m yours. Always yours.”
Satisfaction flared in his blue eyes, and finally he let go. One hand slipped between our bodies to find my clit and he rubbed hard as he fucked me hard enough to make the bedposts scrape against the wooden floor with every thrust of his hips.
“Mine,” he said roughly as we fell apart in each other’s arms and he spilled inside me.
It hurt how true that was. It hurt even more that he had always known it was true. I was his, now. I was his, way back then.
That was why he had left.
And that hurt most of all.
I slept. It had been an emotional rollercoaster of a day, and that combined with the epic orgasm had wrung me out. The second Brax tucked me up against his hard, warm body and pulled the quilt up over us, I was dead to the world.
He was still there when I opened my eyes to darkness. It was the first time we had spent the whole night together. Usually, we started the night on the couch and ended up in his bed, before I would eventually untangle myself from his arms and go back to the guestroom.
I lay there for a moment, listening to his quiet snores. It was too dark to see, but my fingers found their way to the tattoo on his chest just the same. I traced it there, in the darkness, my heart doing uncomfortable things in my chest.
All this time .
With a sigh, I slid out of the bed, careful not to disturb him. It was Saturday, the one day we both had off. My body was so attuned to rising early that I woke up at 5 a.m. every day of the week, whether I had to work or not. Of course, on my days off, I simply rolled over and went back to sleep. I had the feeling that wasn’t going to be possible today.
My brain was wide awake.
I pulled on Brax’s sweats that I had commandeered and headed to the kitchen to make coffee. I wasn’t hungry yet, so I wrapped a throw blanket around my shoulders, shoved my bare feet into shearling slippers, and took my coffee onto the porch to greet the sunrise and sort out my messy mind.
The sky was a grayish purple, still dark enough that a few stars still twinkled. I didn’t know any constellations except the Big Dipper, because it was obvious, and Orion’s Belt, because it looked like an upside-down frying pan, but I loved to look at the stars. When I was a kid, I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that they were always there, regardless of whether I could see them or not.
Love was supposed to be like that. Immutable and true even when you couldn’t see it .
But I was still that child staring at the blue sky, searching for proof.
It had been there all along. The tattoo. My kiss on his heart. And he had hidden it from me. He had hidden his heart from me. It felt like a betrayal, but maybe one that neither of us could have understood at the time.
The door opened, and Brax stepped out, looking adorably rumpled.
“Hey.” His voice was gravelly from sleep. “Is there space for me on that swing?”
Silently, I scooched over a couple inches and opened the blanket. He sat down, then rearranged my body so I was facing him sideways, my legs draped over his lap, the blanket wrapped around us both.
“You didn’t want coffee?” I asked, noting the lack of mug in his hands.
He shook his head. “I didn’t know where you were. If you had gone to Lodestar without saying goodbye, or—” He broke off and shrugged.
His feet were bare, I realized. It was twenty-three degrees out here and he was fucking barefoot. My chest ached as I realized his first thoughts had been of me this morning, that he had been in such a hurry to find me that he hadn’t stopped to take care of himself first.
I pulled off my slippers and dropped them at his feet. “Here. They’ll be tight on you, but it’s better than nothing.”
“You’ll be cold,” he protested .
“I have the blanket. I’m fine.” I was already tucking my toes into the flannel.
He hesitated. “Essie?—”
That’s when I lost my shit.
“Put your goddamn feet in the goddamn slippers, Brax,” I said softly.
It might have been the quiet that tipped him off. I was never quiet. He eyed me warily as he shoved his feet into the slippers.
“I am an adult. I have been in charge of my own feet for at least twenty-eight years now. The only person who gets to decide if my feet are too cold is me . Do you understand?” I kept my voice pleasant, but inside I was seething.
“Then isn’t that the same for me, too?” he asked reasonably. “I get to decide for myself.”
“No, Brax. You don’t. Because you’re a jackass who would freeze his own feet off rather than take something from me that I am freely offering, because you don’t have any faith in my ability to take care of myself. Therefore, you forfeit all slipper-decision autonomy until you can pull your head out of your ass.” I blew on my coffee, sending the steam curling into his face.
He paused. “This isn’t really about the slippers, is it?”
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”
He sighed and scrubbed a hand over his eyes, wiping away the last vestiges of sleep. Silently, I handed him the mug. He took a sip, then handed it back to me .
“Come on, Essie. What would you have done back then if I had told you I was in love with you? We were seventeen. We were way too young to handle how we felt about each other. Your mom was right about that. That kind of love, at that age? It takes over your brain. Overrides all common sense.”
I squinted at him in the shadows. My mom made no secret of the fact that her greatest fear was that I’d end up a teen mom like her. “Is that what this is about? My mom? Because I did, in fact, lose my virginity my senior year of high school. And you lost yours the year before.”
To Valerie Kensey, a girl Brax had dated for six months. Damn, I had hated her. Now she taught fifth grade at the local elementary school and had a husband and two sweet little girls. She was actually pretty nice. But back then, she had something I couldn’t admit I wanted, and I hated her for it.
“Fucking Connor McRae,” Brax muttered, and it occurred to me that he had similar thoughts of the boys I had dated.
“He’s nice,” I said sweetly, enjoying my husband’s caveman side. “I saw him at the grocery store the other day. He’s the manager now, you know.”
Brax glared at me.
I gave him another sip of coffee. “My point is that there weren’t any unwanted pregnancies for either of us, as far as I know.” I gave him a questioning look, and he nodded. “So if you’re going to sit here and tell me you made that promise to my brother because you were worried you’d knock me up, I’m going to remind you that condoms are a thing, something you were aware of even back then.”
“It wasn’t about sex. Not entirely, anyway. It was you .” His hands squeezed my thighs under the blanket. “Think about it. If we had gotten together that summer, would you still have travelled all over the country for barrel racing competitions? Or would you have been more selective, choosing smaller, local rodeos so you could stay close to me?”
I frowned. The pull to be near him had been so strong back then. If we had been together ? With kissing and promises and touching each other naked? “I…I don’t know.”
“And then we would have kept dating through our senior year,” he continued. “Because what we had wasn’t a short-term thing, and I knew it even then. What then? Would you have put your dreams on hold a little longer? Compete part-time so you could follow me to college?”
“I don’t know,” I said again.
He was relentless. “By the time I graduated college, we would have been together for five years. What would we have done then? Marriage? Babies? That’s what people do after five years together. What would have happened to your dreams?”
“ I don’t know .” I blew out a frustrated sigh. “That’s a whole lot of questions I don’t have answers for because I’m not omnipotent. The thing is, neither are you. But you still tried to answer those questions for the both of us. That’s not fair. We should have worked through those issues together.”
“I didn’t want to be the thing that held you back,” he said quietly. “The way you pulled me from the cliff? I wanted to do that for you. I couldn’t stand the thought of you giving up anything to be with me, much less everything.”
“Brax, I—” I leaned over and carefully set my mug on the porch railing, then shifted so I was fully straddling his lap. With my hands on either side of his face, I held his gaze. “That’s something we need to decide together . This marriage won’t work otherwise. If we’re in it, we have to be in it together . There’s no other way.”
He blinked slowly. “What—what did you say?”
“I said we need to decide together,” I repeated.
“No, the other part.”
I wrinkled my nose. “This relationship won’t work otherwise?”
“You said marriage.” His throat worked as he stared at me. “Does that mean this is real?”
“Of course it’s real,” I said tartly, like my insides weren’t turning to mush from the heartbreaking vulnerability in his eyes. I took my hands from his face and folded them behind his neck. “A marriage is a legally binding contract, remember?”
“Essie.” He touched his forehead to mine. “I don’t mean on paper. I mean in your heart. Is it a real marriage in your heart?”
I closed my eyes. “Maybe it always was.”
Abruptly, Brax pushed to his feet, with me clinging to him like a monkey.
“Brax!” I laughed. “What are you doing?”
“Taking you inside. I want to make love to my wife.”