33. Bad Thoughts #2
“Ridiculously horny for you. What are the chances for a preview of tonight?” He husks against my ear before drawing the lobe between his teeth, causing me to arch into him at the sensation.
“What did you have in mind?” I go for coy, but the shuddering breath at his touch mars it and just shows how deeply into where this is heading I am.
“Don’t really care, I just want to see you come for me,” he says, his voice a mixture of sensuality and possessiveness that only adds to the slow melting of my body.
He has a way with me that makes him impossible to deny. I know there’s no way I’d have ever been able to resist him for as long as I did if I’d tasted any of this before. He’s all-consuming, sex and fire, affirmation and warmth. Absolutely everything I’ve ever needed.
“We don’t have much time,” I point out, desperately trying to block the bad thoughts from returning to remind me of all the reasons I don’t deserve this.
“We have enough,” he breathes, before his hand snakes down between us.
His fingers coil around my already hardened dick, and he proves how little time he needs to make me come undone beneath him.
The stadium is packed, and there’s a charge in the air.
The home games here are always electric, but I don’t know if it’s me or if it’s the anticipation of seeing a replacement starter after someone with a following like Holt Myers suddenly left for a pro team.
Or maybe all of that just feels really huge to me because I don’t know enough about the sport to tell whether that’s big news or commonplace.
I’m in the stadium seats with all of our parents. With Tristan and Marcus both playing, their parents came, and of course my parents are joining them on a group vacation that they are leaving for right after the game, so they are with me as well.
My parents have definitely gotten close to the Bauers and the Donovans while all of their children have been away at college. I absolutely love seeing the strong bonds of friendship my parents are building with good people who appreciate them.
My mom is on my left side, her arm wrapped around mine and her head on my shoulder.
She had come to visit right after my first therapy session, and we’d had a long heart-to-heart about therapy and healing.
She told me about some things from her past, and I realized I wasn’t the only one dealing with trauma.
She’s managed to live a happy life, both externally with us and internally with herself, despite some really bad things that had happened to her before she met my dad.
She also reiterates often, especially when I call her on my bad days, that healing isn’t linear.
It’s something Marcus pointed out earlier during my spiral, and Grant reminds me of every week when I get frustrated about the bad moments that creep up and take over, too.
The moments where I’m doing so well, and then I plummet without rhyme or reason, and all the old haunts reach out and snag my brain.
They remind me that it’s normal, that I’m not irrevocably broken.
But when the bad thoughts are meaner on the days I need them to be the quietest, it almost feels like I’m purposely sabotaging myself.
It makes me question how I can possibly be the truly decent person everyone seems to think I am if I’m so determined to hurt myself and the people around me.
Samayah pulls me out of my thoughts when her fingers thread through mine, and she looks at me with a patient smile so full of warmth and sincerity that it’s deeply grounding for someone I’ve only met a handful of times and spoken with maybe a handful more.
“I’m so happy you two figured things out,” she says, reiterating how happy she is that Marcus and I are together.
I wasn’t sure how to approach the parentals about that.
Neither Marcus nor I had talked about it.
Although considering we left his room together, after they’d all arrived at the house, there really should have been a discussion.
We’ve only officially been together for a week, so I hadn’t gone so far as to tell my parents, and I didn’t know if he had.
But then, when we got downstairs, and Marcus made no move to act any differently than he had over the past week, it only took his refusal to remove his arm from around my waist and his constant stream of kisses on my cheek, my temple, and my lips for everyone to realize we were a couple.
Honestly, I was worried about backlash. I haven’t been the steady adult in the house that Marcus’s parents had wished I would be.
I have done very little over the semester so far, other than repeatedly hurt their son for things that were never his fault.
So when Samayah gushed, wrapped me in a ‘welcome to the family’ hug, and his dad gave Marcus a congratulatory clap on the shoulder, I was more than a bit shocked.
I’ve tried really hard today to keep the bad thoughts to myself, but they’ve slipped through at random moments.
This morning, with Marcus, when I woke up.
Again, later with Tristan, when I heard Marcus and his parents talking about his friendship with Imani, and he described her as beautiful.
My brain immediately latched onto the word that’s universally accepted as an upgrade from pretty, and I wondered why he’d called her beautiful but me only pretty.
It was Tristan who heard me mutter something petulant under my breath, and he pointed out that people have preferences, and Marcus’s preference isn’t beautiful; it’s pretty.
Just because it’s universally accepted that ‘beautiful’ is an elevated version of ‘pretty’ doesn’t mean everyone sees it that way.
Tristan even went so far as to use Kairos in his analogy, pointing out that it’s universally accepted that Kairos is the more high-end and generally preferred eating establishment.
Still, it’s not my thing, and I prefer the outdated pastel-colored deli down the street.
The deli is exactly my cup of tea, just like my pretty is exactly Marcus’s kryptonite.
Tristan’s words had unwound the tight ball of anxiety in my chest and quieted the bad thoughts for a while.
But now, again, Samayah has expressed happiness that I’m with her son, and yet all I can think about is the weight of the damage I’ve caused him since I met him.
The constant rejections, that ugly fight, that I’m still shocked he ever spoke to me again afterward.
The push and pull, and the very blandness of me, that doesn’t explain why he felt it was worth it to push through all of that just to be with me.
“Don’t you think he deserves better?” I ask her, letting the bad thought slip out, because even though they’ve been chased away every time today, they are bound and determined to keep coming back.
Samayah shakes her head at the question, not even stopping to think the question through.
“Marcus knows what he wants, and he wants you. You are what makes him happy, and his happiness is the most important thing in the world to me.”