I huff and roll my eyes because if I don’t, I’ll cry. He just smiles at me and shakes his head with a fondness in his face that I have no idea how I earned. His eyes meet mine steadily, and I don’t know how he does it, but I still know that he somehow knows every thought that’s rattling around in my brain right now.
“You know it’s normal, right? To let the bad thoughts win sometimes. You’ve been through hell, and you’re still very deep in the fight of tackling that one step at a time, and you’re doing so amazingly. Having bad days is a part of it, though. You’re allowed that. I just hope you’ll let me be here to remind you of all the reasons the bad thoughts are wrong. Not thatyouare wrong to listen to them sometimes because that’s a part of being human, but reminding you of the reasons whytheyare wrong in the first place,” he says before leaning down for another deep kiss.
“So, will you let me?” he asks once he pulls away from the kiss and traces my cheekbone with the tip of his nose, his warm breath on my face seeping into my skin and starting to chase away the ice the bad thoughts had splintered into me earlier.
I lightly nod my head, a shaky breath exhaling from me with the movement.
“Yeah, Marcus. I don’t think I could let go of this now, even if I tried,” I breathe out, wrapping my hand around the back of his neck to hold him against me.
He nuzzles into my cheek. “Well, let’s just agree not to let go then,”he states firmly, ready to move the conversation along now that he’s said his piece, not pushing me to feel any certain way, just so long as he knows I listened.
I’ve had people sit with me through harsh moments and refuse to move on from the topic until I’d somehow managed to perform enough happy vibes to convince them they’d pulled me out of the funk. But Marcus doesn’t do that. He understands I can’t just bounce from one end to the other so fast, so he makes sure his positive words sit in the basin with the bad thoughts, so there are positive things to ruminate on alongside the negative ones. It’s one of the many things that makes talking to him so easy. I can just express myself without feeling obligated to act one way or another.
“Okay,” I whisper against his skin.
He sits up enough to look me in the eyes. “I know you think you’re being selfish, but I promise, I’ve never been happier. If you think making me happy makes you selfish, then I’d definitely question the subconsciousness of your bad thoughts.”
I roll my eyes because,of course, he’d find a way to twist it.
“We shouldn’t even be focused on me right now. We should be focused on you. It’syourbig game today,” I point out, trying to change the subject to one that really should be more important.
Marcus rolls his lips between his teeth, his eyes twinkling with a heated gaze that I’ve come to know quite well.
“With the lingering promises of my reward, trust me, pretty, today’s game is already in the bag,” he says confidently, his fingers grazing suggestively from my chin past my collarbone. The movement has my skin trembling beneath his touch, heat blossoming from where his fingers touched me.
“You’re ridiculous.” I huff, despite the heat lighting up my nerves and sending little shivers through my body.
The warmth in his eyes, and the all-consuming growth of it expanding from his touch to my belly, have my brain shutting down, blocking out the bad thoughts. Not chasing them away, but overwhelming them for a moment as something else takes the forefront.Something increasingly needy for Marcus’s touch that’s far more visceral than anything I’ve ever felt before.
“Ridiculously horny for you. What are the chances for a preview of tonight?” He husks against my ear before drawing the lobe between his teeth, causing me to arch into him at the sensation.
“What did you have in mind?” I go for coy, but the shuddering breath at his touch mars it and just shows how deeply into where this is heading I am.
“Don’t really care, I just want to see you come for me,” he says, his voice a mixture of sensuality and possessiveness that only adds to the slow melting of my body.
He has a way with me that makes him impossible to deny. I know there’s no way I’d have ever been able to resist him for as long as I did if I’d tasted any of this before. He’s all-consuming, sex and fire, affirmation and warmth. Absolutely everything I’ve ever needed.
“We don’t have much time,” I point out, desperately trying to block the bad thoughts from returning to remind me of all the reasons I don’t deserve this.
“We have enough,” he breathes, before his hand snakes down between us.
His fingers coil around my already hardened dick, and he proves how little time he needs to make me come undone beneath him.
The stadium is packed, and there’s a charge in the air. The home games here are always electric, but I don’t know if it’s me or if it’s the anticipation of seeing a replacement starter after someone with a following like Holt Myers suddenly left for a pro team. Or maybe all of that just feels really huge to me because I don’t know enough about the sport to tell whether that’s big news or commonplace.
I’m in the stadium seats with all of our parents. With Tristan and Marcus both playing, their parents came, and of course my parentsare joining them on a group vacation that they are leaving for right after the game, so they are with me as well.
My parents have definitely gotten close to the Bauers and the Donovans while all of their children have been away at college. I absolutely love seeing the strong bonds of friendship my parents are building with good people who appreciate them.
My mom is on my left side, her arm wrapped around mine and her head on my shoulder. She had come to visit right after my first therapy session, and we’d had a long heart-to-heart about therapy and healing. She told me about some things from her past, and I realized I wasn’t the only one dealing with trauma. She’s managed to live a happy life, both externally with us and internally with herself, despite some really bad things that had happened to her before she met my dad.
She also reiterates often, especially when I call her on my bad days, that healing isn’t linear. It’s something Marcus pointed out earlier during my spiral, and Grant reminds me of every week when I get frustrated about the bad moments that creep up and take over, too. The moments where I’m doing so well, and then I plummet without rhyme or reason, and all the old haunts reach out and snag my brain.
They remind me that it’s normal, that I’m not irrevocably broken. But when the bad thoughts are meaner on the days I need them to be the quietest, it almost feels like I’m purposely sabotaging myself. It makes me question how I can possibly be the truly decent person everyone seems to think I am if I’m so determined to hurt myself and the people around me.
Samayah pulls me out of my thoughts when her fingers thread through mine, and she looks at me with a patient smile so full of warmth and sincerity that it’s deeply grounding for someone I’ve only met a handful of times and spoken with maybe a handful more.
“I’m so happy you two figured things out,” she says, reiterating how happy she is that Marcus and I are together.
