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Flick’s palm sat against his heart. “I’m not angry.” She might feel it. The disappointment, the unexpected bitterness.
She kissed the back of his neck. Stayed wrapped around him. “You made me forget and I needed that. I needed you.”
Proximity. Obligation after abandoning her last night. He’d certainly had worse sex. Left a bed quicker. Wanted to shower it all off.
“What happened to you today?” he said.
“Let me kiss you and I’ll tell you.”
He was a sucker. There were worse ways to end with her. He hauled her around his body into his lap and let her kiss him.
Chapter Eight
Flick had never had a lover as considerate as Tom. It was unnerving.
It wasn’t that he was bad at sex. He wasn’t hesitant. He didn’t have lousy technique or poor rhythm and shit timing. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy himself. He gave. He’d done for her beautifully, he watched, he listened, he followed, but he didn’t know how to take. He stayed in control, on track, kept to the plan. Not robotic, but not spontaneous, not free.
He didn’t let go so much as endure.
It might’ve hurt her heart to see he was that way. Constrained, even in how he took his pleasure.
A hundred other women wouldn’t complain. A hundred other women would make Tom happy by letting him be the giver.
Flick wanted him to understand it could be different. She wanted him to know what chasing pleasure for its own sake felt like. Not out of guilt, not for opportunity or expectation, or habit. She wanted Tom to know how to reset his life because he’d kissed someone, fucked someone till he was blind on the experience of it, scoured clean and reborn and ready to deal with whatever the world could throw at him with his massive shoulders squared and his chin up.
He deserved that. And then he could choose how to be. Free or constrained by those rigid self-made rules he was hemmed in by.
It all went some way to explaining how he walked away from their session in the living room. It’s why he wanted to leave the bed now. He resented her even as he let her kiss him, make him hard again. And it was impossible to imagine he wouldn’t hate her for pushing him.
To do that she needed a plan. Tumbling him into bed again wasn’t it. She couldn’t let him leave the room angry and she’d made him feel uncertain. He would set her aside again. He’d withdraw as soon as he had the chance and she didn’t know if she had what it would take to show Tom O’Connell how to fuck the limits he imposed on himself.
He made her come again and she was loud, came shouting his name. He came too, almost silently, jaw tight against his feelings.
Someone had made Tom think discipline only had one face and that face was hard work, regularity, sacrifice, adherence to standards, no surprises.
Flick knew discipline was a multi-faced goddess on her period. A cranky whip cracker, a procrastinator, a shirker, a boring plodder, a superstar. Not one flavor, all of them. The lows to create the highs. The highs to shatter the ceiling.
Tom didn’t try to stay out of the bed this time. Came back immediately after he got rid of the condom and crashed down beside her to sleep. She dozed too, head full of disjointed, nonsensical scenes. Burning her hand in a microwave. Tom pushing a Walmart cart. Feeling panicked on Constitution Avenue with no place to live.
“Flick.” She opened her eyes to Tom’s smile, his hand on her forehead. “You were dreaming.”
He smoothed her hair and she pulled on his neck so she could have his lips. Walmart, Tom noticing her burn scar, and the perennial bad dream of being homeless. That one would make more sense if she’d ever been without a safe bed to sleep in, but still it arrived whenever she faced a change as if to remind her how far she could fall.
“Did I say anything to make you doubt my sanity?” she asked.
“Nothing I could make sense of. What was the dream?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Something that happened on your visit home?”
He wanted to help. She nibbled on his upper lip, but he didn’t engage. “Nothing happened. Nothing out of the usual. It’s always awful. But it preys on me. I support my older sister and her two kids because she’s a single mom, sometimes, and sometimes she’s married to an unstable, unreliable douchebag. I send Mom money because Dad drinks his pay away. I’ve been doing that since I got a good job. When I got better jobs, I paid off my student loans and kept sending money home. I don’t know how to stop sending money home.”
“What would happen if you stopped?”
“No one would be homeless or without food or clothing.” Not immediately, anyway. She’d have a chance to save, to build her own future, buy a condo like Tom’s so she never needed to have the homeless dream again.
He hooked his arm behind her head and they lay facing each other. “You could stop, but you don’t. Why?”
