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Once upon a time, I’d thought telling my father everything in my past may allow him to see me as weak. Like he’d look down on me. I’d wanted to handle things in my past on my own, and I hadn’t wanted him to see how many of my choices I still carried on my shoulders. It was something I’d probably be working through the rest of my life, but I now understood I didn’t need to go through things alone.
“Allowing people to be there for you makes you strong, son, and you’re showing me that every day.”
Dad had actually said that to me during family therapy, and he and my mom were still working through everything too. We all were with my sister. Our family had done therapy together and communicated. Our whole family dynamic had changed. We’d changed.
I’d changed.
There were some things that stayed closer to home. Things like the fire and the real reason I’d kept Aspen in that cabin. My parents wanted to protect me, and my mom had made the calls to make sure all that in the past stayed there. Normally, my dad would have taken the reins on that, but Mom wouldn’t let him. She turned into Mama Bear and took care of her boys. I was sure that was hard for my dad, and though it was hard for me too, we let her. Sometimes, it was okay to let yourself get taken care of. Mom kept what I’d done to Coach within the confines of the Reed family. Aspen and my friends knew about it, of course, but Aspen’s mom was still in the dark. That had been Aspen’s request. She wanted to protect her mom from more pain, yes, but she wanted to protect me too. She didn’t want to risk any potential fallout for me.
Fuck, how I loved this girl.
How different I’d become in such a small amount of time. How different I’d allowed myself to become, and I knew a big part of that had to do with this girl in my arms. There was no keeping myself locked up around her. It was like I wanted to tell her my secrets, my desires. Currently, those desires involved bringing out more of her little sounds in the bathtub, and she smiled after the last one I got her to make. She sounded so beautiful when aroused.
“What’s up?” I asked her at one point. She’d gotten kind of quiet after the water settled and we just sat in the bubbles for a while. Actually, the bubbles were nearly gone. “I feel like you’ve been quiet.”
She had with the exception of the noises I was physically making her make, and really, she’d kind of been like that all night since the performance. It was something I’d noticed. She’d allowed everyone else to talk, and I figured that was just because she was the star tonight and wanted to drink it all in.
I might have been wrong about that, her lips turning down after what I said. I pinched her chin, tipping it up. “Something going on?”
She knew she’d done amazing tonight, right? A fucking badass. She hadn’t frozen, and she’d commanded the whole damn room. It’d been amazing to watch and inspiring.
Her eyes lifted, her expression warm. “Can’t you just… I don’t know, not know when I’m in my head about something?”
She was in her head about something? Fuck. I arranged her in my lap, making her look at me dead-on, and she laughed.
Her hands smoothed over my shoulders, feeling so fucking good, and my cock rose beneath the water under her. How quickly she could get me hard… distract me, but I wasn’t getting fucking distracted if something was wrong with her.
“As you know, I’m going on a winter tour,” she said, her arms wrapping around me, and I did know that. This concert today was pretty much the kickoff to that, and though she’d finished her semester at Pembroke, she planned to go back to work. She wanted to because she truly loved what she did and the music she made. She did, and I loved that for her. Though, I would miss her. She was going to do online classes while she was on the road, though. She wanted her degree too. Her head tilted. “Multiple dates. Dozens of cities.”
She’d be busy throughout Christmas and the New Year. I would see her on Christmas, though. We’d already worked out that time. I braced her hip. “Okay?”
Her head dipped, suddenly looking shy in my lap, and Aspen Davis wasn’t fucking shy. She shook her head before facing the ceiling. “You know what? I’m just going to ask…”
“Snowflake, you’re kind of fucking scaring me,” I said, but my unease left a bit when a smile lifted her full lips.
Her thumb touched my mouth. “I wanted to know if you wanted to go on tour with me. We’d be back for Christmas still, and you’d be back for school in the spring. None of it would interfere with that.” She shifted in my lap. “It’s a lot of dates. A lot of travel, and you probably want to spend that time with your family, but?—”
I pressed two fingers to her lips. “You were nervous to ask me to come with you? Seriously?” Did this girl not know I’d literally do anything for her? I felt like I’d proven that, and honestly, I’d been debating stowing away in her luggage, hard-pressed to let her leave without me. I’d like to say that was just for her, but this girl had made me completely dependent on her ass. What could I say? I was in fucking love and didn’t fucking care who knew that.
Her smile went sheepish, shy. She shrugged. “I just feel like you’d get sick of it.”
“Of what? You?”
“Maybe.” Her arms settled around me. “I have no right to ask anything from you. Not a damn thing, Thatcher Reed. Not ever.”
She’d never ever asked anything of me, and she’d never have to. I touched my forehead to hers. “Do you want me to go on tour with you? If so, I’d be fucking honored. Honest to shit, I wasn’t sure how I’d let you leave me for weeks. I need to be with you.”
“You do?”
I smiled. “I do, and that’s a choice. It’s one I’d make every time.”
Something about what I said put tears in her eyes. She was so strong, but I had to remember sometimes, that was a front. This girl needed to have her walls broken down sometimes, and I had no problem bringing the hammer. She helped me with that too.
I fucked my girlfriend again that night. I fucked her a couple of times until I proved to her every word I’d said. The bubbles were gone by the time we finally got out, our hands and toes prunes, and she showed me something too that night. That it was okay to ask for what you wanted and accept when someone wanted to be there for you. That was hard for me sometimes too. Some of my nightmares had come back after I started going hard again with therapy, but Aspen was always there. Sometimes she never even said anything. She was just there allowing me to be in that safe space with her, and she didn’t know how much that fucking meant to me. She was a rock I hadn’t known I needed, a lifeline who had casually worked her way into my soul, and I’d forever be grateful for that.
I was eternally fucking grateful for that.
EPILOGUE
