Slow Burn

Chapter 14

It’s the unfamiliarity that wakes me.

My eyelids are swollen, and it takes me a minute to realize where I am. I hear the slow, even breathing against my ear, feel the light smattering of hair against my hand, and I am suddenly aware of my breasts pillowed against Becks’s bare chest. I take a moment to gather my bearings, the stillness of the surroundings making every little motion and sound from him magnified in my head: the weight of his hand under my tank against my naked back and the softness of the throw he put over my shoulders but that has since fallen and is now pooled at my waist.

Embarrassment hits me first. Then an influx of dread at falling apart when I wasn’t alone. The witness to the raging chaos in my psyche wasn’t the neutral walls of my bedroom but rather a real person this time. Someone who experienced my roller-coaster ride from needing something to help me forget to holding me so the broken pieces of me wouldn’t completely fall apart.

A part of me is relieved, but at the same time, I’m also more worried than ever. Someone finally knows that I’m not handling this all as flawlessly as I’ve tried to portray. It’s all been a facade to cover up the turmoil within me. Rylee’s seen some of my slips, but I reined them in to lessen her worry with everything she had on her plate. My parents have seen it only in bits and pieces because they lost their child too, and I can’t have them worrying about the other one. Danny’s been so far down the bottomless well of his grief that solace isn’t something he has to offer. So I’ve held all of the pain deep within me for so long that tonight it must have festered up until the poison needed to escape.

And now Becks knows. He knows that perfect Haddie isn’t so perfect. I’m a powder keg of emotions that any little thing might cause to ignite. I’m not as stable as my take-no-shit attitude conveys. I’m vulnerable and a mess. I’m weak and irrational. And needy. And goddamn it, I hate being needy.

But he stayed. He held me tight and didn’t let my tirade deter him. As I lie here, I try to wrap my head around what that means and how I feel about it.

And I’m just not sure how I feel. So I focus on the tangible. The warmth of his body against mine. The sounds and scents and sensations of being physically close to someone again. I’m so used to that empty feeling, the one that strikes me anytime I’ve done that morning-after-skip-of-shame-out-the-front-door to subdue the emotions raging inside.

So I allow myself to revel in everything; since he’s asleep, I’m not being watched, scrutinized, or figured out. I can just enjoy the innocent moment because I deserve to feel this, to get the chance at normalcy with him.

I’ve conditioned myself so well over the past year that the thought—even though it’s only to myself—causes anxiety to take hold of my body. And I need some distance from the sudden ache in my chest. Becks’s breath alters momentarily, but it falls back into rhythm by the time I’ve scooted away and sat on the coffee table a few feet from the couch. Out of habit, I wipe whatever is left of my makeup from under my eyes and then reach for the fallen blanket and wrap it around my shoulders.

I lift my eyes to take Becks in. He has a pillow folded under his neck, one arm stretched up over his head and the other resting across his bare abdomen. But it’s his face that captures me. Those assessing eyes of his are closed—dark lashes fanning against tan cheeks—and I can study him for a change. Stubble dusts his usually clean-shaven face now, and with his lips pursed in sleep, the lines that usually frame them are nonexistent.

Staring at him without the constant pressure to guard against the feelings that must be transparent in my eyes, I can’t help but acknowledge what a truly great guy he is. Old-school in some ways. Yet he’s without the drama of the bad boys I’m usually drawn to and definitely offers more stability. He’s kind and caring and patient in all things emotional when most men I’ve dated are out the front door the minute the first tear falls.

Even though he is the ironic best friend’s husband’s best friend, he is the perfect epitome of what a forever guy should be.

And then it hits me like a spank on my ass. A fact so staggering that I don’t quite know how to process it. I rise from the edge of the table on shaky legs and walk with an unsteady heart to the windows overlooking the street below and the dark beach a few city blocks beyond. I try desperately to focus on the hustle and bustle of the city’s nightlife. I contemplate how this condo isn’t what I’d expect from Becks—I’d pictured porch swings and open land somewhere in the fresh air—and realize how little I really know about this man, who’s slowly capturing my heart. Trying to divert my attention, I think about everything I don’t know about Becks rather than the one thing I know for sure.

Chills race over my flesh, and my heart thunders. The thought staggers me momentarily, my hand pressing against the glass for figurative stability, but I know I shouldn’t be surprised. What the heart wants, the heart takes … even when it knows its owner won’t allow it.

I’ve fallen for him.

I let the notion wash over me, trying to figure out where to go from here when I’ve said love isn’t an option I would allow myself. And I’m not sure how long I’ve been standing there when I hear a soft chuckle from the couch. It startles me because my emotions are so scattered that I can’t face him just yet. I need to cover up my heart, which I’m currently wearing on my sleeve like a tattoo, before I can speak to him.

I turn around slowly, expecting him to be sitting there, waiting for me to go first in that patient way of his, but when I do he’s still fast asleep. “A dream,” I murmur, and I’m not sure if I’m talking about what brought on the laughter in him or the rising hope in my heart. I stare at him lying there so warm and inviting—unknowingly rocking my world—and for the first time in what feels like forever in my tumultuous life, I smile.

And my smile only grows wider as I begin to accept the feelings, acknowledge that they aren’t going to go away. Just as he hasn’t gone away when I’ve been the emotional, crazy, chaotic woman he’s seen over the past week. He’s stuck by my side, sat on the other end of a silent phone line so that I wouldn’t be alone.

My feet, which wouldn’t budge earlier, have no problem moving now, but rather than through the door away from him like I’d expected, I’m walking toward him. Somehow my mind feels calmer, but there are still heady emotions swelling up in me.

I push away the doubts that creep in. Sure, there’s hypocrisy in going against the promises I’ve been making to myself—the ones I reaffirmed just hours ago while we screamed at each other. But I tell myself to shut up, own the stilettos I’m walking in, and take the chance.

To go for it.

My smile grows even wider because I know somewhere in Heaven, Lexi just stood up and cheered for me. And the thought alone gives me the confidence I need to continue forward and tell Becks the one thing he needs to hear.

By now I’m standing next to the couch, looking down at him. I force a swallow down my throat as I realize that my fears have been irrational. That God can’t be that greedy to steal my mother’s breasts, extinguish my sister’s light before her time, and then want my life way too early as well.

And as I stand in this darkened condominium, where a Keurig sits askew next to a half-empty clear plastic container of sugar cookies, my realization is like a weight off of my shoulders—I want this. I want it with him.

I let the blanket slip off my shoulders and fall to the floor with a soft whisper of sound. I pull my shirt over my head and toss it beside me. My hands pull my cell from my pocket and place it on the table before finding their way to the zipper on my skirt, opening its teeth, and pushing it down until it pools around my feet.

Tears well in my eyes as I dredge up every emotion I’ve shoved away over the past six months, every denial of wanting more since my first time with Becks. I stand there in this strange apartment with Becks snoring softly before me. It seems silly to have this epiphany here of all places, but it also feels imperfectly perfect. I’m naked in so many ways that processing the magnitude of what I’m opening myself up to is impossible. All I know is that the silence in my head has turned into a loud buzz of thoughts that seems harsh against the raw honesty of my decision.

My mind spins in a dizzying eddy of possibilities as I sit my hip on the couch beside his waist and breathe him in momentarily. My rational side tells me to shove up from the couch and escape as fast as I can, but then every other part of me has me lean forward and press my lips to the middle of his chest.

I keep my mouth there, and the warmth of his skin and the thunder of his heart beneath my lips combined with my sudden courage are an intoxicating mixture. I begin to lace soft, gentle kisses up his sternum. His breathing changes, becomes less even with each breath he draws. I inhale the scent of his cologne at the dip beneath his Adam’s apple before lifting my head and brushing a kiss against his lips. I repeat the motions with soft whispers of touch until I hear a muted moan from him as my actions slowly stir him awake.

I know the minute his mind has caught up when his lips are already kissing me before he’s even awake. His muscles tense; then the arm above his head juts forward until it lands on the bare skin of my back.

“Haddie,” he says in a dreamlike voice as he attempts in his sleepy state to comprehend what’s going on. I just keep meeting his lips over and over until his hand on my back finds my hair and fists in it so that I’m forced to meet his startled blue eyes. He’s trying to work out how I went from hating, then wanting, and then crying to now needing him.

And the smart-ass in me thinks, Welcome to being a female, but the moment is so much more poignant than a quip can signify. So I stay quiet, and as our eyes hold each other’s, I know that this unspoken connection is so much more intimate than words could be right now.

So we sit like this, his hand in my hair, our breathing uneven, and an unasked question hanging between us that once it’s answered can offer so many possibilities. Becks just continues to stare at me, the crystalline blue of his eyes holding me hostage, and I wonder what I look like in his eyes.

“I—I woke up wanting to kiss you.” I fail miserably at telling him what I need to, stumbling through the words so I offer up this lame explanation for my about-face. Confusion and rejection flicker through his eyes, and I lean forward and tease his lips ever so softly with mine to buy myself another few seconds to build up the courage for what I want to say.

I pull back and look into his eyes so chock-full of concern. “I can’t … We can’t keep—”

“Sh-shh!” My finger is on his lips, stopping him instantly. “We are,” I whisper to him, looking at his lips and then back up to his eyes to reinforce the words I’ve just said. His mouth falls lax as he sucks in a breath from my unexpected answer. “I need you, Becks.”

And I’ve never spoken more honest words in my life.

His eyes widen, the pupils overtaking the irises and his mouth smiling cautiously beneath my finger. I lean forward—praying he doesn’t reject me—and slant my mouth over his again. And this time he responds. He parts his lips and allows me to slip my tongue between them and lick softly against his. It’s a soft sigh of a kiss, so very different from the earlier frantic energy, but there’s still an underlying desperation that I can sense … and I’m just not sure if it’s on his part or mine.

But I choose to push the thought away. I choose to get lost in him instead. So I reach down with the hand not resting against his cheek and make quick work of the buttons on his jeans. I take a second to savor the warmth of his skin before pushing down his boxer briefs so I can take him in my hand. It takes a few uncoordinated moments of him raising his hips and helping to shove the waist of his jeans down.

No words are spoken—none are needed as we use the intimacy of our mouths to express what we feel about the chances I’ve just given us.

I continue to kiss him softly, gentle draws of mouth on mouth, while my hand encircles him and slides over his length. Every moan he emits as I repeat the action makes me crave another from him.

He reaches over and puts his hands at my waist, and I can feel him jolt with the awareness that I’m already naked and ready for him. And I can’t deny the charge I get in knowing that I can come to him completely naked and know he’s going to want me. There is something most definitely sexy and empowering in that feeling.

His hands direct me to rise up and settle over his hips so that I’m on my knees with my hand still stroking him between my parted legs. I look at him now. Run my eyes up his golden skin, the tightened disks of his nipples, to the bottom lip his teeth are biting into as he fumbles to put on the condom that he’s produced from his wallet. When he’s protected, his eyes meet mine just as I line him up at my entrance and lower myself onto his wide crest. I can see and feel his whole body tense at the partial sheathing—my tease to his more than ready cock—and his hands reach back up to my hips to urge me to lower myself onto him.

I don’t even fight the smile when I choose to ignore the pressure at my hips and sink down at a torturously slow pace. It’s absolutely killing me with a potent combination of pleasure and anticipation, so I know it has to affect him just as much, if not even more.

He hisses out when I’m over him root to tip. For a moment, I just sit there, letting the slow burn of his girth subside, before I pop my hips forward so that I slide up and down on him, earning a soft hiss of pleasure. I continue controlling the pace, the movement, and angle myself expertly so I can make sure that my inner hot spot is hit each time.

The pleasure is so strong, so intense that I’m in a state of indecision—I want to slow down, draw it out so I can enjoy every single withdrawal and subsequent settling back down onto him, and at the same time, I want to be impatient and selfish and push myself to climax as quick as I can. Find my release so that he can chase his.

He’s so incredibly deep inside me—feels so fucking good—that I don’t even realize my eyes are closed, face angled up to the ceiling, and hands are gripping Becks’s hands, which are still holding on to my hips. The pressure begins to build, spears of white-hot heat shooting sparks up my spine, causing my breathing to quicken but my rhythm to remain even and seductively slow, despite his hands urging otherwise.

I lose myself in the feeling for a moment, letting the current of our union overwhelm me until Becks shocks my head forward when he adds a subtle grind to his hips along with my motion. I look to meet his eyes—lids half-closed as the sublime sensations begin to pull him under.

But when our gazes meet, the intimacy of the moment as we keep moving—our bodies, our thoughts, our souls connecting all at once—is so powerful that we falter for a minute. My body is damp with sweat, and goose bumps threaten, the intensity of the emotion so overwhelming, it drowns me momentarily.

His dick involuntarily pulses within me, causing a sly smirk to shadow his lips. His arrogance is unexpected and sexy as hell. I squeeze around him, and I love the groan my action garners from him. He begins to urge my hips to move again with our linked hands, and I want to keep this steady course, not rush it because damn he feels like fucking Heaven.

So I take control and move our joined hands to his chest so that I can hold them there while gaining some leverage to maneuver my hips in different angles. I lean forward and press my lips to his, slipping my tongue in between. My forward motion exposes more of his dick, from the crest just to the opening of my sex, so that when I slide horizontally, his head hits every damn nerve I possess. I moan, his mouth capturing the sounds he’s coaxing from me, and with each thrust of his hips upward and my push downward, my body jolts with even more awareness, the precipice of bliss that much closer.

I tell myself to take note of everything—the slide of my chest against his, his taste on my tongue, his complete domination of every fucking sensation below my waist, the soft exhale of pleasure he makes when I take him completely inside me. All of these factors help heighten my sensations, push me up and over the edge.

The sex this time is so different from last time between us. Whereas before it was a discovery of bodies and a proving ground of abilities, this time it is slow and mesmerizing. When my orgasm hits with a violent intensity, I’m not prepared for the breath it steals from me.

Yes, my toes curl and my back arches like normal, but I’m shaken irrevocably as the flash of vulnerability streaks through me. My body is left trembling as the intense sensations of pleasure ricochet back to my core, my heartbeat a thunderous roar in my ears, and my body starving for the air my brain can’t seem to tell my lungs to suck in.

My name falls in a strained exclamation from Becks’s mouth as his hands hold my hips still. He grows iron hard within me, making my body sing with the added pressure, and then he’s lost to his own onslaught of sensations. His body tenses as his hips thrust fervently and his neck arches upward, his fingers digging harder into my skin as a guttural moan fills the silence around us.

I lay my head against his chest and listen to his heart, which I’ve helped send into its current rapid beat, my own feeling like it’s quickening too but for a different reason. I close my eyes as Becks presses a kiss to the top of my head, his fingertips trailing lazy lines up my spine and then back down in a way that gives me goose bumps. We sit there for a few moments, coming down from our orgasmic hazes. He begins to soften so that he slips out of me, and I move so he can clean up, but instead he just wraps his arms around me and holds me against his chest.

“We are,” he murmurs, repeating the words back to me before emitting a satisfied moan. “We are.”

My breath hitches with his comment, my own response tangled in the confusion in my head. This feels so right with him at the same time that I’m worried I’m only going to cause us pain. But I push the worry from my head because everything will be okay. It has to be.

“’Night, City.”

“’Night.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, both satisfied and scared by the man who’s at fault for breaking the first link in the chain I wrapped around my guarded heart. Whereas I used to use sex to quiet my thoughts, this time it’s had the opposite effect.

My thoughts are screaming so loud now that they can’t be ignored.

The transition between sleep and waking is gentle. I’m in that dreamlike haze where my mind is drifting softly, trying to fall back under the pull of slumber so that I can return to sitting with Lex by the pool, where we were talking. Where we were laughing and I felt closer to her than I had in forever. Every single thing I feared I had forgotten about her—the pitch to her laugh, the line of her posture, the ease of her smile—was there, allowing me to grasp it back and hold on to it a little longer.

I’m not startled or surprised by the fact that I’m pressed up against Becks’s naked body or in his bed. I vaguely remember the feel of his arms carrying me in here from the couch. I note the rise and fall of his chest beneath my hand where it lies over his heart. I’m oddly the most at peace with myself that I have been in a long time, and I snuggle into the feeling as well as into Becks.

My thoughts tumble aimlessly as I will myself to go back to sleep to steal a few more hours ensconced in this feeling of relaxed contentment. But I’m at an awkward angle, my breasts smashed uncomfortably up against Becks’s firm torso. I begin to shift at the same time he turns in his sleep and find myself emitting a muffled cry as he lowers his arm and pinches a part of my breast.

It’s a split second of time. I’m sure thinking about it later I won’t even be able to process how fast the awareness hits me. The pain is quick and fleeting, and when I move in reflex to pull away from where my breast is pinched between the mattress and his back, I become conscious of the fact that I feel something there.

I sit up immediately, my mind fully alert but my subconscious telling me I’m crazy, all while my rational mind runs through a series of thoughts that are far from welcome. My breaths come out in sharp rasps. I tell myself it’s because I’ve moved so quickly, but I know the truth: The fear has taken hold.

I tell myself I was half asleep, my skin really was pinched, and that there’s nothing there to cause pain. No tumor, no cancer, nothing like Lex.

Next I take a calming breath, my fingers already moving toward my left breast. But whereas my routine checks are usually timid and gentle—more afraid of what I’ll find than not knowing what is there—I find myself pressing as hard as I can, being overly thorough. I become frantic in my movements as my mind starts running a million miles an hour. I keep moving in circles with the pads of my three fingers, but as memories and fear and disbelief start to collide, there is no rhyme or reason to my actions. I pull at the tissue, pressing my fingers together on both sides of the stretched skin, causing myself pain as I try to feel any trace of something.

Sitting in Becks’s bed with a stream of moonlight falling over it, I manage to work myself into a frenzy when I should be snuggled up against the handsome man fast asleep beside me—living, feeling, loving. I don’t know how much time passes because I’m so worried, so panicked that a mist of sweat coats my skin, and at some point, I must have started to cry because I taste salt from the tears that leaked out and reached my lips. My hands are trembling, and my mind is chastising me for not being able to re-create the same sensation that I felt moments ago.

Was it just moments ago? All I can think about is the possible parasite beneath my breast that threatens to take the life from me. I just about give up, my breast sore and reddened from my probing and prodding, my nerves so damn frayed that connecting one thought to another is nearly impossible. I glance at the clock and realize I’ve been at this for a half an hour. I haven’t found anything yet … no lump, no bump, no dimple. I’m just making myself hysterical.

Calm down, Had. You’re jumping to conclusions. It was nothing. You were asleep and you were thinking of Lex and it was just a pinch.

Quietly I sigh, glancing over at Becks to make sure he’s still asleep. I’ve already lost it once tonight with him, so this is the last thing I need him to see. He’s a patient man, but I think he just might give me the balcony exit if I lose it again.

As my shoulders sag, I tell myself one more time. I’ll examine myself one more time and then be done with it for the early-morning hours. I raise my hand and go through the motions, a slight sense of ease settling over me, when I just about stop and I feel it.

I freeze.

My fingers stop moving, the tissue still pinched between them. My eyes widen. My shaky inhale of breath fills the silence of the room.

My body stops, but my mind races as my whole world comes crashing down around me. I raise a trembling hand to stifle the choked sob that never comes. My eyes blur as I shake my head back and forth in shock, images of Lexi colliding against one another in my mind.

Time passes as I sit paralyzed with fear, numb with disbelief, and void of emotion.

Becks shifts in bed, and the movement jolts me to the here and now. I tell myself the lump is tiny, could be fibrous tissue, for all I know, but I don’t believe my own lies. I know it’s something more because I’ve made it a point to know my breasts in and out over the past year. I try to hold on, but I feel like my thoughts are slipping away from me as a false, eerie calm begins to settle over my body.

My hands shake and my mind tries to process but just keeps coming up empty. I won’t allow it to go where my biggest fears lies, so I focus instead on right now. On the man beside me. On how I just opened up my heart, invited him in, and told him we are, and then look what happened.

I rise from the bed without thinking of collateral damage or the fallout. Of Becks lying in bed asleep and what to say to him because there is nothing I can say but sorry—and sorry doesn’t cut shit right now. Sorry doesn’t ease the overwhelming sense of disbelief that has struck me. The overused word doesn’t ease the sting of loss, of watching your loved one die, or of leaving someone so they don’t have to go through it and suffer with you.

I keep my eyes averted from him as I pull my clothes on and dress quietly on autopilot, focusing on zippers and buttons, habitual actions. I have to physically think to do each thing, perform each routine movement because when I don’t, I find that I just stand there and stare out the window to the world outside.

Carrying on like everything is fine when it’s clearly not.

Once I’m fully dressed, shoes in my hand so I don’t wake him up with their sound on the floor, my feet are still rooted in place. My chest physically hurts, and my head is pounding. My eyes burn, and my heart feels like it’s being twisted, acid eating holes through the muscle at a menacing pace.

I glance over to Becks and stare at him through the light of the night from beyond the windows. There are so many things I want to say to him, but all I keep thinking is how I jinxed everything. Tonight I went against everything I had promised myself, and look how fate came with a cruel backhand to put me in my proper place.

I should be used to it. Expect it. Right when everything was okay with Rylee and Colton from their hospital stints—just when my closest friend in the whole world was looking toward happily ever after, my sister was staring down a loaded shotgun.

These memories flicker and then flood me—accompanying her to mammograms, then her double mastectomy, brushing her hair as clumps fell out, her fighting the fight and exhausting all resources—until I feel like I’m suffocating, reaffirming the fact that I can’t do this to Becks. A raw sadness marries with the grief I carry, and I tell him the empty words that I hate more than any others. “I’m sorry.”

The words feel like a noose closing over my neck.

I turn from the room and pad in my bare feet out to the family room, where I realize I don’t have my purse or my keys. I spot his wallet on the coffee table where he left it open when he pulled the condom out earlier and add injury to insult when I pull on the twenty-dollar bill partially exposed from it. I hate doing this, but I don’t have any other option. Just another reason for him to hate me even more. For him to validate his earlier accusation that I’m a coward.

Because if I didn’t acknowledge it before, doing this makes it pretty clear as fucking day that I am.

But I don’t know what else to do right now. I’ll pay him back. I look over my shoulder through the open doorway to where he sleeps peacefully, and then I walk to the front door and slip out to the streets below to hail a cab.

The guilt is heavy and oppressive, dropping through my soul and occupying my thoughts just as handily as the fear sitting in its worn recliner, where the feeling has made itself comfortable over the past six months. All I keep thinking is, he doesn’t deserve this.

Hell, neither do I.