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“Do you dream about them a lot?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” She stacked her hands on top of each other on my chest, elevating her chin on them, and I was once again struck by how simple it was to tell her the truth. I’d always been private, particularly when it came to my family, but I wanted to tell Gemma what happened. I wanted to tell her everything.
Mistaking my pause for something else, she backtracked. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“I do.” I wound a lock of her hair around my index finger. “When I dream about them, they’re alive. They’re talking and laughing and dancing, sometimes with me. It’s like I’m ten again or something. My friend is really into psychics and stuff, and he said when I have those dreams, it’s them trying to communicate with me.” I huffed out an incredulous laugh. “I don’t know about that.”
She drew lazy figure eights on my sternum. “What were they like?”
Memories inundated my mind, and I sighed in contentment. It had taken me almost a decade to be able to think of my parents without getting choked up. “My mom’s name was Jane, and she was the quintessential mom, cooking and baking. She was the mom who brought the orange slices to basketball games. You know that kind of mom?”
“I’ve heard of her,” Gemma said, giving me a half smile. “What about your dad?”
“Everybody called him Bill, except for her. She called him Billy. That’s what I remember most about him. The way he perked up when he heard her say his name. I was just a kid, but I knew they loved each other a lot.”
“What happened?”
Even though she could ask any and all questions she wanted, that one was still tough to answer. I wasn’t there that night, and when I was younger, my imagination often spiraled out of control, inventing terrible images of what it might have looked like. Anchoring myself to the present and Gemma’s deep brown eyes, I told her, “They were on their way home from dinner when a drunk driver hit them from behind.”
She eyes closed tight, wincing at the information.
“Their car spun out of control and flipped. My parents weren’t wearing their seat belts. They were dead before the ambulance arrived.”
I had been through enough therapy to be able to relay that information with some detachment. As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn’t know how to process my grief, though as I got older, it had been to have every detail in my life in order. No surprises, good or bad. It was better for me to take the straight and narrow; I could see exactly what was coming and where I was going.
As if Gemma could read my thoughts, she leaned up on her elbows. “That’s why you’re so straitlaced.”
“Hmm?” I tipped my chin down, brushing her hair off her shoulder. “Why I’m what?”
She counted off with her fingers. “You’re super smart, good at everything you do, your house is spotless. I mean, you even make your bed. What single guy does that? You like everything perfect.”
I rolled onto my side, supporting my head with my hand, thinking back to those middle school years. “I wasn’t always like that. I went through a rebellious period. I was having trouble dealing with everything, and I got into trouble. I was drinking, smoking a lot of pot, staying out late.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I can’t picture it.”
“The last straw was this party the summer before I started high school. Frank found me at this kid’s house at one in the morning or something, and right there, he laid into me. Verbally kicked my ass into the next county, screamed at me about how acting that way wasn’t going to change anything.” I shook my head. A shadow of guilt still followed me around, even all these years later. “He had his own stuff to deal with too, and it made me understand what an extra burden I was to him by acting the way I was. He needed me as much as I needed him, but I was too high to notice. It took him finding me at that party, yelling and crying at me in the front yard, for me to finally see it.”
“And look at you now,” Gemma said, sitting up with a playful tilt of her lips, “you’re as uptight as they come.”
I scooped her up, wrestling her back down to the mattress. “I’ll show you uptight.”
She shrieked with laughter, trying uselessly to push me away as I blew raspberries down her stomach. I wiggled her legs apart with my own and laced our fingers together as my tickling turned into kisses. “Every day with you, I feel like I’m being unraveled.”
“Yeah?” She writhed under me. “Feels like you’re the one doing the unraveling right now.”
“You said it yourself. I like to be good at everything I do, and practice makes perfect.” I licked at the crease of each thigh and came to hover over the soft pink skin between them, prepared to stay down there for hours and then, “Gemmie! We’re home!”
I froze with my mouth barely touching her pussy, and Gemma let out a frustrated moan, echoing my internal one. “Unbelievable.”
The honeymooners were home three days early. She rolled away from me and grabbed the first articles of clothing she could get her hands on. “You owe me one orgasm.”
I held my hand out for a high five. “As many as you want, Gemmie.”
“Ugh. God, don’t call me thatnow.” She gestured to me, naked and half hard, then let out one more groan before heading downstairs. I threw on jeans and a long-sleeved thermal T-shirt, interrupting Caroline, in a gold sarong dress and appearing tanned and refreshed, mid-conversation with Gemma. Frank, on the other hand, hunched over a chair, his face drawn and pale.
“Oh, Jason, I didn’t know you were here,” Caroline said, landing a kiss on my cheek. “It’s so nice you were here to keep Gemmie company.”
