WE ARE ONE: Volume Two

by Jewel, Bella

  “Lots … that’s—”

  Her fingers dug into my scalp when I flicked my tongue rapidly and sucked as much of her breast into my mouth as I could.

  She pulled on my hair, yanking my head back enough to separate my lips from her skin. “We have to stop,” she pleaded through heavy breaths.

  My eyes found hers. Desperate. Panicked. Soaked in lust.

  “Do we?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay,” I crept kisses down her stomach to the seam of her underwear, smelling just how wet and aroused I’d made her. “Are you sure?” I asked, pressing my nose against her clit and licking the material covering her pussy.

  “No. Yes. YES!” She scampered back and out from underneath me, her chest puffing, her eyes wide and blinking. “Yes. Please stop. We can’t. I … I don’t want—”

  She looked about ready to dive headfirst through my window just to escape, and it scared the ever-living shit out of me.

  “Okay. Okay,” I said, interrupting her while holding my hands up in surrender. “No fucking. I promise, no fucking.”

  Her body relaxed just slightly.

  “But you should know that doesn’t mean I don’t want to, Danielle.”

  A pained expression drifted across her face.

  “And I know you want to as well. But I won’t push. I’ll never push.”

  Getting up from the bed, I walked around to my side and pulled back the covers before climbing in and lying on my back with my arm outstretched, an invitation for her to rest her head upon my chest. “I’ll wait till you’re ready.”

  She sighed, slid under the covers as well, and took me up on my invitation, cuddling into my side. “Lots, I may never be ready.”

  I hugged her tightly and kissed her head. “You will, so I’ll wait.”

  Lying there, with Danielle in my arms, I felt like pinching myself. She was where she belonged, and I had every intention to make her see that.

  Every intention.

  I’d only ever waited for her — twenty-two years, in fact. Another day, month, year or two wouldn’t matter, because I’d wait forever if that was what it took.

  Placing her hand on my heart, I could feel her uncertainty, as if she knew my heart was hers but just didn’t know how to accept it.

  It made me smile

  … because I knew that one day she would figure it out.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I’d always hated those initial moments of waking up, when your brain computed reality from make believe and you realised what you’d just experienced never happened. Some days that realisation was a good thing, like when I’d wake from a nightmare fuelled by my memories of being trapped in the drain. Those mornings were terrifying and, thankfully, few and far between. Then there were the times when it wasn’t such a good thing, like when I woke with a sated smile on my face because I’d just experienced the world greatest orgasm or sweetest gesture. Regardless, I still hated that split second before reality hit, where I’d have to decipher which morning I was to encounter.

  Squinting my eyes, I swear my heart forgot to beat, as I experienced that moment I hated so much before quickly realising the smile forming on my face was the result of Elliot’s two, strong, warm, arms encasing me from behind. Oh my God! Elliot Parker is hugging me … in bed … in HIS bed.

  I slipped my hands down the front of me, feeling for my knickers. Yes, they’re still on. Thank fuck for that. The presence of my underwear confirmed what I’d just experienced before waking was a dream, a really good one.

  A safe one.

  Wanting to get back to my subconscious bedroom jockey skills, I closed my eyes and willed the scene back to the forefront of my mind but with little success, mainly because Elliot’s rock hard proximity made leaving reality far too difficult.

  He’s so warm, and hard, and smells good.

  Not many people smelled good in the morning, it was basically when we were at our worst. But Elliot … he smelled like clean sheets, firewood, pine needles, and man. Dirty, raw man but in the cleanest way possible.

  Slowly rotating in his arms, I was extra careful not to wake him, holding my breath and biting my lip each time he moved. When we were younger and he was allowed to stay over one time, I’d woken before him and watched him sleep. Back then, it was perhaps a little creepy … unlike now, because, technically, I was just rolling over in bed and keeping my eyes open. It wasn’t my fault that he was in my line of sight.

  Smiling, my teeth clamping harder on my lip, I took note of Elliot’s dishevelled hair, parts of it covering his forehead and eyes and other parts sticking up at the back. He looked adorable, a bit like Ernie from Sesame Street sans the orange skin and big red nose. I giggled, and his eyelids twitched.

  “You’re awake, aren’t you?” I asked quietly.

  He didn’t answer, but I swear he was fighting the muscles in his face not to smile and betray him.

  “Pity,” I sighed. “I can’t seem to find my knickers. They were here just a second ago.”

  His eyes shot open.

  “Ha! I knew it, ya faker.”

  “Do you seriously think I can sleep while you’re moaning and rubbing your arse against my cock?”

  “What? When? I did not.” Shit! Did I gyrate him while dreaming?

  “Yeah, you did. You’ve been doing it all morning. Want to see the proof?”

  I shook my head and pursed my lips. “Your factual bullshit won’t work on me.”

  He laughed and kissed the tip of my nose. “Good morning, Beautiful.”

  I smiled. “Morning.”

  He smiled, too, neither of us talking for what felt like minutes, our eyes gleaming and searching one another’s face. I wanted to kiss him, to trace the contours of his jaw with my fingertips. My need and pull toward him was as natural as breathing, and yet … it made me a little sad.

  His eyes dulled. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. We didn’t fuck. That’s a good a thing.”

  “Help me understand why.”

  I shrugged. “I told you. Friends should never fuck.”

  “So, technically, what you’re saying is that you can’t be friends before you become lovers.”

  “No. I’m just saying that you can’t be friends after you’ve been lovers. It never works out. I don’t want us to not be friends, Elliot. Ever.”

  “So you’re pre-empting a failed relationship if we were to ever start one?”

  “No. Well … yes … well...” I rolled onto my back. “I’m not getting lured into one of your cross-examinations. It’s too early in the morning, and I plead the fifth.”

  He belly-laughed. “You’re not in America, and I’m not trying to cross-examine you. I’m just trying to understand your logic.”

  “My logic stems from experience. Every one of my sexual relationships has progressed from a solid friendship that has been ruined because of sex. Every. Single. One.”

  “They probably weren’t doing it right.”

  I whacked him in the gut. “They were. And it’s every relationship bar one, and that’s only because I ended the sex before it got out of control.”

  “So you’re saying that every sexual relationship you’ve had has ended badly?”

  “Yes.” I focussed on his ceiling.

  “And you think it’s because you introduced sex into the mix?”

  “I don’t think, I know.”

  “Danielle, have you ever considered that the dissolution of the friendship could be due to the fact that neither of you fought to keep it post sex?”

  I sighed. “It’s not that simple.”

  “But it can be.” He rolled me onto my side so that I was facing him again. “If the friendship is strong enough, it can survive anything. It will survive anything. That’s us, Danielle; we can and will survive anything.”

  “But we haven’t, have we? You’re forgetting that seventeen years is a long time not to talk to one another.”

  “Trust me, I’m not forgetting.”

 
; “So what happened, Lots? Why’d we drift apart so easily?”

  He moved a lock of hair behind my ear. “I don’t know. One minute you were there, the next you weren’t.”

  I blinked. “Me? One minute you were there, the next you were taking ## to the year-nine social dance at your new school.”

  He blinked, too. Twice. I counted.

  “Well, yeah. She was in my class and the only girl who would talk to me. I needed to take someone.”

  “She wasn’t the only girl who talked to you,” I mumbled.

  “Are you shitting me, Danielle?”

  “What?”

  “Are you saying that you stopped talking to me solely because I took some random girl to my year-nine social dance?”

  “She wasn’t just some random girl, Elliot. She was in my netball team and liked to share detailed information about her ‘dates’. And …” I wiped the tear from my eye before he noticed it. “And she wasn’t me.”

  “No, I’m fully aware she wasn’t you,” he said, his tone annoyed.

  An awkward silence settled between us. It was strange. Unfamiliar. I didn’t like it.

  “Well, I’m glad we established that,” I said, kicking off the doona to quickly get out of bed, a sharp, painful reminder of my sore foot shooting up my leg. “Faaaaaaaark.”

  “What’s wrong? You okay? Elliot rushed to my side of the bed and knelt down before me. “Show me.”

  He tried to take my foot in his hand, but I stopped him. “Don’t. It’s fine. It’s just sore.”

  “Danielle, don’t do this.”

  “Do what?”

  He pointed to me. “This.”

  “Me?” I slapped my hand to my chest. “Don’t do me?”

  Placing his palms on my knees, he spread them apart then crawled in between my legs, moving his hands to my arse and abruptly dragging me across the bed, my pelvis slamming into his chest. “If you think for one second that I’m gonna let you ruin the past twenty-four hours because of some misunderstanding over a girl back in high school, you’ve got another thing coming. Because, unlike your past boy ‘friends’, I don’t give up easily. And where you’re concerned, I won’t give up at all.”

  My chest tightened, and I tried not to let out the sob that was desperate to tear its way through me. But it was pointless, because I was fairly certain that sob had been buried for seventeen years, and now was the time to set it free.

  “But you did give up,” I cried, letting it burst out of me.

  “Yeah, I did, when I was a kid that didn’t know any better. But I’m an adult now, and I know that giving up on you was the single biggest regret of my life.” He placed his hands on my cheeks and wiped my tears with his thumbs, his touch soft, soothing. “I won’t make that same mistake again. I promise.”

  Unable to stop the tears that were now drowning my face, I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and buried my head against his neck. “Please don’t, Lots. And please don’t let me make it either.”

  * * *

  During the car ride to my house to drop Dudley off before we headed to the garden, I had time to think about how such an inconsequential event could be misunderstood and therefore cause a ripple effect that would last half a lifetime, perhaps even longer had it not been for a series of fortunate events. But then … that was how life worked sometimes, how it challenged us. There were paved paths and roads with flashing, neon lights; options set out before us that seemed the best choice to make. They were easy, unmarred, often convincingly safe, but not necessarily the direction we were meant to take. Because if we looked harder, made more effort, and ignored the seemingly obvious, sometimes, just sometimes, the correct path was the one hidden beneath the security blanket often laid.

  “Let me get this straight again,” Elliot said, as we pulled up to the community garden. “You thought I was dating ##?”

  “Yes,” I drawled while undoing my seatbelt.

  “And that’s why you started plucking your eyebrows and hanging out with ## and ##?”

  “Yesssss.”

  “And why you lost your virginity to Max Noonan?”

  I snapped my head in his direction. “WHAT? How do you know that?”

  “I had my methods for discovery, even as a teenager.”

  Glaring, I let out an embarrassed laugh, facepalmed, and groaned into my hands. “It was the worst thing ever. He was horrible. And keen. Super keen. Then again, the fact that he seemed to be trying to win a race was probably a good thing.”

  Elliot laughed, but his smile didn’t quite reach his eyes as he took my hand in his. “All I ever wanted was to be your firsts.”

  “You were, Lots. Many of them.”

  “Yeah, just not the right ones.”

  I squeezed his hand and went to ask him to elaborate but was interrupted by a rapping of knuckles on the car window beside me.

  “You two lovebirds gonna leave the mobile nest, or am I gonna have to enter it?” Mum asked. “We’ve got a lot to do today, so get out of the car.”

  Opening the door for me, she stood back and held it ajar as I swivelled in my seat. “Sorry to say, Mum, but I’ll be on light duties today.” I pointed to my bandaged foot.

  “Oh, dear, what did you do?”

  “I slipped in the bathroom and sprained my ankle.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Not all that much.”

  “Don’t worry, Jeanette,” Elliot said, as he stepped up to my door and once again took my hands in his. “I’ll be carrying her to wherever she needs to go today.”

  “You will not,” I stated with absolute certainty.

  “Yeah, I will. Either that, or I’ll shove you in a wheelbarrow and wheel you around.”

  Mum laughed. “I’d like to see that.”

  * * *

  Two hours later, and that was exactly what Mum was seeing as Elliot pushed me from one point of the garden to another in a wheelbarrow.

  “If you crash this thing, I will never speak to you again,” I half barked half squealed.

  “Have faith, oh head of chocolate curls, for I can steer this chariot like no other man before me.”

  “Shut up, you idiot and watch that bum—”

  He hit a small log and the force bounced me a little higher than what was deemed comfortable, my arse landing in the wheelbarrow with a thud. “Owwwwww.”

  “Sorry,” he chuckled. “Driving hazard.”

  “I’ll give you driving hazard.”

  “So, where to, m’lady? Where can I deliver thee safely?”

  “To where the greenhouse is going to be built, kind sir.”

  He slowed down, almost stopping. “Why there?”

  “Because I’m gonna help you build it.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yeah, I am. I’ll read out the instructions, you follow them. It will be easy.”

  He performed a wide turn and pointed us toward where Mum and Helen were constructing planter boxes. “I’m sure our mums could do with more help.”

  “Elliot Parker, turn us back around. I’m not helping our mums.”

  “Why not? Look at them, they’re flustered.”

  I took in Helen’s confused stance, her fingers lightly scratching her head while assessing the tape measure. Mum wasn’t any further at ease, angrily wrestling with the battery pack attached to the drill. My guilty conscience reared its ugly head —they really did look as if they needed help — but I quickly buried the unwelcome nuisance, knowing that if I helped them, they’d spend more time hassling me about wedding dates and venues and nothing would get done anyway.

  “No. They’ll sort themselves out. They always do.”

  “I don’t think they will.”

  “ELLIOT!” I growled.

  “Okay, if you say so.” He steered the wheelbarrow to the right again, pointing us back on course. “This is a bad idea, Danielle.”

  “It’s not. We’ll nail it.”

  “I’d rather nail you.”

  I looked around
for something to throw at him, but I was the only thing in the wheelbarrow that could be thrown. “Keep that up and the only thing you’ll be nailing is your coffin.”

  “Technically, I can’t nail my own coffin.”

  Grrrr.

  Technically,

  I. Could. Nail. Him. In. The. Eyeball.

  * * *

  “It’s back to fucking front, Danielle!”

  “It’s not … oh, wait, it is.” I turned the instructions back up the right way. “This greenhouse is stupid. Shouldn’t the panels be the same on both sides?”

  He deadpanned. “No, they shouldn’t. If they were, it wouldn’t be a very good greenhouse.”

  “You’re such a smartarse.”

  “Thank you.”

  “That wasn’t a compliment.”

  “Technically, it was.”

  I picked up the bag of screws with the intent to launch them at his head, but, instead, I just clenched them tightly and screamed inside.

  “I told you this was a bad idea.”

  “It wasn’t. You not listening to me and jumping three or four steps ahead is the bad idea.”

  “There’s no point in me waiting for you to instruct me when I know what comes next. That’s not efficient time management.”

  “But that’s the problem,” I shouted. “You don’t know what comes next. You’re guessing and guessing wrong.”

  “I am not. You’re reading the steps in the wrong order.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Danielle Uma Cunningham! Language.”

  I snapped my head around to find Mum and Helen, standing behind me, Mum’s hands on her hips, Helen scowling at Elliot.”

  “What’s going on here?” she asked.

  “Yes, why are you two arguing? The whole neighbourhood can hear you.” Helen added.

  I glared at Elliot and the bastard glared back.

  “Oh, don’t worry, it’s nothing,” I said, faux-laughing it off. “My stubborn Schnookums is trying to finish the job too soon.”

  Elliot matched my contrived chuckle. “Honey, you should know I never finish a job too soon.”