Page 48 of Left of Forever

He nods. “Thank you for letting me. I liked—loved getting to be in your head.” The candlelight dances again and makes his eyes spark. “I’m sorry about the vows. I should have tried.”

I feel my expression waver. “I didn’t think of that as a bad memory, Ellis. You told me what you were feeling in that moment and it wasn’t something rehearsed or premeditated, and it meant more to me because of it.”

“I know, but… I could have tried. That was the point, right? Finding a compromise. Even if I couldn’t say them publicly, I could have written them to you. I could’ve tried, and I don’t know why I wasn’t willing to back then. Seems so fucking stupid now.” He sits back in his chair, his lashes splaying against his cheeks. “You were my best friend and I still kept shit too close to the chest sometimes.”

“So did I,” I confess.

His eyes move up to mine again before he blows out a long sigh. “The silent treatments. That’s my second thing for the day.”

“Worse than my cryptic musical showers?” I say wryly.

“You avoided fighting with me, and I think I avoided fighting with you, too, Byrd,” he says, his smile turning sad.

He’s right. I never knew how to fight with him. Not only because I didn’t grow up with two parents to witness or learn from, either, but because of everything Ellis had always been to me. How do you tell the man who’s always wanted to take care of you that you resent how much you need him? I never wanted to be a broken mess to the person who’d spent his life managing everyone else’s. I didn’t want to be angry at him, not when I didn’t always understand why I was angry in the first place back then. And no one teaches you what to do when the person hurting you is stillgoodto you. He wasn’t off cheating on me, he was an excellent dad and cared about our home and well-being. It feels silly and selfish to say,I hate that you’re working so much and it feels like you’d rather not be here with me, like you’d rather be anywhere else, when that person’s work consists of saving homes and lives. It was easier to convince myself that the growing distance between us was all in my head. I’d thought we could love each other through our hard times, but maybe we should have fought our way through them, too.

“I promise I’ll fight with you more,” I say. I’ll fightforyou more, too. “Even if things don’t . .” I don’t want to finish that sentence.

“I’ll fight with you, too,” he says, grinning genuinely now. “Even if things don’t.”

“We robbed ourselves of makeup sex, didn’t we?” I say. We’ve done our two bad things and spoken some truths. I’m not going to overthink flirting with him the rest of the night.

He coughs on his water a little. “I have heard great things about it, but I never felt robbed in that department.”

I smile into my wine and take another drink.

We take our time savoring our meals after that. I relish watching him eat. I let myself luxuriate in the simple pleasure of eating a meal and having a conversation with him again. I remember how I used to look forward to this all day when we’d moved into our house and out of the Byrds’. Sam was a toddler and would get put to bed at an early hour, still, and for a while, it felt like these meals were the only time we got to be us again, rather than Mom or Dad or baker or firefighter or whatever role we played for other people.

“What did you want to ask me earlier?” he says at some point when our plates are cleared. He pours an ice cube from his empty drink into his mouth and crushes it in his back teeth.

“Hmm,” I say, a raspy hum. The alcohol and food have me feeling toasty and brave. “Is there anything we never tried that you wish we would have? Is there anything in particular we did that you think about?”

His pupils dilate in the dim light. I see his pulse hammer at the base of his throat. Watch his Adam’s apple roll. He swirls around his highball glass before he tosses back another cube.

“So that I don’t misread this,” he says, careful and dark, “do you mean sexually?”

“Yes.”

An unsmiling nod. Another crunch. He swallows.

“I just think about making you come,” he says, simple and gruff. And I know that’s exactly how it’d be. Filthy, raw, no-nonsense. “But I think about tying you up, too. Binding you, somehow.”

Air escapes me, my nipples pulling so tight they sting. I can’t make eye contact with the waiter when he drops off the bill a moment later. Can’t even look at Ellis when we leave. We separate in the cable car again, each of us with our hands behind ourbacks against the glass like we’re keeping them restrained. When he grabs my hand in the Uber back to Santa Cruz, my breath hitches. I feel every circle he traces against my skin like he’s teasing my opening.

It is humbling, how desperately and how quickly I want him this way. How much effort it takes me to walk in an even-measured stride across the lobby when we get back to our hotel.

I am a panting, wanton wreck by the time we make it into the elevator. He slams a fist on our floor number when the doors slide shut, and dives for me. We’re a frenzy of needy sounds and obscenities and desperate, grasping hands. Sloppy, erratic kissing and too-hard bites. I shamelessly grab him by his ass and hook a thigh around his hip so I can grind into him where I need him. He buries a primal grunt into the valley of my chest.

We miss it when the doors open the first time on our floor, and he has to blindly reach around until he slaps the open button again. And then we’re ping-ponging into the hallway until he presses me into the wall between our doors.

“My place—” he says, punctuating it with a hot kiss and a feral grin. “Or yours?”

I growl out an ugly moan and throw my key at him. He eagerly shoves it in and slams it open with a bang before he’s hauling me into my room behind him.

“Fuck, it smells like you in here,” he groans.

I garble something and chase him with my mouth.

“I just gotta make you come. Just once. Please let me,” he says.