No barriers.
Which is really a problem when a barrier is what you need between yourself and your handsome ex.
Between your desire and your rational mind.
Between today and yesterday. All the yesterdays.
How do you move on when your sexy past keeps catching up with you? I did wish for a miracle, didn’t I?
I didn’t wish for him to be hurt, though. Or for my new-found, delicate equilibrium to be shaken and broken to pieces again.
Then again… who said miracles are always perfect? I guess they just get the job done.
So I should just shut up and take whatever time I have with this man. Forget about yesterday, and about tomorrow, and for once just live for today.
“You okay, baby?” he asks. He hasn’t let me go since I arrived, practically growling at the nurses when they tell us visiting hours are over until they leave. “You seem sad.”
I’m half-sprawled over him on the narrow bed. He says he has no injuries other than his head, but I asked a nurse just to make sure. She said that his ribcage is bruised and one knee banged up but otherwise he’s fine.
Except for his skull, which is thankfully thick enough it didn’t break when he slipped on a slick of oil in the car workshop where he works and cracked it on the floor. They don’t know how long he’d been unconscious when they found him, and it seems this version of Kaden is not as confused as the one I’d have met had I come two days ago.
At least now he remembers his own name and what year it is.
Jesus.
So I cling a little bit more tightly to him, and he growls deep in his chest. It’s different from the menacing growl he keeps directing at the poor nurses.
No, this sounds more like… a purr? Like he’s a content big cat, a lion, with his big paw around my back.
I keep feeling the urge to scratch behind his ears – or rather down his muscular chest, down that happy trail leading into his briefs…
…and I should stop this thought right there, because I’m not getting anywhere near that happy trail or his briefs, and not only because he’s wearing one of those awful blue hospital gowns and he’s laid out with a bad concussion.
Nope.
Me and Kaden naked? Not happening. Bad idea.
But my mind keeps wandering where my hands can’t.
My mind is out of control and should get spanked.
Which brings me back to memories of Kaden spanking me and how good it felt to be under his hands, at his mercy, in his control, that my body reacts without permission, my thighs clenching with an ache nobody else has been able to satisfy like he did.
Dammit. Yeah, I am totally out of control, and all I’ve done is see him, exchange a few words with him and place my head on his chest.
Living in an illusion where we’re still together, where our epic row never happened. Where he cares for me and never cheated.
Where I never found those photos and messages on his phone, where I ignored the fact he rarely took me to his apartment, and I lived in blissful ignorance and amazing sex-filled nights with him.
But no matter how beautiful a dream is, sooner or later, you wake up.
“You look sad,” Kaden says for the hundredth time, pointing the spoon at me and an accusing look. He’s been eating some soup and Jell-O the hospital staff brought him.
“I’m not sad.”
“Where were you? You were not here.”
And I shouldn’t feel guilty. He isn’t accusing me. He doesn’t sound angry, just… worried. A bit sad himself.