Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
IAIN
It was mid-afternoon, and here he was lying in bed with a goddess beside him.
Iain’s pulse had just about dipped back down to a normal, steady rhythm, his lungs finally taking in air as they should. How hard he’d worked his body today had taken a toll on his muscles, every one of them delightfully sore as he lay on his stomach, one arm across Maisie pulling her in against his side. She was so soft that her every curve conformed to him like the tide did against the cliffs.
He’d chucked the blanket that’d been beneath her to the floor to be washed, leaving his duvet to pull up over them both. It sat in the low dip of his back whilst Maisie lifted her half to her breasts.
“How are you feeling?” he asked her gently.
They’d gone only that one round, but Maisie had given a lot of herself, and Iain didn’t have the strength to even stand. He’d been thoroughly fucked with zero regrets – except for maybe not giving himself the chance to rest after his game that morning. Still, he’d been honest when he’d said that this last hour was about her and what she needed to be comfortable. Everything she’d confessed about sex being painful for her he’d taken to heart.
Maisie massaged her fingers through his hair. “A little uncomfortable,” she said, her face turned in the pillow she’d claimed. “I get cramps a lot after sex, but these ones aren’t bad.”
Iain didn’t want her to be in any pain at all. “That doesn’t sound good.”
Maisie gave a one-shouldered shrug, gently sighing. “It’s not great.”
He shifted his hand from her waist with barely any pressure across her belly, and the warmth melted into her skin. “Does this help?”
Tension in Maisie’s shoulders ebbed as she hummed. “Heat helps.” Iain made a mental note to buy something microwaveable for her pains without questioning the thought.
“The internet was useful for looking up your condition,” he said, circling his palm lower where she shifted it. “I won’t pretend to be a know-it-all, but at least I know more, now.”
Maisie blinked at him. “You researched endo?”
“Yes …” Why wouldn’t he? She was trusting him with her body in the most intimate of ways, so yes, he researched her condition.
A smile like sunshine spread on Maisie’s lips. “You’re not a grizzly bear at all. You’re a big ol’ softie, Iain.” She ruffled up the curls on top of his head and Iain feigned trying to escape her reach.
“Alright you, let me keep some of my reputation.”
Maisie chuckled tiredly, a sound like honey being poured into his veins.
“More seriously though, did I do something in particular to cause this?” he asked.
Across her cheeks and chest were still pink and warm from her exertion, but they blotted with more colour, then. “I think it’s more how hard you made me …”
A smirk pulled on Iain’s lips. “Come?”
“Yes … that.” Her eyes flicked away from the smugness on his face for a second.
“I haven’t ever not had to fake it”, my ass. Every time she wanted an orgasm she should just say his name and he would appear from now on.
“There’s a lot of muscle contractions involved,” Maisie continued to say. “Lots of … movement.”
“Trust me, I felt them all around the length of me.” He kissed her upper arm. “You were so amazing, love.”
Iain didn’t think anything of what he’d said, not until Maisie’s silence, the absence of her body rising with a breath beside him.
Love. He hadn’t meant it like—at least, he didn’t think he’d meant it like …
His heart skipped over every other beat.
Some bubble of delusion he’d let himself float within without realising it burst. He’d been ignoring the signs that what was happening between them was more real than just two people giving in to lust and attraction. It hadn’t just been that for him for weeks.
With a delicate smile that looked like she tried to tame it, Maisie wiggled closer down into his side. “I never imagined being special enough to be called someone’s love.”
They were nose to nose, Iain’s mind racing whilst Maisie looked like the start of a heartbreak he would never recover from. What unspoken truths she inched them closer towards were too close to home.
He exhaled. “You are so special, Maisie.”
“In general,” she began hesitantly, “or … to you?”
Iain’s attempt to shift the direction of conversation backfired. Yet he said, “Both.” The truth was that he didn’t know anymore.
The line separating his head from his heart had always been clear, and he’d always neglected the latter to keep the first one safe. Words from years ago echoed in his mind: “You’re not enough to make someone happy, Iain.”
But then Maisie had fallen into his arms. Literally .
He hadn’t wanted this whirlwind of a woman to come in and turn his life upside down in all the right ways – make him see that he shouldn’t resign himself to the situation he was stuck in now just because he was too much of a pessimist to think that there was something better out there for him. Maisie made him feel like he didn’t need to change. That he could make something of himself and be proud. He was better because of her.
He wanted to be enough.
He wanted to be enough desperately for her.
He wanted to be enough that she would stay.
But he just … wasn’t .
He was one ship passing hers in the night. Maisie could do so much better than him.
Her lower lip ran shallowly between her teeth as her eyes followed the slow path of her finger up and down his back. “Have you … changed your opinions on commitment?”
That question Iain had seen coming since before they’d ever kissed – that’s how long their fakeness had been slipping into a different territory. It was mostly the reason why the pulse point at the base of his throat throbbed so quickly.
Now that they’d shared a bed, he knew that he owed her an answer. Maisie Moss wasn’t the type of woman to treat like a fling – she deserved so much more. Something permanent.
He didn’t want this unnamed thing between them to stop, but at the same time he wasn’t the man who could give that to her, was he? So where would that leave them? A situationship was worse than bed-buddies. They were more than friends but less than committed – not ‘no strings attached’ but joined by ones that would sever far too painfully. He’d promised her no games, but this wasn’t about sex or sparks of attraction anymore. And to answer Maisie’s question: well, he was going to disappoint her either way. He hadn’t done it yet, but he would. His mind would find a way – it always did.
He said, “I’ve loved my life since you fell into it, even with all the bad. For the first time in two years I’ve been living.” It was a cop out – the truth, yet still just fodder to skirt around the words that he didn’t want to say – words that would make Maisie look at him as she did right then, like the light in her eyes was being clouded over by a storm.
“But?”
But …
But he had no answer. He was giving off mixed- fucking -signals, and Iain hated it.
It wasn’t about not having feelings, but rather for the first time in almost two years, he had too many. How Maisie had been so overwhelmed in her happiness the other night and how his only instinct was to hold her tighter should have told him just how far he’d gone in the depths of the valley of falling for her that he’d wandered into. He’d lost the map by now, and the trail had turned to dust behind him.
He couldn’t live with a broken heart again, and Iain knew already with her that if it broke, there would be no fixing it. No glueing the pieces back together. The crash from Maisie Moss would shatter more than just his heart.
He never should have let things go this far.
His fingers hadn’t stopped tracing back and forth across her waist – a nervous tick that was new, apparently.
Iain inhaled slowly, buying himself five more seconds of time. “Why don’t we talk once I’ve run you a warm bath and made us the lunch we never got to?”
She’d asked him for time not that long ago, and now he would ask for the same. An hour or two to get his head straight.
Maisie’s lips twitched in a small smile that was definitely forced, before she whispered, “Okay.”
“Cach. ? * ” Iain rubbed at the patch of red on his forehead, muttering to himself. “ Fel rhech mewn pot jam. Twmffat ? * – what are you looking at?”
Head nestled between his paws over the edge of his bed, Ted stared up at him. The same bland, unimpressed stare he’d had since he was an adolescent terror – a deserved look right then, since Iain had come short of banging his forehead against his fridge door over and over at his own stupidity for the things he’d said upstairs. In the mirror above his fireplace, all he did was make the rest of his forehead redden too.
The creaking of the stairs preluded Maisie coming down. She didn’t have any clothes to wear after her bath other than her dress, so he’d left out an oversized hoodie and clean jogging bottoms on his bed. As it turned out, seeing her in his clothes in the mirror reflection made some recess Iain had forgotten about in the centre of his chest ache.
He couldn’t help but feel that this flame between them wasn’t meant to burn out fast. It was meant to simmer and last. Grow and steal oxygen from the room until they couldn’t breathe. It could die if they let it and so would they. Or they could open a window, kick a crack into a wall, give this delicate flame more of a chance to stay alive.
For an hour he’d thought about what he was going to say in the talk he’d promised, and for an hour Iain’s mind had gone in circles. Neither his head nor his heart were on the same page, and it was agony trying to decide which one to let overrule the other.
“How are you feeling now?”
Curls tied away in one big bun, Maisie’s face looked refreshed. “Better,” she said. “Thank you for doing that.”
“Of course.” Iain scratched at the back of his head. “Food is staying warm in the oven.”
“What did you make this time?” Wearing all navy that was all his, Maisie padded her way around his living room, her nose in the air pointing at his open kitchen.
“Do you have an aversion to katsu chicken and rice?”
Coming to his side, she shook her head. “I love it. What happened to your forehead?” The pad of her thumb feathered over the tender skin.
If he told her what he’d been doing to that fridge door, then she’d think he was an idiot. “Was just … playing with Ted.”
With a doubtful eyebrow raise, Maisie bent down and scratched Ted behind the ears, giving Iain a truly fantastic view of her— Don’t think about it. He had important things to say, and he couldn’t if all his blood rushed south.
“Did you hurt your daddy?” Maisie said to Ted who lapped up her attention like always.
“I’ll show you daddy. ” Iain gripped her hips and pulled her backwards to him. Maisie laughed as he dipped his mouth to her neck.
“Iain!” She covered his forearms wrapped around her with her hands. “I’m still sore.”
“I’m sorry.” And he meant it.
“It’s okay.”
“Did I hear you on the phone?”
“Faye called to catch up. I haven’t spoken to her this week. Oh —Alun said you should call him, by the way.”
Maisie patted his hands and stepped forwards away from him towards his kitchen, and the only reason Iain let her go was because hearing that name on her lips made his body freeze.
His throat tightened. “Alun who ?”
Maisie shrugged, taking the tray of food out of the oven. “I don’t know. He stood by me at the game earlier, and we talked. I said I was there for you, and he said that he knew you when you were younger.”
Fuck. Fuck. “What did he look like?”
Her brows pinched. “He said you’d know who?—”
“Maisie? Please .”
She set the oven tray on the countertop. “Okay. Wait, he might be in the edge of a photo. I took a few.” Taking her phone out of the pocket of his hoodie, Maisie tapped over the screen. “Here. I took a selfie to prove to my brothers that I’ve been to a game. He’s the man behind me.”
Iain’s body may as well have been drowned in ice when she turned the phone to him.
There. He was fucking there.
He inhaled deeply to grab an inch of composure.
“That’s my dad.”
* ? Shit.
* ? Like a fart in a jam jar (useless). Idiot.