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I didn’t realize how much I’d like hearing him say that until those beautiful syllables were bouncing around inside my ears.
Clutching his hand, I pushed back against him and absorbed both our releases as I followed him into oblivion.
“Love you too,” I mumbled as my orgasm broke and began to die down.
He kissed the back of my ear in response.
Time passed. A peaceful lull ensued. Vaughn quietly stroked the bumps in my spine as we both recovered. My eyelids grew heavy, and sleep started to sweep over me, until he jostled me gently, murmuring, “Hey, don’t fall asleep on me.”
“Shit.” My parents were still on their way. “You’re right. Okay, alright. Now we really need to get our asses into gear.” Finding the oomph to scramble off the side of the bed, I landed on bare feet and raced toward the doorway of the room, saying, “I’ll get your shorts.”
“Thanks,” he called from behind me, not bothering to move from the mattress at all.
As soon as I reached his boxers, however, and bent down to pick them up, I spotted his pants in the hall. So I followed the trail, gathering socks and shoes after that. Since I was close enough to the bathroom, I went ahead and ducked inside to grab some pain relievers from the medicine cabinet along with a cup of water.
“I think I got everything,” I announced breathlessly as I returned to the room, where Vaughn was just sitting up in bed, his feet on the floor as he rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Plus some aspirin too.”
“God, you’re a saint.” Then he winced against the sunlight as he simultaneously tried to smile his gratitude at me before reaching a hand my way.
I gave him the pills and drink first, then conti
nued to hold his clothes, draping them over my arm with the shoes piled on top as I waited to hand them over one by one as soon as he lowered the glass.
Sighing as if refreshed, he set the empty cup on the nightstand and murmured, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I glowed, happy to attend to him and give him any kind of pleasure. He deserved to be pampered and loved, and it felt like an honor that he was letting me actually do something for him after all the things he’d done for Ava and me.
Inside his pair of pants, his phone gave a notification ding, and I said, “Oh!” in surprise before fishing through denim to find a pocket and pull it out. “Here you go.”
I started to hand it over, only to catch a glimpse of the screen and stop dead.
“Wait. Is that…?”
I tipped my head and squinted. It was a photo memory notification, letting him know it’d been a year since a certain picture had been taken. The shot was miniaturized and hard to see, but it looked an awful lot like Duke’s big, wide smile.
Instant dread pooled in my stomach. Any kind of reminder of his brother right now was not going to help anything between Vaughn and me.
“What?” Vaughn pushed to his feet and curiously peered over my shoulder to see.
God, I really didn’t want him to look. But it wasn’t like I could hide it from him, so I tilted the phone to let him see, already bracing for impact.
He hissed out a long breath and murmured, “Yeah. That’s him.”
Then he reached around me to open the shot and unlock the screen. The picture grew bigger, showing off his brother in a very familiar scene. It was the cake he was holding and tipping outward to show off to the camera that made my stomach pitch, though.
“I know that cake,” I admitted, blinking rapidly. Then I pointed. “I was on the courtesy committee last year at work. I picked out that cake for his going away party.”
Turning, I looked up into Vaughn’s eyes. “I picked out that cake,” I repeated, my voice feeling hollow.
Vaughn squinted, not understanding.
I shook my head, realizing what this meant. “I remember having no idea what to have the bakery write on it. Everything just seemed incredibly lame or inappropriate, so I finally settled with: we will miss you.”
I watched Vaughn’s throat work as he swallowed. His voice was hoarser than it’d been when he first woke up because he was piecing the puzzle together too and beginning to see the whole picture.
“He sent that photo to me to brag about how much everyone was spoiling him at his going away party,” he explained, his eyes filling with a doomed realization. “I saved it because I wanted to keep every image of him I could get. Holy shit…” Sitting back on the edge of my bed, he gripped his head in his hands and gaped at me in dread. “That party would’ve been the same night you and he…”
He shook his head and closed his eyes, trying to reject the truth.
