I feel the flush on my cheeks. I don’t know why I’m shy now, considering where he was thirty seconds ago.
Gabriel leans down, peppering my jawline with short kisses. “Tell me what you like. What you want from me.”
My breath sticks in my throat. “You know what I like. We have sex all the time.” We have been insatiable since that first time, feral and starving for each other within hours of our last time.
“Tell me,” Gabriel whispers, pushing hair from my forehead. “Be honest about what you want.”
Honesty feels a lot like vulnerability, and I don’t love that idea. But I love Gabriel, and I trust him. I trust there is a safe place to land. It’s not honesty that’s hard for people. It’s what’s at stake after they’re honest.
I swallow against my instinct to withhold my desires. Gabriel glides into me, over and over, and in one breath, I say, “Slower.”
His pace decreases. In the dark of the living room, the tip of his tongue drags up my neck.
“My hair,” I gasp. I see the swell, knowing it’s rising for me, and all I have to do is catch it. “Put your hand in my hair.”
Gabriel slides a hand up my neck, fingers splaying as they venture into my long hair and scrape over my scalp.
“Pull,” I whisper.
He listens. The understated burn of pain mixes with pleasure. My cheek presses against the forearm he uses to support himself, and I turn into him. He’s doing everything right, so right, and soon I’m riding the wave and biting into Gabriel’s bicep. He lets go, too, and I hold on to the coiled muscles in his upper back, offering up my mouth. He likes to kiss me when he comes.
SESSION SEVEN
DESERT FLOWER THERAPY
“What, specifically, was Gabriel's flaw?” Dr. Ruben crosses one leg over the other, capturing his knee with his hands.
“It was the first time I realized Gabriel was capable of keeping something from me. Lying.”
“Did he lie?”
“He waited months to tell me about Nash. It was a massive part of his life, this experience that shaped him. It felt like a lie.”
“A lie of omission, then?”
“I suppose.”
Dr. Ruben bounces his leg. “People lie all the time. Every day. It’s human nature. It doesn’t mean they’re being outright deceitful. It just makes them human.”
“So it should be acceptable?”
“That’s not what I said. Most lies are told to protect a part of the person lying. To protect the ego, the image, the pain, the shame.”
The last word confuses me. “The shame?”
“Oh, yes. The shame most of all. We tend to protect our feelings of shame, because we abhor it and never want to show it to others. So we cover it up, we create stories around it. Lies,fibs, half-truths, call it whatever you want. At the end of the day, they are stories.”
My stomach twists uncomfortably. I can take all of what Dr. Ruben said and apply it to Gabriel, but that’s not what has me feeling nauseous. It can all be applied to me.
“So when Gabriel told me about his brother…?”
“He was pulling back the curtain. Erasing a lie and replacing it with truth. He was showing you that which shames him.”
I nod slowly, thinking back over the conversation from that night. “It humanized him. Which was a good thing, I suppose. Until then he’d been this mythical person. The realization that he was human was, I don’t know, a little unnerving.”
“Tell me, Avery, do you think it was fair to hold Gabriel to this high of a standard?”
“No, it wasn’t.” I sigh, disappointed in myself. “He had so many wonderful qualities, and I didn’t want them to be marred by anything that wasn’t positive.”
