A Mess of Reason (13 page)

“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
want 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?