39. Chapter 28 #2
She screams, her thighs clamp down on my head and her hips ride out her orgasm against my chin. It’s beautiful. She’s beautiful. I could stand by and watch her pleasure crest, and that alone would be enough. To be part of it is something else.
Actually, it’s too much. I rear back because my own release is an unstoppable freight train.
Tucking my hand inside my boxers, I pull my cock out, and it’s barely one, two, three strokes before I’m sending jets of cum across Rain’s thighs.
Like the perfect girl she is, she spreads her thighs again, letting my release coat the top of her pussy too.
It’s as if I’ve marked her. Claimed her.
And everything about it is beautiful. And right.
I collapse beside her, struggling to catch my breath as I look at her with admiration and wonder.
How can one woman be so beautiful? So resilient? So much of everything I ever dreamed of? Even in her freshly-fucked state?
She, too, is only just catching her breath when I roll off the bed and reach for her hand.
“Let’s get you cleaned up, Rainy-o.”
I pull her upright before slipping my hands back where they belong, around her thighs, and carry her like a baby koala to the bathroom. For once, I find myself grateful that my brother isn’t here. I deposit her on the counter only so I can fill the bathtub.
She watches, but we don’t speak much. I can’t, or won’t, speak for her, but I know I’m keeping my mouth shut so I don’t overwhelm her with all the shit I’m feeling about what’s happened between us in the last twenty-four hours.
When I’m confident that the tub is full enough that she won’t get cold, I pull her T-shirt off and help her step into the bath. Before she can sit, though, I slip in behind her.
It’s not like Dax, and I have some kind of Jacuzzi or luxury suite or whatever. The bathtub is just your basic built-into-the-wall one that does double duty as the shower too, so it’s definitely not big enough for us both.
As if I give a fuck.
I sit down and tug her down after me. It takes her a couple of minutes to settle between my legs. Eventually, she does. Though it’s with a sigh.
“Dutch,” she mumbles, all while burying her face in her hands, “I’m so embarrassed you saw me like that last night.”
After having her so open, exposed, and present with me this morning, I refuse to go back to the version of her that hides and keeps secrets from me.
“Why?”
I do my best to ask the question gently. My arms wrap tighter around her small waist so she knows that no matter the answer, I’m not going anywhere. She sighs a second time. So deep her ribcage pushes against my forearms.
“You wouldn’t understand, Dutch. You’ve always kept it so…together. Despite everything. All the foster homes, the cops, the fame, Dax…but I couldn’t.”
Whether she realizes it or not, her body instinctively pulls away from me. Or it tries. But I refuse to let that happen. Now that I know what it feels like to hold her, to really hold her, I have no plans to ever let her go again.
“After…everything…that last show…” She pauses, though there’s no need to remind me what a disaster that was. “I fell the fuck apart.”
I wait for her to explain.
“You know as well as anyone, I was already kind of a mess.”
We all were, but that’s a truth I can tell later.
“That night, when I ran out of Flamingos, I went completely off the rails.”
It’s easy to know which night she’s talking about. Flamingos was the last show we ever played, and that night forms the deepest and darkest of my regrets.
She pauses again before admitting, “You won’t like this part.”
Rainy might keep secrets from most people, but not from me. There are no lies in her body language or her words. If she says I won’t like it, she’s probably right, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear what she has to say.
“Even if it’s bad, Rainy, horrible even, I promise I’ll still love you after.”
I will. I’ve loved her this long. Through Cohen, through years of absence, through all of it. She glances at me over her shoulder, and her expression is sadder than I want it to be.
“I hope that’s true, Dutch, though I’m not sure I deserve it. That night, after everything, I went out and got so wasted. Like falling down wasted. Like woke up in a stranger’s bed wasted.”
She braces herself for my reaction. On that last one, I can’t help it; I wince a bit.
Even though I have no right to, because not only am I partially to blame for driving her away, but I’ve spent the better part of a decade finding solace in women who weren’t her.
What right do I have to judge her for doing the same?
“I did the same the next night. And the night after that.”
I listen, though I cannot help the low growl that escapes me.
“Eventually,” she soldiers on, “eventually, the shame of what had happened became overwhelming. I couldn’t go home.
I couldn’t bring myself to face Grams. So, I just drifted…
from bottle to bottle and bed to bed. Until my money ran out; after that, the liquor got cheaper, and the beds got…
worse. I existed like that for years. Years. ”
I take a deep breath and ask, “What changed?”
“You already know. Grams got sick. She died.”
I feel her sobs more than see them.
“She died, and I wasn’t there because I was too goddamn drunk, and ashamed, and messed up to bother checking in on the only family who ever gave a shit about me.”
Her whole body shakes in my arms as her tears spill over.
My own eyes are watery, and my throat is too clogged to say much, because knowing that Grams died alone, without either of us, might haunt me as much as it does her.
It is most definitely the reason why, even though I play nice, even though I’m glad I saved him, I’m not sure I will ever wholly forgive my brother.
“After the hospital tracked me down, I swore on Grams’s memory that I would get my shit together. I sold her house, paid off the bad debts I’d been racking up for years, and used what was left to pay for the best damn rehab I could afford.”
Pride swells inside me at how much the woman in my arms has done to fight her demons, but I don’t want to interrupt her story.
“Six months in a treatment facility, and it worked. I was sober. However, that was only the start of my fight. Another four years, weekly meetings at St. Gregory’s church in The Neck with a bunch of other addicts, and finally, finally, it felt like I had a handle on my sobriety. Until last night.”
Though the water around us has grown cold, I hesitate to move because I do not want the brave woman in my arms to think her revelations have changed a damn thing.
They haven’t. All I see is someone so strong, who has fought so hard to get to where she is today.
I am in awe of her, because I know how hard that fight is.
For a second, my thoughts drift to Dallas, and I wonder where he would be, where we would both be, if he fought even a fraction as hard as Rain has.
She and I have always had an uncanny ability to read each other’s thoughts, and though so much of us changed since we were those teenage kids, that seems to have remained. Rain spins in my arms so her knees press against my chest, and she takes my face in both hands, forcing eye contact.
“Listen to me, Dutch. Every addict is different.”
I don’t even need a crystal ball for me to know that her thoughts, like my own, aren’t far from Dallas.
“You cannot compare one addict’s journey to another’s.”
“Hmph,” I grunt, “Maybe not, but I can say that you, Rain Gamble, are without a doubt the strongest woman I know.”
Unable to stand any kind of compliment, she rebuffs me with a swat of her hand.
“Right now, I’m also the coldest woman you know. Can we get out, please?”
We both laugh because she’s right. It’s fucking freezing.
I help her out of the tub and wrap her in one of the fluffy towels I bought as a consolation to myself the last time Dax relapsed.
At the time, I blamed myself and somehow thought linens were the cure.
Now seeing Rain wrapped up in them, I’m starting to think I was right.
She hugs the towel tight around her. Though her shoulders are narrow, her hips aren’t, and the curve of them is as tempting as ever as I grab my own towel and follow her back to my bedroom.
She hums as she goes. The tune is familiar, but I can’t quite place it.
“What’s that song?”
“You should know.” She smirks before collapsing backward into my bedroom. “You wrote it.”
Then she sings. On my bed, in nothing but her towel. The girl of my dreams sings,
“Now that you’ve held me,
You can’t let me go,
Because here in your arms,
I’m finally home.
You’ve always been just what I needed,
Only I was too blind,
But I finally see it.”
It’s my melody. It’s ‘Places We’ve Been’, but she’s changed the words, changed the ending.
Where my lyrics ended, hers continue. We don’t just write a different ending to my song; we spend the next few hours in bed writing new ones, better ones.
Love songs and hurt songs and help songs and hope songs.
It’s only May, and the sun still sets relatively early, but by the time we notice how low it’s sitting outside my windows, there are pages and pages of lyrics and music in front of us.
“Should we take these back to the guys?” Rain asks nervously.
I nod, before gathering some clothes of mine that she can wear back to the tour bus.
I take a sick moment of pleasure knowing that Cohen will shit bricks when he sees her head to toe in my clothes, but only a moment.
Because fuck him. He had his chance, and he blew it.
This moment is mine, and unlike him, I have zero intention of fucking it up.
I don’t say a word of that to Rain, because I don’t want anything to sully what has been without a doubt the best day of my whole fucking life, but as I watch her gather up the new songs and music we’ve written today, I know her Grandmother would be so fucking proud of her. Because, lord knows, I am.