“This little piggy—” I jump back as she slaps my hand away.
“Don’t even think about it, Shaw.” She laughs as she stretches and sits up. “Crap, I missed like half the movie.”
“Sorry to wake you up. We have some important shit to discuss.”
“I’d love pizza for dinner.”
“I knew you weren’t sleeping.”
“I was, but then something about a leaf woke me up.”
“That was my bad.” I grab the remote and pause the movie just as Raoul tells Christine there is no damn Phantom and take a seat on the coffee table in front of Brook.
“Listen, we have to have a serious talk,” she says.
“Yeah and then I’ll let you kids watch one more hour of TV before dinner. I’m just playin’, but I do want to talk. Down at the beach, I almost made you cry. Can you tell me what that was about?”
“Oh that,” Brook says, her eyes wide. I glance over at Vaughn and he’s doing his best to hide his own shock. He was busy sucking my dick when it happened. He didn’t see the fear or the tears that had sprung up in her eyes. I know he’s dead, but I’ll dig up Josh Delinksy and whoop his ass if he did anything to make her fear men, especially in a sexual context. Brook sits forward and makes a dramatic show of putting both her hands on my knees.
“Shaw, I think you’ve uncovered my dirty little secret.”
“And what’s that?”
“I am very sensitive. A lot of people don’t believe that, for a lot of reasons, most of them being extremely racist. I know you didn’t yell at me, but you caught me off guard. I don’t like it when people raise their voice at me, especially in a personal context.”
“Would it bother you if I raised my voice at Vaughn?” I ask her.
She cringes. She’s holding back. “I don’t know. Maybe. My parents didn’t yell. I mean, they would beat that ass, don’t get me wrong, but neither of them were yellers, so I just—”
“You don’t have to like being yelled at,” Vaughn says.
“Do you not like it?” I ask him. We’ve never talked about this. I do get loud with him when scenes get intense, but he’s never said anything about it.
“I can take or leave it. You seem to get excited, so I figured it was something you needed as a part of your outlet.”
“Huh, interesting. I won't raise my voice, then.”
“Listen, I didn’t come here to shake things up. If you’re a yeller, you’re a yeller,” Brook replies.
“No,” I laugh. “I thought Vaughn was into it. I don’t have to yell and I definitely won’t get loud with you. That’s no problem.”
“Okay,” she says sheepishly. I can tell there’s more, but I’m not sure I want to push her just this second. She’s given a lot of herself in the past few hours, been very open. She doesn’t need to bleed her herself down all in one day. “There’s one more thing. I realized it later, when I was getting dressed.”
“Okay.”
“And you get to cash in an ‘I told you so’, but there was one thing that used to happen with Josh and you made me think of it today on the beach.
I don’t like the sound of that shit. “What was it?”
“Josh used to rush me.”
“Rush you how?”
“He had this thing about making me come first, but he always wanted me to do it so quickly. I didn’t feel like you guys were rushing me at all, but when you kinda snapped at me, it put me back in this place where it was like ‘stop go, stop go’ and it didn’t matter how I actually felt. I didn’t like it.”
“Thank you for sharing that. How about this? We keep talking and we keep figuring out what does work for you.”
“I like that. And, I mean, if you’re into something I might not be at first, let’s talk about that too. Intent matters. I don’t like to be yelledat,but I don’t think I would mind if you were loud, if that makes sense. Like, you don’t need to whisper,” she says with a little smile.
