“No.” He tossed them, offering me his hand again and making a grabbing motion with it in the same way his niece had earlier. “Come here.”
Confused, I slowly lifted my hand to him.
He grabbed onto my wrist to tug me down onto the bed, a surprising show of strength that really shouldn’t come as that big of a shock considering his line of work. Again, treating him softly when he was anything but.
A paradox—seeing him in a way no one else did. Soft and submissive, pliable to whatever whim he offered to cater to. All mine for the taking so long as he let me.
I liked that.
Mine and no one else’s.
He cupped my face with both of his hands, leaning back into the mattress while pulling me with him. I went without a fight, leaning on my hands to keep from crushing him against the mattress. There was something in his eyes that was hard to name. Warm, inviting. A blooming affection I wasn’t at all used to seeing reflecting back at me.
“You’re not very good at this. Are you?” His voice was soft, mimicking the hold he had when cupping my face.
I chased after his lips, needing his taste on my tongue again.
“I didn’t hear you complaining about how I fucked you last time.”
He laughed again, tilting his head just enough for me to miss his mouth and catch the side of it instead. “That’s not what I meant.”
What in the world was he talking about?
My mind was clogged with too much want and lust to properly think, to dissect whatever puzzle he was trying to lay out in front of me, presented on some silver platter trying to be used to gravitate my attention elsewhere. “Then, what?”
“Feelings wise,” he said.
Feelings?
What did that have to do with any of this?
Feelings were useless in the matters of bodies and pleasure. Getting too tangled up in something that fragile would only lead to an unnecessary amount of anguish no one wanted to deal with.
“Never was my strong suit,” I admitted.
He squirmed under me when our hips met, tilting his head back at the same moment that he screwed his eyes shut. Rutting against him still half-clothed was teenaged behavior, yet, the harder I ground myself into him, the more audible those soft little gasps of his got.
Sometimes it was hard to believe in fate.
A divine intervention in everyday life that always seemed to either work out in your favor or not, yet, leading you down a singular path already chosen for you since birth.
Growing up in the mind of family that had a legacy of generations behind it, and the expectation to uphold it weighing on barely developed shoulders, not much of that concept was foreign to me. In an abstract sense, I could appreciate someone outside of the scope I’d grown up in wanting to believe in having life already decided for them and giving all responsibility over to the powers that be.
After all, I’d done much the same in my young adult life, doing whatever it was my parents told me and molding myself into the kind of child they’d envisioned having the moment my mother’s pregnancy test came back positive in late March thirty-four years ago.
Stepping out of that mold as an adult was a daunting task, not one many wanted to do, regardless of their socioeconomic background. Not when the belief that fate would handle it and reward them for abiding by its whimsical laws without question.
I’d done so, not out of some kind of selfish need to be different or rebel against my parents. It was never that complicated. Being convinced by my only two friends in the world to be adventurous enough to actually do something outside of my pre-planned life had felt obvious at the time. Whynotfollow them to a different country for higher education and major in medicine while they both went into business—the one subject both my parents were banking on.
Money was fleeting, as was life.
Why bother living up to someone else’s predetermined expectations when they wouldn’t be around to deal with the consequences come a few decades from now?
Back in those days, I hardly cared about some invisible tie to the universe, hardly ever believed in anything outside of what I could experience with my own two eyes and hands.
What difference did it make when only I would be the one suffering from the repercussions?
Naïve, in hindsight.
