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She slides me a guilty look. “I thought the sugar might make you sleepy.”
I can’t help a low hoot. “Gwenna…” I laugh as she hangs her head.
“Go on,” she says, looking rueful. “Tell me to bug off.”
I wrap my hands around her waist and pull her back against me, kissing her neck. I groan as my cock swells against her lower back. “Please don’t.”
I shut my eyes as I hold her to me. The sweet scent of her shampoo seems to fuzz my senses. Somewhere very far away, I hear my conscience urging me to get away from her, but it’s too late now. Those stern words are whispered. Her body is so soft and warm. Her hands are careful, gentle, reaching back around to stroke from my hips down my thighs. Illogically, they seem to know me. What I need and what I like.
“Gwen…” Her fingers reach for my dick.
“Yes?” The word soft and sinuous.
I blink at her coppery hair as words rise up within me. They float to the bottom of my throat, and I can’t seem to let them out. My mind is racing. Pulse is racing. Gwenna’s hands are smooth on my pants. My cock is squeezed between our bodies. How do I tell her? And I realize that I can’t. I can tell her nothing, so I whisper, “That feels go
od.”
TWENTY-THREE
Barrett
On the kitchen floor, with the lights on and the TV droning in the background, I come faster than I ever have, and she is right behind me, laughing. I laugh too. I don’t know why. It doesn’t matter.
Afterward, I wash our dinner plate as Gwen lines up bowls and utensils for making something she calls Guinness cake.
I arch my brows, skeptical, and she tells me all about the beer-based layered cake and how to make it, pulling ingredients from the pantry and the refrigerator and assembling them on the counter like a little army.
I can’t help admiring her from every angle. The way her hair shines like a penny when she turns her head. The awkward way she lifts her shoulder to try to scratch her cheek while her hands are flour-covered. I watch her hands bend as she cracks eggs into a bowl. I think about her fingers on my face.
I think about us in her bed. Me in her bed.
I think about my bedroom at my last spec ops base. Maybe because it was about the same size as her little kitchen. I used to always wonder why the ceilings and the walls in that place were so fucking ugly, this gray-brown color that made you feel like you were in a file cabinet drawer. My bed there was too small. I remember turning on my side and covering my head and curling up and wanting to feel…real. No one knew how dead I was.
I look at Gwenna, and I try to remember how her hands feel on me. Did she really ever touch me, though? I’m just a watcher; almost never touched. I look at my left hand and it’s shaking. All the fingers. They can’t move, but they can all still shake.
Gwenna pours the batter into a pan. As soon as she’s finished, she turns and takes my hands. She squeezes them and looks into my eyes. Hers are dark and knowing. A small notch forms between her eyebrows as she tilts her head, her face impassive in her quiet assessment, her hands still holding mine firmly.
“Can you finish this for me?” Her eyes gesture to the cake over her shoulder. “One of the egg shells cut my hand.”
* * *
Gwenna
His moods remind me of an ocean. It’s a pattern I remember from my own PTSD and I still know sometimes: crest then trough, crest then trough…
I’m good at feeling his. Maybe only good at troughs. His crests are smooth and sometimes small: like when he wrapped his arms around me from behind, before we ended up tangled on the floor.
I can feel the trough over my shoulder as I pour the cake batter. It’s like a disappearance, even though he’s still right here. I can tell for sure I’m right—he’s gone away somewhere—because when I cut my eyes at him, his don’t meet mine. His face is vacant and his body seems too still.
It’s like our traumas are swirled together, because every time I sense this happening to him, I start sweating and my heart pounds. As soon as I can sit the batter bowl down, I turn around and take his hands and squeeze them tightly, tight enough so his gaze lifts to mine.
“Can you finish this for me? One of the egg shells cut my hand.” It’s true. I turn my hand so he can see the small cut on the outside.
He blinks slowly at me. “Yeah.”
God, I love his voice—that low, sweet voice.
I wash my hands and lean against the counter as I tell him how to pour the batter for the other layers of the cake. It makes me glad to see his eyes on his hands, his body moving steady in the present.
