After You (Because of You 2)

Grabbing my hand, he brings my palm to his lips and kisses it. “You’re not mean at all.”

Once his cock is seated inside me again, he leans down, palming one of my breasts and brushing his lips across mine. For a split second, the six years we’ve lost no longer exist. Feelings well up, nearly falling off my tongue before I realize it.

I almost tell him I love him.

It’s an old impulse, but it scares the shit out of me. I’m glad I already came, because that would’ve killed the building tension like a bucket of ice water dumped over my lady bits. Unaware of my turmoil, Derek’s powerful body moves over mine as he chases his own release. I love being the one to give it to him. Wrapping my arms around him, I close my eyes and wait for him to groan, for his body to go taut, for the feeling of him emptying himself inside me.

Derek collapses against me when he finishes, his heart pounding wildly against my chest. It’s such a nice feeling, it melts away the panic I felt a moment ago. I don’t have long to enjoy this, so there’s little point in ruining it for myself. Derek pulls back and claims my mouth, at once lazy and passionate. I wrap my arm around his neck, letting him tangle me up in him. There will undoubtedly be chaos and hell to pay tomorrow, but for tonight, I just want to enjoy him.

Chapter Sixteen

Morning light spills in through my window. I see it when I open my eyes, but I’m still sleepy so they drift closed again. It takes me a minute to come out of my sleep fog—I’m a vivid dreamer, and the separation between fantasy and reality sometimes feels less pronounced for me than it seems to be for others.

For instance, it takes me another moment to realize Derek really is lying in bed next to me, his strong arm wrapped around me. I feel so warm. I never sleep snuggled up to someone like this. I would have turned the air conditioning down a couple more degrees if I’d been planning to sleep on a space heater all night long.

He is unashamedly naked. Even though it’s summer, I pulled a blanket over myself out of a sense of common decency, but Derek did not. He lays sprawled across my bed as naked as the day he was born, and it shouldn’t be so damn endearing, but I can’t help a soft smile from tugging at my mouth. I trace every inch of him with my eyes, committing it all to memory. When he’s no longer lying in this bed with me, when I’m alone again, I want to remember the way he looks right now. The peace on his handsome face, his devil-may-care sprawl.

I wonder what it’s like to be him, to be so good at so much. I have my talents, certainly, but I have many limitations as well, and he doesn’t. Derek can befriend anyone. He still has friendships from childhood. I can’t keep a friend for more than a couple years, and that’s a lengthy attachment for me. I don’t care what people think about me, but it took a lot of time, hurt, and practice to get there. It comes to Derek so naturally. He can just as easily make you his friend or his enemy, and he legitimately doesn’t give a damn if someone doesn’t like him. He has an inherent confidence, an easy charisma I could never have, not with any amount of work.

We’re so mismatched. We were mismatched in high school, and now there’s no institutional hierarchy pointing out how utterly unalike we are, but it’s still as clear to me now as it was back then—maybe clearer.

Derek is the cool, devil-may-care collector of relationships, and I am the loner, outcast from a social order I have no place in. It has always been that way, and it always will.

My gaze wanders to the tattoo. I saw it from a distance at his house last weekend, but both times we’ve had sex, I haven’t had enough time before or after to check it out. During, he moves too much for me to read his skin. It’s two lines, four words.

Two hearts.

One soul.

Huh. That’s simple, but the last thing I would expect Derek to ever get inked onto his body. I wonder what it means, but then unease crawls over me. I imagine him getting it for her. For Kayla. He couldn’t have loved her that much, right? It doesn’t seem like something he would pick out for himself though. Maybe she picked it out for him. I can see her nagging him forever until, exasperated, he agreed to it just to shut her up.

If she put it there, I should be grateful. What better reminder could I ask for that he can never be mine? Instead of gratitude over another insurmountable obstacle between us, I want to scratch his skin until it’s gone.

>

Maybe it’s not that. Maybe they’re lyrics to a song he likes or something. Still an odd thing to pick for his solitary tattoo, but I can’t stand thinking it has anything to do with Kayla. Even if it does, I hope he lies to me when I ask, because I don’t want to know that.

Feeling icky, I move out of his embrace. Our differences in personality may not be enough to keep us apart somehow, but Kayla is. My grudge is. I would rather nurse it forever than let it go and deal with that evil whore’s presence in my life. He chose simplicity with Kayla over me, and I’ll choose my own peace of mind over him. We all have to live with our choices, and that is one I can definitely live with. My days of piecing out my self-respect just so I can hold onto him are long over.

No longer in the mood to soak up his presence, I go to roll out of bed. He catches my arm, halting me, then snakes his other arm beneath my body and rolls me right back against him.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asks, a sleepy smile on his handsome face.

My aching heart contracts. The damn thing is so weak, it’s already begging me to go back on my principles. It always has betrayed me for him. My fool heart is charmed just as easily as everyone else Derek comes across and decides to befriend. All it takes is his sleepy smile to make it forget how easily the tides can change, how quickly he can go from holding my heart in the palm of his hand to squeezing the life out of it.

Thank goodness I listen to my head instead of my heart. I would be defeated if ever I let my heart take the reins—defeated, destroyed, pounded to dust. I have the dumbest heart anyone has ever had.

“I’ve got work to do,” I tell him.

“It’s Saturday,” he replies, as if this is unreasonable.

Nodding patiently, I explain, “Yes. Some of us work on Saturdays.”

“That’s lame. You’re the boss. Give yourself the day off.”

“Can’t do that. Publishing waits for no man,” I inform him, attempting to roll away again.

Keeping an unrelenting grip on me, he tugs me right back. “Okay, so when is your day off? Tomorrow?”