“Scout, oh God…”
He pulls his lips from mine, looking into my eyes as he opens two more buttons. I glance down at his hands as he continues on. Another two. My eyes are pinned to his fingers until every last button has been opened. And that’s when I drop my basket and freak like I’ve been sideswiped in a hit and run. Every mean word I’ve cataloged comes rushing through my mind like a flood from hell, every word about my ugly freak-show melted skin. I grab the front of my shirt and pin it together with my hands. Crying… Goddammit. Crying. I barely hear my mumbling words through the terror that races through my mind.
“No, no, Scout, no…no…stop, please. Don’t look at me. Please, no more. Stop!”
His arms are around me instantly. Holding me tight. “Shhh. Shhh. It’s okay, Tess. Shhh. It’s okay, my beautiful girl…shhhh.”
His hands caress my back, telling me how beautiful I am. But Scout opening my shirt to see me the way he wants to, no…that won’t be beautiful, he won’t look at my skin and ever think that it’s beautiful. Because he’ll never have the chance.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SCOUT
How in all these years could I not have put it together that something about my Tess was broken? It makes me love her even more, this intensely vulnerable side that’s she’s locked away and battled alone. I thought I knew everything about her, and I mean everything. To think you have someone figured out at their core is a bold assumption to begin with. But to be blindsided with something so intimate and personal about them, well…it’s a bit life altering, to say the least. It makes you want to question everything you hold true in your heart.
But it also answers lots of questions. My biggest one…is this why she never wanted me? Fear of exposure? Not for anything is she trusting me with this. And that’s the part that breaks my heart. She can’t make her way through to see that I will never be pain for her. Maybe in time she’ll find me, but the looming question now, of course, is what path will she take after this weekend. Is the fairy-tale wedding clouding her judgment so much that she doesn’t see him for what he is? Or is he her safety net? She’s never needed to be true to him. Two years and he has yet to see her fully naked. Good God. That makes me want to die a little for both of them. It seems impossible that you’d be able to commit yourself on that level and not be able to fully be yourself. Though I kind of stand in those very shoes. Fifteen years of an intimate relationship and here I sit, sucker-punched.
Tess sleeps in my lap, her hands clutching her unbuttoned shirt with every bit of life force inside of her. To be with her tonight, the way we were…Jesus, just so beautiful. And though we barely did anything, it was as arousing and incredible as anything I’ve ever felt between us. I knew we wouldn’t make love, and I won’t if she’s going to stay engaged to Creed. I won’t if she isn’t able to let me see her—see all of her truths. I won’t do that to us.
Touching her? I could touch her all day, all night…but beyond that, I’d be cheating both of us, and it would hurt like hell to never have her that way again. Because once I make love to Tess, there will be no one else. I don’t care how fucking long it takes for her to come to me.
She’s out like dead wood. I carry her to the bed and lay her as carefully as I can under the covers, then button her shirt. Would I like to open it and peek? You’re damn right I would, and she’d never know it if I did. But I can’t. She has to show me herself when she’s good and ready. She thinks it’ll be never. I’m more of a glass-half-full guy than that. I’ve slept in Tess’s bed more times over the years than I can recall. We never did anything, not even one of those times, because we were both always with someone else. I’m always in my clothes and so is she, so at the end of the day it’s always been ridiculously harmless. For us it’s just more of a hold-each-other thing. She trusts me…or so I thought she did.
I climb under the blanket as I have so many times before, to spoon my body against hers. For the first time, though, I’m naked against her, and she has on a shirt and panties. It still feels so good that it makes me hard. I hold her all night and beg her in quiet hushed whispers to let him go once and for all and find me in any way she can.
*
The snow continues to fall at a heavy pace, and darkness butters the bedroom even though it’s eight in the morning. Tess never sleeps late, but last night was a pretty massive bag of emotions for her and she’s still out cold. She lies across the bed like the willowy branch of a fallen tree limb. I sneak into the kitchen, make us cappuccinos, and grab the cock cake along with one fork. As I walk back into the bedroom, Tess is just stirring. I snuggle in next to her warm body and keep the tray with our cappuccinos and cake on my lap.
“Are we having cock for breakfast?” Her smile is ear to ear, her eyes sleepy and dusted with last night’s tear crumbs. Her cheeks hold a ripe pink blush, making her look as if she had been just picked fresh off a farm.
“Would you like cock for breakfast, baby? I was planning on hand-feeding you.”
“Well, that’s tempting. And, I might add, now that I’ve seen your rod of pleasure, I have no doubt it would be lovely and filling, to say the least.” An amused smirk smacks the edges of her lips as she flashes me an indulgent glance.
“Yeah, well, I did give you an eyeful last night, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did.” She turns onto her side, drags her fingers across the cake, then licks the frosting off. It’s pretty sexy… I mean she’s hot regardless, but now that we’ve gotten a tiny bit more intimate and are finding ourselves more curious about each other, the heat factor is significant.
“So was that okay, to see me in the flesh?” I can’t help but waggle my eyebrows at her in a half-serious look of seduction.
“Um, yeah. That was more than okay—that was making me come undone in a really good way,” she says, her eyes cast downward as a low, throaty laugh escapes her throat. “You’re, ah…well, really beautiful. I mean, not just your big gorgeous manhood down under, but you’re beautiful in the way you love me. I wish I could open up to you in the same way…you know, with my…um….”
I cut her off. I have to. Not that I don’t abso-fucking-lutely love where this conversation is going, but I can’t bear to have her take herself out at the knees. I won’t let her do it. I grab the hand that’s just reached into the frosting and I suck the sweetness off her finger, then I hold her hand and squeeze it tightly as she shoots me a sideways glance.
“You can open up to me, Tess. Hi…hi there, it’s me. Remember me?” I do all I can to persuade her that together we can hurtle into the future, even as I navigate the depth of her congested thoughts.
“I’m the guy who would take a bull’s horn up my ass for you. You think I want to hurt you. You, Tess, you are the beautiful one. Please, I beg of you, don’t hold back with me, don’t shield yourself from my eyes. My eyes love you, so do my heart and my fingers and my ears and my lips and yes, Tess, my cock too. My cock adores you…and it wants you, wants to love all of your sexy parts…but it doesn’t get to have you. So it’s kind of a sad and sorry cock.”
She slips her hands around my naked waist and pulls herself into me possessively. “Oh. Your cock can’t have me, because…?”
“Really? Would you do that to him?” I ask, all the while reveling in the firm pressure of her hands and hips that shoot a hot spark of reaction through my groin.
“To your cock?”
“Tess, come on. For Christ’s sake, to Creed. My cock is an island for now and you don’t get swim to it or take a boat to it. You might get to look at again if you want, though.”
I move the tray to the end of the bed and brush my lips against the edge of her ear. “Would you let me make love to you? Because once I do, there’s no going back. Once I sink myself into your gorgeous tight cunt, you know I will own it for the rest of my life.”
“You’d want that?”
With pulse-pounding certainty, I answer, “That? To make love to you? Yes, you…everything about you. Yes. I’d w
ant that. But what about you? You don’t trust me enough to look at you. That worries me…not to mention the fact that you’re getting married next Saturday.”
Tess stares at me in challenge as a battle between our eyes ensues.
“I’m not going to tell you to break off your engagement,” I continue. “I won’t do that to you or to me. I just won’t. But we keep running into each other in very new ways…in ways that, from what I can tell, you like, right?”
“Yeah,” she says as her eyes search my face, while the smallest crack of a smile forms at the corners of her mouth in a wonderment sort of a way.
“But you don’t trust me. The trust I need to make love to you, I would need all of you—none of him, but every inch of you. That’s the only way, sweetheart. You say the words and I’m there.”
“I do, but this is bigger than trust. I’ve been holding on to this my whole life. You can’t understand it. I can’t just change. You can’t just expect to snap your fingers at me and boom, I feel all warm and fuzzy about my body. It’s deeper than that. I can’t explain it…it’s too much.” Her bluntness is stunning; her pained expression, though, a dead giveaway that she feels under attack.
“Try me. We’re stranded. I’ve got all day, I’ve got all night. And I’ve got enough cock cake to keep your mouth and belly full for days.”
She gives me a torturing slap as she snorts out a bubbling laugh. The tenderness of our moment is a bridge that hopefully demands her attention.
We laugh. We poke fun at each other. We talk, and talk, and talk. And still, hours later, she cannot be moved to the center. She’s like a tree with roots that go on for miles. This thing, this pain…this is not going away any time soon. It’s broken her, deep down inside. I can tell her nonstop how much I love her, how beautiful she is, how she can trust me…but her eyes tell me all I need to know. She will not trust me. And in all honesty, it scares the crap out of me. How could we ever have each other in the ways that I want her if she won’t trust me with this?
He’s safe to her. He won’t push for it. I will. He trusts that she’s giving him everything already; he needs nothing more of her. Not me. I need all of her. I need all of her trust and all of her body. I need her to be committed to me in that kind of intense, all-out, all-consuming way.
Because if all she can give me are bits and pieces of herself, I’m not sure I’ll ever get to the core of her heart. And if I can’t do that, if I can’t have her like that, then how will we make it through tough times? What if something else happens and she shuts off another part? Then how much of her do I get? Will she slowly be whittled away from me over the years, little tiny chips at a time? Or will she be able to let go all the way and free fall with me into a beautiful, all-encompassing, complete surrender of love and trust?
The snow keeps coming and I wonder if we might be stranded for more than another day or two. I’m not complaining. Believe me, inside I’m pretty much cheering for Mother Nature to just bring the fuck out of this blizzard, because it gives me the one-on-one time with Tess that I need to see if she has it in her to turn the corner with me by her side. I realize it’s asking a lot of someone to hand over a sacred piece like this when it’s never crossed their mind that someone might expect it. Maybe she’s thinking the same thoughts. Maybe, though, hers are more along the lines of hoping I’ll back down, hoping she can convince me that this piece is for her to keep and never share. Well, she’s wrong, because that is not ever going to happen.
*
Her arms are flying about in joyful birdlike gestures. “You made me mini lobster pot pies because I was ignoring you this week?”
“I knew you’d come around and I know you love them almost as much as my mac-n-cheese.”
Her slender fingers cup the ramekin as if she’s holding a chunk of solid gold. “These might rival your mac-n-cheese, Scout, plus I feel really classy eating them while drinking straight out of a champagne bottle with the penis topper.”
“Yeah, well, you look classy. Someone around here needs to get sucked off.”
She’s so damn cute, sitting on the kitchen counter, crossed-legged in just her panties and a big sweatshirt. Every time she takes another swig of the champagne and wraps her lips around that penis topper, my cock twitches. Twitches like it knows exactly how good it would feel to have her lips wrapped around it.
“Are you asking me to get on my knees?” Her eyes shine and I know for certain she’s more than half serious.
“No, I’m not asking you to get on your knees. I’m sure your fiancé wouldn’t like it very much if you blew me.”
The wet pink flesh of her tongue circles her lips suggestively as I shake her off, even though that’s exactly where I’d like her. But first I’d like her to call him and end her engagement. An unlikely scenario, I realize. For one thing, there’s no cell service here.
“You need to stop bringing it up.” A silent lie sits in her eyes as she snaps her head away from me.
She means the wedding. Him. All of which will be the end of our messing around at the edges of what’s getting more dangerous by the minute. It’s not that we haven’t always been out there with each other, it’s just I never thought she’d meant any of it. It used to be when I’d say “blow me,” she’d get on her knees and crawl to me. Then we’d crack up and I’d bump my cock in her face with a mock blow job motion. You know: jeans on, just pretending, fucking around. But the thing is, now she’s threatening it, and I know she means it. We’re not eighteen anymore. She’d love to get on her knees and blow me, and fuck if I could stop her once I was unzipped. It’s all I want. Can you blame me? What the hell do you think I’ve been jerking off to for fifteen years?
“You want me to stop bringing up the elephant in the room? The fact that you’re getting married next weekend…you want me to ignore that? No.”
“Please, can we have one night of just total fun like old times without talking about it, and him? This is my last weekend as a single girl, please. That’s the whole point of this party!”
“Nope.”
“Why not?” She’s semi-pissed. Her eyes are like impenetrable shields, dark and brooding, filled with tension.
“Why not? Why fucking not? Seriously, Tess? You still haven’t ’fessed up as to why you have to marry him. And yet you’ve been prancing around here playing house all goddamned day in your panties and sweatshirt like I’m your fucking sorority sister. Tess, not that I need to point this out, but you are a major cock tease who’s got a massive rock on her hand, which equals a Do Not Enter sign on her pussy.”
“You want me to put some pants on?” The virgin purity of the look she’s sporting makes me laugh out loud.
“I didn’t say that.”
She has the tiny ramekin bowl up to her mouth and she’s licking the last of the lobster pot pie straight from it, literally tonguing the entire thing. The edge, the inside, the outside. Giving it a rimmer of sorts. I wish to hell I was videoing this because it’s hotter than fuck to watch her tongue and lips move so seductively. And again, this is not new: she always eats this way. She’s suggestive in just about everything she does. Provocative is her nature, but now it’s different.
“Then what do you want me to do?” she says mockingly. Fine by me, sister.
“Make a choice, because I can’t make it for you—but you are making it really fucking hard to be stranded alone with you.”
“Because you want to fuck me?”
There’s simply no misinterpreting her. I take two steps towards her and wrap my arms around her body and empty logic out of my brain. Then I make love to her eyes while laying on a simmering, seductive, panty-dropping voice. “Because I want to tie you up to that bed and strip you naked and fuck you seven ways ’til Sunday. Yes, Tess, I want that. But, that, sweetheart…is not going to happen, and you know all the reasons why.”
“It wouldn’t really be like cheating, because we’re best friends.” She practically sings it like she’s Polly-fucking-Anna.
; I think she actually has convinced herself of this idea. Another lie. She’s decided she wants to mess around with me, then run off and marry him. She seems to be glossing over reason number two. But that makes sense, as it’s all she’s ever known. Shiv in the heart much?
“You can call it whatever you want. I’m not playing that game, baby. And by the way, should you be drinking so much?”
Let’s see if she takes my bait and ’fesses up. A big part of me still wonders if she’s also pregnant—another reason she has to marry him. But not a word, and she’s drinking like a fish. I realize one bender weekend might not hurt an embryo. I’m a guy, hell…I don’t know.
“Since when do you ration my liquor, Sister Mary Prudence?” Her answer comes wrapped in a cold-blooded stare.
“I don’t know, you tell me.”
“You are so cryptic tonight. This is my bachelorette party: I’m supposed to be getting drunk, you’re supposed to helping me. Now line up some of those penis colada shots like a good best friend would do!”
“So bossy! You’re a big girl, Tess, whatever you want.” I put three penis shots in a row. Then two shots of tequila for me, without the penis topper, of course. I can’t drink out of a penis-covered shot, even for Tess.
“Eww, I don’t think I like creamy shots.”
“I don’t know, Tess…you sucked them down like a champ. You got skill, girl.” She’s licking the cream from the penis, then off her lips, and I find myself at a loss once again. I just can’t help but watch her tongue. She knows exactly what she’s doing because her eyes never once leave mine, as a tiny, crooked smile sits on the edge of her lips, making me want to do every naughty thing conceivable to her.
“You want to be my next victim?” Relentless, right?
“You want to stop threatening to blow me? You’ve been telling me for fifteen years what a great blow job you can give. Jesus, Tess. Go pick out a game—there are only about twenty choices, every one of them dirtier than the last. You girls are raunchy.”
A Mess of Reason Page 10
