Mabel lets go of my hand and I notice her top pulled up against her stomach and my eyes on impactdart to the area of her stomach, now on show.
Tiger strips line her stomach, and it reminds me of how powerful and beautiful a woman’s body is. I’m hit with the thought of running my lips over them, lining each one with kisses and running my tongue across them, moving my body down lower to find the beginning of her pussy, worshipping her over and over again for bringing one life into this world.
The blood rushes down and my dick hardens automatically in my jeans. My eyes lock back onto Mabel’s face as she dusts herself down before the sheer look of panic sprawls across her face as she aggressively pulls her top down over the part of her stomach, that my dick’s now throbbing at.
My dick calms as I watch her pull her top down further than it should go before I realise what she is doing, and my face automatically softens. Women only do that when they hate something about themselves.
“Mabel, you don’t...” I start, leaning towards her to comfort her when I hear Jane shout from behind us.
“Hey, honey, could you give us a hand?” She calls from the porch. Mabels eyes look at her mom and then back at me.
I want to ask her to stay. I want to comfort her and make all the bad things go away. My heart aches at the thought.
“Sorry, duty calls.” She says before moving quickly beside me and up towards the porch where her mama and mine are standing.
Double fuck.
The sinking realisation that Mabel’s self-conscious of her stomach hits my heart with force. The girl I remember never cared about stuff like that, because she knew that no matter how she looked she was always beautiful to me.
As I watch her walk away, I rub my fingers alongside my hands, trying so hard not to reach out to her and pull her back, feeling the usual clamminess that happens just before a panic attack.
I take deep breathes to try and calm myself down at the anger that is boiling within me.
The anger is purely directed at myself; at the fact my girl doesn’t love herself anymore. I continue taking deep breaths in and out, trying to calm the panic attack, when I feel both my arms being lifted over two sets of shoulders.
“Hey, Mav,” Iris says, sneaking under my left arm. My vision goes back to normal looking down at the girls who have snuckunder my arms, and I start to feel better.
“Someone’s a bit sweaty.” Hope winks at me, implying I’m hot because of a certain someone.
She isn’t wrong, just not for the reasons that she’s automatically thinking.
Lifting my head up from looking at the girls either side of me I catch sight of Mabel, up on the porch, laughing with her mama as she takes the coverings off the food that’s been lovingly prepared by her and her family; like they’d once done all the years that I spent here.
My memory flickers back to when I’d grab her by the waist and hide her around any corner that I was close to, stealing kisses any way that I could whilst she was busy helping host this mighty task every year.
Holding onto the girls that’d attached themselves to the side of me, steading myself from the panic attack that was about to hit me in front of the people who I left behind, I walk up the path alongside them, rubbing my fingers along the palms of my hands. Urging the pain in my chest away.
Looking up from the grass below me, I spot Luke standing alongside Colter, who’s nursing his glass of whiskey. “Glad to see you made it, Mav’,” Luke winks at me, raising his beer in a salute towards me.
I extend my arm from over Iris’s shoulder and hold it towards him which he takes with a firm hold, shaking it back and pulls me into an embrace, slapping his hand on my back.
“Missed too many of these.” I shift my stance. “I didn’t need to miss anymore,” I say as he pulls away from the embrace.
I see Colter’s teethy grin in the corner of my eye as I pull away from Luke. Gripping tighter onto my glass of whiskey, I finish off the final mouthful.
“Top up?” I asked my group of childhood best friends. “No, all good,” each one replies, holding up their full bottles and glasses. I nod at them before turning on my heels and heading straight to the porch where the drinks and food are being put out on display by my girl and our mom’s.
Climbing the steps to the porch, leaning one hand on the fence, I pull my face to look in Mabel’s direction. She’s on one knee, both hands on her daughters elbow’s, smiling deep into her eyes as she speaks before pulling her into an embrace and letting her go again.
Reaching the drinks table, Mabel stands up from the position on one knee that she was in. Her gazemeets mine and her eyes soften. Studying her even more, I can’t help myself but lose my breath at the beauty that’s standing in front of me.
It reminds me of all those nights she’d hold my hand, walking through the fields between my land and hers. Back when I could walk over to her any time I wanted, hold her head and dip her body back into a deep, meaningful kiss, where our tongues would dance against each other in perfect harmony, her hair tangled up in-between my fingers as she lost herself in my touch.
“You good, bro?” I hear my brother say, snapping me back into today’s reality. Blinking back into the moment, I notice Mabel is gone from the spot that I drifted away from.
“All good,” I reply back to him, shaking my head and reaching for the bottle of whiskey.
Jake leans into me, bumping his hip with mine and giving me another one of his famous shit-eating grins. “Good.” He nods back at me with his one-word response before turning his attention back to the little girl holding onto his leg for dear life.
