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“If you just tell me what you need from me —,” she started to say, but my hand slapped right over her little mouth to interrupt that shit.
“Stop that. Now. I don’t need anything from you, baby.”
The tears were right back in her eyes, but I hadn’t moved my hand from her mouth so she still couldn’t speak.
“Understand?” I asked. “I don’t want to hear that again, Triss. I’m not your problem to fix.”
She nodded her head, so I released her face and kissed her again quickly.
“Come on,” I said and squished her into me another time before I turned her back toward my room.
She at least stopped crying, but she hadn’t said another word by the time I slid into my bed beside her. She rolled toward me the second I was beside her and tried to kiss me. I felt like an asshole for it, but I hadn’t come back into this room with her for sex. Not because I didn’t want her. I just had absolutely zero faith in my ability to stay in control of myself. I put my hand on the side of her face again and pushed my forehead against hers another time.
“Not tonight, baby.”
I kissed her and promptly rolled her until she was facing away from me. I pulled her back into my body until there wasn’t any space left between us and locked my arm around her waist like it could anchor her to me for the rest of my days. About the time that I thought I’d try to apologize to her for the nightmare of a rollercoaster she’d been on in her head over me, she was already snoring loud enough to put a lion’s roar to shame. It didn’t bother me so much tonight though.
I didn’t even trust myself to fall asleep this close to her. Dreams, nightmares, and being unconscious in any sense held too many opportunities to wake up in some other unpredictable mindset. So, I’d just stay awake and hold her tonight. I wanted to touch every part of her again, to feel her around me, to do everything that made her squirm and writhe and scream that she hated me. I wanted her to be able to feel what I felt for her too, but that just wasn’t worth the risk of what I might also do to her if I blacked out when the emotion flooded both of us.
Nothing about my headspace was stable. It hadn’t been for weeks anyway, but now the knowledge that Memphis had significant proof about what had been done to my family, to my four-year-old, an innocent fucking child who wouldn’t even tolerate me hurting a bug inside the house, that sent me spiraling in a bad direction. I blamed myself for it even when I believed my wife had pulled the trigger just because I hadn’t been home to ground her, but now I blamed myself in having to acknowledge that my fucked up skill set was the reason they were all murdered. Someone set out to take their lives to be sure I’d plummet so deep into a pit of depression that I’d be more than willing to give up every tie I ever had to my identity in exchange for a job that would allow me to start over as someone different.
Every terrible thought that ever crossed my mind about Liz came rushing back to the front of my memories to send me on an uncontrollable guilt trip for ever believing she’d done it. And I hated to fucking admit it, but something in my brain was having a difficult time separating these women. Nothing about them was even remotely similar. They were separated by years, by death, pain, grief, personalities, behavior, appearance, the way they offered love in return, everything; and I still nearly called Trista by Liz’s name more than once over the last week just because she was back in my head round the fucking clock right now. Something in me even started to wonder if it was because I never should’ve tried to love another woman. Was I even more of a monster than I originally realized because I was able to feel something for someone else when my wife had been taken from me the way that she had? After I fucking spent years blaming her for it, on top of that.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
trista
I should’ve just been happy that Jersey was at least staying in his room with me overnight, even if he didn’t actually sleep or do more than just hold me until I was asleep. I’d spent the last three days waking up to his absence at some point throughout the night. He hadn’t moved to the living room or to the couch though. He’d be standing at the window, just watching. Or looking through one of the photo albums from the bookshelf.
We still had a difficult time talking to one another, which wasn’t anything new. We didn’t communicate well, or nicely, from our initial encounter. Whether that bothered him as much as it did me was impossible to tell. He’d always been comfortable in silence before so maybe that was just how he lived in general. Either way, it left me still very much craving the explosive physical connection that neither of us had ever been able to deny successfully. I’d done everything I could think of over the last few days to entice him, and it was painfully obvious that he wanted it too, but the motherfucker just wouldn’t let it happen.
I was gearing up to take another chance on it though when he followed me out to the pool today. He still couldn’t get in the water because his body hadn’t healed entirely yet from everything Bryson had done, but he was in the lounge chair right at the edge of the pool with every fucking inch of his annoyingly perfect broad shoulders on display. I made sure to wear the bikini that was really more of a thong than it was a bathing suit, and I left my hair down since he always seemed to enjoy pulling it. But he looked like he was fucking asleep while I thought I was putting on a show; getting in the water so slowly, tossing my hair back like those stupid models, wiping the water drops from my chest just to touch my own breasts like I was the one who enjoyed them. Everything inside me wanted to get right back out of that pool to rip the sunglasses off his face to find out if his eyes were even open, or if I was in here making a fool out of myself. I made my way to the edge of the pool where his chair was.
“Listen, I don’t mean to sound like the nagging, insecure girlfriend, or even the overly pushy and horny boyfriend, because I get it that you’re in a weird place right now and space matters. But if you don’t touch me sometime soon, I might actually die.”
He didn’t move at all, but he laughed. “That sounds just a bit dramatic, Fancy Face.”
“Jersey.”
He chuckled again and adjusted the back of the lounge chair so that he could sit upright rather than recline. “Come here, baby.”
He pulled me down onto his lap the second that I was within his reach, and I shifted until I was straddling him. Then I fucking laughed because the man might as well have had a piece of steel hidden under his swim trunks all this time.
“So, you were watching.”
He smiled. “I mean if you’re going to go out of your way to put on a demonstration like that, I feel like it would’ve been rude of me to not watch.”
I moved his sunglasses from his eyes to sit them on top of his head.
Those perfectly blue eyes that I was still jealous over not having myself.
“You don’t ever have to worry about me not wanting you, Triss. It’s a pretty constant state of existence for me.”
“Then what’s been happening in here the last couple of weeks?” I asked and poked him right in the forehead. He smacked my hand away and laughed.
“You’ve seen what happens. You’ve been there for the blackouts. Sometimes, I feel something so deep that it rips open some other part of me and I have no control over whatever it is that gets out. Every so often, I can feel it coming and I can keep part of myself together, or sometimes someone else can intervene before it happens. But sometimes, I don’t know it’s coming, and I don’t even know that it’s happened until somebody is trying to shake my ass out of it after the fact. That part has been running loose lately, and I don’t know if I can trust myself around you yet.”
I felt like a lunatic that that made me smile, but it did. “Because you feel something so deep when it comes to me,” I said. His entire body tensed underneath me. The muscles across his chest tightened and his fingertips dug into my thighs.
