Page 77 of From This Moment (After We Fall 4)
“Hey.” He jiggled his hands on my back. “I’m not giving up on us. And I don’t want you to, either. I’m just irritated with my mother.”
“Okay.” That wicked little ball was building at the back of my throat again.
“I mean it. Look at me.”
I did, but it took me a minute.
“I will deal with her, okay? She is not your problem.”
“But she is, Wes. She’s affected by this. How she feels matters. And I can tell you right now, she is going to have a huge problem with us. Lots of people will.”
“I’ll handle her, I promise.” He tightened his arms around me, lowered his forehead to mine. “Don’t give up. Please.”
“I don’t want to, but—”
He kissed me, silencing the rest of my sentence. “Don’t. We’ll figure it out together, okay?”
“Okay.” When he talked to me in that quiet, sweet voice, I couldn’t refuse him.
But when I closed the door behind him a few minutes later, I felt a pit open up in my stomach. And as I plodded up the stairs, it began slowly filling with doubt, like sand trickling into an hourglass.
He came over the next three nights in a row, and each night we took another step forward. Tuesday he came for dinner and did the dishes while I put Abby to bed. He didn’t leave and come back like he’d done the night before; instead, he’d gone up to say goodnight to Abby, come back down, and we stretched out on the couch together to watch a movie. With my cheek on his chest and his arms around my back and our legs tangled beneath a blanket, I felt some of the doubt recede. I had a brief moment of panic when Abby came down the stairs asking for a drink of water, scrambling out of Wes’s arms and jumping off the couch, but she didn’t say anything about him or ask any questions. We didn’t have sex that night, but that was okay—I needed to be sure that our connection wasn’t just sexual, and it felt good just being close to him.
Wednesday night he worked late and had dinner out, and I hosted Wine with Widows. I didn’t say anything about Wes when it was my turn to talk, but Tess was the last one to leave, and when she asked if I’d seen him, I confessed that I had.
She gasped. “Spill!”
“There’s not much to tell,” I said. “We stayed away from each other for two weeks, but the feelings didn’t go away.”
“Told you.” She looked smug. “So it’s going well?”
“Yeah.” My face got hot. “It is. I mean, it’s brand new—it’s only been since Saturday—but it feels really good.”
“I’ll bet it does. So the sex was just as good the second time?”
“And the third.” I couldn’t resist. “He blindfolded me with his tie in that bathroom right over there. And tied my hands behind my back with his belt.”
She glanced at the bathroom and back at me, her eyes wide. “Who are you?”
I laughed. “I’m still me. I’m just figuring some new things out about myself.”
He came over later and we snuck upstairs, locked my bedroom door and tore off each other’s clothing before fucking like porn stars in a silent film. When the bed made too much noise, we moved to the floor, Wes on his back on the rug and me on top, riding him with reckless abandon. Before he left, around one in the morning, we laughed at the rug burns on his ass and my knees.
“Where’s your car?” I asked him at the door.
He kissed me. “I parked around the block. I don’t want people to see my car here so much, especially this late at night.”
“Oh.” It was thoughtful and sweet, but it was yet another reminder that what we were doing was something shameful to be hidden away in the dark.
Thursday Abby came home from school and showed me a picture she’d drawn in crayon of her family. There was me, with long brown hair and big brown eyes and suspiciously big feet. There was Abby, with yellow pigtails and a pink dress, holding a gray scribbly thing I could only imagine was her stuffed elephant. And there was a man, with green eyes and brown hair, whose hands seemed much bigger than anyone else’s.
Was it Drew? Or was it Wes?
I felt terrible I didn’t know. Abby didn’t say one way of the other, but she was proud of her work and hung it on the fridge with a Valentini Brothers Farm magnet.
That night Wes came for dinner again and took us out for ice cream afterward. When we got back, I told him to pull his car into the garage.
“Are you sure?” he said.
