“I snuck one of my mom’s books when I was thirteen,” he said, setting the book down on my side-table. “There was a half-dressed woman on the cover, so I was prepared for some extremely hot second-base action.”
“The extent of your knowledge?” I laughed.
“Exactly. But she found me sobbing my face off under the covers a week later. The hero’s brother had died. It was traumatic as fuck.”
I laughed, but my heart ached for this man and the boy he’d been. I felt, in that moment, perilously close to tumbling into a place I couldn’t get it back from.
“Tell me about your mom,” I whispered.
He did. He told me all about what she was like growing up, and where she was now. How when she finally left the boys’ father a month after Mitchell moved away, his Mom had told him first. “She drove all the way across the country, showing up at my dorm room crying, apologizing that she hadn’t left him sooner.” Mitchell stroked my arm, then raised a hand to his lip. His beard was growing back, so I couldn’t see the scar he ran his finger along, but I knew that’s what he was touching.
“She apologized to me personally because of this fight they’d gotten into. Dad had gotten pissed at me for something and called me a freak. He pushed his lip up to make fun of my cleft lip scar.”
I gasped audibly.
Mitchell dropped his hand, taking mine against his chest.
“I didn’t remember he’d done that. I was only five. But I did remember coming back. I guess she packed us all up in the car and we went to her parents, but they talked her into going back. Dad made good money, they said. He took care of us.”
Mitchell laughed ruefully. “That’s all I remembered: the car ending up back in the driveway a week later and Dad being nice to me for the first time ever. It lasted maybe a week, but it was a happy memory for me. Isn’t that fucking sad? I guess it’s good now that she doesn’t remember it either.”
I rose up on my elbow, my heart breaking for this family; for both versions of this woman who’d given Mitchell the softest heart I’d ever known a man to carry. For the little boy he was.
Mitchell stayed at my place all week, doing work from his laptop while I was out, and doing things like washing dishes and then reading nearby when I needed to work at home. He let me ask him endless business-related questions, and never made me feel stupid, even when they were very basic questions I should know as a business owner. But his knowledge from running a foundation made him an amazing resource. A huge perk besides him fucking me silly.
I don’t know what it was about being at my place, but it felt safer there. Like having Mitchell fit into my life felt more natural than me into his, even though this was the opposite of a reality we’d still never know.
I’d come home to him making dinner, and curl up with him reading to me in a voice low and melodious enough that I swore he’d missed his calling as a book narrator.
But there were functional things happening that had to do with our lives being separate again. Mitchell having heated business calls in my back room. Me booking flights to meet a school for women in trades in California, then callingmy brothers to arrange the trip, only a week from now, to coincide with Thanksgiving. But somehow, I could compartmentalize them. I could pretend this domestic life we’d created here was the way our lives could be now.
And then one night, it rained again, and Mitchell told me he needed to be back at his place to take care of some things before he left.
“Right,” I said, swallowing, my throat suddenly lined with thorns.
“I’m going to figure this out,” he promised. But then his phone rang and once again, he was gone. It had been happening more and more the past few days. The calls were getting more insistent, the line between Mitchell’s brows was just a little deeper each time he came back to me.
That night, as we fell asleep in the bedroom upstairs, Mitchell kissed the back of my shoulder. I turned around, feeling heavy with the knowledge that we had only days left.
When Mitchell met my eyes in the dark, I knew he felt it too. “I love you, Winona. I know I’m not supposed to say it, and it’s too soon, or too late. But I need you to know. I love you so fucking much. I want to make babies with you. I want to be with you when we’re old. I want… everything.”
My heart shattered and healed and shattered again.
I climbed onto him. He was hard. Endlessly, relentlessly hard. And I was wet yet again. I slid down on him, shuddering with pleasure at the sensation of him filling me. I breathed out his name, my fingers curled on his warm chest, thumb in the notch of his sternum.
When I was fully seated, though, our gazes locked, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
“Winona.” Mitchell’s hands gripped my hips, holding me in place. He looked as if he couldn’t speak.
So he felt it too.
I didn’t move. Neither of us did. We simply stared at eachother, the intensity of our connection more than just the pleasure of our bodies fitting so well. It felt like some kind of system collapse.
“I love you too, Mitchell.” I whispered. For a moment, I had a dream of us living a happily ever after, with little babies in our laps and children spilling cereal on the breakfast table. Ryan and Calvin would be the best uncles in the known universe.
It was too much. Before I knew what was happening, tears spilled down my cheek.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, half laughing, half crying. “I’m okay.”
