We get back to the house and once I’ve made sure my grandmother and Betty are okay, I head to the basement. Coward that I am, I’m relieved when the lights are off in the room, her form still and peaceful beneath a pile of blankets.
I strip down to boxers and climb in the bed opposite hers. Easton rolls to her side and the rubber mattress cover makes a godawful noise, but she doesn’t wake. Probably because she’sstill recovering. I knew she was a master at repressing stuff—I just didn’t think I might have become part of the trauma she was repressing. That as bad as the shit was that she dealt with as a child, I might have been as bad. I might have been worse.
Was there a better way I could have handled ending things? I lie awake until it’s late, asking myself the question. What was I supposed to do? It was never going to work.
Easton twists in the sheets, the rubber mattress cover crinkling beneath her. I’m never going to fall asleep with that fucking noise—not that it appears I’ll be falling asleep either way.
I’m in the process of pulling the pillow over my head when she makes this sound—high-pitched, wordless—and twists again.
She’s either having a very bad dream or a very good dream.
The sheets are between her legs when she rolls over the next time. She groans. It’s not the kind of sound you’d make during a nightmare.
Fuck. She’s having a sex dream, which is a thousand percent not what I needed to be made aware of right now.
She sucks in a breath and I grip my cock hard, punishingly. I remember her noises from the only night we were together. I can practically taste those noises I remember them so well. Her gasps as I went down on her and—Jesus Christ, thinking about this is not helping my erection.
Only one thing is going to fix this.
I climb out of bed and creep across the room to the bathroom, then shut and lock the door behind me. The room is so flooded with moonlight I don’t even need to hit the switch.
I slump against the vanity, my palms clenching its marble lip, and stare at myself in the mirror.
I push down my boxers and wrap my cock tight in my fist, trying to think of literally anyone else, but it’s her face that keepscoming back to me. It’s her smile after she jumped in the water yesterday, and her ass pressed to the side of my face as I carried her over my shoulder tonight. It’s the way she came on my tongue when I barely touched her and then came a second time too.
My eyes open and I look in the mirror again. “Stop,” I demand. I’ve spent years trying to think of anyone but her, and it never fucking works.
In the mirror I spy the reflection of her bikini bottoms hanging from the hook off the door.
Fuck my life.
I can’t help it. I really can’t.
I picture being the one to strip them off of her. Or slipping my fingers beneath the elastic and making her finish like that. I swallow, telling myself not to grab them while I’m already reaching toward the hook. I let my finger run along the inside panel. This is so fucking wrong. So wrong and disgusting and...I pull them off the hook and press them to my nose, searching for the scent of her and finding it, faintly. I breathe deep as my hand moves faster.
I’ve thought about that night a million times, about watching my cum coat her skin, stain her panties.
My hand moves faster. It’s almost as if she’s here, as if she’s spread in front of me on a work table with her skirt around her hips. I shoot my load into the crotch of the bikini—I didn’t even realize it was pressed there.
And for a moment, before I realize what an absolutely sick, fucked up thing I’ve just done, that smear of white fluid shimmering against her bikini bottoms is better than any trophy I ever took home.
God, I’m so fucked. I’m not over her.
I’m never, ever going to be over her.
21
EASTON
Iwake.
The bathroom door just closed, I think.
I want to return to the dream I was having, one in which Elijah and I were back on that table.
I feel empty for it now, in the darkness. My hand slides down, following the path his fingers took that night. Down my sternum, over the flat plane of my stomach, finally slipping between my legs.
I’m already soaked, so wet that my fingers can barely find purchase as they slide over the places his tongue once flickered, over the places where his cock pulsed in controlled thrusts as he rubbed against me, beneath my skirt.
