He breathed deeply to dispel the fog of fatigue and then went to stand behind her as she rinsed dishes out in the sink. He wrapped both arms around her waist, pushing his front into her back.
“Yes?” she said, stretching the one word out as a question.
He tilted his head down to kiss the side of her neck.
She set down the bowl she’d been rinsing, turned off the water, and pulled out of his arms, turning around so she faced him. Her expression was sober as she said, “We’re not going to do that again tonight.”
“Do what?”
“Have sex.”
Defensive anxiety rose up, more quickly than normal since he had so few defenses left, but he did his best to keep his voice light. “I thought you were enjoying my excessive horniness.”
“Of course. To an extent. But there’s something not right about it.”
Ander froze, briefly paralyzed at the realization that what he’d always been the best at—sex—wasn’t something Lori wanted from him.
“I love having sex with you,” she continued, as if he’d actually spoken a reply. “You know I do. But, ever since you’ve gotten back, it’s started to feel like it used to—when I was your client.”
Waves of confusion and fear slammed into him. He must have damaged their relationship, when all he wanted to do was hold onto it. “What do you mean?” His voice sounded strange, stiff, stilted.
“I mean it feels kind of like it did back then, with you completely focused on pleasing me.”
“What’s wrong with that? I want to please you.”
She shook her head, emotion contorting her features. “I mean it feels like your focus is only on pleasing me physically, like you have some mission to accomplish. It’s not what we’re doing that seems wrong—it’s how we’re doing it. It’s like you—like you—aren’t really there.”
“That’s absurd,” he objected, sounding angrier than he felt. What he felt was on the verge of cracking. “Of course I’m there.”
“I’m telling you what it feels like, and I’m not making this up. I’ve been thinking about it all day. I thought at first it might be…be just me, but it’s not. I know I’m not imagining it. It’s like you’re hiding yourself away somehow—the way you used to, when we weren’t…when we weren’t together.”
Ander froze again when her voice cracked and a tear slipped out of her eye.
Her shoulders shook with suppressed sobs. “I don’t need another orgasm, Ander. I need you. I need you back with me again.”
More tears streamed down her cheeks, and she swiped them away impatiently.
And Ander couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand that he’d hurt her, when she was the most important thing in his life.
And he couldn’t fix it. He had nothing in him that could fix it.
He was breaking for real.
Breaking right now.
He opened his mouth to speak, to say anything, but no words came out.
He felt that deep shuddering inside him, impossible to control now, impossible to stomp out, impossible to deny.
He hated it. Hated it. That he wasn’t the man he had thought he’d become after all.
But he wasn’t. He turned on his heel and headed for the only place he could escape in their apartment.
He went to take a shower.
After turning the water on as hot as he could tolerate, he tossed his clothes on the floor and stepped under the spray.
For a minute, he just stood there, the water beating down on him so hot it almost hurt.
The shuddering rose in his chest again, and he pressed both hands against the tile wall, pushing against the solidity, as if he could push the feeling away.
It hadn’t yet worked when he felt a rush of cold air.
Lori climbed into the shower with him.
“Lori,” he said hoarsely, not turning around, not moving his hands from the wall since at the moment it was the only thing holding him upright. “Please just leave me alone for a minute.”
“I’m not going to do it.” She adjusted the temperature so the water wasn’t quite so scalding and then wrapped both arms around him from behind. “It isn’t good for you. We’ve been through too much, and I’m not going to let you push me away now.”
So he stood there, braced by the wall, and he let Lori hug him as the shuddering grew even stronger.
After a few minutes, he felt her kiss the back of his neck, the top of his shoulders, the ridges of his spine. His eyes were closed, and the water streamed down over both of them.
“You know I love you,” she murmured. “You know you can tell me anything.” She rubbed her palms up and down his chest and belly, pressing another kiss into his shoulder blade.
She deserved a response, so he tried to give her one. “I know.”
She slid one hand up to his head and stroked it in a way that never failed to affect his heart. And his body.
He felt himself begin to harden from the feel of her hands, her lips, her wet, naked body behind him, her absolute tenderness.
The muscles of his thighs and abdomen clenched as one of her hands slipped down to rub his hardening cock. “I thought you didn’t want to have sex.”
“I didn’t want you to be on this mission to make me come.”
As if that was enough explanation, she moved so that she was between him and the wall. She pulled his head down into a kiss, and Ander tried to focus enough to respond. He couldn’t do more than cling to her mouth, and the deep emotion palpable in the connection of their lips caused the shuddering inside him to intensify again.
He pulled away when it threatened to overwhelm him.
“Ander,” she said, bringing his attention back to her.
He blinked down through the streams of water at her beautiful face, her eyes vivid against her pale skin and her dark hair hanging wetly against her head and shoulders.
“Can I please do something for you?”
He wasn’t sure exactly what she was talking about, but he couldn’t deny her anything—not when he needed her so desperately. He gave a jerky nod.
She kissed him again, briefly this time, and then started to kiss her way down his body.
Ander’s brain wasn’t working at full capacity, so she was as far down as his belly before he realized what she would do.
His body clamped down almost painfully as her mouth drifted even lower, and he flattened his hands against the tile again to buttress himself against what he knew was coming,
Lori ended up sitting on the built-in shower bench as she reached to take his hips in both hands. He was bending at the waist slightly to leave room for her between him and the wall.
Then she leaned forward to slide his now erect cock into her mouth.
He groaned uninhibitedly at the feel of her warm, wet mouth around his flesh. He jerked his hips reflexively before he was able to restrain the urge.
She drew her head back, letting him slip out. Then she licked a line up the underside, reaching around with one hand so she could grab one of his ass cheeks.
“Oh, fuck, baby,” he rasped, pushing hard against the wall so he wouldn’t grab her head.
She smiled up at him and then took him in her mouth again, wrapping her fingers around the base of his cock and establishing a rhythm, her lips reaching the top of her hand.
He tried not to thrust into it, but the sensations were intense, and he had absolutely no defenses against them.
He groaned embarrassingly, mumbling out a silly succession of words as he felt a climax rising fast. When she moved a hand to cup and squeeze his balls, his whole body jerked and he fumbled for purchase on the wall.
She was sucking him hard now, hollowing out her cheeks with her rhythm, twirling her tongue around the head of his shaft as she did. It was all he could do not to fuck her throat.
“Fuck, baby,” he gritted out, every muscle in his body tensing in preparation. “I’m going to—fuck, baby.”
She hummed wordless encouragement over his erec
tion and dug her fingernails into his inner thigh.
He roared out in surprise as climax surged up and swallowed him, the pleasure intense and sustained and utterly leveling.
His whole body rocked with it.
“Oh, fuck,” he mumbled, as she kept sucking him through the contractions. “Oh, fuck, oh, fuck.”
He was still barely holding himself up against the wall when she finally let him slip from her mouth. She stood up from the seat and wrapped her arms around him.
His knees buckled. They literally buckled.
They had an awkward moment until she managed to help him sit down where she’d been seated earlier.
She lowered herself until she was on her knees beside him. She leaned her head against one of his thighs, and he managed to reach out so he could hold her there against him.
The shuddering was too strong now, and he had no strength left to hold it in.
His whole body rocked with it, so much more powerful than the climax.
He leaned his head back against the shower wall and closed his eyes. Took several ragged breaths.
She made a sound like a stifled sob. “Oh, sweetie, please tell me.”
And that was it.
He just broke.
Rasped out, “My…my father died.”
The words were so horrible—hanging in the air as they did, real in a way they hadn’t been the moment before—that he shook even more violently.
Lori breathed, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”
There was nothing he could say to that.
He’d hated his father for most of his life, but he’d never been able to hate him enough.
“Oh, my God. When?” Lori asked.
“Five days ago.”
Five days. Six hours. And fifteen minutes—give or take a few minutes, since he couldn’t see a clock at the moment.
It was then he’d gotten a phone call that changed everything.
“Oh, my God. I haven’t heard anything, on the news or anything.”
His father was an important businessman in the city. His death, if made public, would be reported in the news.
“They’re keeping it quiet. Until they get everything settled…with the estate and…” He couldn’t finish. Couldn’t say any more.
Lori pushed herself to her feet and turned off the shower. Then she opened the curtain to reach for a towel. “So all this time…” Her face was twisting as she dried herself off.
His face felt like it was twisting too. All this time, he hadn’t told her. He hadn’t told her something so important.
He waited for her to reproach him. To tell him how wrong he’d been, how badly he’d treated her.
He would deserve it. All of it.
She could leave him, and he would deserve that too.
She lifted the towel to her face and gave a little sob into it. One he just couldn’t understand. Then she wrapped the towel around her and reached for another.
“Can you stand up?”
He wasn’t sure he could, but he tried. He managed to keep his feet while she dried him off.
“Lori, I’m so sorry,” he began, the words painfully raw in his throat.
“Shh. Not now.” She left the bathroom and returned with a t-shirt and pajama pants for him to wear. “Let’s go to bed.”
He managed to pull on the clothes and brush his teeth. Then he slowly made his way to their bed, every step heavy and sore.
She’d pulled on pajamas too and had gone to get two bottles of water for each of their nightstands. Then she turned out the lights and crawled into bed beside him.
He rolled onto his side, so she just pressed herself behind him, hugging him as she spooned him.
“I’m so sorry, Ander,” she murmured. “I’m so, so sorry about your dad.”
He started to shake again.
His father had defined his life—for most of his life. As a boy, all he’d wanted was his father’s love, and it was something he’d never been able to get. As a teenager, he’d done everything he could to defy his father and all of his expectations, so he’d made decisions he’d known would enrage and humiliate him. For so many years, he’d made himself nothing more than a body, since he’d believed he wasn’t worth anything more.
“It shouldn’t matter,” he managed to say. “It shouldn’t be a big deal. He’d had a heart-condition for a while, and he hasn’t been a part of my life in years. It’s not like someone else losing their father.”
“Of course, it matters. Of course, it’s a big deal. He was your dad.”
He hadn’t thought about him as his “dad” since he was a boy.
He’d never believed in the possibility of that ever changing, but now the thinnest sliver of a chance was gone for good.
It felt like Lori’s arms were the only things holding him together. He was never this weak. Never this shattered.
He just couldn’t stop himself from being so right now.
“He left…” His voice broke so he had to try again. “He left the bulk of his estate to…to me.”
He heard Lori’s soft gasp and felt her tighten in surprise.
His own reaction had been more dramatic.
“Why would he do that?” he choked out, trying to take full breaths.
“I don’t know.”
Ander kept trying to breathe.
“Maybe he loved you after all.” She squeezed him, so tightly it would have been painful at any other time. “I know he didn’t know how—at all—but maybe, in his way, he did.”
“He couldn’t have. Not after the way he always treated me. He couldn’t have loved me.”
She was crying now. He could hear the smothered sobs and feel it in her body behind him.
She was crying for him.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “But maybe this was his way of trying to show you—at the end—that he really did.”
Ander couldn’t think it through clearly enough to sort through such possibilities. He couldn’t do anything but feel emotions that ripped through him like a storm. He couldn’t do anything but shudder, shake, breathe in painful wheezes.
Lori never let him go. Not when he could finally breathe evenly again. Not when his body gradually relaxed in pure exhaustion. And not, a long time later, when his eyes closed, and he drifted toward the oblivion of sleep.
She held him the whole time, with a kind of undemanding support he used to believe didn’t exist in the world.
Sometime during the night, he rolled over so he was facing her and wrapped his arms around her.
So they ended up holding each other.
Six
The next morning, Ander could barely move.
Every muscle in his body ached, and his head pounded brutally. He smothered a groan as he reached for the bottle of water beside his bed and downed it in about six gulps.
His motion must have woken Lori because she stirred restlessly and then opened her eyes. She smiled up at him, obviously too groggy to remember the night before, since there was no trace of concern in her expression.
He smiled back, wondering how he’d ever managed to get such an extraordinary woman to say “yes” to a marriage proposal.
Her expression changed as her memory of the night before returned. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve been through a battle.”
“Me too—kind of.”
He didn’t doubt it. She loved him so much that she hurt when he hurt. Three years ago, he hadn’t known it was possible.
“You don’t have to work today, do you? It’s Saturday and…” She trailed off, her eyes searching his face.
“I don’t have to work today.”
“Good. Then you stay in bed. I’m going to get us some coffee.”
He lay back down, mostly because his body protested any other option, as she went to the bathroom and then disappeared toward the kitchen for the coffee.
When she returned with two mugs, Ander propped himself up on the pillows and she situated herself beside him
.
They were silent for a while. He draped an arm around her shoulders to pull her against him, wanting her to know that he wasn’t going to withdraw anymore, although he couldn’t think of a way to broach the subject.
“So I’ve been thinking,” Lori said at last.
“About what?”
“About what happened. Is it all right for us to talk about it now?”
“Yeah.”
“This is what I think happened. You just tell me if I’m wrong.”
“Okay.” He was foolishly relieved that she was going to articulate it first, since he couldn’t seem to make his mind work at all.
“It hurt you. A lot. What happened to your dad, I mean. And it reminded you of who you used to be. And then you tried to pretend that part of yourself didn’t exist. You tried to act normally, but it wasn’t you completely—so it all ended up kind of…twisted. Or something like that.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “That’s pretty close.”
“I really do understand why it was so hard and twisted for you. But I don’t understand why you thought you had to hide it from me. From me.”
Her words weren’t intended as a reproach, but there was a trace of hurt evident in her tone, and it was like a blade to his chest.
“I’m so sorry, baby.” He tightened his arm around her. “There’s no good excuse. No rational reason. I just…” It was so hard to admit, even now.
“You just what?”
“I just didn’t want you to see me so…so broken.”
She put her coffee down and reached out to hug him, burying her face in his chest. The move threatened his coffee too, so he set down the mug so he could hold her.
“I’ve got things so good now,” he murmured against her hair. “I have everything I could ever want. I shouldn’t be broken anymore.”
She was crying again—in tight, almost silent sobs. He had no idea what to say so he just hugged her until she drew back.
“I think everyone is broken. In some way. It’s just part of being human. I mean, look at me.”
He frowned. “What about you?”
“I was starting to get all insecure again because you were pulling away. I thought maybe you didn’t want me anymore. So I started making up stories about how you were feeling guilty about your feelings changing and that’s why you were working all day and then having sex the way you were.”