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“Your mother?” Emory’s voice was cautious.
Jesse nodded. “I don’t miss her. I can’t pretend I do. I don’t remember her.” He scowled into the dark. “People always ask what it was like, growing up without a ‘mum’, never knowing your ‘mum’. People don’t ask what it was like never to knowher—Ellie Truelove, the person.” Jesse shook his head, suddenly struggling to speak. “And bloody hell, my family loved her. Still love her. Losing her messed them both up for so long…most of my life. To have inspired so much love…” Jesse swallowed. “Yeah, I think I would have liked to have known that person.”
Emory propped himself on his elbow and gazed down into his face. “Perhaps you do know her. Perhaps she lives on in you? Ever consider that?”
Jesse snorted. “I highly doubt that, somehow.”
“Perhaps your family didn’t show you how much they love you because they assumed it was obvious, just like they assumed it was obvious to you how they felt about her.”
“Why do you think I want to escape all this?” Jesse said, covering his face with his arm. “It’s just all too damn hard.”
“But you’re so good at it,” Emory said, drawing his arm away from his face. “A lot better than you think you are. And besides…” A guarded smile played on his lips. “Perhaps I want a human parent for Dimity. Didn’t you consider that?”
Jesse blinked. “Huh?”
“It’s probably time we talk about that, isn’t it?”
Jesse’s body tensed. “Was this… Was this what you were thinking from the start of all this?”
Emory grinned playfully. “Why? Don’t you like her?”
“I’m crazy about her, but—”
“But?”
Jesse opened his mouth, closed it again and looked back at the ceiling. “I just want the pain to stop.”
“Pain is part of life, my love,” Emory said, ghosting his hand over Jesse’s chest, trailing his finger around his nipple bar, making his sated arousal tickle back to life. “But I hope I can continue to balance it for you.”
“You are pretty good at that,” Jesse conceded, gazing into Emory’s face. “That last time… It was…different.”
“I believe that was making love rather than just ‘fucking’.”
Jesse looked away. “Glen, my ex… He liked to take it slow sometimes. But I dunno, I always found it…boring. I know that’s bad.”
“But not this time?”
“No,” Jesse said and kissed him again. Emory returned the kiss, leisurely but intense. Jesse fought a moan and broke away. “You’d better go. It’ll be getting light soon.”
“I’ve got some time yet,” Emory said, rolling Jesse on top of him and plunging his tongue into his mouth.
“You want to do it again?” Jesse panted into the kiss.
“Being with you keeps reality from becoming too real,” Emory whispered as he ran his hands down Jesse’s back. “I’d do it forever if I could.”
Chapter Eighteen
Jesse again woke up in the master bed. He lay for a long time, feeling Emory’s touch still burning on his skin, inhaling the smell of him on the sheets and smiling.
He showered in the en suite and tried to decide what had changed. The hearing was still to come. His sex confession was still doing the rounds. He’d stormed out of the deposition, and Trixy was still in possession of videos of him that could throw fuel on the flames. But none of it seemed to matter as much as it had yesterday. It mattered, but not as much as the fact that Emory loved him—and Dimity loved him, and perhaps, so did Ant.
The date of the hearing came to them via an email from Darragh Kelly a day later. It was scheduled for Saturday evening on the last weekend of Dimity’s extended Christmas holiday. Sunday was the tenth of January, Dimity’s birthday.
“That’s shit,” Jesse whispered to Emory. Dimity sat on the other chair sketching dogs as101 Dalmatiansplayed on the large screen over the living room fire. “Really shit. Not only will she not know until the last minute whether she’s going to be packed off to Helena’s again, but she also has to find out on her birthday?”
Emory squeezed his leg. He was drinking a glass of wine. Jesse marveled at the calm, contented look on his face.
“It is what it is, my love,” he said in a low voice. “At least it will be over.”
