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“Ah, fuck, yeah. I feel that. Fuck,” Sunny cries out, his hips thrusting faster and faster, the wet slap of skin-on-skin cracking through the shower stall. “Della.”
When he comes forcefully inside me, when his body shakes and his breath comes hard and fast, I realize I’m no longer thinking about anything else but him.
32
DELLA
The message lands on my phone two days later while Sunny is driving and the sat nav tells me that we’re seven minutes from my home.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I mutter, and the hand that has been resting on my thigh for the last eleven miles squeezes it gently.
“You okay?” Sunny asks. “You hardly ever swear.”
I bite down on the side of my thumb as I look at the message. Hoping the words might rearrange into something less horrifying than the current combination.
“Mom and Dad are outside my house and want to know where I am.”
“Meaning?”
I turn to face him. He’s so very competent in the side profile. “A couple of weeks ago, they invited themselves over for dinner tonight because they like to check how I’m doing in my little house with my little goals and little means. And I forgot all about it with everything else that’s going on. I haven’t told them I’ve been suspended.”
“So, we handle it. And we don’t tell them about the suspension. Lie to them. I’ve got your back.”
There’s a psychological thing that happens in relationships. Like, if one of you likes to run and hide from the arguments, the other will assume the role of pursuer. If one chooses silence, the other will fill it with opinion. And right now, I’m carrying two hundred percent of the panic, and Sunny looks utterly unruffled.
“You don’t understand, this is the worst possible thing that could happen.”
Sunny turns to look at me. “Am I missing something? Are you expecting them to have guns?”
That stops me in my tracks. “What? No. Of course not.”
Sunny shrugs. “I feel like we’ve already handled worse in the last week, then.”
“That’s irrelevant. You don’t understand parents.”
Sunny looks in the rearview mirror before he brakes to turn. “Technically true, seeing as I don’t even know who my dad is, and my mom’s a raging addict.”
I know about his mother, enough to understand the word parent means something different to Sunny than it does to me.
“I’m sorry,” I say, genuinely meaning it. “My parents have always been there. Never forgotten me. Never disappeared. Never failed to pay a bill or show up when expected. But while they’ve been doing that, they’ve been watching, measuring, assessing, and, perhaps, worst of all, judging.”
Sunny takes my hand and lifts it to his lips.
“You don’t have to come in,” I say. “It might be too early for them to meet my…”
“Sex god?”
A laugh escapes me. “Boyfriend.”
He stops in the middle of the road. I’m so glad we’re in his truck. It’s supposed to rain heavily in the morning when we plan to head back to his house. I just needed more things from home. “Like that word coming out of your mouth…as long as I’m the only one you ever call that.”
I turn to face him, even though I should be telling him to ride towards my parents’ car. “Wouldn’t you become husband, one day?”
He grins at that. “Like that word even better. Hold that thought, Indy. We gotta survive dinner with your folks before we talk about that.”
“They’re going to judge you,” I say, when the truck starts moving.
He shrugs. “Most people do.”
