After Forever (20 page)

I heard Eden sniff, felt her stir. She turned her face up to look at me. “Hey.”

“Hey.”
 

“I’m probably crushing you.”

I hadn’t noticed until then, but my hands were cradling her ass, familiar and possessive. “You’re fine.”

I swallowed hard, my eyes on hers. She seemed to sense that I was making some kind of decision, and she stayed as she was, watching me think. I closed my eyes, sighing, knowing I’d come to a point from which I’d never return. I cupped her ass, kneaded it, and then slid my palms up her back. She breathed in, her nostrils flaring. Giving in, surrendering, I unclasped her bra. Pushed her shirt up. She wormed out of the shirt and her bra at the same time, dropped them on the floor beside us. Waited. She was wearing a skirt that came just past her knees, had been wearing knee-high boots with it but had taken those off hours ago. I found the zipper at the side, pulled it down. Tugged the skirt off. She was wearing a yellow thong, and I pulled that down, slid the string out from between the cheeks of her ass. She lifted one knee, pulling her foot free, and then the thong was flying away, kicked off. She was naked on top of me, and I was still fully clothed.
 

Eden kissed my jaw, my throat. I blinked, held still. She ran her hands up my torso, pushing my T-shirt with it. It stuck on my head, and I ripped it free. She kissed my breastbone. Rolled against the couch back, opened the fly of my jeans with one hand, lowered the zipper. Slowly worked my jeans off, one side at a time, until I kicked them off. They crumpled in a heap on the floor, next to her skirt. Her eyes flicked up to mine and then down, and I waited. She curled her fingers under the elastic of my boxers, pulled it away to reveal the tip of my erection. I waited. She looked up at me, then back down again. Pulled the gray elastic down further, and then more, and then I was bobbing free and I kicked them away.
 

She rolled back down on top of me. We stayed like that, naked, but not yet joined. “This one is all you,” she murmured.
 

I knew, somewhere in my heart, that if we did this face to face again we’d lose ourselves. I’d surrendered, but I still had to retain that tiniest part of my soul. I didn’t have much, but I had that at least. I sat up, and she moved with me. I took her shoulders in my hands, gently but firmly turned her toward the arm of the couch. She knew immediately what I intended, and leaned over it, placing one foot flat on the floor, the other leg spread wide to the crack of the couch. I knelt behind her, my foot beside hers, and she reached down her front, between her thighs, grabbed me, dragged the tip against her folds. Found her entrance, slid me in, and I plunged deep. She gasped, dropped her face to the arm of the couch, arched her back to push into me. I put my hand on the top of her ass, grabbed her hip in the other and began a slow, thorough, pounding rhythm, all the way out, all the way in. She met my rhythmic strokes with arching, rolling thrusts of her own. She turned her head to the side, and her hair fell across her shoulders. She hadn’t dyed it in a long time, and her dark roots were showing. I wasn’t sure why I noticed that. She watched me over her shoulder, her eyes narrowed and her mouth open.
 

We didn’t slow or speed up, we didn’t talk or groan, we only moved. I felt her walls tighten around my cock, and she gripped the arm of the couch with both hands, body lifting up off the cushions as she rocked back into me. She bit down on her lip, face still turned toward me, but her eyes were closed now and her brow was furrowed in concentration, and then I felt the rising of my own climax and we began to rock in earnest.
 

And then her straightened leg buckled and our rhythm faltered. “Stand—stand up,” she gasped.

I knew what she meant. She rotated away from the arm of the couch, and I moved with her, and now she put both feet on the floor, bending over, clutching the back of he couch. I stood up straight behind her and shifted my stance wide. And now…I slid deep, once, slow and soft, and she shook her head, grunting once as she rocked backward, hard, bending at the knees to gain extra force. I picked up speed, and now, having already been close to climax once, felt it burgeon inside me within seconds. She was there with me, judging by the expression on her face and the way she hung her head between her arms and leaned over further, seeking to get me deeper. I pulled her hips back into my thrusts, and then she buried her face in the back cushions of the couch. She was bent nearly double now, and I was slamming into her, her ass shaking with the force of my thrusts, and she was groaning in the back of her throat.

I was there, at the edge, and then I was over, climaxing, coming, slamming hard and fast into her, and she was hanging on to the top of the couch while leaning as far down as she could, thrusting backward into me arrhythmically, trying to match my pace but simply unable to as she was rocked by the force of her own climax. I groaned once as I released inside her. She gasped once, loud, and then she fell forward onto the couch, to her knees, rolling to a sitting position. I flopped down beside her.
 

Neither of us spoke.
 

We sat there, panting, sweating, as the sky lightened to gray. I started to doze, and then I felt Eden’s hand on my thigh. She leaned against my shoulder, looking down at my cock. I wrapped my arm around her shoulder, and she burrowed into me. She took me in her hand, fondled and stroked me until I felt myself responding. When I was hard enough to stand free, she looked up at me, then slid down my chest, taking me in her hand and into her mouth. She mouthed the head, just the head, and stroked me until I was rock hard again, and then she straightened, stood in front of me, facing away from me. She straddled me, shins on the couch underneath her, and impaled herself on me. She sank me deep, paused there, and then rode me with unrelenting vigor. She set the pace immediately, rising and falling with quick, wet rhythm. I cupped her tits in my hands and played with her nipples as she rode me, and we never spoke a word, never gasped or groaned at all this time. She leaned forward into my hands and I held her weight, and we moved, rocked, fucked.
 

We came, first me and then her.
 

After we could move again, we went to my bed and slept until the sun was high in the sky.

~ ~ ~ ~

Eden

I was sore and tired. I was confused. Cade was…losing his identity. I wasn’t sure if sex with me was helping or hurting him, whether I was somehow adding to the crisis of self he was experiencing. Certainly I understood where he was coming from. He’d lost his mother at a young age, and then his father, and then finally found Ever as his one true love, only to lose her as well. It was simply too many hard blows for any one person to endure. And Cade…he was cracking. How could he not?

I didn’t know how to help him. I couldn’t love him. He couldn’t love me. I couldn’t let myself fall in love with him, although I was desperately afraid that was happening despite my efforts. And I feared he would, at some point, if enough time passed, stop caring whether I fell in love with him or he with me.
 

Couldn’t
was not the right word in that equation.
Shouldn’t
. Had no place. No right. And if I did, or he did, it wouldn’t be love built on the right foundation. It wouldn’t be based on mutual respect and affection, or a deep soul-bond. It would be about sex, need, lack of anything else as a salve on raw and open wounds. You depended on a life raft in a turbulent sea; you didn’t fall in love with it. You didn’t develop misguided feelings toward it.
 

He was still asleep, for once. Usually I woke up and he was already awake, or still awake. And the fact that I could use the word “usually” in that sentence was a kind of scary thing. I watched him sleep. Even at rest he didn’t look at peace. He had a slight crease in his brow, lines of worry permanently etched on the bridge of his nose. There was a slight downturn to his mouth, a permanent frown. He shifted in his sleep and a hank of black hair swept across his brow, into his eye. My hand reached out of its own accord and brushed it away. There was no reason for my middle finger to brush again across his forehead, trying to soothe away the lines of deeply carved pain.
 

I couldn’t heal him. I couldn’t take his pain. I couldn’t replace Ever. All I could do was be there for him, try to ease the agony, try to be a rope to which he could hold as the waves battered him. The way I was doing it was stupid. I knew it was. Sex didn’t solve anything. It was only confusing both of us. Yet despite intellectually knowing that, I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I couldn’t seem to stop wanting him. He’d given me, in a handful of angry, desperate, confused sexual encounters, more pleasure and more meaning than all my previous partners put together. No one had ever made me feel as good as Cade. And he wasn’t even really trying. He wasn’t attuned to my needs. It wasn’t that he didn’t care; I knew that. It was that we were both simply taking what we needed from each other. And I couldn’t help wondering and wishing I was worthy of knowing how it felt to have his full attention, his affection, his love.
 

It would be magical.
 

Glorious.
 

He very nearly sated me, by the time we were done. But not quite. I was always left wanting…something. As if, despite the fury and the primal aggression with which Cade fucked me, there was an element missing. I didn’t mean love. I wasn’t sure that existed for me. But I felt instinctively as if, with the right touch, the just-perfect technique, I could reach a heretofore-unknown sexual peak, a kind of nirvana. I’d sensed it with one or two of my previous partners, but with Cade, I actually got a taste of it. Saw it, could make out its shape in the shadows. But I couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t reach it.
 

Maybe someday, with someone.
 

But probably not.

I slid out of bed, careful to not disturb Cade, and turned on the shower, let it go scalding, steaming up the mirror, fogging the bathroom. I stood under the stream and let the almost too-hot water scorch me, let it soak into my muscles. I didn’t wash, didn’t shampoo or condition. I just soaked.
 

And thought.
 

This thing with Cade, it was a demon. A red-eyed monster clutching both of us by the throat, holding us together, binding us to each other with skeins of unbreakable shadow. I wanted free, but couldn’t break loose. I wanted to not need him. I wanted to be able to be comforted by him without it leading to sex. It wasn’t normal. People went through situations like this all the time, surely, and they didn’t resort to fucking.
 

It was more than fucking, a voice inside me protested. It might not have been love, but it wasn’t empty fucking. I’d gone around in circles on this topic for hours, trying to figure it out as I worked the weight machine circuit, as I cycled and hit the heavy bag and sat through classes. The only time I was free of thoughts of Cade and the nature of our dysfunctional relationship was when I played Apollo. Then, when I drew the bow across his strings and listened to the music resonating from his aged frame, I could float away, and my mind would go blessedly quiet and I would be free, just for those too-brief moments.

I finally got around to washing and conditioning my hair, scrubbing my body. I was lathered in soap when I heard the bathroom door open. I turned around and saw Cade in the doorway. The shower was glass walled, marble tiled. Room for two. There was a bench in the corner, just the right height. I stood, dripping soap, clutching the poofy orange loofah sponge across my body against one shoulder.

He was naked still, and as gorgeous as ever, despite the rings under his eyes.
 

I pushed open the door in silent invitation. He sighed, a resigned sound. That hurt. The fact that he was resigned to the time we spent together, resigned to sex with me, that hurt. Deeply. It cut into a dark place in my soul, the kind of pain that you’d never share with another living person. It wasn’t fair, I knew, and I did my damnedest to not let it reflect back at Cade. It wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t trying to hurt me. Maybe I was being naïve or too forgiving, or just a plain slut, but I knew Cade was only using to me cope with the horror show his life had become. I was a coping mechanism. And honestly, he was the same for me. I’d lost my sister, my twin. She’d been my only real friend, the one person I could confide the whole truth to. If this situation with Cade had happened in such a way that Ever wasn’t involved, I’d have told her everything. Even that I resented him for making me want him, need him, that I was hurt by his resignation to sleeping with me. But with Ever comatose, I had no one to talk to, no one to confide in. Except Cade, and I couldn’t tell him about himself.
 

Cade stepped into the shower, closed the door, and then simply stood there looking at me. Either lost as to what to do next, or simply too stunned by my beauty to look away.
 

I was going with the former.
 

I waited. When he didn’t move, I went back to washing my body, but I couldn’t help performing a bit. Arching my back as I washed my tits, shoving them forward, leaning over double to wash my calves and feet, which was stupid and unnatural, but effective, since it made his cock twitch. I lathered up, rinsed off, and did it again, all for his benefit.
 

But still he didn’t move.
 

I wasn’t going to make the first pass. Not this time. Just because this was a fucked up and dysfunctional relationship didn’t mean I didn’t want to feel wanted.
 

Finally, fed up with his silence and his seeming inability to actually
do
anything, I started to move past him.
 

“Wait.” He stood in front of the door, blocking me. The water rushed past both of us. “All this time, I haven’t…done anything. For you. You’ve given things to me, done things just to make me feel good. But I haven’t done the same.”