Chapter 12
I can’t adult today.
-Coffee Cup
Tai
“You don’t want any help…” I said.
My voice sounded skeptical…as it should
I looked around Mia’s living room, completely and utterly confused as to why she wouldn’t want help moving.
“I just…I don’t think I can do it without breaking down and crying the whole time…and I’m tired of people seeing me cry,” she admitted softly.
I walked forward and gathered her into my arms, moving my face down until I could run my lips over her cheek.
“I’ll have the boys over here tomorrow to help…why don’t you and me just focus on getting you packed today?” I asked.
She pursed her lips, then nodded jerkily.
“Yeah, I think I’d like that,” she said. “Just…don’t be surprised when I have that breakdown…because it’s going to come.”
And she did have a breakdown…five different times.
And I held her through each one.
The first one was because we’d found a pacifier that’d been Colt’s favorite underneath the couch.
The second had been when we’d found a bottle that she’d lost when her dish rack had been pulled down off the counter when Colt had grabbed hold of it during a bath.
The third was the worst.
She’d found Colt’s coming home from the hospital outfit.
That one had been over an hour of listening to her cry, and it’d broken my heart over and over again.
The fourth and fifth had come from when we’d gone through the pictures on the walls. She told me about the first time Colt had his picture taken in the hospital. How he’d peed all over the clothes he’d been in.
Then she’d given me a funny story of the first time Colt had grabbed a lemon and immediately stuffed it into his mouth.
That picture was my favorite, and I asked her for a copy of it.
I didn’t know why.
Those memories weren’t mine…they were hers. However, I felt bonded to him. And I wanted that picture because it was beautiful.
Now we were making dinner…or I was. Mia was on her stool with a glass of wine in front of her.
“What did you want to be when you grew up?” She asked me suddenly.
I looked up at her from where I was cutting up chicken.
“I wanted to be an astronaut,” I said. “I’ve always been pretty big into stars, and they’ve always interested the fuck out of me.”
Mia giggled.
I found that I really loved that sound.
She hopped off her stool and walked towards me, wrapping her hands around my gut and pressing herself against the full length of my back.
“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve your endless understanding, but I’m going to take it. And try as hard as I can to give you what you need back.”
I patted her hands with the inside of my wrist, since my hands were covered in chicken guts, causing her to laugh.
“You’re humble,” she said.
I snorted.
“No…,” I said, hesitating. “The second you walked into the department’s gym, I knew I wanted you. Then you sat a huge problem at my feet, and I felt like, for once, I was able to give someone something…to offer someone more than just heartache and pain.”
I could practically hear her mind screaming for answers.
But she needed to know me…all of me. She needed to know that at one time I wasn’t a very good person.
And for her to know that…I had to tell her things…things I didn’t really want to tell her because they’d probably send her running.
“I’ve never gotten anything from you but understanding, acceptance, and…love,” she said. “And last night was absolutely beautiful,” she added.
I laughed humorlessly.
“It was…but I’m a selfish bastard for even doing that when we haven’t even gone on a real date yet,” I said honestly.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said firmly. “You really have no clue what it’s like. Everyone watches me, practically waiting for me to break down. You, however, do not. You support me. You let me cry, and you move on with me. You don’t dwell, or toss me worried looks,” she added. “And, for once, it’s nice to be treated like I’m not a grieving mom. It’s nice to forget, just for a little while.”
I finished cutting the last piece of fat off the chicken, then gathered it all up in my hand and dumped it into the trash that was sitting next to my legs.
I turned the water on in the sink that was on the opposite side, and then washed my hands quickly and efficiently.
Once I was done, I turned, crossing my arms over my chest to study her.
“I was an asshole kid. I did drugs. Had sex before I was thirteen. Ignored my family. Did everything I possibly could do to be anything but responsible. Married a woman that I hated. Divorced her,” I said. “When I say I was a bad person before…I wasn’t joking. I’m the man that nobody ever wants to take a chance on or trust because my track record is shit.”
“You have an ex-wife?” She asked, picking that out of all that I’d just told her.
“I don’t talk about my ex-wife,” I growled, turning away from her.
“Why not?” She asked. “The torture of knowing you had a wife at all is killing me. It’s like some big dark secret that you refuse to tell me, and all I can imagine is the worst!”
I whipped around.
“Nothing you can imagine is anything close to the truth. There’s ‘the worst’ in your mind. Then there’s ‘the worst’ in mine. And in mine, ‘the worst’ doesn’t even register on your scale,” I growled furiously.
I did not want to talk about this. Not even a little bit.
“So what happened?” She asked. “How’d she trap you?”
I walked swiftly to the table, pulling out the chair and taking a seat before allowing my head to drop into my hands.
I looked at my feet, resting both of my elbows on my knees.
“She was going to accuse me of rape if I didn’t give her baby a name. Claim it as mine. All so her father wouldn’t skin her alive for getting pregnant by some nameless, one-night stand. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t the baby’s father,” I murmured.
Silence surrounded us, but I didn’t chance a look up to see what she thought about that little announcement.
It wasn’t pretty.
Not at all.
“Then what happened?” She persisted.
I closed my eyes.
“I denied it. Refused to do it. And she accused me of rape to her father,” I said. “He didn’t believe her at first. But I was a good guy at that point…got my shit straightened out even though my brother refused to see that. Had a good head on my shoulders, so he offered me a deal. To make it all go away, he offered to let me marry her instead.”
I let that digest for a moment before I turned my face to look at her.
She was crying.
“And what happened then?” She cleared her throat.
I wanted to wipe those tears away with my lips.
I stayed where I was.
“At first I balked. I knew I could get out of the rape charges. The night she claimed I did it was a night I was on shift and at a scene of a residential fire. However, he was the financial advisor for the city,” he said. “He started to cut pay scales. Reduce funding for the fire department. Soon, all our equipment didn’t get updated like it was needed, and it was causing injuries where there never should have been.”
“You gave in?” She asked.
I nodded. “I gave in.”
“Then what happened?” She asked.
“I married her. Lived my life away from her. Didn’t date. Lived like I was married, just didn’t live with my wife,” he said. “I fell in love with someone, a dispatcher at the fire department where I used to live, and Marissa, my ex-wife, showed me really quick that I couldn’t pursue that dream. So I just kind of lived, without really living.”
“You were in love?” She said in a small voice.
I nodded. “I was.”
“What happened to her?” She continued.
I closed my eyes and thought back to Erin.
The memories were bitter sweet.
She was married now with four kids, and her husband had been on the San Antonio Fire Department with me.
It’d been pure torture to be there during my last six months at that station.
Then Adam had died, and I finally got my excuse to leave.
Jack had arranged for my ex-wife problem to be taken care of. However, by the time it was, there was nothing to salvage with Erin.
I explained what had happened, leaving nothing out.
“That’s terrible,” she whispered.
I grunted.
“Yeah, it was.”
“Does she still contact you?” She asked.
“Erin?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No, your ex-wife.”
I shook my head.
“No. Not anymore. Not since Jack fucked with her life. With her father’s life. Now they both leave me alone,” I said.
“Hmm,” she whispered.
Hmm, indeed.
“And why does your brother think you’re a fuck up?” She wondered. “You’re not…and I can see that. Why can’t he?”
I just shook my head.
“My brother just sees what I used to be. The kid who’d do absolutely anything to get out of my responsibilities. And I feel like he partially blames me for Adam’s death,” I explained.
“Who’s Adam?” She sounded tired.
I sighed.
She was really getting into the deep stuff, but I knew I had to give it to her. All of it. She had to make her own decisions whether or not to stay with me, and to do that, she needed to get every single detail.
“Adam.” I said, choking on the word slightly. “Adam is…was…my brother’s best friend.”
She didn’t say anything, and I looked up to see her eyes on me, rimmed in red from her tears, staring at me intently.
“I knew Adam for as long as I can remember,” I said. “He and Jack had been best friends for what seemed like forever,” I said. “Adam was there when Jack thought he’d lost Winter, his wife. He watched over me…and I was supposed to watch over him, but I couldn’t. I didn’t.” I licked my lips. “We were on a call at an abandoned building when the building exploded around us…Adam was very close to it the actual explosion. He died instantly.”
“He died while you were together?” She probed.
I nodded. “Yeah. I was on the other side of the room, but I was close enough,” I swallowed.
She looked down at her hands. “I can’t even imagine.”
I shrugged.
“But that doesn’t explain how you think his death is your fault,” she said.
I picked at my fingernails.
“Adam got promoted to a different position, but he stayed back because he’d promised my brother that he’d take care of me,” I said. “He’s dead today because of how I acted.”
“You just told me that you got your head on straight. What makes you think that Adam and Jack couldn’t see that?” She asked fiercely. “If you want my opinion, I bet that Adam stayed because he liked being there with you. Nobody does something that they really don’t want to do for long, even if they’re doing it for someone they love.”
I looked sharply at her.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I’m just saying that, in general, people are all about self-gratification. You would’ve seen that Adam was unhappy if he truly was. And you would’ve confronted him, correct?”
I thought about that.
Yeah, I guess I would have.
Adam never once showed discontent.
In fact, I saw him smiling more often than not….in fact, he’d been smiling at me when he’d died.
And that image of his smiling face would be forever ingrained in my brain.
She got up and tried to walk to the counter, but I caught her hand and pulled her back to me.
She pressed up against me, facing me with an expectant look.
“You’re good for me, you know that?” I asked.
She smiled. “Glad to be of service.”
I moved forward until my lips pressed lightly against hers.
“Seems we’re both doing a bunch of learning about each other today,” I said.
She laughed and wrapped her hands around my neck.
My cock started to stir, and I was glad I’d demanded we make a stop at the drug store before we’d come to her place.
Especially when she started to slowly grind into my cock that she felt against her.
Her mouth came down hard on mine, and her hands found purchase, once again, in my hair.
My heart started to race as our kiss went from something sweet, to something dark and naughty.
“Maybe we shouldn’t,” I started to say.
“Maybe we should,” she challenged.
“We’re both fucked up right now…,” I continued.
But her hands…I couldn’t think straight when she placed them on me.
They were now traveling down my chest, and my nipples hardened.
“We’ll both probably always be fucked up,” she said. “All we’ve gotta do is stay fucked up together, and stop trying to make it a bad thing that we like being together, even though we’ve got bad shit going on in our lives.”
I couldn’t argue with logic like that.
Not one single bit.
I left my worries about her and me behind, instead fisting my hand in her hair and pulling it down to expose her throat to my hungry mouth.
“Yes,” she growled.
I hummed in amusement as I licked a line up from the base of her throat to the very tip of her ear.
She shivered, and then reached for her shirt, roughly yanking it up and over her head.
She was still in the same clothes she’d been in last night, but I wasn’t complaining.
It was fun to take them off of her.
Clothes went flying, mine and hers.
We ended up naked on the couch, our clothes in a trail from the kitchen to it.
Fingers were everywhere, touching, plucking and tickling.
She wrapped her fingers around my cock stroking it awkwardly in the tight space between our bodies. There wasn’t much room, which meant that my cock was sandwiched in between the softness of her belly and the hard ridges of mine.
She felt better.
Although, it wasn’t surprising, that she did.
“Condoms,” I said.
Her head lifted from mine, and she looked around desperately.
She found them on the end table behind her, and she arched backwards to grab them.
I held onto her hips, then dipped my head down to capture her nipple as she thrust her breasts into my face.
She cried out, nearly dropping the bag in her surprise.
“God, your lips and tongue are devastating,” she whispered, spilling the bag’s contents on the surface of the table behind her.
I moved to the other breast, and she yanked the box of condoms trying desperately to get it open.
She finally succeeded, pulled out a condom and was ripping into the packet with her teeth.
“Boring old clear,” she said as she got her first good look at the condom.
I started to laugh, but it died on my lips as she raised up and deftly slid the condom down over my hard cock.
She got it all the way on, then immediately positioned herself over my cock, sinking down on my hardness slowly.
I might, or might not have shouted.
I couldn’t tell you.
My mind was too busy focusing on the hot, tight heaven that was Mia’s pussy to care about what sounds were coming out of my mouth.
Which was why I was in danger of becoming a three-pump-chump since I was on the verge of coming before she’d even finished the third stroke
By the fourth, I was gripping her hips and lifting up.
She, however, wasn’t having any of that.
She continued to ride me, and I had a death grip on the back of the couch. I was praying that she came fast, because my own release was sitting at the base of my cock, and it was getting harder and harder to hold back.
“Stop,” I croaked.
She ignored me.
Her head was tossed backwards, exposing the column of her throat to me.
She was unintentionally giving me an unhindered view of the entire front of her body, and I desperately took advantage of it.
My hand descended her body, zeroing in on her clit.
I flicked the distended bud with the pad of my thumb, and she clenched down even harder.
I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes, but it was no use.
I was coming.
I did, however, find the ability to keep my thumb moving throughout, which helped because it was only seconds after the last dregs of my release had filled up the tip of the condom that she came, too.
Her pussy rippled, and my eyes crossed.
God, she felt like heaven.
We stopped moving all at once.
Her body collapsed on top of mine, and my hands at her hips held her steady as we both caught our breath and gathered up our scattered wits.
“I’ve never had anything like this before,” she whispered.
I grunted.
That was all I was capable of, at the moment.
She’d blown my mind.