Page 47 of The Interview

“You don’t have to do this for me,” I tell her quietly. “I mean, I fucking love that you want to. It’s great for my ego, but you don’t have to.”

“I’m doing it for me, for you, for us. I’ve decided. No more conversation needed. When the boys get here tomorrow, we’ll tell them… together.”

She kisses my cheeks, then my eyes, then my lips.

“I love you. More now than ever, but I seriously need to sleep.”

“I love you, too, but you’ve made me hard. I need to fuck you again before I can sleep.”

“Far out. Are you not too old for twice in one night, two nights running?”

I grind my dick against her belly, roll her to her side, line myself up, and push into her from behind.

“Does this feel old?” I ask while I simultaneously play with her clit and her nipples.

“Not old, just hard,” she says breathily, forcing me to bite the curve of her neck before setting about giving her a fourth orgasm.

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

GEORGIA

“I’m so fucking proud of you,” he says against my ear at the same moment I smell him, sense his presence, feel the brush of his skin against mine.

“Yeah? Well, I’m beyond pissed off with you.”

He chuckles. Fucking chuckles!

“Thought you might be.”

“It’s not funny. How could you keep something like that from me?”

He sighs, long and slow. The exhale caresses the skin at the side of my face and neck. I reach for his hair, comb my fingers through to the tips, where I know it’ll be curling up.

“Because I didn’t want to give them the power to hurt you any more than they already had.”

“But what about you? You’re hurt?”

“They took you away from me for four years. Nothing they did after that could hurt me more.”

“They assaulted you, violated you. You should’ve brought charges. Had them nicked for being the fucking predators they were.”

“G, baby. It was the eighties. Things were different. Imagine the stigma that would’ve remained with me. The amount of people who might’ve thrown it in your face. I wasn’t having that. I wasn’t giving them that power. They took enough from us. I wasn’t letting them take any more. That’s why I swore Len to secrecy, for you, for me, and for Marley, who was still eaten alive with guilt at what had happened at the time.”

“But we weren’t even together when you made that call.”

“I knew one day we would be.”

I let his words wash over me, blanket me in warmth. I want to open my eyes, look into his beautiful brown ones, with their flecks of gold, but if I do that, if I open my eyes and he’s here, it will mean my life was different. And as much as it hurts, I know that life, a life where I grow old with Sean, isn’t the life that was planned for me.

“Did you?” I ask, my eyes still firmly closed.

“Always. I never gave up hope. There were times I had to let you go. Times where I just needed to breathe and live without the weight of missing you, but they didn’t last long.”

There’s a drawn-out silence, but I know he’s still here. Like I know when he’s not around, I know when he is.

“Thank you,” I whisper. “Thanks for never giving up on me, on us.”