How My Brother's Best Friend Stole Christmas

He slipped his hand between my legs, shoving my thigh out wider so he could slip the whole of his palm up against me, but somehow that wasn’t even enough. He pushed me away, onto my back, and fell down between my thighs.

“Sam—”

“I know what you need,” he said.

And he did. Oh God, he did. His mouth and his fingers and I let him use all of it to push and pull me into an orgasm. I was sizzling light exploding all over the room.

“More,” I said.

“Yeah.” He laughed against me. Twisted his fingers inside of me to tease out another orgasm. But I needed more of him. More of his body against mine. More of his weight and his heat. I needed my legs around his waist and his lips against my mouth and his heart beating against mine.

“This,” I said, pulling him up and over me. He put his hands beside my head and his hips pressed mine flat to the bed. “Inside, Sam. I need you inside.”

“Yeah.” Not just like he agreed, but he knew.

He got on his knees on the bed and shifted me forward, and then there was the slow, sweet press of him inside of me. And I gasped because it was a lot. He was a lot. He licked my throat, bit my chin, kissed my mouth.

He kissed me like I was home and he’d missed it so much.

That second lock blasted right open.

18

It took me a second after coming. To feel my feet. The top of my head. To be in my body again. But I felt him roll away. Shift away. Until there was space between us and all I could still feel was the heat of him.

“That was…” I said.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve said that about a million times tonight.”

“You make me speechless, Soph. What can I say?”

I smiled, turning my head to look at his profile, the scar right through his eyebrow. Tender and high on endorphins and the love leaking out of that second lock, I reached up to touch it. Run my finger along the raised edge of it.

He flinched, his hand coming up lightning fast to push mine away.

“Sam,” I breathed, stunned.

“I’m sorry. I’m…” His eyes met mine, panicked and wide. He shook his head. “Sorry.”

And then he was up and out of the bed and I was left there. Wondering why I was surprised.

“Hey!’ I said, following him. Naked and well…naked. I couldn’t hide my love. My hurt feelings. My anger. “You said you wouldn’t do this!”

“What am I doing?” he asked, pulling on his underwear and T-shirt and then handing me mine.

“What you said you wouldn’t. Fucking me and leaving me like this. Ignoring me.”

“I’m not leaving. I’m not ignoring. I just…wanted to be dressed to talk to you.”

“To tell me why we can’t do this again.”

“No. Please… “ And then I realized he was naked. Dressed, but naked. His face was still but ravaged. His eyes full of anxiety. He was just dressed; he wasn’t leaving.

I pulled back all my anger and stood there.

“I want to talk to you. I do. Let me.” He gestured back toward the bedroom, and I grabbed my sweater and put it on so I wouldn’t feel quite so naked naked.

Back in my bedroom he crawled onto the bed and so I did too, and when he turned off the light I lay there in the dark beside him, like we had been seconds ago, but now we were awkwardly dressed. Awkwardly lying there. Just…awkward.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice hushed in the dark.

“Any conversation in bed that starts like that isn’t going to end well.”

His laugh was a sharp, almost hard thing that made the bed shake a little. “The flinching…I have some lingering…stuff from the injury.”

“The PTSD?” I asked. “Your mom told me.”

I rolled over onto my side, facing him, tracing the arch of his nose and his forehead with my eyes.

“That’s why you did the meditation room and the running thing?” he asked.

“I heard it helped.” I shrugged, and to my surprise he rolled over to face me, too, one arm under his head, the other stretched out along his body. I curled my knees up toward my chest and he lifted his knee to touch my toes and that third lock on my heart, the last lock, my very last lock, it shook.

“Heard that, did you?” he asked.

“I did some reading.”

“Of course you did.” He stroked my hair off my forehead with the flat of his hand. “And there’s a lot of stuff that goes on with the PTSD. But I have brain damage from the concussion and they don’t know when or if it will go away.”

“What…what does the brain damage do?”

“It can…fuck up how I feel. Someone can touch me, and even if I know it should feel good, some wire gets crossed and it’s like my skin is trying to crawl off my body.”