Letting out a hoarse yell, DeShaun thrusts up and his muscles—his beautiful, perfect muscles—tense as his cum hits my chin and dribbles between us. The warmth sends me flying, and I shoot, hard.
I collapse against him, wrapping my arms around him, smearing our combined cum as I thrust out the last of my orgasm against his ribbed belly.
“Oh, fuck. Your knee.”
I pull up, removing my weight from his lap. He shakes his head, pulling me back down.
“It’s fine. The knee is solid, I promise,” he says with a lazy, sex-drunk grin.
Fuck, his dimples are going to be the end of me. After coming like that, I’m gonna need a nap at the very least.
* * *
I wake up to the sensation of DeShaun’s body jerking next to mine. My first thought, which puts a smile on my face, is that maybe he’s jerking off. After a few more seconds, I realize that the noises coming from his side of the bed are not sounds of pleasure. The moaning isn’t ecstasy and the grunts read like pain.
I wake up a bit more and realize that I no longer have the covers on me. They’re twisted, painfully, around DB's legs. I turn on the dim light on my side table, hoping it’ll wake him up. It doesn't, but now the tears streaking down his cheeks are visible as he mumbles to himself. It’s not regular mumbling, like talking under one's breath. Given the way his Adam’s apple is working up and down…it's the sound of someone trying to scream with a hand over their mouth.
I reached over and gently grab his shoulder. "DeShaun," I say softly. “D, it's me. I'm here with you. Baby, please wake up."
He groans a bit louder, blinking. "What?"
"DeShaun, it's me," I say, repeating myself as I gently stroke his arm. “You were having a bad dream, so I woke you up. I hope that's okay."
He blinks several more times then finally focuses on me. "Yes, please always wake me up if I'm having a nightmare." We sit there in silence as he rubs his knee, gently rocking himself back and forth. “It was weird, the dream. It’s usually the moment of the blast, but this time it was about you.”
“Me?”
He nods, keeping his eyes closed. “We were on an op together and you weren’t able to get out. I was screaming for you, but you were stuck.” He shivers as he tucks the blankets around us. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll call my therapist in the morning, get squared away. I get these after every op, it's fine.”
It’s really not. What we saw this afternoon wasn’t even an op; it was barely an arrest. I run to the tiny kitchen and grab the frozen peas, then get back into bed with him and place them over his sore knee.
“Your brother is going to kick my ass if I fuck up the knee he just gave me,” he says, taking the bag of peas from me.
“Does it feel like you’ve re-injured it?”
He shakes his head. “No. I just sometimes kick and it pisses off the surrounding tendons. This is nothing, I promise you.”
I go to say something, but there’s not much to say. Instead I open my arms. "Do you want to snuggle in?"
Biting his lip, he shifts away, hesitates, then slides over and lays himself across my chest, notching his face against my neck as he holds me tight. I wrap my arms around him and breathe out a steady rhythm, which he begins to follow. A few more tears leak out against my neck, but soon enough, his breathing evens out and he falls asleep.
I thought when I saw the scarring that I fully understood why he felt like he couldn’t be with me. I was wrong. Without the scars, we’re still left with the fact that his trauma goes deeper than just a sense of feeling like he doesn't belong physically. The stuff in his head is layered and continues well beneath the surface. While I'd love to believe that my presence will eliminate the bad dreams, I know that's simply not the case. I can support and comfort him, but this is not a layer to be pulled off, reskinned. It is woven into the fabric of which he is built.
And while I know at my core that his struggles will never stop me from loving him, a single declaration won't be enough. As he grips me tighter in his sleep, I realize that he'll need constant reassurances that the demons he wrestles with every day will never deter me.
26
Odd
It’s our last day in Austin, and even though—or perhapsbecause—last night was rough, DeShaun wants to get out into the sunshine. We walk around downtown, get some amazing bratwurst and beers from Bangers across the street, and settle back into the little efficiency that’s been like a bubble for us, a safe place to come together.
While we haven’t spent much time talking about the future, I’m definitely taking my car and following DeShaun up to Dallas tomorrow, and we absolutely don’t have an end date on me staying at his place. Hell, we haven’t even discussed the fact that I’ll be staying at his place; it’s just assumed.
While I’m waiting for D to come back with some ice cream, I pull up Hedy on FaceTime to talk to her about stepping away from my engineering duties for a while.
“So you’ll be staying in Dallas?”
Running my hand through my hair, I fight back a smile before peering at the screen. “For the foreseeable future, yeah.”
