41. Rae
41
RAE
Now
T here’s bad decisions, and then there’s bad decisions.
Ruinous, life-altering choices you know you’ll regret when it’s all said and done but somehow still manage to enjoy in the moment, and God , am I enjoying myself right now. My legs spread wide, the fabric of my birthday dress scrunched up around my waist, my panties pushed to the side because you don’t get completely undressed when you’re making a mistake, even when it’s one as deliciously salacious as this.
The flat of his tongue rolls over my clit again, and my thighs twitch around his ears. I shouldn’t be doing this. It shouldn’t feel so fucking good.
But I am, and it does.
He grips my ass with rough fingertips, lifting my pussy up to his mouth like a bite of a forbidden meal, and I scream at the top of my lungs the way I never can at home with Aaron—not because his mother or my daughter might hear—but because in all the years we’ve been together he’s never made me feel like this.
Wild. Reckless. Capable of ruining someone and desperate to be ruined in return.
No, that part of me can only be unlocked by the man between my legs. The man now holding my entire ass in the palm of one of his hands so he can use the fingers of the other to invade the walls of my dripping sex. My core contracts, and my eyes roll into the back of my head as pleasure pulses through me, incoherent words flow out of me as my body floats into a cloud of euphoria so thick it’s able to keep me suspended for long moments, keeping me from the regret that’s waiting for me on the ground.
I didn’t come here for this.
That’s the thought going through my mind as Hunter lowers me gently back down onto his desk. He doesn’t even bother to fix my dress or my panties. Just leaves me wide open, my most intimate areas on display for him. I keep my eyes on the ceiling above me, focused on the heart in the middle of the ceiling tile directly above us that has our initials written in black paint.
“You should paint over that.”
I don’t know why I’ve chosen to start the conversation I came here to have this way. It’s random and unnecessary, but it’s the only way I know how to ease into telling him he has to let me go. I reach down and fix my clothes before sitting up and facing him. He’s got his fingers clasped together, resting over the hard slabs of muscle that make up his stomach. For as long as I’ve known him, Hunter has never had a six-pack. He’s just got one of those stomachs that’s thick but solid and toned. I don’t know what you call it, but it works for him.
He doesn’t bother looking up because he knows exactly what I’m talking about. I hate that because I was hoping to buy myself a little bit of time without those eyes on my face.
“Why would I do that?”
“Because it’s…” My throat is dry from all the moaning and screaming, so I swallow before continuing. “Because it’s just a reminder of a failed past when you should be focused on the future.”
One of his brows rises, a thick, dark line that makes my cheeks heat. “Is that what this was?” He asks, waving a large, tattooed hand between us. “You focusing on the future?”
“No.” I slide off of his desk, skirting around his wide spread legs to put some space between us. “This was a momentary lapse in judgment. I didn’t come here for this.”
Hunter stands too, moving forward to delete every inch of space I’ve just given myself to breathe. Now, all the air I welcome into my lungs is infected with him, with his scent and arrogance, with his desire.
“Then what did you come here for, Rae?”
He brings his hand to my face, the same fingers that were just inside me tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. I suck in a ragged breath, and I should tell him to stop because now those fingers are moving down my neck, over my racing pulse to the pebbled nipples straining through the cotton of my sundress. Hunter cups my breast, and while I’m on the verge of coming apart in his hands, the muscles in his face don’t move an inch.
It shouldn’t matter that he appears to be so unaffected by me, but it does. It burns me up inside because I fall apart every time he touches me, every time he looks my way. I’m here with him when I should be with the man who helped me raise our daughter before Hunter ever knew she existed, but instead I’m here, courting ruin with a man who won’t show me what I do to him.
Maybe it’s madness or the pressing need for more of him, but I step closer when I should step back. I bring my hand to the nape of his neck and pull his lips down to mine when I should be coming to terms with the fact that they can’t belong to me anymore. I slip my tongue into his mouth and wait for him to give me something in return.
He doesn’t.
“Kiss me back, Hunter.”
“Why?” He murmurs against my lips, his breathing annoyingly even. I step closer, committed to this act of desperation, and that’s when I feel it. The thick, heated length of his erection nestled between us. With my free hand, I palm it, squeezing lightly just to prove to myself that it’s real. Finally, his stoic facade breaks. It’s a small fracture, a sharp intake of breath that he lets out in a low hiss that passes between his teeth, but it’s enough.
“Because we both want the same thing.”
The fire. The passion. The lost inhibitions we never miss when we’re together.
Hunter makes me regret saying anything when he steps back and shakes his head. “No, Sunshine, we don’t want the same thing.” He swipes his thumb across his chin, an act of agitation I know too well, and stares at me with dark eyes that pierce my soul. “You came here to make a mistake, to make me a mistake, but I want to be more than that. I deserve to be more than that, but you won’t let me.”
“ I won’t let you?” Disbelief paints my tone in dark, broad strokes. It has no place here because we both know what he’s saying is true.
“Yes, Rae, you. You’re the only person who still looks at me and sees…” he trails off, but I don’t need the words for my brain to conjure the image he’s alluding to. An image of a broken man splayed on the ground with the tools of his destruction scattered around his prone form. He’s not that person anymore. The time we’ve spent figuring out how our lives fit together for our daughter’s sake has shown me as much, but I still see it in the back of my mind. Still hold it up as a reminder of how bad things can get. Still use it as a barrier between us in moments like this.
“I’m sorry. I wish I could see something else, anything else,” I lie, exchanging his piercing gaze for the floorboards.
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do, Hunter. Of course, I do.” My voice trembles around the falsities. I’ve never had to double down on the lie before. Usually, he goes along with it, but I guess today he’s tired of my little charade. Maybe he knows today is different. Maybe he feels the walls closing in, the clock running out.
“No, Rae, you don’t. Because holding on to that version of me is the only thing keeping you from me and the only thing keeping you with him .”
“That’s not true,” I shake my head for emphasis even though his words follow the same thread of logic as my thoughts. “Aaron and I are good together. You and I are a train wreck.”
“Do you love him?” The question is wrapped around a broken growl that causes his top lip to curl. It’s a sound that can only come from a wounded animal preparing to lash out in a final attempt to save their life.
I run a shaking hand over my messy hair as my stomach turns into knots. “Hunter.”
“Say it, Rae, look me in the eyes and tell me that you love him, that you love him more than you’ve ever loved me.”
He waits patiently for me to respond to his cruel request, and I hate him more with every silent second that passes. Why can’t he just let this go? Why can’t he just accept that the way I feel about Aaron doesn’t matter because we don’t work outside of the context of sated sighs and gut-wrenching moans. When a full minute goes by without me caving to his demand, he closes the space between us and cups my chin with gentle fingers. Slowly, he tips my head back, forcing me to meet his eye.
One dark slash of a brow raises. “Tell me you love him, Rae.”
He’s so close now, angling me to persuade me with proximity, and I don’t back away. I stand firmly on the line between common sense and the bone-deep yearning for this man. For his hands on my hips and the warmth that spreads through my chest because of it. For his breath on my face as he lowers his forehead to mine and pulls in lungfuls of air just because it smells like me.
I close my eyes, staving off the unshed tears burning the backs of my eyes. “I need to tell you something,” I whisper, scared to speak any louder because our connection is already tenuous and the words that are going to come out of my mouth next are going to destroy us both.
Hunter sighs, allowing me to shift gears. “I’m listening.”
It’s stupid, but I hold him tighter when I should be letting him go, when I know he’ll probably let me go when he hears what I came here to say.
“Aaron asked me to marry him.”
I open my eyes and find myself face to face with his devastation, and it destroys me. I feel like I should apologize, like I’ve broken some sacred vow, etched in stone and sealed with blood, that our souls have only just decided to acknowledge.
“Hunter, say something,” I plead, wondering why I want his words when I already know they’ll just make me feel worse. More guilty. More conflicted. More wrong .
His lips part, and my heart starts to pound, anticipating his wrath, his fire, his hurt, but he’s remarkably calm as he takes my left hand in his right and runs his thumb across each of my ring-less digits.
“You didn’t say yes.”
I pull my hand back, tucking it behind my back. “I did. I took the ring off before I came in here because I didn’t want you to see it.”
Hunter studies me with dark eyes that see too much. “When did he ask you?”
“Tonight. At dinner.”
He checks his watch, arching a brow when it reveals that it’s not even ten yet. “You’ve been engaged for all of five minutes, and instead of spending the night celebrating with your fiancé, you came here to me.”
Something about his calm tone and even calmer demeanor makes me feel like I’ve been stripped down, lain bare, like the whole of every complication I’ve allowed to exist around the mess that is my life has suddenly been made simple.
“I—” My plan is to defend myself, to explain to him that I rushed over here because I wanted to be the person to tell him, that I didn’t want Riley to call and let it slip, but once again, the big, elaborate speech deserts me, leaving me with a stupid response. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
But it does. Doesn’t it? Just like my inability to say I love the man I’ve spent the last seven years of my life with means something. Just like the ease with which I say I love you to Hunter means something.
Hunter scoffs. “Of course, it means something, Sunshine. It means you said yes, but you didn’t mean it. It means there’s still time.”
“Time for what?” I ask, thrown off kilter when he takes a sudden step back and turns back toward his desk. I watch him pull open the top drawer on the right-hand side and pluck something out. It’s not until he’s walking towards me again that I realize what it is.
A square, black box.
He doesn’t open it until he’s standing right in front of me, but I already know what’s inside. Knowing doesn’t stop me from being shocked when I see the gold band of a ring nestled inside the lines of the black silk. The small diamonds surrounding the larger center stone fan out into little triangles that look like a sunburst. I cover my mouth and shake my head in disbelief.
He can’t be doing this.
There’s no way he’s actually doing this.
“Time,” he says, finally answering the question I asked before I lost my ability to speak altogether, “for me to give you another option, a better option.”
“Hunter.”
“ I’m the better option, Rae,” he says, placing the box in my hand. It doesn’t escape my notice that the fear and panic that swirled in my veins when Aaron was presenting me with a ring earlier tonight isn’t there now. All I feel is the quiet hum of inevitability mixed with the very real dredging of doubt. Not about Hunter, per se, but about me, about us.
“You don’t have to take the option right now,” Hunter says. His eyes soft and sincere as they trace my features. “I’ve had that ring for over a decade, and it can wait a little longer. I can wait a little longer.”
“How much longer?” I blurt, heat flooding my cheeks because I shouldn’t be asking him that. I should be handing him back the ring and telling him I’m marrying Aaron. The only problem is, I can’t.
Joy skates across Hunter’s features, and it’s so bright, so pure, anyone looking at him would think I’d just agreed to forever, not asked him how long he’d wait to have it with me.
“A year.” He moves toward me again, bringing his hand up to cup my chin, urging me to look him in the eyes. “A year from now, when you trust me, when we’re settled into raising our daughter and know all the ins and outs of co-parenting. If you still love me, if you still want me , then you’ll meet me at the place where you saved my life, and we’ll finally give ourselves the chance to live it together.” He comes down, dropping a single, soft kiss on my lips before flicking his gaze up to mine. “Deal?”
For the second time tonight, I find myself making a commitment, but when I agree to Hunter’s proposition, I don’t feel a single ounce of regret. “Deal.”
It’s easy to feel like I’ve made the right decision when I’m standing in Hunter’s orbit, surrounded by all the love we have for each other and the faith he has in us, but the moment I leave it, that certainty starts to wane.
Buckling under the weight of the realities I’ve yet to face. The first of which is Aaron, who is waiting outside of Dee and Jayla’s house when I arrive because once I left my own birthday party, Dee smelled trouble and went to pick her up from Marcy. I don’t think either of them would hurt Riley, but I’m grateful that she’s with Dee all the same. Especially because it gives me a chance to have this conversation with Aaron without worrying about her overhearing.
He’s still in his car when I pull up in Dee’s driveway, so I walk over and climb into the passenger seat with his ring in my hand instead of on it.
“You’re not wearing your ring,” he says, looking out the window and not at me.
I set the ring in question on the console between us. “I can’t marry you, Aaron.”
“You said yes.” Anger and almost a decade’s worth of resentment are packed into those three words. “You said yes in front of everyone I know, my co-workers, my boss, my clients, and now you’re taking it back? What am I supposed to tell everybody?”
It should sting that he’s more concerned about breaking the news to his friends than he is upset about losing me, but it doesn’t, which is just more proof that we had no business holding on to each other for as long as we did.
“You should tell them the truth,” I offer, which only makes him more incensed. He whips his head around, his lip curled in disgust as he looks at me.
“And what’s that, Rachel?”
“That I hate being called Rachel, and you know that, but you still do it anyway. That your mom hates me, and I hate her right back. That you resent how much I love my daughter, and have never considered her yours. That we should have broken up after the first time you asked me to marry you, and I said no. That ever since that day, you’ve treated me as a challenge and not a partner, and I let you because I thought I’d never have what I truly wanted again, so I didn’t care what I actually got.”
Heat rushes to my cheeks at that admission. I don’t know where it came from, but it rings true, so I don’t take it back.
Aaron scoffs in disbelief, offended by my honesty. “And what you want, this prize you thought you never were going to have again, is your drug addict ex? You’re choosing him over me?”
“No,” I say, and it’s not a lie because I’m not choosing Hunter.
Not yet.
Right now, I’m choosing me. I’m choosing to heal the broken pieces of my soul that kept rubbing up against the shattered pieces of Hunter’s and left us both bleeding. I’m choosing to make peace with the fact that Hunter has done the work; he’s sealed up his broken pieces with acceptance of his imperfections, grace for his mistakes, and the tools to try to make sure he doesn’t make them again.
With the fact that he’s wiped up all the blood and he’s clean, but somehow, I’m still bleeding.
With the fact that I’ve been angry with him, and pushing him away because he’s the only person who can see it. Who knows that underneath the band aid of faux perfection that’s been my relationship with Aaron and the life I built without Hunter, there’s a gaping wound that needs to be closed up.
I’m choosing to return to myself, to reclaim the version of me that faced down cancer by my mother’s side and fought my way through the ranks of a cutthroat ballet corps, the warrior that swallowed heartbreak, grief, and depression to ensure the child she knew she would have to raise on her own came into this world safely, the bad ass who answered the phone for a stranger and saved his life.
Because she’s the one I need.
She’s the one who can do hard things, and I have a year to find her, to let her guide me down the path of healing, to forgiving myself and Hunter for all of our missteps, which is, perhaps, the hardest thing of all.