“Keep touching me,” she orders. I circle her clit with more pressure, and she inhales a sharp gasp. “Yeah. Like that.”
I expose her breasts, sucking her bare nipple between my lips, and that’s all it takes. I feel it, her orgasm gripping me in a vise. And she takes me with her. With my face buried in the crook of her neck, I let my own orgasm take over.
She looks surprised like she didn’t expect it, and she lets out a happy, sated sigh as the last of my orgasm comes to a dwindling end. Our breathing evens out. She kisses my temple, cradling my head between her hands.
“I love you,” I whisper into her still moist skin.
“I love you, too.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Kendall
NOW
It isn’t raining anymore.It tapered into light plops on the roof until it finally stopped, and I can hear birds chirping outside. I can smell the wet ground, the scent permeating through the barely visible space between the slats in the shed. While there’s a cool breeze blowing past the confines of our small cocoon, it isn’t chilly. James found a folding chair, the kind usually used for camping or outdoor soccer games, and we’re sitting in it. We’re keeping each other warm, his jacket draped over both of our shoulders.
“I started going to therapy.” He’s been drawing circles on my arm, letting my head rest against his, when he tells me this, and it throws me for a loop.
I pull away from him, untangling myself from his arms to look him in the eyes. “When?”
“I’ve only had two sessions,” he tells me, his hands still on my thigh. He squeezes me like he’s worried this confession might send me running to the hills. “But…I don’t know. Ithinkit’s helping? I mean, it’s notnothelping.”
“What made you want to go?” I ask, settling back into his arms.
“I thought since you go, it wouldn’t hurt to try,” I say. “Teeny suggested it, and I guess…I wanted to fix this. I wanted the therapist to tell or show mehowto fix us. But…”
“That’s not how therapy works,” I tell him with a placating smile.
He shakes his head. “No, it doesn’t.”
“When I started going, I thought the same thing,” I confess. “I thought therapy would be some kind of quick remedy. Like popping some magic pill. I guess I was kind of disappointed when it didn’t work that way.”
“Can I tell you something? Something you might get mad at?” He runs his tongue over his bottom lip, hesitating. His brow furrows together with worry, and it worries me just the same.
“I guess,” I say tentatively.
“You know those emails we used to write?”
A wave of relief rolls through me. “Yeah.”
“I’ve been reading them.”
I run my hand over his jaw and smile. “I know.”
“How?”
“I got one of those security alerts when you logged in,” I answer. “Remember I used my email as the main backup email?”
He breathes a soft gasp of relief. “Are you mad?”
“No,” I say softly, my fingers moving into his hair to brush it off his forehead. “It’s ours. We started that together.” I mean it. What we wrote there, it’s meant for the both of us. When we started them, we used it as a way to work through our thoughts. To hopefully heal something in us. Nine years later, we’re still using it to connect us to each other.
“You wrote a lot in those emails,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “You did too. At least, you used to.”
“I wrote one more recently,” he confesses.
