He puts the car in park and turns off the engine, but neither of us move to get out.
We’re both staring at the house casting a shadow over us, probably both contemplating what more tonight has in store.
“Can’t say I had ever pictured bringing you to my family under these specific circumstances,” he starts to say, his tone light and playful. “I mean, I know we’ve both been inside with them already, but it’s weird every time.”
“Yeah, I never pictured meeting them, period,” I say, blatant lie that it is. I had really wanted to meet his family when we had started dating. He’d told me so much about them, and it had all just sounded so perfect. I’d always wanted to be a part of a big family.
Out of habit, I pull out my phone and open up my texts with my mom in case I accidentally swiped away the new message notification away before I saw it, but there’s nothing new since last year there.
I let out a slow sigh, deflating a little and leaning forward over my knees. My forehead touches the passenger-side airbag compartment. Maybe I should have just accepted the offer forone of them to drop me off at home. Maybe this is just another in a long line of bad decisions I’ve been making.
I called her last night too; she still didn’t answer. She’s always been terrible at getting back to me, I remind myself. I can probably expect a text from her later tonight telling me she’s been out of the house all day and left her phone at home, that it’s been lost in the couch cushions for days. None of it true, probably.
I’m contemplating the crumbs and paper straw wrappers and crumpled up receipts that are strewn across the floor of Laura’s car when I feel Shawn’s hand graze against my back. For several moments, he traces gentle patterns back and forth between my shoulder blades.
I can’t help but hum a wistful note. It feels good, and it makes the tension in my jaw ease.
I turn my head against my knees enough to look at him. Shawn gives me a little half-smile, and raises an eyebrow, like he’s trying to convince me it won’t be so bad.
His eyes dip towards my phone screen, a tense line touching his mouth. “I thought you’d gone no-contact with her.”
I shrug and put it away. “Not on purpose. That was just a really long experiment to see if she’d ever reach out first.”
He doesn’t ask if she did, he can probably guess how that went. I’m sure he remembers forwarding me her card, finally congratulating us on getting married a couple weeks after I’d moved out.
He rolls his eyes in a less than subtle way, and I briefly imagine him turning that memory over in his hands as well, when he starts to say, “That’s a dangerous game to play—”
“I missed this,” I confess, cutting him off, if only to make him stop talking about uncomfortable things.
Shawn looks surprised, pausing his scratching for a second. His face softens then, and he nods. “The back scratches?”
If there was one perfect thing about our relationship, something he did just because it made me happy, it was the scratches. I never had to ask, he always just started doing them. Nothing else ever made me feel so easily wrapped up in someone else’s care.
“Well, if we’re going to be specific about it, the leg scratches. You could do magic to the back of my thighs,” I murmur, like I’m sharing a secret with him. I lean back in the seat and raise my knee for effect, but he takes the motion as an invitation to scratch more of my leg. I close my eyes and let it take me back for a moment.
It’s an unexpected memory; one I haven’t thought about in ages; one I never really let myself reminisce over. We used to lay in bed on Saturday mornings, doing nothing but chatting and joking, talking about what we wanted to do for breakfast until noon wandered past. He’d be scratching my legs the whole time.
I miss those mornings, what it was like to bask in the whole of his attention for hours.
Shawn coaxes my leg up over the car’s center console, and it’s all too easy to just let him take my ankle in his hand, to massage the back of my heel.
Despite myself, I giggle. “You cannot be out here grabbing random ladies’ ankles.”
“Just the ladies I know, gotcha,” he replies with a wink, and I cannot contain the laugh that little gesture evokes in me. Iwince my way through it because I know, I know, I know, I’m not supposed to laugh with him anymore. I can’t resist it, it’s just so easy.
Shawn leans across the center console and threads an arm under my knees, pulling them up to my chest. It’s all to create access to the back of my thighs, and he begins drawing long trails of pleasure up and down.
I can’t even snap at him for encroaching on my personal space; it’s exactly the way we used to be, and it feels too good. This asshole and his magic fingers know all of my weaknesses.
“Ugh, yes, just like that,” I nearly moan, my head tipping back and closing my eyes just to enjoy it. When I open my eyes again to glance at him, I realize in just that moment how close his face is to mine.
There is such warmth and depth in his dark-brown eyes. I sigh, and it feels like an admission that maybe I am shallow enough that I’ll let a pretty face fool me. I had let it convince me it was worth being hurt for. But it wasn’t just Shawn’s features, it was how he made me feel, how he took care of me. It was the many evenings we fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV, my cheek pressed against his collarbone and his arm around me, drawing lazy circles on my thigh.
He reaches out and tucks a lock of hair behind my ear, and his fingers trace down from my jaw to my chin, where he runs his thumb over my lower lip.
I don’t know if the feeling building in my chest is the need for him or for closure, but this is neither.
“Elise, I don’t want to leave things like we left them all those years ago when you didn’t give me a choice,” he admits. Everyword he reaches for feels deliberate. “I don’t want it to be how we remember everything we had.”
