Breaking (8 page)

So he stood
there, braced by the wall, and he let Lori hug him as the shuddering grew even
stronger.

After a few
minutes, he felt her kiss the back of his neck, the top of his shoulders, the
ridges of his spine. His eyes were closed, and the water streamed down over
both of them.

“You know I
love you,” she murmured. “You know you can tell me anything.” She rubbed her
palms up and down his chest and belly, pressing another kiss into his shoulder
blade.

She deserved a
response, so he tried to give her one. “I know.”

She slid one
hand up to his head and stroked it in a way that never failed to affect his
heart. And his body.

He felt himself
begin to harden from the feel of her hands, her lips, her wet, naked body
behind him, her absolute tenderness.

The muscles of
his thighs and abdomen clenched as one of her hands slipped down to rub his
hardening cock.  “I thought you didn’t want to have sex.”

“I didn’t want
you to be on this mission to make me come.”

As if that was
enough explanation, she moved so that she was between him and the wall. She
pulled his head down into a kiss, and Ander tried to focus enough to respond.
He couldn’t do more than cling to her mouth, and the deep emotion palpable in
the connection of their lips caused the shuddering inside him to intensify
again.

He pulled away
when it threatened to overwhelm him.

“Ander,” she
said, bringing his attention back to her.

He blinked down
through the streams of water at her beautiful face, her eyes vivid against her
pale skin and her dark hair hanging wetly against her head and shoulders.

“Can I please
do something for you?”

He wasn’t sure
exactly what she was talking about, but he couldn’t deny her anything—not when
he needed her so desperately. He gave a jerky nod.

She kissed him
again, briefly this time, and then started to kiss her way down his body.

Ander’s brain
wasn’t working at full capacity, so she was as far down as his belly before he
realized what she would do.

His body clamped
down almost painfully as her mouth drifted even lower, and he flattened his
hands against the tile again to buttress himself against what he knew was
coming,

Lori ended up
sitting on the built-in shower bench as she reached to take his hips in both
hands. He was bending at the waist slightly to leave room for her between him
and the wall.

Then she leaned
forward to slide his now erect cock into her mouth.

He groaned
uninhibitedly at the feel of her warm, wet mouth around his flesh. He jerked
his hips reflexively before he was able to restrain the urge.

She drew her head
back, letting him slip out. Then she licked a line up the underside, reaching
around with one hand so she could grab one of his ass cheeks.

“Oh, fuck,
baby,” he rasped, pushing hard against the wall so he wouldn’t grab her head.

She smiled up
at him and then took him in her mouth again, wrapping her fingers around the
base of his cock and establishing a rhythm, her lips reaching the top of her
hand.

He tried not to
thrust into it, but the sensations were intense, and he had absolutely no
defenses against them.

He groaned
embarrassingly, mumbling out a silly succession of words as he felt a climax
rising fast. When she moved a hand to cup and squeeze his balls, his whole body
jerked and he fumbled for purchase on the wall.

She was sucking
him hard now, hollowing out her cheeks with her rhythm, twirling her tongue
around the head of his shaft as she did. It was all he could do not to fuck her
throat.

“Fuck, baby,”
he gritted out, every muscle in his body tensing in preparation. “I’m going
to—fuck, baby.”

She hummed
wordless encouragement over his erection and dug her fingernails into his inner
thigh.

He roared out
in surprise as climax surged up and swallowed him, the pleasure intense and
sustained and utterly leveling.

His whole body rocked
with it.

“Oh, fuck,” he
mumbled, as she kept sucking him through the contractions. “Oh, fuck, oh,
fuck.”

He was still
barely holding himself up against the wall when she finally let him slip from
her mouth. She stood up from the seat and wrapped her arms around him.

His knees
buckled. They literally buckled.

They had an
awkward moment until she managed to help him sit down where she’d been seated
earlier.

She lowered
herself until she was on her knees beside him. She leaned her head against one
of his thighs, and he managed to reach out so he could hold her there against
him.

The shuddering
was too strong now, and he had no strength left to hold it in.

His whole body rocked
with it, so much more powerful than the climax.

He leaned his
head back against the shower wall and closed his eyes. Took several ragged
breaths.

She made a
sound like a stifled sob. “Oh, sweetie, please tell me.”

And that was
it.

He just broke.

Rasped out,
“My…my father died.”

The words were
so horrible—hanging in the air as they did, real in a way they hadn’t been the
moment before—that he shook even more violently.

Lori breathed,
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

There was
nothing he could say to that.

He’d hated his
father for most of his life, but he’d never been able to hate him enough.

“Oh, my God. When?”
Lori asked.

“Five days
ago.”

Five days. Six
hours. And fifteen minutes—give or take a few minutes, since he couldn’t see a
clock at the moment.

It was then he’d
gotten a phone call that changed everything.

“Oh, my God. I
haven’t heard anything, on the news or anything.”

His father was
an important businessman in the city. His death, if made public, would be reported
in the news.

“They’re
keeping it quiet. Until they get everything settled…with the estate and…” He couldn’t
finish. Couldn’t say any more.

Lori pushed
herself to her feet and turned off the shower. Then she opened the curtain to
reach for a towel. “So all this time…” Her face was twisting as she dried
herself off.

His face felt
like it was twisting too. All this time, he hadn’t told her. He hadn’t told her
something so important.

He waited for
her to reproach him. To tell him how wrong he’d been, how badly he’d treated
her.

He would
deserve it. All of it.

She could leave
him, and he would deserve that too.

She lifted the
towel to her face and gave a little sob into it. One he just couldn’t
understand. Then she wrapped the towel around her and reached for another.

“Can you stand
up?”

He wasn’t sure
he could, but he tried. He managed to keep his feet while she dried him off.

 “Lori, I’m so
sorry,” he began, the words painfully raw in his throat.

“Shh. Not now.”
She left the bathroom and returned with a t-shirt and pajama pants for him to
wear. “Let’s go to bed.”

He managed to
pull on the clothes and brush his teeth. Then he slowly made his way to their
bed, every step heavy and sore.

She’d pulled on
pajamas too and had gone to get two bottles of water for each of their
nightstands. Then she turned out the lights and crawled into bed beside him.

He rolled onto
his side, so she just pressed herself behind him, hugging him as she spooned
him.

“I’m so sorry,
Ander,” she murmured. “I’m so, so sorry about your dad.”

He started to
shake again.

His father had
defined his life—for most of his life. As a boy, all he’d wanted was his
father’s love, and it was something he’d never been able to get. As a teenager,
he’d done everything he could to defy his father and all of his expectations,
so he’d made decisions he’d known would enrage and humiliate him. For so many
years, he’d made himself nothing more than a body, since he’d believed he
wasn’t worth anything more.

“It shouldn’t
matter,” he managed to say. “It shouldn’t be a big deal. He’d had a
heart-condition for a while, and he hasn’t been a part of my life in years.
It’s not like someone else losing their father.”

“Of course, it
matters. Of course, it’s a big deal. He was your dad.”

He hadn’t
thought about him as his “dad” since he was a boy.

He’d never
believed in the possibility of that ever changing, but now the thinnest sliver
of a chance was gone for good.

It felt like
Lori’s arms were the only things holding him together. He was never this weak.
Never this shattered.

He just
couldn’t stop himself from being so right now.

“He left…” His
voice broke so he had to try again. “He left the bulk of his estate to…to me.”

He heard Lori’s
soft gasp and felt her tighten in surprise.

His own
reaction had been more dramatic.

“Why would he
do that?” he choked out, trying to take full breaths.

“I don’t know.”

Ander kept
trying to breathe.

“Maybe he loved
you after all.” She squeezed him, so tightly it would have been painful at any
other time. “I know he didn’t know how—at all—but maybe, in his way, he did.”

“He couldn’t
have. Not after the way he always treated me. He couldn’t have loved me.”

She was crying
now. He could hear the smothered sobs and feel it in her body behind him.

She was crying
for him.

“I don’t know,”
she said at last. “But maybe this was his way of trying to show you—at the end—that
he really did.”

Ander couldn’t
think it through clearly enough to sort through such possibilities. He couldn’t
do anything but feel emotions that ripped through him like a storm. He couldn’t
do anything but shudder, shake, breathe in painful wheezes.

Lori never let
him go. Not when he could finally breathe evenly again. Not when his body gradually
relaxed in pure exhaustion. And not, a long time later, when his eyes closed,
and he drifted toward the oblivion of sleep.

She held him
the whole time, with a kind of undemanding support he used to believe didn’t
exist in the world.

Sometime during
the night, he rolled over so he was facing her and wrapped his arms around her.

So they ended
up holding each other.

The next morning, Ander could
barely move.

Every muscle in
his body ached, and his head pounded brutally. He smothered a groan as he
reached for the bottle of water beside his bed and downed it in about six
gulps.

His motion must
have woken Lori because she stirred restlessly and then opened her eyes. She
smiled up at him, obviously too groggy to remember the night before, since
there was no trace of concern in her expression.

 He smiled
back, wondering how he’d ever managed to get such an extraordinary woman to say
“yes” to a marriage proposal.

Her expression
changed as her memory of the night before returned. “How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been
through a battle.”

“Me too—kind
of.”

He didn’t doubt
it. She loved him so much that she hurt when he hurt. Three years ago, he
hadn’t known it was possible.

“You don’t have
to work today, do you? It’s Saturday and…” She trailed off, her eyes searching
his face.

“I don’t have
to work today.”

“Good. Then you
stay in bed. I’m going to get us some coffee.”

He lay back
down, mostly because his body protested any other option, as she went to the
bathroom and then disappeared toward the kitchen for the coffee.

When she
returned with two mugs, Ander propped himself up on the pillows and she
situated herself beside him.

They were
silent for a while. He draped an arm around her shoulders to pull her against
him, wanting her to know that he wasn’t going to withdraw anymore, although he
couldn’t think of a way to broach the subject.

“So I’ve been
thinking,” Lori said at last.

“About what?”

“About what
happened. Is it all right for us to talk about it now?”

“Yeah.”

“This is what I
think happened. You just tell me if I’m wrong.”

“Okay.” He was foolishly
relieved that she was going to articulate it first, since he couldn’t seem to
make his mind work at all.

“It hurt you. A
lot. What happened to your dad, I mean. And it reminded you of who you used to
be. And then you tried to pretend that part of yourself didn’t exist. You tried
to act normally, but it wasn’t you completely—so it all ended up kind
of…twisted. Or something like that.”

“Yeah,” he
admitted. “That’s pretty close.”

“I really do
understand why it was so hard and twisted for you. But I don’t understand why
you thought you had to hide it from me. From
me
.”

Her words weren’t
intended as a reproach, but there was a trace of hurt evident in her tone, and
it was like a blade to his chest.

“I’m so sorry,
baby.” He tightened his arm around her. “There’s no good excuse. No rational
reason. I just…” It was so hard to admit, even now.

“You just
what?”

“I just didn’t
want you to see me so…so broken.”

She put her
coffee down and reached out to hug him, burying her face in his chest. The move
threatened his coffee too, so he set down the mug so he could hold her.

“I’ve got
things so good now,” he murmured against her hair. “I have everything I could ever
want. I shouldn’t be broken anymore.”

She was crying
again—in tight, almost silent sobs. He had no idea what to say so he just
hugged her until she drew back.

 “I think
everyone is broken. In some way. It’s just part of being human. I mean, look at
me.”

He frowned.
“What about you?”

“I was starting
to get all insecure again because you were pulling away. I thought maybe you
didn’t want me anymore. So I started making up stories about how you were
feeling guilty about your feelings changing and that’s why you were working all
day and then having sex the way you were.”