Chapter 39
Elle
If it weren’t for the condom, I don’t think either of us would ever move again. But after a while I feel him pull away, and then he rolls off me and goes to dispose of the condom in the bathroom.
I can still see the expression on his face when he braced himself over me and looked deep into my eyes, when I saw his emotions laid bare while he moved in me.
For that moment I could feel his feelings and he could feel mine. And we were both turned inside out, desperate with the need to connect, terrified, elated, falling without handholds or footholds, without promises or certainty, without a net.
It took me over the edge as surely as he could do with his knowing fingers.
But now, of course, I’m wondering: Was that real, what I saw? Or a product of my own brain, addled with sex hormones?
He comes back and stands above me, looking down. There’s an odd expression on his face.
“What?” I demand.
“That was—wow.”
I smile. “It was pretty wow.”
He climbs into bed, wraps his arms around me, and draws me close. I settle my head against his chest. He’s big and warm, and he smells so good, and…“I’m so…sleepy…”
I yawn, and it’s catching; Sawyer yawns, too.
“So sleep.” He shrugs under my cheek.
“But—we have this room and this night. We can’t waste it.”
He laughs, a lovely rumbling under my ear. “Sleeping with you in my arms is not a waste. I mean, think about it. We can get each other off pretty much anytime, but how many chances will we get to do this?” He wraps me tighter, inviting me with a hand to loop my leg over his, which I do. It’s bliss, the feel of his strong body the length of mine, and I let the feeling wash over me.
But then for some reason I hear his words echo—how many chances will we get to do this?
“You mean, because of the boys? Because of having to end up in our own beds?”
“Yeah.”
He’s right, of course. He’s absolutely, 100 percent right. We aren’t going to spring this on the boys until we’re absolutely certain, and in the meantime, there aren’t going to be many times we have the luxury of spending a whole night in each other’s arms.
But he hasn’t said “for now.” He hasn’t said “until we tell the boys,” or “until we’re public,” or—well, anything.
Instead, he made it sound like he still thinks of this as temporary. A relationship yes, but not—
Well, not a forever relationship. Not a marriage.
Oh, Elle, you crazy idiot. Back the hell off. Calm the hell down. Live in the moment. Enjoy what you’ve got.
“You okay?” He lifts his head. “I can feel you thinking a million miles a minute.”
“I’m fine.” Somehow, I manage to make the word sound normal, even bright. And in case he needs convincing, I add, “How could I be anything but fine after sex like that?”
He makes a rough, contented sound. “Sorry it was short.”
“Short, but wow. Anyway, you warned me.”
“And I can make it up to you.” He shifts under me until I feel his cock against my inner thigh, warm and heavy and hardening. “Unless you’re too sleepy?”
See, Elle? He wants you. And he told you he wants a relationship with you. That’s all you need to know right now. The rest is just you borrowing trouble.
About 92 percent of me is convinced. Enough to answer (honestly), “No. Hell no.”
We don’t fall asleep until much, much later.
In the morning, Sawyer orders us room service and we eat breakfast in bed. When we’re finished, he takes my plate out of my hands, sets it on the nightstand, and kisses me. We have sex again, this time with me on top, for his viewing pleasure. It turns out to be my viewing pleasure, too. I can’t look away from his face—blown pupils, a flush high in his cheeks, slack lower lip. Toward the end, he closes his eyes and tilts his head back, his fingers digging hard into the flesh of my backside. When he comes, he rocks my clit against his pubic bone and takes me with him. We give our hotel neighbors more audio than we were intending…
Afterward we shower together, where we review the positive attributes of vertical sex (less vocally than the last round). When we’re both clean and dry, sated and fed, we hit the road. We have lunch in Portland at Bunk Sandwiches on 6th Avenue (I practically fall face-first in ecstasy into my meatball parm, and he tells me that watching me eat is really good foreplay), then visit the famous Powell’s Books, where I buy a few novels I’ve been meaning to read and collect a few sexy romances—man-torsos and all—as a gift for Mrs. Wheeling. Sawyer buys a couple of thrillers. Then we head home.
In the car, we swap firsts. First dance, first date, first heartbreak, first time leaving the country, blah blah blah.
We’re almost home by the time I suggest first kiss.
“Age sixteen, in the movie theater, Amy Orella.”
“I’m shocked, Sawyer. Sixteen? I would have pegged you as a child prodigy.”
“Nope. Slow starter.”
“Hasn’t held you back any.”
“No. It really hasn’t. Your turn.”
“Age twelve, truth or dare at Kelly Simon’s house, in the closet with Devon Santiago.”
“Was it good?”
“It was awful. I almost gave up kissing for life.”
“Thank fuck you didn’t. That would be a horrible waste of the sexiest mouth ever.”
There he goes again with the superlative, and here I go with the self-doubt, but this time I rush to fill the potentially awkward moment, not wanting to make him have to assert, once again, that he means what I know is just a flip comment. “What about first time you had sex?”
“You probably won’t believe it, but it wasn’t until senior year of high school.”
I snort. “You were saving yourself?”
“No, but I really was a late bloomer. I was short and kind of pudgy till the end of sophomore year, and then it took a while for girls to actually notice I was no longer short and pudgy—and then it took me a while to figure out that girls actually wanted me. Once I did, though—”
“You made up for lost time?”
“I may have, somewhat,” he says, getting a faraway look in his eye as he pulls up to the curb in front of my house.
I brace myself to say goodbye, but before I can figure out what that should look like, Sawyer asks, “Would it be weird if I came in and met your parents?”
He didn’t meet them before the wedding because I ran over to his house to save time and a round of introductions (since I already knew Lucy’s parents, who were the ones watching Jonah).
“No! It would be cool.”
He cuts the engine and follows me up to the house. Madden answers the door. “Oh, hey, Mom,” he says, like I’ve been gone two minutes and not two days. Jonah is, of course, standing right behind him. “Hey, Dad,” Jonah says with matching nonchalance, and the two of them fly past us out the front door. My parents are right behind them in the hallway, watching them with amusement and affection.
“You can tell those guys missed you a whole ton,” my mother says, coming forward to embrace me. She’s a small, bright-eyed woman with a cloud of curly salt-and-pepper hair, cinnamon scented and warm, as she has been my whole life. I hug my father, too, who smells like coffee and the pipe tobacco he sneaks in the garage while my mother pretends not to know. “Probably the fact that we plied them constantly with treats. Grandparents’ prerogative.”
“This is Jonah’s dad, Sawyer,” I tell my parents. “Also my wedding date. Sawyer, my parents, Elena and Matthew Dunning.”
“Very nice to meet you, Sawyer,” my dad says, extending his hand.
Sawyer shakes it. “The pleasure is mine.”
“Nice to meet you,” my mom echoes, smiling at Sawyer.
He smiles back. “You, too.”
“We met your in-laws earlier today. After the boys had run back and forth a few hundred times, we invited Jonah to come out for ice cream with Madden, so we stopped by and introduced ourselves to his grandparents and asked if they wanted to come with. How funny is this? We were all in Barcelona during the push for Catalonian independence, and we were probably all in the same square during a certain protest, maybe just a few hundred feet apart! Small world. How was the wedding?” she demands of me, without pausing for breath. Then, without waiting for an answer, she tips her chin up at Sawyer and says, “I’m sorry! I talk too much and too fast, but I get excited and can’t seem to stop.”
Sawyer laughs. “Now I know where Elle gets it.” He smiles fondly at me, which makes my heart skip a beat.
“The wedding was surprisingly fine,” I say.
“I didn’t think she should go,” my mother informs all of us. “I think it was classless of Trevor to invite her, and she should have turned down the invitation.”
“But tell us how you really feel,” my father chides her gently, but my mother just shakes her head and addresses me.
“Your father feels the same way, even if he wouldn’t say it out loud. Trevor was never good enough for you, Elle.”
Thank God for parents and their blind devotion. I so appreciate her saying that, even though I know she’s full of shit; they loved Trevor when we were together and felt as betrayed as I did when he ended up with Helen. Hindsight is 20–20…but again, thank God for parents and their willingness to back you even when you’re clearly the losing horse.
“No. He wasn’t good enough for her.” Sawyer’s voice is definitive. “He didn’t deserve her.”
I go a little gooey over that, and my mom shoots him an appraising look.
The boys fly back up the front path. “Dad, can Madden sleep over tonight? Pleeeeeeeease?”
Sawyer looks at me. I shrug. I’m thinking, If the boys are in the same house, Sawyer and I can be, too…
He sees it on my face, and he raises an eyebrow and smirks. He, too, shrugs. “Sure, bud.” He turns to me. “I’m going to head home for a bit, decompress, all that. I’ll text you and we can get some takeout for the boys and us, too, if you want?”
“Sounds good.” I say it nonchalantly, but secretly I’m all, he wants to keep doing this, he wants to keep doing this, we’re going to keep doing this.
“Very nice to meet you, Elena, Matthew,” he tells my parents.
“Very nice to meet you, too, Sawyer,” they say in unison.
When he’s gone, my mother turns to me. There’s an expression on her face I don’t like.
“Elle.”
She says it very gently. The last time she spoke to me that way was the day Trevor left. It’s the Concerned Mom voice. “His wife just died.”
“Two years ago!”
“Lucy’s parents seemed to feel that he was very much not over her. They said he’s still a wreck.”
“He’s doing fine.” My voice is brittle. Defensive.
My mother fidgets, wringing her fingers. “They said he adored her. Doted on her. That he was destroyed by her death. They said they worried more about him than each other or Lucy’s sister, or even Jonah.”
“Leave her alone, Elena,” my father says. “She knows what she’s doing.” He rests a hand on my mother’s shoulder.
I cast a grateful glance in my dad’s direction. “I know what I’m doing, Mom. I won’t get in over my head.”
But I’m remembering the wrecked look on Sawyer’s face as he thrust into me, the shocking sense of connection, and how much I wanted it to mean that he felt the same way I felt, and a voice inside me says, You’re already in over your head.