“Let me hear you,” he murmurs, shifting the angle and hiking my leg higher.
I bite his shoulder when I come, hard enough to mark him. He drives into me twice more before finishing with his face buried in my hair.
After a moment he sets me back on my feet, steadying me until my legs hold. I pull my shorts up and lean against the tile, staring at the ceiling.
We end up on the floor with our backs against the bench, passing his water bottle between us.
The bite mark on his shoulder is already going red. He doesn’t mention it.
“I missed you,” I confess to the far wall. “These two weeks. The talking. I missed having someone around who doesn’t turn every sentence into a status report.” I take a drink and hand the bottle back. “I hated that I missed you. I still do, right now, sitting six inches away from you, which makes no sense.”
He turns the bottle over in his hands and nods. “Tonight doesn’t change what I kept from you. I’m not going to pretend it does.”
“That’s the problem. If you tried to paper it over, I’d know how to react. Instead you’re telling me the surveillance was exactly what it was and refusing to dress it up.” I shake my head.
“I don’t know what to do with a man who won’t defend himself when defending himself would be easier. I can’t separate whatyou did from who you are to me. I’ve tried for two weeks. Every time I pull them apart, they snap back together.”
I look away.
“I can’t forgive one without deciding what to do with the other. And I’m not there yet.”
He doesn’t try to solve it. He just sits there, taking my tirade without trying to argue his way out of it.
That’s the part I can’t work out.
Whether he respects me enough to sit in it with me… or whether he’s simply run out of things to say.
Maybe both are true. Maybe that’s the problem.
Without another word, I stand and look at him.
He doesn’t ask for anything I haven’t offered.
I walk to the door and into the corridor. I make it four steps before I have to stop.
I collapse against the wall, clutching my chest. My eyes burn. My throat closes. The first tear spills over, and after that, I stop trying to hold any of it in. I press the back of my hand to my mouth and let the rest come, silent and ugly.
I’ve spent two weeks being furious at him and missing him at the same time, and tonight only made it worse.
And yet, for some fucked-up reason, I would do it again.
