by Adriana Law
“I’ll try not to.” His words are hard to understand around the mouthful of candy.
When I am not watching him, he is watching me.
We work together.
A team.
It is several minutes before I mutter an, “thank you.”
“For what?”
“For being nice,” I say.
“Mya, you don’t have to thank me for being nice to you.”
***
Tori and Sterling are in town, bringing up some of her carvings and his artwork. They opt for staying with her mother. Sawyer says it is driving Sterling insane. The woman is still adapting to her daughter dating a self-proclaimed druggie bad boy sporting way too many tattoos.
I know how Sterling feels. Samuel Bentley still despises me. So, the fact that Tori’s mother even allows Sterling to stay with them is progress.
Sawyer surprises me Friday evening by suggesting we invite Sterling and Tori over for dinner. I’m nervous, very unsure how to act. Do we kiss? Keep us a secret? I don’t know?
All the worry dissolves the second they get to the apartment and immediately, without apologies, Sawyer is very hands-on. While he grills downstairs and talks to Victoria about the upcoming show, I go up to the apartment and get the bar ready. Sawyer still has no table so it’s going to have to buffet style—fix your plate and eat on the sofa while watching a movie. Very relaxed and non-formal which I think we’re all used to by now. In fact, the mood is great. It is fun hanging out with them and pretending to be normal.
I consider beer with our meal. Since I won’t be drinking any, will Sawyer notice and suspect that I’m pregnant. Positively pregnant, by the way. It was a cheap test but accurate enough considering my body is already telling me that’s the case. I hope he notices that I’m not drinking and asks me about it later. You can’t lie to a direct question, can you? No, I decide. You can’t. Maybe if I drop enough hints, Sawyer will pick up on one of them and save me from myself.
I’m bent over digging salad dressing out of the refrigerator when I sense Sterling at the bar. I know it’s him and not Sawyer by the feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s dread. Not desire. Closing the refrigerator door I smile and show Sterling what I recovered from the very back. “Hope this is okay. Fat-free dressing. You know, Saw.”
“Yep, and obviously…so do you,” he comments.
I sit the dressing down on the counter.
Sterling steals a cucumber from the top of the salad and pops it in his mouth. Palms on the counter I watch him closely, wondering now what I ever thought was so great. He doesn’t even come close to comparing to his brother. We just stare at each other; Sterling chewing, me reminiscing over how blind I can sometimes be. “Are you saying you disapprove?” I finally get the nerve to ask. Here we go…
“Not at all.” Sterling smiles. “Opposite.” He steals a tomato chunk this time. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen my brother this relaxed and happy. It’s good to see that he does remember how to smile.” I release all the air I was holding in my lungs. Sterling laughs. “Relax, Starr. We’re good. What would you have done if I said I disapproved?”
“I would have told you to go fuck yourself. I’m keeping him.”
“I figured.” He swipes one of the cold beers I took out of the refrigerator and paused before going back down to Victoria. “Word of warning though…whatever you do…just do not lie to my brother. He hates that shit.” Sterling’s blue eyes search mine, lingering. “He told you about Rach?” he asked, looking distraught and ate up with guilt.
I loathe that Sterling uses a shortening of her name like she was a huge part of their life. Sawyer’s life. “Yea. He might have mentioned it. Bad brother,” I joke to release some of the tension. Sterling doesn’t laugh. “Not my finest moment that’s for sure.”
“I bet. You know, he has forgiven you.”
Sterling raises a brow. “Has he?’ There is a long, excruciating pause. “Maybe…but it will always be there.” He tilts the neck of his beer in my direction, a dead-serious look in his eyes. “I’m telling you. Don’t lie to him.”
I hold the smile of ‘No, I never would’ until Sterling is gone, and then I press four fingers to my throat where I can feel my crazy heartbeat under the surface. Shit. I am so totally screwed.
After the meal, Sawyer and I are stretched out on the couch. Fully clothed, barefoot and making out like two lovesick teenagers being observed by the occasional parent. “For real, can you two just move it on into the bedroom,” Sterling says staring down at us. A pole with a roller stands erect beside him.
Then Tori is there also, hand on her hip. “I second that.” She turns her head and looks at her boyfriend. “How did we get stuck painting their walls.”
“Their damn good manipulators, that’s how,” Sterling returns.
“We should never have come over,” Tori says. “They suck as a host.”
“I agree. Somebody drank all the beer.”
Sawyer laughs into my mouth.
I move my mouth to Sawyer’s ear, partly because I want to lick it and partly to whisper, “Payback is a bitch.”
He gets it. We have watched those two fawn all over each other. Now it’s their turn. While kissing me Sawyer holds up a hand and moves a finger in the general direction of where the painting needs to get done. “Nobody said you two can take a break. Get back to work.” Our company listens well and disappears. Sawyer’s nose caresses my cheek. “They’re playing our favorite song, beautiful.”
“You are correct. They are.”
“Sun kissed skin is touching my body, and soft lips are slowly dancing…” he sings into my ear, his voice soft; raspy and deep, “…I think I’m falling for ya...”
I giggle, warm sensations spreading throughout my body.
I am in an exceptionally good mood. Not more than an hour ago I went into the bathroom to check my face, make sure my eyeliner wasn’t running, and to make sure my hair wasn’t flat…things like that, and I noticed he’d changed his third goal for tomorrow. Changed it from keeping her to Love Mya. I didn’t say anything. I never do. He knows I saw it. Like I know that it’s the closest he can come to actually saying it out loud. He can admit all his flaws, all his shortcomings but the simple words “I love you” are not so simple. The fact that he wrote anything remotely close to it on the mirror, unashamed his brother would see it, makes me hopeful. It makes me just want to touch him all over, regardless of who is watching.
The kissing gets a more intense and Sawyer moves from beside me to between my legs, hovering. My hands slide up under his shirt, my nails skirting over warm abs.
“Screw it,” Sterling says. “You two can paint your own damn walls.” I hear Tori squeal, and I assume Sterling picked her up. Sawyer’s bedroom door shuts.
Sawyer lifts up and shouts, “No way. Not in my bed! You two have to go home. You’ve overstayed your welcome.”
“Fuck you,” comes from the room. “I lived here first.”
I hear Tori laugh and my mouth falls open. “How dare she? And we were nice to her. We gave her food.”
“I know, right,” Sawyers says and then returns to shouting at his brother. “Technically, I believe your bedroom was out here. That big ass bed dominating the entire room…just like your big ass head.”
“Suck. My. Dick.”
I sigh. “Ah, brotherly love.”
Sawyer looks down at me. “I guess we’re sleeping on the couch.”
“I don’t mind.” My leg hooks around his hip, my foot provocatively rubbing over his fine ass. “I think it’s kind of…neat,” I say pulling him down to me, my hands running up over the muscles of his back.
“Neat, huh? I like that word…neat.”
“Yea,” I smile against his lips, “neat and sexy like you.”
His teeth catch my bottom lip, and I shudder. We imitate sex with our clothes still completely on. His hard-on under his jeans pushes against me, rubbing between my legs in a very suggestive way. It is so unusual. At
one point Sawyer pulls the blanket from the back of the sofa, covering us.
My shirt gets worked up, his mouth and tongue hot over my breast. We’re both breathing hard. Our bodies sweaty. Me, practically begging underneath him. I can’t say I’ve ever been this turned on. Not even close. It’s so consuming, full-on kissing for over an hour while just innocently touching.
“What are you doing to me,” he groans in my ear.
“This is new,” I pant. “I like it. Builds the suspense.”
Sawyer pulls back and stares down at me with heavy-lidded eyes, breathing hard as I am. “What do you mean new?” I blink, my comprehension slightly hazing at the moment. I go to kiss him, but he won’t let me. He distributes his weight to an arm, propped up over me. He runs his fingertips down strands of hair, tucking behind my ear. “Are you saying you’ve never innocently made out before?”
I shake my head.
“Not in high school?” he asks.
Again, I shake my head before lifting my head, determined we’re going to get back to the kissing. “Nah, wait a minute,” he tells me. “Seriously, Mya?”
“You’re looking at me like I have a handicap.”
“Are you yanking my chain?”
“No, Sawyer. The guys I’ve been around don’t make out. The ones that might’ve if I asked…I was too fucked up to ask nicely. I was a bad kid. If you asked me to go left, I went right just for the hell of it.”
“That’s sad.”
“What’s sad is you’re ruining the mood.”
“I’m sorry,” he says kissing me. Not like before; little weak peaks.
I open my eyes to see his are open, and I refuse to move my lips against his, asking, “Do you want to stop?”
“Hell no. I just need a minute. I have performance anxiety.”
I laugh. “You have what?”
“You know…scared shitless that I’m going to screw up your first time make out session on the couch.”
“You are so damn cute when you want to be,” I say.
“So now I’ve been reduced from sexy to cute?”
I think it becomes a challenge: seeing who can hold out the longest. Sawyer moves between my legs making me groan, my head falling back onto the sofa. The friction between our bodies and the way he kisses has me seeing cross-eyed. I’m five seconds away from tearing the boy’s clothes off when I feel him shudder against me. I’m not certain, but think… “Did you,” I ask.
His head rest on my quickly rising and falling chest. Then he is hauling me even closer than before, his heavy breath filling my ear. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I suck. I swear…that hasn’t happened since I was younger.”
I tense.
He goes to kiss me, but I don’t respond. “Are you mad?” he ask, studying my face for the longest moment. “Wow. That’s was pathetic, wasn’t it? I can usually control my shit better than that but the intense rubbing action and those sounds you kept making…baby, I couldn’t help it.”
“Sawyer, stop. I’m not mad.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No. I’m not.”
“Then why won’t you kiss me?” he asks.
“I just—”
“Just what…say it, Mya.” He sits up; one of my legs still behind him, the other over his lap. He blows out an irritated breath dragging both hands down his face before he looks at my face. “Dammit, don’t punish me when I don’t even know what I did wrong.”
“You said: it’s been since you younger that, that happened, which means it’s happened before.”
“So…what about it?” He shrugs and holds up his hands. “What am I missing?”
I gnaw on my bottom lip.
“Mya, you gotta talk to me or this isn’t going to work.”
“I’m wondering…did you mean with her?”
“Her who?”
“Racheal,” I all but scream. I dislike myself more than usual. I’m noticing that when it comes to Sawyer, I’ve become possessive. It’s not pretty.
Even in the semi-dark I can see his face go pale as understanding dawns. His eyes shut, the heel of his hand going to his forehead. “Fuck. I am an asshole. I shouldn't have said that.” And then he is moving me, laying down next to me. “That’s what you’re thinking about? A girl I dated a long time ago.”
“It wasn’t that long ago. You said it yourself; you went to Colton’s to escape the bad memories and, by the way…good act.”
“What do you mean…good act?”
“Back then you acted like a serious womanizing pig.” I want to say: like you father, but I hold it in. “It was a huge turn-off.”
“Thanks.” He goes to get up, but I stop him.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That was uncalled for. I don’t like the thought of you with her. It makes me sick to my stomach.”
He doesn’t get up from the sofa; he sits on the edge though. He’s right. We need space. “Listen,” he says, his elbows resting on his legs, his head in his hands. “I’m not going to blow smoke up your ass and tell you I didn’t really like her. That she was ugly and I don’t know why I dated her for so long.” He straightens and leans over me, a hand on each side of me. “But what I will tell you is she cheated on me with my brother and that pretty much killed it for me. If you think for one second that I’m still holding onto that shit…then, you don’t know me. Yeah. It took me a little while to sort it all out, I’m not impulsive, I think things through.” He rests the weight of his upper body on me now, taking my hand and holding it as he stares directly into my eyes. “I don’t want Racheal. I want you. But if you don’t chill with the jealousy—”
I interrupt. “I know. I know I’m purposely pushing you away. I’ve never had anything this real, Sawyer.”
“I understand.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, and I’ll even go one step further by saying, if you ever notice you’re starting to feel insecure, if you’ll just come talk to me about it, instead of bottling it up and trying to entrap me in some way…I help you by reminding you how special I think you are.”
“You really mean it, don’t you?”
He leans and softly kisses me. “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.”
I believe him.
It’s not him I don’t trust, it’s me.
***
“Jason called in sick. I have to go in for a couple of hours. You going to be ready when I get home?” Sawyer says right before shoving the toothbrush in his mouth. He leans in the doorway of the bedroom. “Do you hear me, Mya?”
“Uh huh,” I mumble, “I’ll be ready. Tori’s show. I won’t forget.” I don’t look up from where I am sitting in bed against the headboard reading. Or at least Sawyer assumes I am reading. I haven’t turned a page the past half hour. I’m too busy gnawing my bottom lip and thinking.
“What you reading?” he asks around a mouth full of toothpaste.
“A book about dreams.” The sounds of bristles running over teeth comes from the doorway. My eyes never leave the book. “Listen to this…it says here that dreams about death can mean the termination of something in your life. Although dreams of death can be horrifying they also can mean monumental change is ahead…like the birth of—”
More foamy gurgled speech. “Have you been dreaming about death?” he asks
I shrug.
He points the tip of his brush in my direction; eyes narrowed, “don’t say that shit. You know I’m already paranoid about leaving you here alone,” then he turns to leave. I tell him, “That’s not what I was getting at.”
Sawyer totally missed it.
Over the past two weeks I have dropped a ton of blatantly, stupidly-obvious hints like: Not hiding the fact that I keep getting these waves a nausea that send me sprinting for the bathroom, or the dreamy far-off looks while laying a hand on my belly. Not smoking. Not drinking a beer whenever he grabs one after work. The signs are all there. Either Sawyer is a cop who doesn’t notice the obvious, or he is distracted.
He change
d one of his goals a week ago to: Hunt the fucker down.
This lead to him telling me that Ricin had indeed been released on bond, something Sawyer had been withholding to not “frighten me”. Needless to say, Sawyer’s been clingier than usual, hesitant to go even to work. I fear him doing something irrational and for this very reason begged him to drop it and just let it go. “I just want to be happy,” I’d told him.
Sawyer is not listening.
He said his new mission is to focus on human trafficking and all that entails. He’s become obsessed with it really. Obsessed with all the men involved with hurting me and every other woman out there—Ricin Carter at the top of that list.
It may sound awful, but I don’t want to share him with every other woman out there.
I want his focus here.
On me.
Is he distracted? Yeah. That has to be it.
I am desperate to share the baby with him. I’ve mapped out the entire conversation in my head already, how I will explain the unexpected pregnancy: I swear. I don’t know what happened I took my pills religiously, every day. But, now that it has happened… I am happy because it’s your baby…our baby. We can do this, Saw. You’ll see. It’s going to be great! Then I will throw my arms around his neck and squeeze him close telling him how he and this baby are a blessing.
I want Sawyer lying beside me; his face lit as he kisses my belly, telling me how my face glows, and it will be true because for the first time in a long time…I am happy.
I want Sawyer there for the ultrasound when we find out for sure if the baby is a boy or girl. It’s a boy. I already know it. It’s the only choice that makes sense; another Bentley boy and I will raise him…we will raise him to respect all women. He will be smart and just an insanely strong and handsome as his father.
“Have you seen my belt?” Sawyer asks coming back through without the toothbrush.
“Sofa cushion,” I answer half-heartedly.
