You’re a junkie for that forever feeling, Miller had told me once after yet another breakup from a woman I likely never should have dated in the first place. Every small hint of ever-after with a woman is your fix. You should work on that.
She wasn’t wrong.
I wanted that forever feeling. I wanted that every day.
I was never the man who wanted shallow connections, who wanted to hop beds, who only wanted a warm body.
I wanted a warm home. I wanted someone in it with me. I wanted the ideal the world like to tell us only women were after.
And, yes, I often thought I could find that with even the most unlikely of women, ones who, if I stopped to think logically for even a couple of minutes, I would know weren’t going to be beside me in a rocking chair when we were eighty.
Even though a large part of me knew Miller was right, I never seemed to give her words much thought, just kept chugging along at my usual pace, making my same old mistakes over and over again.
Why, then, were her words popping into my head now? Why with Gemma did her warning seem to be sage advice?
Because there was absolutely no way Gemma and I could ever build a life? Because the impossibility of it seemed as strong as my sudden desire to get more of her?
Christ.
“If you don’t mind, I’m gonna go take a shower before dinner.”
A cold, cold shower.
With a lot of reminding myself why Gemma was off-limits, why I could never put my hands on her, why I couldn’t conjure up an image of us fifty years down the road.
“Go right ahead. I am holding out for a date with that clawfoot tub later. I haven’t had a bathtub deep enough to sink down in for ages.”
Fuck me.
The image of her naked in the tub, her round breasts weightless, her dusky pink nipples peeking out from the water, her long legs leading up, up, up… yeah, that was not what I needed right then.
It was also not an image I could shake
Not even after my cold shower became R-rated.
Not even as we small-talked about the changes in the office, her life outside of work, the upcoming birthday party we would both be attending as we ate the best goddamn soup known to mankind and ripped apart bread still warm from the oven.
And certainly the fuck not when after dinner, I sat in bed listening to the water filling the tub followed by the long silence after it was done. Then, finally, not as I heard the splash as she lowered her body down into the warm water.
Right then, all I could picture was being able to climb off the bed, follow the sounds, give into the lure of her and her body and go into that bathroom, drop my clothes, and climb in behind her.
Maybe the weirdest part of it all was the fact that my fantasy didn’t have me shifting her up on my lap, and sliding my cock inside her.
No.
It was simply pulling her back to my chest, wrapping my arms around her middle, and feeling her head press back into my shoulder.
Just sharing a bath.
Just a type of intimacy that didn’t come from sex.
“Fuck,” I sighed, hopping out of bed, strapping sneakers onto my feet, leaving a note on the door to her room, then taking myself for a run. Hoping for a clear mind, and praying it did something to put things back into focus.
Even after getting back, exhausted through and through, as I heard her bed creak as she shifted, it all came rushing back.
I didn’t know how long she was going to be staying in my house, but I somehow did know that it was going to be the longest period of time in my life.
FOUR
Gemma
The days turned into a week faster than it seemed possible for them to. Especially given how slowly things had been moving since I started at Blairtown Chem. Before taking up residence in Lincoln’s guest room, everything had been slow. A life that had once been light and airy, always feeling a bit like I floated through it in the best way possible had been turned into a daily slog through the knee-deep cement of dread and fear and uncertainty.
I chalked it up to multiple factors.
Knowing what I was doing, knowing it was important, but also that it was–in the strictest definition of the term–wrong. Not only that, but everything about the world I suddenly found myself in went against who I knew myself to be.
I could no longer look like me, dress like me, act like me.
It became so all-consuming that I started not to feel like myself anymore. By the time I got back from the office, it took nearly until I fell asleep to get back to who I genuinely was. If I even managed it at all. Some days I didn’t. Some days the mask won, became a small part of my actual existence rather than something I put on and took off at will.