AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A few minutes later, I found myself staring at a perfectly naked, and nearly asleep, Trista in the giant bathtub in my bathroom.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
trista
I heard the door to the bedroom, then the door to the bathroom, and I heard him stop breathing entirely once he was in here with me.
“You don’t have to creep from the corner,” I said and giggled. “I feel like maybe you’ve seen me without clothes before. A couple times, even.”
He chuckled before he dragged the small wooden stool from the corner of the shower over to the side of the tub to sit beside it. He folded his arms on the edge of the tub and leaned forward to sit his chin on his arms.
“Figured you’d be out there with Memphis longer than that.”
“She told me to come be with you. Apparently, neither of you want me around right now,” he said and smiled.
“Right now,” I repeated. “I think it’s most of the time.”
He smirked and his fingers dipped down into the water just enough to run up my arm toward my shoulder. I sat quietly for a moment to see what those fingers would end up doing.
“I’m sorry, Triss,” he said so very, very quietly. “I’m having a hard time remembering the me that you know. Reminding myself that who I was isn’t really who I am now. I know it’s been weird for you because of that.”
“The you that I know sure doesn’t seem like the kind of man who’d sit here with me while I was in a bathtub just to apologize. Nothing about you ever really seemed like the apologizing kind of man.”
He smirked while his fingers made their way to my collar bone and then up to my neck.
“My wife used to do the bath thing,” he said. I tried instantly to sit upright and to cover myself at the same time just at the mention of her, like she was about to appear in this bathroom with us and catch me stealing her husband. He laughed and moved that hand until it was under my chin, where he could hold me by the jaw.
“She didn’t do the bath thing in this house, Fancy Face. Calm down. I wasn’t trying to make you uncomfortable. It’s just — I don’t know. I guess sitting beside a woman in a bathtub is just where I got used to talking about the hard shit that happens in relationships.”
I stayed perfectly still, staring back at him while he held me where I was by my chin. He made it sound like it was perfectly normal to take a conversation about his wife and let it flow effortlessly into one about a different relationship, and I simply had no fucking idea how I was supposed to be reacting to such a thing. And I guess, maybe it was normal? I hadn’t done this before. I hadn’t been married and then had to figure out how to move on with another person. Hell, I hadn’t even had an actual boyfriend from whom I had to move on
“Sit back down, baby. I’ll stay here with you. We don’t have to talk about Liz if it bothers you that much.”
“I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do, J,” I said, sitting back in the tub again. “I know how it feels to have no one left. I know what it means to have human connection taken from you, but I didn’t lose a spouse. Or a child.”
“We’re not competing for who’s been hurt worse, Triss,” he said and chuckled. “You don’t need to know how it feels to lose a spouse. It feels just as fucking terrible as it does to lose your father.”
“Do you want to talk about her?” I asked and tried to swallow an absurd amount of fear.
“Not particularly, but I don’t want you to think you can’t ask if you have questions about all of it. I never imagined you’d find out about them the way that you did.”
“I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk about them if you need to, J.”
He smirked at that. “I made my peace with them being gone. I came to terms with it a long time ago. Now, I just have to figure out how to reconcile the way that I felt about her for the last half a fucking decade with the fact that she didn’t actually pull the trigger.”
His hand went back into the water to grip mine, and I just continued waiting quietly. Hoping desperately that he’d keep talking so I wouldn’t have to figure out what I was supposed to say.
“Having to figure this out doesn’t mean I’ll stop wanting you, Triss. I don’t want you to think that. I’m fucked up right now. I probably will be for a while. I don’t even know what happens to me from minute to minute lately, and it’s terrifying,” he said and paused. “But I still want you, if you can figure out how to survive it with me. If you can survive me.”
“If I survived the queen of Hell, I think I can survive you,” I said and tried to smile. His hand tightened around mine in an instant and he sucked in a sharp breath like I’d slapped him right across the cheek just by mentioning his car. He stood up quickly to lean all the way across the tub to kiss me. Fucking hard. Not the soft and heartfelt kind that had been happening a lot lately. This one felt possessive and almost brutal, like he was about to try to prove a point.
“Fuck, J,” I gasped out when he pulled back and looked down the front of my body.
“You’ve got two minutes to get your ass out of this tub and into my bed, Fancy Face.”
His words ripped the ability to speak right out of me, so I just nodded at him while his thumb swept across my lips and down my cheek. He backed away to take my towel from the hook by the shower door and came right back to hold his hand out toward me. He pulled me to my feet as soon as he had my hand in his and he held the towel open while I turned my back to him so he could wrap it around me. He stepped all the way against me, and I felt his mouth on the sensitive skin just below my ear a second later. He seemed to be very much in a battle with himself over whether he wanted to use his tongue or his teeth on my neck, but his mouth moved right to my ear next.
“Two. Minutes.”
