I nodded slowly. “Being honest is really hard,” I said.
“I never thought it was before.”
“Well, aside from this one thing, your truth was easy to tell because you’ve always been proud of it.” I bit my lip and then made myself stop. “It feels different when you’re ashamed. Or scared.”
“Fuck,” Rhys said. He still looked a little uncertain. But beneath that burned something sharp and bright. Something just for us. “What if . . . what if you don’t like it?” he asked.
“Then I’ll tell you to fuck off.” I smiled at him. “I already, uh . . . You get that I really like it, right?”
His lips parted.
“It makes me feel safe, but it also . . . like, it really gets to me.”
I shivered. Rhys’s eyes went dark, and he ran his fingers over my lips and nodded. I slid closer, letting his heat consume me.
Chapter 13
Over the next week, Rhys and I slowly began to relearn the shape of our life together.
We talked more than I’d ever talked in my life. The first few days, it felt as if we were living a nightly version of our first date at the diner.
He was home during the day, working on some new songs, and would scrounge up something for dinner so it was ready when I got home. We’d eat and then take a walk around town. And we’d talk. Not just about me, thankfully. We talked about his songs and about my ideas for the project at Mariposa to fund art and music supplies for our clients—which Imari had loved and approved; it would be my first solo project.
Yes, Rhys seemed bound and determined to talk about every single topic under the sun, like he was prepping for The Newlywed Game. It was charming and endearing, and irritating and exhausting. Sometimes I got tired of talking. Sometimes I got nervous that Rhys’s sighs at the things I revealed meant it was getting to be too much for him, which made me get even quieter. When I got too quiet, Rhys got nervous; when Rhys got nervous, I freaked a little.
“You need shortcuts,” Rhys said one night. “Something you can say that means you hear me and you don’t want to talk about it right now because it’s hard.”
“Couldn’t I just say, ‘I hear you and I don’t want to talk about it right now because it’s hard’?”
Rhys looked at me sharply. “Yeah, you could. But you don’t say that, babe. You go all quiet on me instead. Maybe it’d be easier if it was just a word, and we both knew what it meant.”
“Like a conversational safe word?”
Rhys chuckled. “Exactly.”
“Fuck, where’s that been all my life. Okay. But nothing weird.”
“I thought maybe ambidextrous or cuttlefish. You know, something that wouldn’t be likely to come up in conversation.”
“Says you. I could be ambidextrous for all you know—”
I broke off when I realized I’d just proved Rhys’s point, and he gave me a tired smile.
“Okay, how about just ‘I hear you,’” I offered.
“Sounds good. Want to try it out?”
I elbowed him and rolled my eyes.
“That’s great nonverbal communication, Matty. Okay, now tell me all about your feelings when you were—”
“I hear you!”
* * *
—
We had Caleb and Theo over for dinner. I was worried it would be awkward to see them after they knew how much I’d hurt Rhys. After Caleb basically heard me lose it on the phone. So I was quiet and nervous. But then Rhys warned them against leaving applesauce unattended, if they were thinking of making any with the apples we’d given them, and Caleb laughed and Theo grinned at me and winked like he assumed it was my fault, and everything seemed okay.
And all week I could almost see Rhys flexing his possessive muscles to see how I’d respond. On Tuesday night, when I stripped out of my work clothes, ready to jump in the shower, Rhys stopped me. He pulled me to him and sniffed me. “I love the way you smell,” he said. “Don’t shower.” My heart pounded, and he dropped to his knees and put his nose to my crotch, breathing in until I shuddered. I didn’t shower.
On Thursday morning, he woke me with a blow job and then fucked me. “I want you to feel my come dripping out of you all day,” he said, and then he kissed me soft and sweet, and I got hard all over again. Practically speaking, it wasn’t great, but I did think of him all day.
And I loved it. I felt like I was learning about a Rhys I didn’t know before. And I felt a pang of sadness that I hadn’t met him sooner.
That’s how Rhys feels about you. That’s what he means when he says he wants to know all of you. I thought about that for a long time.