“I love making you do that,” he said with a chuckle, but it cut off mid-laugh when I reached between us and took him in my hand.
“What was that about another round?” I asked.
He shook his head. “You’re welcome to try for a bit if you fancy, but I’ll need a while longer.”
I pouted in response, and he narrowed his eyes.
“But,” he said, and I smiled hopefully, “I feel pretty confident in my ability to get you there again, at least once. And I’ve been dreaming of you in a different position…”
He flipped both of us this time so I was sat on top of him. I could see the tip of him peeking out between us as I straddled him, and I grabbed the headboard with my hands. “Right here?” I asked, sliding back and forth along his length, but he shook his head.
“No,” he said, then hooked his forearms under my thighs. He pulled me all the way forward, until I was hovering just above his chin. “Right here,” he said, and I could feel the vibration of his voice and the tickle of his beard on my still-swollen skin.
Then he closed his mouth around me once again, and I tilted my head back and let myself go for good.
Chapter22
Phil
I’d been imagining for years what it would feel like to be Amy Evans’s boyfriend, and now that it was happening, it was blissfully anticlimactic.
Well, technically, there was alotof climaxing. But besides that, the whole thing felt surprisingly, wonderfully normal.
To be fair, we’d been practising the relationship side of things for nearly two months. She’d already become the person I texted when I had a random funny thought in the middle of the day, and she was the person I thought about first when I woke up. The only difference was that now I didn’t have to keep my hands to myself, and thank god.
It wasn’t just in bed, either. Our no-PDA rule had clearly just applied to the fake dating arrangement, and literally overnight we went from relatively hands-off to almost offensively hands-on. We walked around the festival the next day in our Donkey and Dragon costumes, constantly hand in hand or arm in arm, only breaking contact when we absolutely had to. She sat snuggled in my lap on the picnic blanket as we laughed along to a D&D-themed choose-your-own-adventure comedy set, tilting her head back to kiss my face through my beard every couple of minutes. We danced together in the rain as a pirate band played the last set of the festival, and I carried her on my back on the return walk to the rental at the end of the day, both of us with sore feet from dancing and sore cheeks from smiling.
One of the best parts of the day was seeing how willingly she threw herself into everything. She’d been so resistant to anything nerdy just a couple of months ago, and now she was buying sparkly dice and shopping for cloaks at a fantasy festival without a care in the world. I’d always thought of her as passionate and curious and excitable, but it was so satisfying to see that unbridled by insecurity and judgment.
She was more herself than ever, which meant I was more under her spell than ever. Which was fine for once, since we were finally on the same page.
* * *
Back at home,our routine remained largely unchanged, except now it felt like a given that she’d tag along everywhere. She scheduled the workload for her dad around Ethel’s appointments– her car was better for that anyway– and she stayed over after date nights on Saturdays so she was already there to drive us to the Evans family dinners on Sundays.
To be clear, I was still exhausted. Over the next couple of weeks, Ethel still needed me more than ever, and I was filling the time I had spent working on costumes with more data entry jobs, trying to bring back up my scarily low bank balance. I’d also started working on something special for Amy for the fantasy ball, even looping Morgan in to help me sketch out the idea.
The difference was, I was exhausted and happy.
Amy would wake up with me for Ethel’s morning routine at half five every morning she was there, until one morning she must have turned off my alarm, and I woke up at eight more refreshed than I’d felt in months. I panicked at first, thinking I’d overslept, and I’d stumbled out of my room as fast as I could. But when I did, I found Ethel fed, dressed, and sitting by the window, teaching Amy to crochet. It seemed Amy had managed Ethel’s morning medications perfectly thanks to the notebook, and she’d even taken her for a walk around the block. Only then was I able to relax with a cup of coffee, a smile playing at my lips as I watched the two of them laughing together, backlit in the bay window: the woman who had raised me, and the woman I loved.
I’d never said the L-word to Amy, even platonically. But if I were honest with myself, I’d been in love with her before we’d even started this whole charade, and I was no less in love with her now. I couldn’t imagine anyone in my position could avoid falling for her. She was gorgeous, obviously, but more than that, she was so unapologetically herself. And she fit so seamlessly into my life, probably because she’d almost always been a part of it. I wished so badly that my parents could have met her; they would have loved her just as much as I did.
But no matter how happy she seemed, and no matter how set she supposedly was against going to Niamh and Chris’s wedding, she apparently couldn’t stop thinking about it.
We were side by side in the kitchen one afternoon, the smell of cookies wafting over from the oven. Ethel had an extra-long physio appointment, so we’d come home instead of staying at the hospital, and I’d whipped up a quick dough whilst Amy worked at the table.
A while later, when we were doing the washing up together, she started telling me about the other friends who would be at the wedding. She sounded almost like she was changing her mind about going, especially as she talked about needing to show them how well she was doing away from them.
I handed her a baking tray I’d finished washing. “You don’t have anything to prove to those assholes. You know that, right?”
“I know,” she said with a sigh, running the towel over the metal to dry it. “But wouldn’t it be nice to get a bit of closure?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, feels like the opposite of closure to me. Like you’re just picking at the scab of what happened.”
“But what about my friends?” she asked, almost wistfully, as if she were thinking aloud rather than asking me, so I paused a moment to let her, despite the voice in my head yellingthey are not your friends!
“I do miss them,” she said, and it felt almost like she’d managed to convince herself. “They don’t seem to know I’m not going, and they’ve all sounded so excited to see me. I know things won’t be the same– I don’t wanna be friends with Niamh, and I don’t live there anymore– but maybe it’s worth it to salvage some of the few friendships I have that aren’t tied to my brother?”
