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Me: Hey! I’m the coolest person you know.
Teddy: Pfft, says who?
Me: Honey. My soul sister.
Teddy: Hands off my sister. Mine. Not yours. I heard about your past of stealing siblings.
Me: Don’t worry. I’ll just borrow her from you. Besides, pretty sure she loves me more than she loves you at this point. *snicker
“Teddy again?” Aslan asked, padding barefoot into the kitchen, running a hand through his longish, wet hair from a shower. He’d dressed in a pair of track pant shorts that hung off his trim hips, teased with his happy trail, and clung to the mouth-watering bulge between his legs.
“Yep.” I couldn’t take my eyes off him. “He’s still moaning about the lack of suitable building supplies.”
“Tell him he’ll have to design something himself if he truly wants to do this. Nothing in today’s building supplies will work.” He scratched his five o’clock shadow. “Believe me, plywood, Gib board, metal, glass—none of it will be strong or durable enough. Tell him to put his fancy degree to work and design the materials before the structure.”
“God, I find you so sexy when you talk like that.”
He chuckled. “Like what?”
“So assured. So confident.”
“Glad you find me sexy, askim benim. I suffer the same affliction whenever I look at you.” His teeth dug into his bottom lip as he looked me up and down. “Sexiest woman I’ve ever met.”
Liquid heat flushed between my legs.
God, when would I stop falling into a lusty stupor around this man?
When would my heart stop kicking and my stomach stop clenching?
Never.
That was the answer.
Never.
Even the therapist Wayne Gratt recommended was pleasantly surprised that my desire for Aslan had never waned, even after what Ethan had done to me. My libido was well and truly healthy, even though I could’ve shut down all forms of intimacy.
We’d had a few sessions via Zoom, and she’d given me some visualization techniques for those sneaky moments that made me doubt myself. I hadn’t told Aslan, but sometimes, just sometimes, bussing home at night—if I’d stayed longer than normal at uni—brought back unresolved fear.
On later nights, Aslan offered to pick me up in the Cherokee, but I had mild panic attacks of him driving around Townsville without me. What if he was stopped again? What if they realised who he was, and I came home to an empty house and no idea where they’d taken him?
I’d rather take the bus, even in the dark.
Besides, nothing had ever happened on those bus rides, and my fellow students were nothing but nice. All of us shared a love of animals, the desire to make the oceans a better place, and the ethics to work hard to complete our life’s purpose.
It annoyed me that I couldn’t control those pesky day terrors that could pounce from nowhere for no reason. But thanks to my therapist, Maureen, and her expertise and kind ear, I’d learned it would take time for my psyche to fully let go.
A full year we’d lived here.
A year that had been one of the best of my life.
Aslan had fully embraced becoming a building manager. Griffen regularly stopped by with awe in his eyes at how neat and improved his complex was. Aslan had muscles that he’d never had before from hauling heavy timber and using a sledgehammer to break apart kitchens and bathrooms, and he’d even bought a cheap pair of reading glasses when we were last in town as he complained his eyes were getting tired looking at numbers late at night.
There hadn’t been a single moment of my life that I didn’t think Aslan wasn’t the hottest man alive. Yet when he’d put on those black-framed glasses?
Fuck me sideways, I was not responsible for the way I jumped him.
It was his fault the chair legs broke beneath him as I launched myself into his lap.
His fault that we crashed to the floor in a tangle of limbs and heat, and somehow ended up with him behind me, me on my hands and knees, and him riding me painfully hard amongst the rubble of the broken chair.
We hadn’t even closed the drapes. Anyone in the communal garden would’ve seen.
But I didn’t care.
And by the way he’d roared as he came inside me, he hadn’t cared either.
It was a nightly effort for me not to pounce on him whenever he put those glasses on. I knew he probably needed a proper check-up and visit an optometrist, but without ID or a Medicare number...I didn’t know if he’d be asked uncomfortable questions or if records of his test would be saved on systems that could ruin his secret life on our shores.
He’d never once seen a dentist. Never needed a doctor (thank God), and it was getting to the point where we stopped thinking about all the things he couldn’t do because we were lucky enough to find things he could.
