33. Bad Thoughts
BAD THOUGHTS
Qiang’s POV
I wake up cold and clammy, which is saying something because Marcus’s body is wrapped around me so thoroughly I’m practically cocooned within his arms, and he’s a body heater all on his own.
But his heat isn’t seeping into me like it usually does.
It isn't doing anything to touch the layer of ice that seems to have settled in overnight.
My stomach is unsettled, and my mind feels off.
I’d been doing so well this week. Marcus’s arms had been keeping the bad at bay, but this morning, the anchor of everything is back, weighing me down and chasing the warmth away. I feel cold and bereft, adrift with the monsters circling me.
I roll away from Marcus, curling in on myself to try to stop the tears from falling. I can’t do this today. It’s Marcus’s first game. Our families will be here soon. Everything is a celebration. I absolutely cannot be the weight that holds him down. Not today.
I need to get up. Take a shower. Get moving. Something… anything to get this funk out of me before everyone else gets up. Can’t let them see. Not when I’ve been doing so well; they’d be so disappointed in me. Hell, I’m disappointed in myself right now.
Before I can actually get up and do any of those things, though, Marcus’s arms reach out to wrap around me and pull me back into him. My body shudders at the contact, a mixture of relief and wrongness.
Not that he feels wrong, not at all. If anything, nothing has ever felt more right than Marcus. But it feels wrong to take his comfort when I shouldn’t. I’m such a fucking mess. A dark cloud that has no business darkening his bright, sunshiny skies.
Eventually, he’ll see that, too, that I don’t belong.
That I was just something different to fixate on for a minute.
How long do I have before he gets bored with me?
Before he realizes that there’s nothing here beyond the dark grey I’ve tried to cover up with color and vibrancy? It’s all fake. I’m fake.
“Tell the bad thoughts to go away,” he murmurs in my ear, tightening his arms around me.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” I deflect, because I don’t want today to be about me.
I need to tuck this ball of bad emotions into a bag and shove it somewhere in a corner.
I hold the sigh in at that because a huge talking point in therapy is learning better coping skills than tucking things into corners and letting them rot until the smell becomes too overwhelming to ignore, and yet it’s still my immediate go-to when shit goes south.
Marcus isn’t having any of the deflection this morning, either, because he shifts and then moves us both until I’m flat on my back and he’s partially on his side, but mostly hovering over me.
His thumb caresses my chin while his fingers hold my face until I meet his steady gaze. His eyes search mine, and I know I haven’t fooled him at all. The softening of his eyes tells me that he knows the ugly parts of my brain are winning right now.
“I can hear them from a mile away, pretty,” he murmurs before leaning down and kissing me.
“Morning breath, Marcus,” I mutter into his mouth, not denying him, but I’m feeling like I don’t deserve his kisses right now.
“I’ll go brush my teeth in a minute, just bear with me for a second before I get up,” he murmurs again, going for another kiss.
I roll my eyes at that and tap my finger lightly against his bicep to get his attention.
“I meant mine.”
A sleepy smile crosses his face as he nudges my nose with his.
“Oh, then in that case, I don’t care. Just want to soak up how lucky I am to wake up with you like this.”
“Lucky? If either of us is lucky, it’s me. Don’t know why you held out so long, really.”
The sardonic words slipped out before I could stop them, so I follow them up with a chuckle to soften the delivery of the doubt. Despite the softening chuckle, it lands harshly anyway. I can tell by the dip in Marcus’s smile that he felt it too.
His eyes sweep my face, so softly and lingeringly, that it’s almost like a caress on its own.
“Normally, I wouldn’t have. Fuck knows, I never have before. I tried to let go at first. Not because I didn’t want you, but because I knew how badly this could end, and I didn’t want to hurt Tristan and Qi or make things awkward for them, or for us even, knowing we’d be living in the same house.
“Everything came in stages. Want, followed by the logic that it was best to deny it. Acceptance, and thinking maybe we could just fuck and get it out of our systems. Of course, you shot that down real quick, but I realized my regret wasn’t the loss of a one-night stand, but the loss of the chance to experience you.
And then there was the realization that one night was never gonna cut it,” he says, his eyes on mine with a vulnerability that shows just how deep his words are right now.
“I’ve never been a romance guy. Even though I’ve seen beautiful examples of romantic love all my life and I’ve never had any real reason to distance myself from it or feel turned off by it, I’ve always kind of felt like, for whatever reason, it just wasn't for me. I’d never felt sad that I didn’t have it in my life, or ever really felt like I would need it in the future.
I was distanced from it, I guess. I knew it existed, but it just didn’t seem to exist for me.
But then you happened, and at first, maybe it was all just about experiencing you, but when you moved in, I knew it went deeper than that.
“I don’t just want to experience you; I want to be a part of you, like you’re already a part of me.
That includes all the best parts of you.
The pretty, the fun, the snark, and very hot sexy times.
But it also includes these parts of you, too—the doubt, the trauma, the moments when the bad thoughts win.
I’ve never felt any less for you, even in the harshest moments, than what I feel for you in the best ones.
They’re all a part of you, and I care for all of you, not just parts of you,” he says steadily, his fingers caressing my face, shoulder, collarbones, really anywhere they can reach at the moment.
I huff and roll my eyes because if I don’t, I’ll cry.
He just smiles at me and shakes his head with a fondness in his face that I have no idea how I earned.
His eyes meet mine steadily, and I don’t know how he does it, but I still know that he somehow knows every thought that’s rattling around in my brain right now.
“You know it’s normal, right? To let the bad thoughts win sometimes.
You’ve been through hell, and you’re still very deep in the fight of tackling that one step at a time, and you’re doing so amazingly.
Having bad days is a part of it, though.
You’re allowed that. I just hope you’ll let me be here to remind you of all the reasons the bad thoughts are wrong.
Not that you are wrong to listen to them sometimes because that’s a part of being human, but reminding you of the reasons why they are wrong in the first place,” he says before leaning down for another deep kiss.
“So, will you let me?” he asks once he pulls away from the kiss and traces my cheekbone with the tip of his nose, his warm breath on my face seeping into my skin and starting to chase away the ice the bad thoughts had splintered into me earlier.
I lightly nod my head, a shaky breath exhaling from me with the movement.
“Yeah, Marcus. I don’t think I could let go of this now, even if I tried,” I breathe out, wrapping my hand around the back of his neck to hold him against me.
He nuzzles into my cheek. “Well, let’s just agree not to let go then,” he states firmly, ready to move the conversation along now that he’s said his piece, not pushing me to feel any certain way, just so long as he knows I listened.
I’ve had people sit with me through harsh moments and refuse to move on from the topic until I’d somehow managed to perform enough happy vibes to convince them they’d pulled me out of the funk.
But Marcus doesn’t do that. He understands I can’t just bounce from one end to the other so fast, so he makes sure his positive words sit in the basin with the bad thoughts, so there are positive things to ruminate on alongside the negative ones.
It’s one of the many things that makes talking to him so easy.
I can just express myself without feeling obligated to act one way or another.
“Okay,” I whisper against his skin.
He sits up enough to look me in the eyes. “I know you think you’re being selfish, but I promise, I’ve never been happier. If you think making me happy makes you selfish, then I’d definitely question the subconsciousness of your bad thoughts.”
I roll my eyes because, of course, he’d find a way to twist it.
“We shouldn’t even be focused on me right now. We should be focused on you. It’s your big game today,” I point out, trying to change the subject to one that really should be more important.
Marcus rolls his lips between his teeth, his eyes twinkling with a heated gaze that I’ve come to know quite well.
“With the lingering promises of my reward, trust me, pretty, today’s game is already in the bag,” he says confidently, his fingers grazing suggestively from my chin past my collarbone. The movement has my skin trembling beneath his touch, heat blossoming from where his fingers touched me.
“You’re ridiculous.” I huff, despite the heat lighting up my nerves and sending little shivers through my body.
The warmth in his eyes, and the all-consuming growth of it expanding from his touch to my belly, have my brain shutting down, blocking out the bad thoughts.
Not chasing them away, but overwhelming them for a moment as something else takes the forefront.
Something increasingly needy for Marcus’s touch that’s far more visceral than anything I’ve ever felt before.