An Ounce of Hope (A Pound of Flesh #2)

by Sophie Jackson

  “Is this good?” he called out, holding the canvas against the wall, his large arms open wide, the red T-shirt he was wearing pulling deliciously across his broad shoulders.

  Grace crossed her arms over her chest, admiring the view. “Um, a little to the left.” He did as she asked. “A little to the right.” Again, he complied. “Up.” He sighed. “Down.”

  “Grace.”

  “Now left. Right.” She was giggling into her fist as he turned to glare at her.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Oh, come on, lighten up,” she said with a wave of her hand.

  “I’ll lighten up when you make a damned decision,” he grumbled, but Grace wasn’t blind to the small smile he tried to hide.

  “Where you had it was perfect.”

  He mumbled to himself and set about hammering in the hooks to hold it. They’d blown off their usual run—both of them too tired after the prior evening’s frivolities—and, with neither of them working, had set about putting up the pictures, mirrors, and art pieces Grace had bought. Max hadn’t questioned her when she’d asked for help and had worked diligently all afternoon, even driving into town to get them lunch.

  His laid-back attitude and his unquestionable acceptance of her life story endeared him even more to her. It had been a long time since she’d opened up to someone new, someone who wasn’t family or getting paid to listen, but it hadn’t been as difficult as she’d supposed. Max listened intently, as he always did. She saw no pity in his large, dark eyes, only anger and alarm and, predictably, guilt.

  But that was simply ridiculous. He could argue all he liked—and she didn’t doubt he would—but Grace knew and her gut knew: Max was good to his bones. She didn’t know why he’d gotten embroiled in drugs, although his mentioning of his fiancée may have been a clue. But she saw he was nothing like Rick.

  Nothing.

  She hummed while she hung another picture. A fraying piece of fabric stamped with the Martin Luther King quote, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” It had been her mother’s favorite and it took pride of place in the hallway. It would be the first thing her guests would see when they walked into the house.

  She stood back, liking its placement, suddenly aware that there was no noise coming from Max’s part of the room. She turned to find him watching her, an intense expression on his face, his arms folded.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Is that why you asked me? Because of what he did to you?”

  Grace frowned. “Asked you?”

  “The other day, on our run, about whether I found you attractive, about whether I’d have sex with you. Is it because of what he did?”

  Ah. That.

  Grace’s cheeks warmed. “Kind of.” She exhaled. “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  Max remained silent, expectant.

  “I’ve tried being with a man twice since Rick and both times were disasters.”

  And that was putting it mildly. Her first attempt ended with a trip to the ER, Grace unable to breathe for the flashbacks that began hammering her when he’d climbed on top of her. Her second was equally heinous.

  She approached Max slowly. “I couldn’t handle them . . . being on—holding me down; holding me too tightly. Truthfully, I struggled with everything intimate. It didn’t take my therapist to explain why.”

  “So why would me touching you be any different?” Max asked his brow creasing.

  Grace smiled. “Because you’re the first guy since my husband that I’ve wanted to get close to. Not like that,” she explained when he fidgeted uncomfortably. “I wanted to get to know you, be your friend. I felt safe being near you, and the urge to run away and lock myself in a room goes away when we hang out.” Grace cleared her throat, awkwardness teasing her neck. “I just thought that . . . because I can handle being with you, I might be able to handle being with you.”

  Max’s eyes widened when understanding struck. “I see.”

  Grace toed the floor with her bare foot. “You saw what happened when Buck touched me. You think I want that to happen the rest of my life every time someone wants to fool around?” Anger bubbled through her. “I hate that he has power over me, even when we’ve been apart all this time. I hate that he still gets to dictate who I can be with, who I can be friends with. He doesn’t deserve that power. He did nothing to earn it.”

  “I agree. You shouldn’t let him control your life.”

  “I want to reclaim it.” Her voice raised in volume. “I want to be sexy again. I want to be passionate, and not afraid to be sexual.”

  Their eyes met for a brief moment, until Max looked away with a deep inhalation. He rubbed his face. The sound of his whiskers scratching his palm did funny things to Grace’s belly.

  “Can I be honest with you?” he asked, his expression sincere but torn.

  “Of course you can.”

  He paused, opening his mouth a number of times without speaking. He stretched his neck and shifted his weight. “You’re hot, all right,” he said finally. “And you’re sexy as all hell; you really shouldn’t worry about that. And six months ago, I would have fucked you any way you wanted me to.” He stared. “Shit, I’d still fuck you any way you wanted me to.”

  Grace swallowed. “Okay.”

  “But, like I said, you deserve more than that.”

  “I don’t want more than that, Max,” she argued. He appeared doubtful. Grace stepped forward. “All right,” she began. “Hypothetically, if you agreed to this, what would be your terms, your limits?”

  “ ‘This’ being us fucking?” Max clarified.

  “Yes.”

  He lifted his chin, his eyes traveling down her body in a way that caused her skin to heat. “No cuddling, no lovey-dovey talk, no pet names, no kissing.”

  Grace cocked her head. “No kissing, period, or . . .”

  “On the mouth,” he answered quietly. “It’s too intimate.”

  Grace smirked. “How very Pretty Woman of you.”

  “Pretty what?”

  She waved her hand. “Never mind. Those seem fair terms.”

  Even the cuddling. She wasn’t about to tell him how he’d held her all night long. That would be her little secret.

  “No promises, no expectations,” he added, firmly counting the limits on his fingers. “We use a condom.” He pointed at her, his expression grave. “That’s a deal breaker for me.”

  “Of course. I’d expect nothing less.” She watched Max gather himself. “Anything else?”

  He pressed his lips together. “I don’t think so. As long as we’re clear that this is what it is, nothing more. We’re friends. No relationship, no love, no bullshit.”

  Bitterness laced every word, but Grace nodded anyway. “Sure. You’re just a friend helping me move forward,” she said as though reading from a textbook. “We try it once and see what happens, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay.” Grace licked her lips, underlying excitement pinging through her veins.

  Max cleared his throat and shifted where he stood. “And if you’re not okay the first time?”

  Grace lifted a shoulder, praying to everything she adored that she would be. She’d be mortified if she had another attack in front of Max. “Then we can try again,” she offered, her voice lifting as though it was a question. She didn’t want to assume Max would want to sleep with her more than once, despite his words to the contrary. “Until I can handle being touched without freaking out like an idiot and I find someone who can love me, warts, and all, we do this.”

  She smiled, but Max didn’t reciprocate. She understood his reticence, of course; this was a big deal; but Grace didn’t allow herself to worry about how their being intimate might throw a wrench into the workings of their friendship. He’d made it abundantly clear where he stood, and Grace would respect that. Plus she trusted herself not to let any nonplatonic feelings creep into the equation. No. She wouldn’t. It was what
it was. No more.

  She looked Max square in the eye. “It won’t get weird. Promise.”

  “Good.” His shoulders dropped slightly; he was apparently relieved. “What about you?” he asked after a beat of silence. “What’re your limits?”

  She blinked at him, surprised by his question.

  “Grace, I don’t want to touch you and make you panic,” he added steadily. “If this is gonna work, you have to tell me what I can and can’t do.”

  Grace licked her lips and thought hard about what would make her panic, what would scare her. Looking at Max so earnest and responsible, she struggled to bring anything to mind.

  “I . . . don’t like being held down,” she said gently, recollecting the previous night. “As you saw with Buck, I can’t handle being— I get claustrophobic.” She pulled her hair over her shoulder. “I need to be able to move my hands.”

  “Understood. What else?”

  Her heart skipped as a memory of her and Rick flashed through her psyche. His angry voice, her tears, his hands on her head holding her to his body. “This may be another deal breaker for you.” She closed her eyes, not wanting to see Max’s face while she spoke. “I don’t, I can’t . . . go down—I don’t like it.” She opened her eyes slowly. Max’s expression hadn’t changed. “He wasn’t— Rick wasn’t kind when I did it . . .”

  A muscle in Max’s jaw jumped and his gaze burned hot. “I get it,” he said softly. “And I can live with that.” He paused before the corner of his mouth lifted wolfishly. “Do you like it being done to you?”

  Grace coughed. “I, um, I don’t—I can, um, yeah, I don’t mind.”

  Max laughed, his face regaining its usual gentleness. “Good to know.”

  Grace chuckled, too. The tension in the room lifted around them. “So, are we gonna do this?”

  His grin dropped. “As long as you know that I can’t give you any more than—”

  “It’s just sex. I get it,” Grace interrupted with mock exasperation. “Seriously, dude, you’re not that hot. You’d think you had a whole gaggle of women following you around declaring their undying love!”

  Max barked out a laugh, his cheeks pinking adorably. He rubbed the back of his neck, a nervous gesture to which Grace was becoming accustomed.

  She stuck out her hand. “Shall we shake on it, just to make sure there’s no misunderstanding? That we’re just two friends helping each other out.” Confusion flitted across Max’s face. “Oh, please.” Grace laughed. “You need this as much as I do. I don’t care what you say.” He narrowed his gaze but didn’t respond. “Deal?” she asked.

  He looked from her eyes to her hand and back again, before he took it and squeezed gently. “Deal.”

  “You seem tense,” Elliot noted as he wrote on his legal pad.

  Max shifted under his shrink’s all-knowing stare.

  “You wanna tell me about it?”

  “Not really.”

  The truth was, since Max had decided to help Grace with her . . . intimacy problem, he’d been feeling all sorts of chaotic. The day after the deal was agreed to, Grace left for DC. Following her panic attack, she’d arranged an emergency appointment with her therapist. She also wanted to spend a little time with her brother, which suited Max just fine.

  A bit of space before the inevitable could only be a good idea, right?

  He exhaled heavily and clasped the bridge of his nose. Seriously, he was losing his damned mind if he thought he needed space from Grace. If anything, he’d missed seeing her the two days she was away. His run wasn’t nearly as fun on his own. It wasn’t space he needed. It was the chance to contemplate what their agreement meant. And after he’d contemplated, ruminated, and brooded like the motherfucker he was for forty-eight hours, he conceded that the mere thought of fucking Grace left him in a cold sweat.

  It was crazy. He’d had sex before, for Christ’s sake. A lot of sex before, and he’d never analyzed it as much as he had for the last seven days. He’d had women of all ages, sizes, and races, and enjoyed them, but Grace was different. Things with Grace were different. She wasn’t some broad he’d picked up in a bar and never thought about seeing again. She was a friend.

  Once Grace had returned from DC, looking and sounding more relaxed, they’d fallen back into their old routine. They ran, talked, and hung out at her house, even when Max wasn’t working. He helped her paint, hung more pictures, and even took her to the local garden center to look at plants she wanted for the place. Things were just as they’d been before she left, except, they weren’t. Because, in all the time they’d spent together since they’d shaken hands, neither one of them had made a move.

  Not one.

  Not a light touch, a lingering glance, or even a fuck it, let’s get down to it.

  Nothing.

  Max had thought about it. Jesus, how he’d thought about it. He’d watched her work behind the bar, and he’d watched her run, but now he imagined what it would be like to touch her under that skirt she wore at Whiskey’s, or even taste the sweat that trickled down the sides of her face as they ran. He listened to her laugh, watched her throw her head back, and wondered if she’d do the same when she came.

  Yeah, “tense” was a great word for it. It’d been a long time since his cock had taken such an active role in his day-to-day life. Ever since his body recognized Grace as no longer off-limits, it had been more than willing to “help” her out whenever she needed.

  “Are your meds working? Any more terrors?”

  Max began nibbling the corner of his thumbnail. He shook his head in answer to Elliot’s question, pondering whether he should simply tell all about Grace. He knew what the doctor’s first instinct would be. He’d think Max was getting involved in a relationship, which he wasn’t, and he’d explain how it was a bad idea.

  Maybe it was a bad idea. But seeing Grace’s face as she told him about what she’d been through and the struggles she still dealt with daily was all the push he needed to help her. She wanted to win, to reclaim herself from that fucker who beat her, and who was Max to deny her?

  “I have a question,” he blurted around his hand. “A hypothetical.”

  Elliot’s brows jumped. “I’m all ears.”

  “Okay, so,” Max began, sitting forward. “Relationships for recovering addicts are a bad thing, right?”

  “Not an altogether bad thing, no, but we try to dissuade patients from engaging in any new romantic attachments. The emotions can be too overwhelming at the beginning of a relationship and have been known to trigger a relapse.”

  Max clasped his hands together and let them fall between his knees. “And what about sex? Do you dissuade your patients from that, too?”

  Elliot paused, his hand by his face, the pen between his fingers motionless. “As long as you’re safe and honest with your partner, I don’t see anything wrong with your having sex.”

  “Why do I feel like there’s a ‘but’ comin’?” Max asked wryly.

  Elliot placed his legal pad on the arm of his chair. Uh-oh. “I simply want to make sure you’re not substituting one need for another, Max.”

  “It’s not like that, Doc,” he said vaguely. “She’s . . . we’re not— It’s complicated.”

  Elliot nodded but didn’t push. “And she knows about your past, your addiction?”

  “Some. She knows about my rehab, you, Tate. I’ve mentioned Lizzie.”

  “That’s good, Max.” His smile was proud. “That’s a good start. Honesty in any relationship, platonic or otherwise, is vitally important.”

  Yeah, that much Max knew. He sat back in his seat, feeling somewhat calmer with Elliot’s affirmation that sex was okay—not that Max wouldn’t have done it anyway if he’d said no. He was the biggest rule breaker and asshole there was, after all. But his therapist’s words eased an anxious part of him that had been griping for more than a week.

  The drive back from his session was long. Max wound the window of his truck down and enjoyed the warm evening air on his fa
ce, allowing it to help build up the resolve that had started to take shape while sitting in Elliot’s office. The whole thing with Grace would become problematic only if he allowed it to. He’d opened up to her and shared things that, ordinarily, would have had him disappearing inside himself. That was the hard bit out of the way.

  Sex was easy. Sex he knew. Sex he was good at. Sex with Grace would no doubt be awesome.

  He just needed to, as Grace would say, stop overthinking it, and by the time he pulled up outside the boardinghouse, he had. He was going to fuck a hot woman with no strings attached. Any other normal guy would be singing from the rooftops and it was about time he did the same. He smacked his hands on the steering wheel, resolute.

  No pressure, no worries, no fuss.

  Yeah, he was going to start enjoying himself, goddamn it.

  Tate arrived the following morning with his customary wide smile and a yellow T-shirt decorated with—

  “What the fuck is that?” Max asked with a puzzled shake of his head, once they’d sat down in their usual seat in the coffee shop, each having bought a sub sandwich.

  Tate glanced down at himself and cocked an eyebrow. “It’s a Minion dressed as Wolverine,” he answered, his tone clearly disgusted with Max’s lack of comic book expertise. “What the hell else would it be?”

  Max snorted. “I apologize. I’m obviously having an off day with DC—”

  “Marvel! Jesus.”

  “Whatever.”

  Tate shook his head, looking out of the window toward the sky, his mouth full of sandwich. “I don’t even know why I keep coming back to see you. I really don’t.”

  “Because you love me,” Max retorted, taking a mammoth bite of his chicken on rye.

  Tate shrugged. “Someone has to, I guess.” They sat in companionable silence, watching the world go by, while they ate. “So how have things been?”

  Max nodded. “Okay. Got my six-month medallion.”

  Never for one moment had Max thought he’d get to that point, but the gold medal in his pocket proved it. When he’d been awarded it at his last group session, it had been the first time he’d truly felt a shiver of pride.