Forever Loved (The Forever Series) (24 page)

He was hot in my hands, and I wanted to make him crazy, to feel as desperate as I did. I worked the shaft with my fingers, pressing into the tip, reveling in the slippery wetness that meant he was as needy as me.

He reached beneath me to unhook my bra and shoved it out of his way, taking a breast into his mouth with a hunger that shocked me into another level of urgency. I did not want to wait. I could not bear another minute without him inside me. I let go of him and pressed against his back, driving my hips into him.

Gavin grasped the edge of my panties and eased them down. I reached for him, wanting to thrust us together, but he shifted away, driving first one, then two fingers inside me. I arched up, crying out, and he braced my back with one hand, helping me hold position without strain. His mouth left my nipple and it puckered in the cold until he folded me close against him.

I didn’t think I could take any more, his fingers fluttering against me, the pleasure spreading out but intensifying my need. He kissed me again, and my tongue lashed into him, frenzied, aching. His mouth trailed along my jaw, my collarbone, along the curve of a breast again, and heading down. I clutched his shoulders, unable to wait, wanting him now, stopping his descent. He understood and shifted over me.

I wanted to weep with relief as he slid inside, spreading everything open like a flower blooming. Emotion crashed over me. I did not want to let him go. I could not bear any space between us, any distance at all.

He braced himself on his elbows and cradled my head in his hands. His strokes slowed down, deep and drawn out. His lips caressed my forehead. The light from a streetlamp outside cast a feeble glow across his shoulders as the muscles shifted. I felt a round of weeping coming on and tried to stop it, not wanting to trigger any coughing or difficulty breathing. But something was changing between us, and I was so afraid of tomorrow, the test, what would happen if the boy was his. How I would manage, knowing Gavin’s son was alive and well but there might be no others, the only child of ours turning to dust in a powder-blue coffin in the ground.

“Shhh, shhhh,” he said, rubbing his thumbs along my cheeks where I had failed to stanch the tears.

The harder I tried to hold in the sobs, the more determined they were to come out.

“Hey,” Gavin said. “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.”

I wanted to believe him. I tried to imagine every scenario and work through it. The disappointed Rosa, turning away after the test was negative. The exuberant version, if she was right. Gavin’s expression, relief or shock. My own reaction, stalwart or embarrassingly overwrought.

“You’re thinking,” Gavin said, his body moving more steadily now, with more purpose. “No thinking. Let it go.”

He released my head and propped higher on his arms, biceps bulging as he worked faster. I gasped with the change of pressure and intensity, and seeing I was engaged again, he reached for my knee, lifting it up and giving himself the leverage to work even harder and faster.

I clutched his ribs, the pleasure radiating out from where we were joined. He took it another step, resting my ankle on his shoulder, and his freed hand returned to the folds between us, pressing into the already hot nub.

He knew exactly where to take it, and I spiraled straight into oblivion, the tightness blasting through me like a wave. My voice and my fear and my grief and my release all mixed together as he worked straight through the orgasm. When I began to come down, he let my leg fall back to the bed, but didn’t pause even a moment, moving his hands beneath me and flipping me over.

He gathered me against him from behind, still refusing to let me get cold. I propped up on my elbows and he slammed inside, each thrust sending a flash through my body. I wanted to scream with it, get lost, obliterate every other sensation that tried to crowd its way into my thoughts.

He reached around and pressed his fingers against me yet again. I thought I would be exhausted, spent, but instead I was exhilarated, frantic, pressing backwards into him, moving against his strokes to take it in harder and faster, until nothing existed but the crash of his skin into mine.

I felt it building again, tighter this time, more focused and intense. But I refused to let it unfurl, keeping it wound up. I was in control, and as Gavin moved, I met him with more force, until his body tensed. Only then did I release the pent-up tension, my cries mixing with his, the hot flow pulsing into me.

I collapsed down against the bed, Gavin crashing over my back. He withdrew and pulled me in close. Shivers ran along my body, and he jerked the blanket around us, tucking it in tight. “I got you cold,” he said. “I shouldn’t have started this.”

I rolled over into him. “I needed it.
We
needed it.”

He stroked my hair. “It’s not worth it if you get sick again.”

“It is. And I won’t. I feel fine.” I pressed my lips against the hard muscle of his chest, reveling in the heat of his skin. “I don’t want tomorrow to come.”

His arms tightened around me. “We’re going to be fine either way.” But his voice caught at the end, and I knew he was seeing the scene too, the one that proved the boy was his, and his fear at what I would do.

I couldn’t comfort him in this. I didn’t know myself.

32: Gavin

Waking next to Corabelle felt like the last good thing that could happen that day. I slid away from her, making sure the blanket was tight against her. Her breathing still wasn’t as deep as before, and I worried about this, hoping I had something hot I could make her to take with the antibiotics.

The floor creaked as I pulled on some sweatpants and headed to the kitchen. We’d dropped her bag by the door, so I fetched it, digging around for the bottle of pills her father had picked up at the hospital pharmacy. I read the label, the words blurring. We had hours to go until the meeting for the test results. I wasn’t sure how to spend a day like this any more than I had the day of the funeral, just waiting, unable to think about anything else.

I dug through my cabinets, pretty sure that somewhere along the way I’d been given herbal tea at some holiday thing — probably back when I worked at the grocery store. I shoved aside all the other stuff I never opened, some jams Mom had sent, a box of stoned wheat crackers that came from who knows where. Sure enough, in a little cheap basket, I found a selection of tea packets tied together with a red bow.

Peppermint. Orange Spice. Blackberry. I snatched up the peppermint and filled a pot with water. Mom had a kettle or something, but I figured hot water was hot water.

As I waited for it to warm up, I stared out the window at the empty trees, bare limbed and bleak. I tried to picture Rosa and the boy, getting up in some other house somewhere in the city. She seemed so sure that her son was mine. Probably this was a happy morning for her.

I still didn’t know anything. If Manuel belonged to me, the test wouldn’t make a difference at first. There was a birth certificate to change. Legal stuff. Child support. She was from another country. That would make it complicated. We’d probably need a lawyer.

My head started clanging and I pressed the heel of my hand into my eye. Maybe I would just drop out of school for a while, get things to some sort of equilibrium. Get Rosa set up somewhere, get Corabelle with me. If she still wanted me.

Damn.

I shook the bottle of pills, pulling one out. I didn’t even have health insurance for myself, much less the kid. I’d have to fix that.

Fix a lot of things.

I walked through the living room. I could sell the weights, maybe a few other things. Scrape enough together to get us started. The raise was going to help, once I got back to work. I had to do that, pronto. Bud had given me those insurance papers. I think he had some group policy I was eligible for now.

Time to fucking grow up.

I could hear the water bubbling in the kitchen, so I went back and dumped it in a mug with the tea bag. I didn’t even know the simplest thing, like if Corabelle would want sugar in it. I carried it back to the bedroom along with the pill, setting them on a rickety table beside the bed.

She was still asleep, her brows drawn together like she was dreaming fitfully, or in some pain. The tea needed to cool a bit, so I could let her sleep.

If there was ever a day that could change your life, this one was it.

33: Corabelle

Tina waited for us by the doors to the lab. “We’re actually going to move to one of the meeting rooms,” she said. “There’s some legal stuff involved here, so I asked one of the social workers to come along.”

I glanced at Gavin, to see if he also registered that this meant Tina knew what the results were.

Tina caught the look. “I haven’t peeked. I don’t know anything. So don’t try and read the results in my expression. Besides, I’ve got the poker face of a hard-core gambler.”

“I bet you do,” Gavin said.

“I could lie about your mother and you’d buy it,” she said.

“I believe that too,” he said.

Tina leaned against the wall. “Rosa’s not here yet. We’ll just wait.” She’d skipped the pigtails today, her blond hair sleek on her head. She looked like one of those waif models you might find in a magazine, tiny and strangely dressed, her yellow eye shadow almost otherworldly.

Today her striped stockings were green and blue, two shades so matched in tone that they almost blended together. I decided staring at them was easier than looking anywhere else.

Gavin took my hand. He’d been attentive all day, fussing over tea and then breakfast. We’d met my parents for lunch and then driven them to the airport. I could not have been more relieved to see them go, but the meal had gone easily enough. No arguments. No awkward talk. Gavin and my father hadn’t exactly come to any understandings, but at least they could tolerate being in the same room.

“She’s here,” Tina said, looking behind us.

Gavin turned around first, and I watched his face to see if it revealed anything about what he was feeling. He put on a grim smile and said, “Glad you made it.”

I forced myself to face her as well. She was alone today, wearing the same teal coat, this time with a gray sweater and jeans, much less dressy than yesterday. She seemed calmer too, far more than I felt myself.

“Manuelito is with my cousin,” she said. “I decide he should not come.”

Tina pushed away from the wall. “Probably a good choice. Let the adults work this out.” She pulled out her phone and tapped out a message. “Just letting the social worker know we’re heading her direction.”

We all walked together, Tina leading, Gavin and I behind her, and Rosa alone at the end. I lost track of the corridors we snaked through, through an administrative office, then into a small room tucked away from the bustle of the medical side of the hospital.

Another woman waited there, thankfully not Sabrina and her cat’s-eye glasses, but a grandmotherly one, an official-looking folder on the oval conference table in front of her. I could not take my eyes off it, knowing my future rested in those pages. All of ours did.

Gavin, Rosa, and I took the three vacant seats, and Tina stood against the wall near the door.

“Hello, I’m Abigail Jennings. I work in family services here,” the woman said. She reached for a pair of reading glasses hanging on a gold chain and put them on. Her silver hair was coiffed and elegant, much like my own mother’s, and this helped me calm down a little. She had undoubtedly seen pretty much everything that could happen. We were not going to be anything outside her norm.

She opened the folder, and all our eyes went to it, hoping for our first glance at the answer, the big question coming to a close. But the print was small and light, numbers cascading down the page in a table.

“We are an AABB-accredited lab that provides results with an accuracy level that meets requirements for the courts as well as immigration agencies.” She tugged out the top sheet of paper. “When we have a case that includes a child whose parentage might involve issues of custody across international borders, we have to dot a few more
i
’s and cross a few more
t
’s.”

She turned the page around. “Our test looks for sixteen genetic matches. In this column,” she pointed to the first segment of the table, “we have the child’s genetic markers.” She tapped the next column. “Here are the alleged father’s.” Her fingers trailed down the numbers in the rows.

I could already see the tally at the bottom: 99.9%. But I wasn’t sure which way it went. It talked about exclusions.

“Sometimes our combined index falls into a gray area, depending on the mutations in the markers, but in this case, the conclusion was sufficient to satisfy both a court and the embassies.” She looked up. “It proves without a doubt that the child and the father are related.”

Rosa let out a breath, her hands flat on the table. Gavin’s jaw was tight, the muscle twitching, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he tried to swallow.

I couldn’t think, the words still hanging in the air like laundry on a line. I blinked, working to believe it, trying to let them penetrate.

Gavin reached for the page and moved it toward him, staring at the numbers. I felt Tina’s presence behind me, her hands on my shoulders like she had done the day before, in the lab.

Then everything came at me at once, like I’d just broken the surface of the ocean, gasping for breath, my chest heaving. I wasn’t crying or making any sound, just sucking in air.

“Breathe, Corabelle, breathe in,” Tina said.

Gavin turned to me, his hand on my back. “It’s okay, baby. We’re going to be all right. We’ll figure this out.”

“She just got discharged yesterday,” Tina said to the social worker. “She’s had pneumonia.”

“Should I call someone in?” Abigail asked.

“She’ll be okay,” Tina said. “Let’s give her a moment.”

I listened to all this impassively, as if they were talking about someone else. All I could see was Gavin as a child, his expressions, his impish grin, the swirl of his hair over his ears. I realized I had seen it all along in Rosa’s son, and I had known, but was unwilling to acknowledge it.