“Neil.” I sought him out in the darkness, using the faint moonlight tohelp. But my eyelids were heavy, and my head was spinning. When I sensed him next to me, however, I quieted.
He was still there.
I rolled over onto my side, wincing at a twinge of pain between my legs, and eased myself down onto his chest. I heard him suck in a breath, but I didn’t care if he didn’t want to be touched just then. I needed him, and the sooner he realized I was nothing to be afraid of, the better. I breathed in his smell and rested my hand on his tightened abdomen, feeling the defined muscles there. The back of my hand brushed against his member where it curved up from his groin. Then I wrapped my hand around it and gave it an impish stroke.
It was warm and wet to the touch.
I rotated my thumb around the glans, his most sensitive area, and he let out a moan.
“You want to give him a little more attention, Babygirl? Give him a half hour to recover, and he’ll be looking just as perky as before. Your pussy is more of a lion, you know,” he teased, and I let out a laugh.
At times, his unexpected quips would put me in a good mood.
I wished he could always be like that: calm and dryly funny.
I stopped stroking him and rested my hand a little higher up on his side, holding him as tightly as I could.
“For some reason, your sense of humor always surprises me. I guess I’ll have to get used to it,” I answered, amused, resting my head against his pecs. Neil wrapped his arm around my shoulders and pulled the covers up over us. I was trembling, and he probably thought I was cold, but it was actually just from the powerful feelings I got in proximity to him. My nose brushed against his skin, and I drew it along him, intoxicated. “How do you smell so good even when you’re sweaty?” I asked, visibly surprised.
Neil laughed and slowly stroked my arm.
“I took a shower right before I came to see you. I’ll have to take another one in a little bit,” he murmured.
I occurred to me then that our skin-to-skin contact might be bothering him, and the thought made me sad.
“You can’t stand to smell me on you?” I asked, hoping he would say that wasn’t the case. I knew that people like Neil who had experienced severe trauma in their childhood often developed unusual behaviors in adulthood.
One very common one was a fixation on cleanliness.
“I can’t stand to smell anything on me that’s not me,” he clarified. The darkness concealed the finer features of his face, but I was certain it had gotten grimmer as he thought about what had happened to him. I decided in that moment that I was going to pull him away from those thoughts and bring him back to the present with me. I raised a hand and felt for his face, rubbing his jaw, which I could feel was tense. The friction of his stubble against my palm raised goosebumps, and from the almost imperceptible motion of his cheek, I suspected he might be smiling. To make sure, I ran my fingers along the edges of his warm, full lips to confirm it. He had pulled one of his mysterious or wicked smiles.
“What is it, Babygirl?” he asked softly, before opening his mouth and trapping my index finger between his teeth playfully. I jumped at the sudden movement and laughed.
“Are you staying here?” I asked, enthralled. When he released my finger from captivity, I continued to trace the lines of his perfect face. I slid along his straight nose, which dominated a face full of firm, masculine features, and, fortunately, he didn’t reject my touch. He let me do it.
“If it won’t cause you to have delusions about our future relationship, then yes, I’ll stay,” he answered, blunt as ever.
I was always hopeful at heart for some sort of change in him. The only way he’d be able to truly understand that not all women were like Kimberly would be to actually share his soul with one. But his wounds ran too deep to be healed by an inexperienced girl like me. So I would have to content myself with what he could give me and love him in silence because he wouldn’t accept any other sentiment from me.
Once before I had said to him, “What if I love you?”And I still hadn’t forgotten how that had gone for me. I promised myself that I would never again be explicit about my feelings for him. “Love” was a word he simply did not want to hear, even if I struggled to really understand why.
“Then stay,” I answered simply, making myself comfortable on his chest.
“Go to sleep, Babygirl. You have a busy day tomorrow; you’re going to see what you’re doing here.” He stroked my hair, and I relaxed against him. My body was worn-out, and Neil’s arms were the only ones that could warm my heart.
He was like a book with a dusty cover that had never been read.
He was a broken record, discarded without ever being heard.
He was a storm with a beautiful sunset on the horizon.
He was the art and imperfection.
He was a good soul trapped in the wrong life.
He was a man trapped in his own world of chaos, but it was also the most beautiful place I’d ever visited, though he couldn’t imagine that.
By that point, there was no escape.
