by Jewel E. Ann
The back door closes. I freeze and hold my breath. His footsteps get closer and the bathroom door clicks shut. A few seconds later the shower sounds. I release my breath, focusing on controlling it, calming it before he comes out.
I stay really still again when the shower shuts off. A minute or two later the door opens. His bare feet pad along the wood floor to the other side of the bed. It dips as he sits on the edge. There’s the tap of him setting his phone on the nightstand, followed by more shaking of the bed and rustling of the covers.
I will not cry. The closer he is to me, the more this hurts.
I don’t blink.
I don’t swallow.
I don’t breathe.
My body stiffens when his arm hooks my waist, pulling me across the bed and into his embrace.
I blink. Fuck the stupid tears. Here they come.
You suck, Swayze.
I swallow and choke on a sob.
But I still can’t breathe because I feel like a fool in love with this guy, who is my opposite in so many ways. Tonight has been another reminder of how I don’t fit into his world. Sometimes it feels like more than that … it’s this awful feeling I’ve had my whole life that I don’t fit in anywhere.
I’m different. Not good different. Not necessarily bad different. Just … different. Puzzle piece 1001 in a 1000-piece puzzle.
“Tell me about your day, Swayz,” he whispers in my ear.
I laugh past the sob that wants to escape. If I wanted a guy who got down on his knees—hands folded at his chest—to apologize, I wouldn’t be engaged to Griffin Calloway. This is his apology. It’s slow and easy, but I have no doubt that he will own every piece of me again by the time he’s done.
“Shitty. This guy I love … he’s been ignoring me. And tonight he kinda broke my heart. He let another woman sit on my bucket. And he let her touch him.”
His grip on me tightens as he kisses the back of my head. There he goes, gathering up the pieces of me and tucking them away next to his heart. I let him because that’s where they belong.
“I should take him out back and beat him a breath from his life for hurting you.”
“No. I love him too much. Even if he’s falling out of love with me.” The last few words break as they fall from my lips.
“Swayz …” He turns me in his arms.
CHAPTER NINE
Griffin
I wasn’t looking for someone who shared my love of motorcycles, NASCAR, tattoos, or working out. Honestly, I wasn’t looking for anyone at all. My life was good.
Good job.
Good family.
Good friends.
I worked hard and purchased a house just after my twenty-third birthday. It’s not huge, but I don’t need much.
Then one day I got behind this blonde in line at the grocery store. Her hair was tangled in a pile on top of her head, falling out of her hairband in all directions. She riffled through her beach-sized handbag in a frantic search for her wallet as the lady at the register frowned in annoyance.
She was a chaotic mess to my diligent organization. I know she struggles with her averageness, but I think of her as not too anything; Swayze is my just right. My own tale of Goldilocks.
I didn’t find her. She didn’t find me. We found each other. It was effortless. It was perfect.
It still is.
The good. The bad. The sea of ugly in between—as long as it’s us, it will always be perfect.
“I’m sorry for breaking you today.” I hug her to me as silent sobs rack her body, hands covering her face. I embrace her vulnerability because she doesn’t show it to everyone. She trusts me to protect her, yet I let her down. Tonight I should have guarded her heart.
Her bucket. I let someone sit on her bucket and that mattered to her. I hate that I hurt her, but there’s an odd pride that it gives me to know that something as simplistic as an overturned bucket in my garage means so much to her.
I pull her hands away from her face, exposing her tear-stained cheeks and quivering chin. “You’re it for me. Do you know this? There’s no one else. I asked one girl to marry me, and I will never ask another. I want to marry you. I want to hold you. I want to have a family with you. I want your hands to fondle my old gray balls.”
She chokes out a laugh.
I frame her face, waiting for the perfect shade of blue to look at me. And when those eyes meet mine, I grin. “I want every smile. Every giggle. All the tears. I want to fight with you just to make up with you.”
Her mouth pulls into a smile. I take it because I want every single one.
“Did you wash your left cheek really good?”
I chuckle. “Yes. I’m pretty sure I removed at least three layers of skin.”
“You’re not riding with Apple or any other fruity-named girl to California as long as I’m still alive.”
I fight my impending grin and nod.
“And if you ever let another woman sit on my bucket—”
I kiss her until her body relaxes, surrendering to me. “Yeah, yeah…” I mumble over her lips “…such a tough girl. I’m sure we’re not done duking it out. You’re going to piss me off and I’m going to piss you off.” I grab the hem of her nightshirt and pull it up her body and over her head.
And for a few seconds I let her take my breath away. Every day I think this could be the day Swayze doesn’t render me speechless, but every day she does. I’m not even sure how she does it. She just … does.
“But at the end of the good days and the bad days, let’s promise to meet back here, under the covers, in the dark, to lick each other’s battle wounds. Deal?”
Her lips press to my chest. “Can it be that simple? Can we come back to our cocoon—inside these four walls—and shut out the pain? The anger? New psychiatrists? Stolen buckets? Forgotten birthdays?”
I want the answer to be yes. Reality is a buzzkill.
“We can try.” I slide my leg between hers.
She ghosts her fingers along my naked ass and up my back. Looks like today isn’t the day that her touch stops driving me insane with need. Maybe tomorrow. But I doubt it.
“Why do we keep hurting each other?” she whispers.
“Because we’re fucking terrified of losing this.” I slip my hand down the back of her panties.
When her lips find mine, I squeeze her sexy ass a little harder until she moans into my mouth.
She nips at my lower lip while rubbing herself against my leg that’s threaded between hers. “I wanted to kill her.” Her playful nips turn into bites like a dog that’s no longer playing.
My head jerks back before she draws blood, narrowing my eyes.
“Thanks for loaning me your guy.” Her mocking tone rings with very little sarcasm.
She’s jealous.
And pissed off.
I may have underestimated the situation.
“And that gum-sharing, toe-nudging, eyelash-batting bullshit made me want to pull her perfect black hair out of her head and rip off your testicles for letting her sit on my bucket!”
I one hundred percent underestimated the situation.
“Your bucket …” I say with the ease of coaxing her away from the ledge.
“My bucket.” She pushes my chest.
I roll to my back, letting her have control, in spite of my testicles questioning what could happen next.
Swayze straddles me like a queen perched on her throne. “My guy.” Her hair brushes my face as she leans forward, jaw locked, hands pressed to the pillow on either side of my head. Who is this woman? And where the hell has she been?
“Yours.” I grin.
“Mine.”
I chuckle. “So what are you going to do with me?”
Her lips part and something dark passes over her face, a cloud forming over my view of the sun. And in a blink, all her feistiness and anger vanishes, leaving behind the expressionless face of a ghost.
CHAPTER TEN
Swayze
“So what are you go
ing to do with me?” Nate’s voice. Nate’s boyish grin.
Long blond hair from above tickling his face as excitement flashes in his blue eyes.
“Swayz?”
“So what are you going to do with me?” That grin … Like he’s always on the verge of snickering about something or like whatever he’s looking at makes him happier than anything else in the world.
“Swayz, are you okay?”
I blink.
It’s not Nate. Not his face. Not his voice.
The eyes are whisky and the lips are turned down into a frown.
Griffin sits up, taking me with him. He grabs my head and furrows his brow. “Where’d you go?”
I blink again. “No…” I shake my head “…nowhere.”
The concern on his face hardens into something not so soft, not so nice. “We’re in our house, our bed, sharing something pretty fucking personal and you’re a million miles away. Dare I say a lifetime away?”
The thin material of my panties is the only thing between his naked body and mine. He’s right. I should be here and only here. And if he didn’t look so angry right now, I think I’d feel more shame.
“Did you fuck Apple?” Fight or flight. I couldn’t keep those words in if I tried.
His jaw slides side to side several times, eyes black as night in this dark room. “You weren’t thinking about me fucking anyone. You weren’t thinking about me at all.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Right back at ya, Swayz.” He lifts me off his lap and gets out of bed, tugging on sweats and a tee.
I stand on my knees, pulling my nightshirt back over my head as rage knocks on my chest, sending fire up my neck until my ears burn. “I don’t care if she was some … fuck buddy of yours. I care that she asked you to go to California with her sometime and you didn’t say no. I care that you’ve been blowing me off for days over something I can’t control.”
He grabs his pillow and storms out of the bedroom without a word. I chase him into the living room.
“Control? Really? You want to use that excuse? Try this …” He whips the pillow down on the sofa and rests his hands on his hips. “Quit your fucking job. Plan a wedding. Get out and make new friends. Clean up after yourself. Take a cooking class. Send out your resume to every school in the area. Take on more design clients. Hell …” His shoulders shoot up into an exaggerated shrug. “Spend more time worrying about who’s sitting on your bucket. Do absofuckinglutely anything to keep your mind away from this self-destructive obsession of yours.”
I take an uneasy step backwards. The truth hurts more than a thousand lies. Lies can be forgiven, but the truth holds no debts.
My truth—I’m losing Griffin to a past I can’t change and a future I can’t control.
He scrubs a hand over his face on a heavy sigh. “I’m sorry. I—”
“If I quit …” I start to say with nothing left but defeat in my voice and a dull ache in my chest.
He meets my gaze with regret eating up his face, sinking deep into his eyes.
“If I quit my job, if I find a teaching position, if I make friends in a cooking class, if I take on as many extra design jobs as I can fit into my day … if I do all of that and still have these memories…” I swallow the pain in my throat and draw in a breath to chase away the sting in my eyes “…will there be a wedding?”
“Swayz—”
“Just answer me.”
“I asked you to marry me. I’m not taking it back. Set a date. I’ll be at the altar. Will Swayze be there?”
“Swayze is just a name.” I hold my arms out to the side. “This is just a body. I will be at the altar.”
“And who are you?”
After a few long seconds of silence, I stare at my feet and shrug before turning back to the bedroom. “I thought I was the woman you love,” I murmur, retreating with my tattered white flag dragging behind me.
The bed creaks as I crawl into my spot, so does the floor at the end of the bed. Griffin removes his clothes, slides under the covers, and pulls them up over our heads.
No words.
No smiles.
Just two tortured souls scared of losing everything.
“But at the end of the good days and the bad days, let’s promise to meet back here, under the covers, in the dark, to lick each other’s battle wounds. Deal?”
He slides off my panties as I shrug off my nightshirt. His mouth covers mine, slow but demanding—eyes wide open as if so much as a blink will pop this temporary bubble.
He kisses me until my lungs burn for a breath.
My neck.
My breasts.
The curve of one hip and then the other.
My hands guide his head between my legs, but I don’t close my eyes. Not for one second. I love him. I don’t want to share this moment with anyone else. Even if I can’t see his eyes, the moment his tongue slides inside of me, I know that soulful gaze is looking up at me with lust and adoration.
I know, as he slides two fingers into me and I moan, that those same eyes start to leaden with pleasure. The bed shifts slightly from his pelvis grinding into the mattress as he lets all these emotions fade away.
We pause life.
We mute the voices.
We drown the pain.
I arch my back and twist as my orgasm hits hard. Griffin crawls up my body and sinks into me before I can see straight. With one hand on the bed next to my head and his other hand gripping the headboard, he drives into me like he wants to exorcise the demons from my mind.
But he can’t. And after he finds his own release, he collapses on the bed beside me. I wait for him to speak.
He doesn’t.
I wait for his arms to pull me into his body.
They don’t.
When his breath evens out, I slip out of bed to use the bathroom.
“What is happening?” I whisper to myself in the mirror before returning to our bed and a sleeping Griffin.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hazelnut.
I grin.
He’s here. Griffin doesn’t drink coffee, so this aroma luring me to the kitchen is all for me.
“You’re here.”
Griffin glances up from his phone, taking a sip of his green drink. “Yeah.” He looks so sad. Where’s my morning smile? Where’s the crook of his finger beckoning me to straddle his lap so he can kiss me good morning?
“Thanks for making coffee.” I pour it into a mug and sit next to him at the table. This shouldn’t hurt. This shouldn’t feel awkward.
But it does.
He gives me a polite smile. “You’re welcome.”
I don’t want polite. I want hands in my hair, lips on my mouth, and the kind of grin that dissolves my panties.
“I’ll run by the store on the way home tonight. Text me if there’s anything you need.”
Keeping his gaze on the phone screen, he nods. God! Give me something more than a nod.
I sigh just before taking a sip of my coffee. As the events of last night replay in my mind, guilt and embarrassment give my conscience a sharp elbow. I lost my shit over a bucket, a rejected half a stick of gum, and one of the most ridiculous female names ever.
Okay … I don’t regret my feelings about the name Apple, but the rest feels cringe-worthy in the light of day and the silence of two scorned lovers. We’re mere inches apart, but it feels like we’re not even in the same house.
“Did you work out this morning?”
I know the answer. I’m just that desperate to settle back into us. If he doesn’t answer me soon, I’ll be forced to mention the cool weather we’ve had lately.
The weather.
If that’s not a sign of a doomed relationship, then I don’t know what is. My parents were married for twenty-three years, and I don’t ever recall them discussing the weather over coffee. I’m sure the occasional storm came up, but not out of desperation.
There aren’t any storms that I know of predicted for Madison anyti
me soon, so I bite my tongue about the nippy forty-degree weather.
“I gotta go.” Griffin scoots back in his chair and stands, taking his glass to the sink.
“You should take your truck. It’s cold out.”
The stupid weather. I give myself an internal eye roll.
He slips on his jacket and bends down, palming the back of my head and brushing his lips next to my ear. “Have a good day.”
I fist his jacket as he goes to stand. His gaze sweeps across my face while I fight to translate what’s in my heart and eating at the pit of my stomach. My eyebrows draw together. Griffin returns a sad smile, feathering his knuckles over my cheek.
“I love you too,” he whispers.
Yeah, that.
I nod in lieu of actual words.
*
“Helllooo?” I slip off my shoes and my coat.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say no one was home. The lights are off in the kitchen. There’s no aroma of coffee.
“Hello?” I repeat with a softer voice as I sneak down the hallway.
“Bedroom,” Nate says in a groggy almost muffled tone.
“Are you decent?”
His door is partially shut.
“Far from it, but come in anyway.”
I peek my head around the door. “Whoa! You’re still in bed?” Morgan rolls around on the floor surrounded by enough toys to keep her from escaping out into the hall or into the bathroom.
“Sick.” He’s on his stomach, like he collapsed. One arm hangs off the side of the bed, loosely gripping a toy.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Uh huh,” he mumbles into his pillow.
“I take it you still need me? Or do I have the day off?”
A grunt is his only response.
“Sounds like a yes. Come on, Miss Morgan.” I pick her up. “Let’s get you away from your sick father.”
Another grunt as he lets the toy drop from his hand, but he doesn’t move his arm back on the bed. He’s nothing more than a corpse.
“Can I get you anything?”
“No.”
