I couldn’t wait to be done with this bullshit and have Tessa back in my bed. I had to stay in Los Angeles to deal with the insurance claim adjuster, who couldn’t come out to do an appraisal for three fucking days. At the end of the first day, I was ready to say fuck it and just eat the cost of the damage, but Tessa assured me she would be waiting for me when I got back and persuaded me to stay here and get everything straightened out. By the time I was boarding the plane to leave Los Angeles, I was more than ready to spend the next few days doing nothing but worshiping Tessa’s body.
Between the airport and the hotel, I stopped to pick up some essentials for our time together. Growing up in California, I never thought it could be so difficult to find an adult toy store. I had to take a cab thirty miles out of my way, but it was going to be worth it. After dropping off my purchases at the hotel, I met Tessa at The Happy Valley and we rode back to the hotel on the bike she liked so much.
When we entered the room, I didn’t waste any time getting her naked and under me. As my cock entered her tight, hot pussy, I knew without a doubt that this was where I belonged—with her. And I never wanted it to end. I needed her. She needed me. And even though she would be pushed beyond her limits, I knew she could make it. She had to be the one to make it.
After making a terrible mess of the bed—even the fitted sheet had been ripped off—we ordered room service for dinner and I pulled Tessa into the bathroom to set her up in a hot bath.
“I’m just going to go wait for the room service. They are pretty fast here. I’ll be right back,” I told her as I slipped on a robe. I closed the door behind me and started gathering up our clothes. Earlier I had been sure to pack up all of my clothes from the dresser and closet and had given them to housekeeping to store for me. Now I just needed to get rid of the clothes we’d had on when we arrived. We didn’t need clothes for what we were going to do for the next few days. I had everything packed up and in a bag when there was a knock on the door.
“Room service.” Perfect timing. I opened the door.
“Just put the cart over there. I’ll take care of it. I need you to take this bag and store it with the rest of my belongings until I am ready for it. Don’t let anyone get it but me and I’ll make sure you get an extra tip,” I said while handing him a crisp hundred-dollar bill.
“Yes, sir. Of course. Is there anything else I can get for you this evening, sir?” he asked with his hands clasped behind his back.
“No, that will be all. Thank you. Have a nice evening.”
“You do the same, sir.” He tipped his head and left, shutting the door behind him.
I checked the food to make sure that everything was just right and went back into the bathroom. “The food is here. Are you—” My words were cut short when I found that Tessa had turned on the jets in the tub and positioned herself so that one was pointed right on her clit, her head thrown back over the tub.
I stood frozen in the doorway, my mouth open like a teenage boy who had just found his dad’s stash of dirty magazines in the garage. I had never seen something so erotic in my entire life. The jetting water had created tiny bubbles that were clinging to her silken skin, and her hair was wet and slicked back from her angelic face. Her legs were spread wide to let the stream of water give her the pleasure that was causing her to arch her back and shove her perfectly round breasts up like an offering to the gods.
As much as I wanted to go to her, to feel her tighten when she came, I didn’t want to do anything that would interrupt her. I saw her sensual mouth curve into an O-shape and wondered if she was thinking about her beloved Tequila-O’s. I was going to have to order a bottle and find out.
As quietly as possible, I leaned up against the doorframe and watched as her body began to move, no doubt adjusting where the pressure from the jet was hitting her. Her hips began to rock up and down, giving me pointers for the next time I had my tongue between her legs. Suddenly, her nipples hardened into peaks and her entire body tensed and began to vibrate. This was a woman who knew exactly what she needed to find her release.
After she rode out the last waves of her pleasure, Tessa let her body sink back down into the water, and as she let out a breath she had been holding, her legs slipped back into the tub. Not knowing how she would react to knowing I had watched her, I waited until her head sank under the surface of the water and pulled the door closed. After getting composure of myself, I gave a quick knock and poked my head inside.
“The food is here. Are you hungry?” I said.
“I’m starved!” she responded, and I was sure that, after what I had just witnessed, she was.
“There is a robe on the back of the door. Get wrapped up and come on out,” I said.
We sat at the table and ate the steaks, baked potatoes, and mixed vegetables we had ordered with a bottle of merlot I had picked up earlier that night. Dessert of chocolate cake with raspberry filling paired perfectly with it.
Tessa let her hair out of the towel it had been bundled in and let it fall down her back before she climbed to the middle of the bed, looked back over to me, and held out a wide-toothed comb.
“Comb it for me?” she asked.
I walked over and climbed on the bed to sit behind her and work the tangles out of her hair. When Tessa’s phone started going off, I jumped off the bed, flipped the switch to turn it to silent, and put it in the desk drawer. “No phones, Tessa. No phones, no internet, no outside world. Just us for the next two days.” That was when Tessa realized that all of our clothes were gone.
Looking around the room, she said, “Reese, where are my clothes?”
“You’ll get them back. All you need is this beautiful light blue robe, but it does look better on the floor,” I said as I reached over and pulled on the belt holding her robe on her. As her robe fell open, her fantastic tits came into view. I made slow love to her until we both fell asleep tangled in the sheets and each other.
“Tessa”
“What the fuck are you doing?” The loud yell had come from Reese, who was violently tossing and turning next to me. “Get away from her!”
I jumped off the bed to avoid being hit by arms that were now punching out, trying to hit something that wasn’t there. As hard as it was to do, I stood and watched as the nightmare played out. I knew from when Alayna was little that if I were to touch him it could make it worse. She’d had the worst night terrors after Ruby died.
So I stood by the side of the bed, watching the man who was stealing my heart struggle and fight against his dreams, wondering what he had been through that could cause him so much pain. He grunted some more words that I couldn’t make out and then his body went still. Now I could wake him up. I spread out on the bed next to him, careful to keep a few inches of space between us, laid my hand on his chest, and shook him gently.
“Reese, hey, wake up. I think you were having a nightmare. Are you okay?”
He started moving and stretching a little, signaling that he was waking up. He blinked a few times to open his eyes before looking at me. “Sorry, baby,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s been a really long time since I’ve had a nightmare. I just need to go splash some water on my face. I’ll be right back.”
While Reese was in the bathroom, I picked up my robe from the floor and wrapped myself in it. When he came back out, his short hair was wet and spiking up on his head. Even after the nightmare, he was beautiful in the morning.
You don’t have many mornings left with him.
I pushed the painful thought from my mind and asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”
Reese climbed back on the bed and kissed my forehead. “Just some shit that happened at a carnival almost ten years ago that comes back to me every now and then. I’ll be okay.”
He must have thought the look of horror on my face had to do with being scared of clowns or elephants. He has to be talking about a different carnival, right? I mean, he couldn’t have possibly been at the same carnival, could he? When I found my words again, I asked “Reese, what carnival?”
“Don’t worry about it. I don’t want to scare you with the story. It was just some bad shit that happened when I was in college. I got some help after, but I still have a nightmare from time to time.”
My mind was reeling. “Reese. You shouted, ‘Get away from her!’ What carnival?” I demanded.
He let out a long sigh. “You aren’t going to drop this, are you?”
“No.”
“Okay, but I’m not giving you details. You don’t need to hear that. It was actually here.” My whole body went tense. “A bunch of us from college were up here for baseball camp one summer, and Myles had heard that there was a carnival in town that weekend, so we went. At first, it was fun. We were drinking beers. I’d heard that it took a lot of 3.2% beer to get drunk, and after my sixth cup, I was finally feeling something. Myles didn’t fare so well after we went to the fortune teller, so he was off in the bushes, losing all of that weak beer and the hotdogs he had been eating all night.”
They went to see the fortune teller Madame Miranda too? When the cops interviewed her, she’d said that she had warned Ruby to leave. I had to know what she had told Reese and Myles.
Reese continued. “Myles sat up, wiped his chin, and then said, ‘What the fuck is that over there?’ while pointing into the trees. We saw a large form that we thought was a bear crouched over something smaller.”
Oh god, he saw her! My hands came up to cover my mouth, but Reese was still looking down at the bed and didn’t take in my reaction.
“At that age, we thought we were pretty invincible, so we started moving toward the bear. Myles was still weak from puking, so he was stumbling a little and wasn’t watching where he stepped. When a branch that had fallen tripped him, he fell to the ground with a loud oomph. I still had my eyes on the bear, but when it stood, I saw that it wasn’t a bear at all. It was a man. And then I saw the broken body of a girl at his feet.”
That was Ruby and he saw her. He saw that she was broken. By this time I had tears running down my face, but Reese still wasn’t looking at me.
“When his eyes connected with mine, he knew he had been caught, so he started running. My body leapt into action and I started chasing him. He darted out of the trees and started running across the field towards the parking lot. I was a pretty fast runner back then and was gaining on him until I didn’t see the orange plastic fencing that had fallen to the ground. My feet got all caught up in it and I went down. I went down hard. My ankle didn’t move like it should have when my body twisted and I shattered it. That was the night that ended my baseball career. The next day, in surgery, they had to fuse the bones in my ankle together. But the worst part about the whole thing is that I almost had him.” He finished speaking, took a deep breath, and looked up at me.
By this time, I had completely lost it and was trying to cover my face with my hands as the tears were flowing down my cheeks.
“Tessa, what’s wrong? Please don’t cry. I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said while wrapping his arms around me.
“You saw her,” was all I could get out between sobs.
“Saw who?” Reese asked while rubbing circles on my back.
I looked up at him and said, “You saw her. You saw Ruby. You were there. You saw her broken. Oh my god, Reese, you saw him!” The realization that Reese had been there was more than I could handle. My breathing was getting faster and faster, but I felt like I couldn’t get any air. Then everything went black.
I don’t know how long I was out, but when I came to, Reese was holding a cool washcloth on my forehead, asking me to come back to him. When I opened my eyes, Reese smiled a little and said, “There’s my girl. You had me worried there for a minute.” Then he helped me sit up and placed some pillows between my back and the headboard. Tucking my hair behind my ear, he asked if I would like some water and helped me take a drink from the glass that was waiting on the nightstand.
Reese took both of my hands in his and asked, “Tessa, did you know that girl?”
I nodded my head and, fighting back tears, said, “She was my best friend.” The words starting rushing out of me, and Reese pulled me into a tight hug, rocking me back and forth as I spoke. “She was my best friend and I wasn’t there for her, Reese. I abandoned her to make a stupid wish. She needed me to protect her and I wasn’t there. I just had to wait for the clouds to part so I could see the first star and make a wish. It was something I did every night. Ruby got sick of waiting, and while I was staring up to the sky, she walked away. I never saw her again. They wouldn’t let me see her body. Dad said she was too… She was too broken for me to see. I couldn’t understand how someone could be broken. But Dad held me tight and said it was like she was one of the porcelain dolls that I collected. She was hurt and too broken for me to see her.”
I pulled back and looked into Reese’s eyes as I realized what he had lost that night. “But you were there. You made him stop breaking her, stop hurting her. Oh my god, Reese. Your whole life changed because you didn’t just look the other way!”
“Tessa, ever since that night, I have believed that everything happens for a reason. If I would have kept playing ball, I would have never opened my first shop, done the things I have done, or lived the life I have lived. I would have never met you, Tessa,” he said and then gently captured my lips with his, kissing me with more emotion and need than I had ever felt before.
Reese kissed the sharp pain of losing Ruby away. It felt as though we were breathing life back into each other, like we were being healed by the hot caress of lips. We fell into the bed and were lost in each other, worshiping each other. Reese’s hands trailed over my skin like I was the most precious thing to him, like he was committing me to memory.
Reese had shifted to put me beneath him, his chest pressing against mine and my legs wrapped around him. His head was buried between my neck and shoulder like he couldn’t get close enough to me as he slowly moved his hips against mine. I could hear words coming from him but couldn’t really make out what he was saying. It sounded like ‘please let her be the one to make it’ over and over again. He rose up on his elbows, put his hands on each side of my face, and then claimed my lips with his once again. I had never in my life felt so connected to another person. The thought that I would never feel this way again was washed away as Reese and I found our release together, my body on fire, burning like a sparkler lit up on the Fourth of July.