My phone alarmblares and I scramble off the side of the twin-sized bed I’m perched on. The only thing keeping me from falling on my face is two strong arms wrapped tightly around my chest and midsection. The ratty black leather of the well-worn string on his wrist digging into my boob.
Fuck, what time is it?
Grabbing my phone, I turn off the offending sound and see my reminder to myself.Babysit Tyler with the silent asshole.
Fuck.
Fuuuuck.
“We have to get to Asher and Jade’s.”
“No, we don’t.” His muffled, half asleep voice is deliciously deep as he talks directly into my neck.
“We do, we promised.”
“I didn’t promise anything,chica. You volun-told me.”
“Jade needs a night out! Come on, she’s my best friend. Tyler’s my godson.”
“He’s also my godson.”
I roll my eyes. “Barely.”
Ty sits back, leaning away from me and I take that opportunity to detangle from him. This can’t keep happening. Us, hooking up when we’re feeling sentimental, or drunk, or stressed, or happy, or… Fuck, just horny. We can’t, it’s blurring the lines in my heart and my head.
“Don’t tell anyone we hooked up again,” I tell him quickly, locating my clothes quickly and running to his bathroom.
“I won’t,” he says loudly. “You can’t either.”
“Trust me, I’m not going to.”
“What is that supposed to mean, Roxie?”
“Ugh,” I groan, finishing my business just in time for Ty to barge into the bathroom as I flush. “It means, this can’t happen again.”
“What if I want it to happen again?” He’s said this shit before. But it’s always the same answer.
“Am I still nothing or are you ready to talk about it yet?”
“I’m not ready for your opinion of me to change. I’m not ready to face it yet. But how many times do I have to tell you that you aren’t nothing? Not to me. You never have been.”
This has happened so many times that I’ve made that the stipulation for us to even consider starting over. How can we go forward with something so big that it broke us up, still hidden?
“Am I still–” I start to say, but Ty jumps out of bed and covers my mouth with his hand. His dark eyes glaring down at me. It’s been a few years now where the mask he wears for everyonefades away around me. It’s like he figured out he was safe with me again.
Even though he’s always, at each step of our life together, been safe with me.
“You know I fucking hate that question. You just say it that way to piss me off,” he growls.
“You deserve it.” His bare, toned chest is pressed up against me while his big strong hands grip my waist tightly.
Fuck, the feeling makes me want to push him back onto the bed and have my way with him. It’s been…so long since I’ve felt him hold me tightly. It’s been light touches, grazes, or intentional movements for years since that night after the bar.
Then, we watched Asher knock his brother Hunter out cold– sending him off with a ‘rapist’ tattoo above his cock. It was a hard fucking day when we all found out it was Asher’s brother who had hurt Jade. He more than hurt her, he raped her and that was incredibly difficult for her to move on from. He drugged her and raped her, and who knows what would’ve happened to her if Asher hadn’t gone down to the basement to check out what his brother was up to, who knows what would’ve happened to her.
I’m not going to lie, sometimes that thought haunts me. But at the same time, that one decision of Asher’s to go check it out brought Jade into our lives.
Asher brought Jade back to the shop, helped her heal, they fell in love, and since then we’ve been fast friends. Best friends. She lived with me for a while before they moved in together.
