Page 98 of Edged
Without a word, Owen climbed off my lap, history repeating itself before my very eyes. I zipped my flagging dick back into my pants, doing my best to not smear his cum all over the wool blend of my slacks.
“Do you want me to get on my knees and beg you, Owen? Because I will. I’m not above it.”
“I know you’re not.” He wouldn’t meet my stare, and I thought that if I could just get him to look me in the eyes one more time, I could convince him to stay, to give us a real chance. “But that’s not where I want you.”
“Where, then?” I asked.
“I want you in California, Archie.” He shook his head, bleached curls bouncing as he stared at the floor. “I want you to go home.”
CHAPTER30
OWEN
SIX MONTHS LATER
Mandy smelled like lavender,most likely on account of her bouquet which had sprigs of the purple blooms scattered around the white roses and baby’s breath. She had some stems tucked into the loose braid of her hair, and when she floated around the room, she carried the soft scent with her. But when she caught my stare from across the room, her face turned serious. I went still, stumbling over my own feet as the intensity of her look stopped me in my tracks.
“What did I do wrong?” I asked when she got within earshot.
Her expression immediately softened, but she rolled her eyes at me just the same. “You know what you did wrong, but this isn’t about that,” she said.
I sighed, looking down at the ground and focusing on the shined black tips of my dress shoes and the delicate, rhinestone-studded straps of her heels that peeked out from beneath the hem of her dress.
“What then?”
She studied me quietly, using her bouquet to smack me in the chest, jostling more of that lavender smell into the air.
“You know what? I was wrong. I do want to talk about what you did wrong.”
“Mandy.”
“It’s been six months,” she accused.
“I have a calendar. I know.”
She hit me again with the bouquet. “Do you know I talk to him every week?”
I did not, in fact, know that Mandy talked with Archie every week, and I could have gone the rest of my lifenotknowing that. It felt unfair in a way I didn’t have the class or the skill to articulate.
“That’s great, Mandy,” I said instead.
“He got me a new car for a wedding present.”
“Am I supposed to be impressed?”I was impressed, but also annoyed, and I wouldn’t give her the courtesy of knowing about either. It didn’t surprise me in the least that Archie was trying to buy his way into our lives, but what surprised me was that Mandy had fallen for his tricks.
In the days and weeks after Archie’s visit home, he’d tried just about every trick in the book to get back into my life, but I’d fought him tooth and nail the whole way. Even with Mandy’s blessing, which had come less than three days after Archie went back to California, I hadn’t felt right about it. Something with the expectation that one of us just give up our life to move across the country felt presumptuous and entitled. And there was a voice in the back of my head that screamed at me every time I fought him, that told me I was being stubborn for no reason at all. That I was only hurting myself by trying to hurt him.
But still.
And the weeks dragged into months, and I was too focused on helping Mandy finalize her wedding plans to deal with much else. I’d found that in the absence of a self-imposed obligation to help her, I truly enjoyed being someone she could rely on. As time progressed, so many things changed, but the one thing that remained steady was Archie’s insistence that I hear him out again.
At least once a day he sent me a message, even though I had long ago started to leave them ignored. I didn’t know what to say to him because his persistence was like a fine grit sandpaper wearing me down so slowly I didn’t even notice I’d begun to soften. By the time I realized that I looked forward to his daily messages, it had been five months since I’d seen him last and even though that was nowhere near ten years, it felt like too much time had passed for me to make it up to him.
“He asks me about you,” Mandy said, and I covered my throat with my hand to hide the flush that burned toward my chin.
“And what do you tell him?”
“I tell him that you’re not the same since you left him,” she said, staring at me down the slope of her nose.
