SIXTEEN
Rhea sleeps nearly all the time now and when she isn’t sleeping, she’s barely lucid. I miss my little cousin. I miss the way she smiles, how she mouths the words when I read the books she’s read a thousand times. I miss the secret way she and Quinn whisper, how they plan and scheme to make a wonderful comic, how Rhea planned to send it to Dark Horse, betting that they’d love the novelty of publishing a comic that came from the mind of a cancer kid.
We have not had more than ten minutes of conversation with her in weeks. We knew this would happen. We’d been warned. But sometimes we tell ourselves that the inevitable will not happen. We convince ourselves that life will move forward even when it isn’t meant to.
We live in denial because it comforts us.
For weeks, without Rhea, watching her slowly fade, I have occupied myself with Quinn O’Malley. Taking from him what he offers. Giving only my body back in return.
Tonight he paints me, laying on his back as I straddle him, his thin brush dipped in red. He draws lines and circles, characters across the planes of my stomach, circling my nipples.
“Sayo, love, slip onto my cock.”
I do. My pussy throbs when he directs me, when Quinn makes demands, probably because it’s the only time I’ll listen and so I do what he tells me, holding his hand smudged with red paint, hovering over his beautiful, long dick as he holds it up for me, then slipping down slowly, sheathing him deep inside me, feeling him, and then moving, moving, until we are both hissing, working against each other, racing toward that final finish.
Quinn holds my waist, directing me and I arch back, loving how tight his grip is, how he lets those fingers rest on my lower back, guiding me, and at my hip, moving, leading my body at the right angle.
“So fecking perfect, love. You’re so fecking tight, so wet…”
I lean over him, moving my weight to the balls of my feet, hovering over him, covering his mouth with my hand. We’ve discussed this. So many times. No talking unless it’s a demand, no compliments or excess words, and still Quinn cannot seem to help himself.
He nibbles at my palm and I straighten, lower back on my knees as Quinn dips red paint onto his hands, finger-painting across my nipples, tweaking one between his fingers as we continue to fuck, our pace easy, practiced, comfortable. Then he shifts his hands up my neck, coming to cup my face, sticking his thumb between my teeth.
“Fecking… shite…” he groans when I suck on his thumb, licking the bottom, and then Quinn moves quickly, sitting up, taking one nipple into his mouth, sucking and sucking, pushing me down on his dick until I feel the swell of my orgasm, until his dick and mouth and grip all level up the sensation, until Quinn pulls on my hair, tugging it because he knows I like it and I come and come and come until he joins me, until he fills me.
It is nearly an hour before I realize that he has abandoned our make-shift bed of clothes for his sketch pad. The red paint flakes when I touch it idly, staring again at the ceiling, thinking of everything and nothing. My friends are leaving me, abandoning the life they’ve always known for one that will become their future without me in it.
Declan has been offered a spot on The Blues rugby team. It’s a start to the All Blacks, a promising beginning for him. But the team is in New Zealand. No one is supposed to know, but Cavanagh is a small town and gossip is a commodity most use to get what they want. Sam wanted to see me smile last week, so he told me. He thought I’d be happy for my best friend, for Declan and the life they’d build together. He’d heard the rumors from Declan’s teammates, from the casual bar conversations Coach Mullens had with Declan when they thought no one was listening.
But Sam didn’t get that smile he was hoping for, and I left McKinney’s feeling sad, wondering when Autumn would tell me her plans. She can’t deny it, not to me. Autumn will follow him. She’ll follow Declan anywhere. Just like I know Mollie will move in with Vaughn in Maryville and Layla and Donovan will have their baby, maybe stick to the plan to give it away. Maybe move onward separately. But move on.
This is what clouds my head as Quinn sketches in his book. Because it keeps my thoughts from Rhea.
A turn of my head and I watch him sketching, his arms moving, his muscles flexing as he works, as he huddles close over that tabletop, naked, breathless.
He is beautiful. I think that often enough, but never tell him. That is not why we come together. That isn’t who we are. But the strong stretch of his back, the narrow dip of his waist, the lean muscles of his thighs reminds me that he is delicious. If I had to fall apart with someone, I am glad it’s Quinn. That’s what I think when I leave the huddle of clothes to watch him.
“You can stop staring, love.” Am I staring? I hadn’t realized I was. My mind is a muddle of thoughts—thoughts of what this has been, Quinn and me, his accent, his body and what we are doing. Why? What had driven us here. But that is a reality I won’t allow myself to think of. In this place with this man, there is only us, together, and the urgency I feel to have him back inside me. “O’course were you to keep staring, maybe step a bit closer, I could paint you again.”
I let him touch me because it feels good when nothing else does. I let him take me because only Quinn knows the sharpness of this ache. He speaks and I feel, taste, touch. “You’re smooth, love. But you burn.” That makes two of us. It isn’t a slight he makes. Quinn doesn’t want to insult me, but he knows, like I do, what this is between us. “You’re like something I know I shouldn’t want. A habit I can’t bleeding stay clear of.” He holds my face, as though he can’t believe how effortlessly he can control me. How quickly I surrender my body to him. “I could paint you all day.” I’d promised myself he’d never get more from me than a look. I promised myself there would be no surrender.
I am a liar.
“Look at you, beautiful. So small, so fragile. I could touch you, never stop touching you, but not how I want. Not as I’d like.” A tug on my hair and his mouth on my ribs, easy comfort, numbing blindness that I welcome. “I don’t want to break you, love”
The pending loss.
The unknown past.
An uncertain future.
I am not the woman I once was. I am fractured, frayed. My spirit has been split and rendered useless. It has become something that feels like can never be mended.
“Nothing left to break.”
Even to my own ears I sound pathetic and I know Quinn thinks so too, I can see it in the way he looks at me, in how his voice softens. “Sayo. Love.”
“Don’t, O’Malley.”
I can’t have that. I don’t want him to comfort me. I only want to be numb to all but his touch, yet I answer him. I explain when he asks, “How broken are you?”
“Enough that there is nothing left for anyone else.”
This isn’t who we are. We will never be a couple. We will never have more than this ache in common and so I remind him. I remind myself. “Take what you want, remember? Take what’s left.”
“Aye, I remember.” Back again is that frown, that protective expression I’ve come to rely on. He tastes me, touches me and my mind is no longer muddled. There is only sensation. For a moment, there is only this. “I could taste you, always. Sometimes I think I could never stop tasting you, don’t I?”
Then that look, the possessive expression that Quinn has only let me see sometimes. It shifts something inside my chest. It breaks apart my guard, the same resolve I have asked him to loosen. And I do. I let it slip, my nails running across his forehead, his scalp, and it has him pausing, giving me that amazed, astonished look as though he cannot breathe, cannot move until I explain myself.
“Sayo…”
But he won’t finish. He won’t ask me what this small, insignificant gesture means. I won’t let him. “Make me forget for just a little while longer.”
Quinn has his entire mouth over my pussy, he opens me wide, licks and teases with his tongue, with his fingers until I cannot breathe, until I flood his mouth, grip his hair, ride my orgasms so hard that I do not feel him turning me, do not realize that my cheek is against the floor, until Quinn’s soft, easy grips against my body have turned aggressive, commanding. He is behind me, moving me, filling me so completely, so surely that I come again, an effortless feat that only Quinn has been able to manage.
Sweat and dried paint clings to our bodies and afterward, our hearts settle. I let him touch me softly, kiss me. It is bliss, for just that slip of time while Quinn’s delicious kisses, his drugging grunts against my skin again take me completely from the building, from the town.
I am free then.
We are free together. For a while I displace the knowledge of what connected us in the first place.
Quinn’s hands down my back, rubbing, touching in a sweet, absentminded gesture is soothing, has me smiling, nearly drifting asleep. Each of his touches makes my skin buzz, makes my heart hum.
When the sharp ring of my cell phone sounds, I push him away, ignoring his sleepy admonishments that I let my voice mail pick up.
My mother’s name and number fill the screen and the quiet bliss Quinn worked in my body disappears the moment I hear my mother’s voice.
“Mama?”
“Sweetie,” she says, her voice cracking. “Rhea is going. Get to the hospital.”
He knows. With just a glance in my direction Quinn’s face loses the pleased, contented expression. One look at me and his mask slips back on. As it always does. Sometimes when we are together, I let myself dream a little. I let myself think of a life with Quinn when things are settled, when the future is certain. He smiles, honestly smiles at me and I think that one thread could be pulled, that it would stretch and loosen until there is nothing Quinn can keep to himself. No more masks at all to hide him. But it’s just a fantasy. This is all too real.
I think maybe he’ll reach for me, hold me because he knows what lies ahead for us. I even tense, hold my breath waiting for his touch, telling myself it’s okay to feel anything for him, that maybe he’s capable of feeling something too.
But Quinn trusts no one. Let’s no one see his real face. Not even me.
That mask remains in place as he walks to the pile of clothes, dressing mechanically. I can only watch him, sitting naked on the floor with that stupid phone resting in my hand.
“Come on then,” he finally says, nodding toward my jeans and shirt on the floor next to him. “Let’s get this over with.”