Rare (28 page)

He didn’t want to be fucked.

I took his face in my hands, kissing away the tension. I had no intention of fucking him, at least not that way.

In the old days, he used to ride me all the time; it was his way of teaching me that bottoming wasn’t about giving up control. He hadn’t done it for a while, though. Life had gotten in the way, and I’d never considered returning the favor until a split second before I lowered myself onto him.

It hurt. It hurt a lot, and I nearly gave up until I felt him tremble beneath me. His whole body shook, and I realized
this
was the moment he really needed me to be strong for him.

He moved to guide me, steadying my hips. “Easy, that’s it, just like that.”

I leaned forward, keeping my weight off any part of him except his dick, and rested my head on his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around me, and we stayed like that for a long time, until the pressure of him filling me gave way to something incredible. The sensation of taking him that way was overwhelming. He reached for my cock, but I knocked his hand away.

It was too much; I just couldn’t.

I moved slowly, the way he’d taught me, following the subtle cues of his body and watching him fall to pieces beneath me. He dug his teeth into his bottom lip, fisting the sheets as he fought to keep his battered body still. He lost. I felt him rise up as I gave into his whispered pleas and rode him harder, faster, the way he needed it. My head and my heart sent me conflicting messages, but I let my heart win. If he had taught me anything, it was that sometimes I had to let go and let my body show me the way.

The heat between us boiled over. I always knew when Pete was close from the way his breathing hitched and his eyes fluttered and struggled to stay open. If he was fucking me, he’d fight it and strain to hold his rhythm, but if I was topping him, he’d go slack and let me guide him as he lost all composure. This was different. He was inside me, but I was the one in control.

At least, I thought I was until he closed his hand around my cock. I gripped the headboard with both hands, moaning out a curse, but I didn’t have the strength to fight him anymore. He twisted his wrist once, twice, and I was undone. I opened my mouth to call for him, but nothing came out. My body spilled over his chest, and the sensation hit me so hard I fell on top of him. There was no time to ride it out, or even move my weight from him. Before my head had even started to clear, he put his arms around me and held me in place. He thrust up into me, groaning with pain and pleasure as he finally found his release.

Aftershocks shuddered through me as he pulsed inside me. I absorbed them absently, feeling the way I always did after bottoming—completely disconnected from my own body. Pete whispered something in my ear and lifted my hips. I made a noise of discontent as he slipped out of me, but it didn’t sound quite right.

In a flash, his tight hold on me disappeared and I found myself on my back. “Breathe out, Ash, let it go. Come on.”

I felt my face screw up as I fought to follow his direction. When I’d had pneumonia, I’d developed a nasty habit of holding my breath for so long I forgot about it and tried to breathe in again without letting it go. It didn’t happen often, and Pete had grown wise to it, but it was a pain in the ass when it did.

I caught my breath as he rubbed soothing circles into my chest. “Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

He couldn’t hide his wince, but his grin was bright and clear. “
It
hurt like a bitch, but it was totally worth it. That was… fuck, I don’t even know.”

I rolled over to face him. “Good, huh? Don’t think I could do it a lot, though.”

Pete snorted softly. “Yeah, I know, but you don’t have to. Do what feels right and it will all come together.” I rolled my eyes at his inadvertent pun, but he poked me hard until he had my attention. “I mean it,” he said. “I needed that, but I didn’t know it until you did it. Your instincts are good, Ash, you’ve just gotta trust them.”

His words hit me hard and I felt the alien sting of tears in my eyes. I looked away and shifted so I could get up and chuck the condom, but he stopped me.

“Don’t even think about it. Trust me. You’re not going to want to move for a while.”

He gingerly rose from the bed to clean up. I watched him maneuver around the room, holding his stomach and using the furniture for balance. It felt wrong to lie back and let him, even with the dull ache forming at the base of my spine and creeping into my belly, but I knew better than to argue. Besides, his free and open smile as he slid back into bed made everything else fade away.

We lay in a peaceful postcoital haze for a while. He hummed as I drew lazy patterns on his stomach, and later, I felt myself dozing as he played with my hair. Eventually, though, reality set in and my stomach growled in protest at being forgotten about.

I raised my head from Pete’s chest. “Did you bring your meds?”

“Mmm? No, I’ll get them later.”

I frowned and sat up further. He had pills he was supposed to take every day to help his liver heal. I’d have to run to Maggie’s and get them myself. “What about food? Are you hungry?”

He shook his head again, but I was getting used to that. His appetite was still a fraction of what it had been before the accident. Sometimes he changed his mind when I put actual food in front of him.

I got up and padded to the kitchen to see what the cupboards held, but I didn’t hold out much hope of anything good. I couldn’t remember the last time I went shopping, and I hadn’t been hungry enough to care about the empty refrigerator.

A small linen bag hanging on the front door caught my eye as I neared the kitchen, considering a quick run to the grocery store.

What the fuck?

I retrieved it. Inside, I found all of Pete’s medication, his cell phone, and his wallet. Confused, I carried it into the kitchen and set it on the counter. Even as messed up as he was, he wouldn’t be caught dead carrying a bag like that down the street. No way had he brought it himself. The mystery deepened as my sense of smell drew my eyes to the pan on the stove. I lifted the lid and peered inside. The still warm eggplant pasta was Maggie’s, but the pot most definitely wasn’t. The funky purple dish had Danni written all over it.

I took a bowl back into the bedroom. Pete sampled a cautious forkful. “It’s good,” he said. “When do you think they brought it over?”

He smirked, but I didn’t get his humor until I was satisfied he’d had enough to eat. “Oh, God. Do you think they saw us?”

Pete laughed, but I was horrified. The whole world could have walked in on us earlier and I wouldn’t have noticed. The thought of either Danni or Maggie seeing that made me feel sick.

“Ash, don’t worry about it. I’m sure my mom’s seen my ass before.” He rolled over onto his side, briefly burying a grimace in a pillow. My gaze drifted to his bare feet poking out the bottom of the duvet. “Why do you keep looking at my feet?”

I shrugged absently, my mind still on the exhibition we might have given my sister and his elderly, devout Catholic mother. “You do this thing with your feet when your belly hurts and you’re trying to hide it.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, they curl up.”

He stared at me for a moment, his gaze intense before he picked up the long-forgotten earphones still plugged into my cell phone. “What were you listening to?”

“Danni. She put some stuff on my phone for me to listen to.”

“And you figured out how to do it?”

I flipped him off, but he laughed harder and followed the wire trail to my cell phone. He pulled on it until the charger disconnected, hooked it onto the bed, and stuck the earbuds into his ears. After a minute, he raised his eyebrows. “She’s
really
good. My mom loves that track. She plays it all the time.”

“She does?”

“Yeah, it’s by some Italian composer dude. I bought her the CD for her birthday. Do you know what that piece is called?”

“What do you think?”

That earned me another chuckle. He’d laughed a lot in the past few hours, but the sound was only now beginning to feel normal again, and a part of me still thought I was dreaming. Pete settled himself beside me, his head on my chest. He closed his eyes as I wove my fingers into his hair and kissed the top of his head.

“
Indaco
,” he said sleepily. “It means ‘indigo,’ like your eyes.”

I
WATCHED
the woman as she rounded her desk and sat down. When Pete told me the name of my new shrink, for some reason, I was expecting a man. Dr. Gilbert was an older lady, Ellie’s mom’s age probably, without the Botox.

“Why don’t you start by telling me why you’re here?”

Was she kidding me? Didn’t she know? I was there because my brain could no longer perceive reality. I was there because Ellie’s father had convinced Pete his worst nightmare was actually my life.

I was there because I had nowhere else to go.

Dr. Gilbert eyed me as mutinous silence took hold. She didn’t frown like I expected her to, and she didn’t look away either. Instead, her eyes, which were a strange light-brown color, seemed to grow more animated the longer her question went unanswered. For some reason, I felt like I’d played right into her hands.

On another day, in another place, in another lifetime, it probably would have irked me. Today, like most days, I didn’t care.

While she stared, I considered my options. Escape was my first instinct. I could go to the bathroom and never come back. She didn’t look all that athletic; it wasn’t like she could chase me down the street. An emotion close to amusement washed over me. Pete was right outside. Dr. Shrink might not chase me, but he probably would. I was faster than him, but he was stronger, and he wouldn’t give up.

He told me he’d never give up.

In front of me, Dr. Shrink sighed and opened a drawer in her desk. She placed a notebook and ballpoint pen between us.

“Silence can be breached in many ways, Mr. Fagin. Let’s start with a method you know.”

D
R
. G
ILBERT
opened a drawer of her desk and pulled out a folder. “I wanted to show you something today.”

I frowned at the piece of thin cardboard she passed me.

Dr. Gilbert smiled. “You don’t remember?”

I felt Pete’s gaze on me as I turned the card over in my hand. “I do, I just didn’t know you kept it.”

“You’d be surprised what I keep in that drawer, Ash. It’s interesting, don’t you think? To see how you saw yourself two years ago?”

She gestured for me to show the drawing to Pete. I duly passed it over, uncertain of his response. He was aware that it had taken me a while to open up to Dr. Gilbert, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever told him the method she’d used to communicate with me until I had.

I watched his eyes follow the words that made up what was, in essence, an eyeball. Dr. Gilbert had asked me to use words to draw how I felt about myself. There were only so many ways to call myself insane, and words were never my thing, but that day, I’d come up with a whole plethora of negative connotations.

Broken. Hopeless. Weak. Crazed.
There were dozens of them, like a thesaurus had puked on the page and swirled in a manic, cyclic pattern that made up what I supposed was my own eye. “Fascinating” was Dr. Gilbert’s word of choice, but I could tell by Pete’s muted reaction that he was trying to hide his horror. He didn’t look at me as he passed the drawing back. In fact, he was utterly silent as he folded his arms across his chest, much like he’d been since we’d arrived at Dr. Gilbert’s office.

It had been a while since he’d come to a therapy appointment with me. He’d come once at the beginning and a couple of times the first summer. Today was my last scheduled session, and because she knew I wouldn’t, Dr. Gilbert had called him up and asked him to come. I was kind of pissed she’d gone over my head, unsure if he was up to dealing with my crap. So far, his closed expression made it hard to tell if I was right.

“I wonder if you’d write the same things if I asked you to do that now,” Dr. Gilbert mused. “Perhaps you could try it at home and send me the result.”

She didn’t seem to expect an answer, but I nodded anyway. Beside me, Pete rolled his eyes. He knew it would take me months to get around to it.

Dr. Gilbert leaned back in her seat and folded her hands together. “Ash, we covered most of our conclusions at the beginning of the week. Today, I wanted to see you both so we could perhaps compare where the two of you were when you first came to see me. A lot has changed, but it seems to me that though your relationship has evolved, in essence, it has remained the same since you met. Am I right?”

She always lost me when she talked in riddles like that. The way I saw it, any answer I gave could be right and wrong, depending on your point of view. And I couldn’t see why it mattered. My relationship with Pete was about us, not words.

Dr. Gilbert stared at Pete. She seemed to expect something from him, which surprised me. She’d been trying to crack him from the very beginning, but I’d figured she knew by now it was never going to happen. He was here for me, no other reason. She was never going to get him to talk unless she asked him a direct question he couldn’t dodge.

“You once told me your relationship was built around pizza,” she baited him cautiously.

Pete snorted. “Did I?”

Triumph sparked in Dr. Gilbert’s eyes. “Yes, you did. I asked you on the phone if you could think about what you thought it was built around now. I asked you to write it down, but I suppose that was too much to ask?”

Pete rolled his eyes. “I don’t need to write it down. It’s not like I’m going to forget.”

Given recent events and my own blighted relationship with my memory, I didn’t get how he could be so sure, but I was curious nonetheless.

“Strength,” Pete said. “And faith. Love isn’t always enough, and we’ve let each other down as far as trust is concerned. When things go wrong, you have to have faith that you’re strong enough to pull through. We have that, even if we don’t always know it, and it’s what keeps us together when life gets tough.”