Page 46 of This Might Hurt

He cracks up with a snort, then kisses me very lightly, no tongue, just the soft, persistent dig of teeth into my lower lip.

My arms are starting to wobble. There’s nowhere for me to go and nothing for me to grab, so I sling a knee uncoordinatedly on the edge and collapse on top of him.

He starts laughing shockingly loudly—I’ve never heard him like this, the most amazing sound—and he doesn’t stop until I get on my feet and drag him up after me.

I slide my boxers up around my dripping thighs and try to shake off my chest and shoulders before pulling on my oversize hoodie. When I turn around, Andrew’s drifting toward the dark spot on the tile, the broken glass.

“Hey.” I catch his wrist and pull him away.

His soft eyebrows furrow sleepily. “Should we clean it up?”

“Not in the dark with bare hands, genius.” I grab his t-shirt from the ground and hang it over my shoulder. “Let’s go.”

The cold hits like a blow when we go inside, all the hair on my damp body standing up. I dive straight under the blankets, dragging them up to my chin, then spread myself out and think warm thoughts. I can hear Andrew trying four or five times to get his phone plugged in by feel.

“Is it always so fucking quiet here?” I roll onto my side facing him and hug his pillow to my chest. Whenever I walked past the living room during one of Lena’s middle school sleepovers, this is what they all looked like, only with more ponytails and giggling.

He tips his chin up thoughtfully, considering. “I don’t know. I used to think everyone’s house must be like this.”

“They’re definitely not. This is a freaking tomb.”

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, like it’s his fault.

Instead of coming under the covers, he fumbles across the floor to our bags and digs through the side pockets of his sleek navy blue backpack.

“Here.” I sit up as he walks over to the mattress on his knees and presses something into my hand with long, careful fingers.

I recognize the shape of a wireless earbud.

“That’s the left one,” he adds politely, so I don’t have to experiment. “Connect them to your phone.”

He puts in the other one, then leans into me with his nose against my shoulder as he fiddles with my phone until some kind of low, ambient post-rock flows into my ear, gritty and soothing. “Good?” He sounds mostly asleep now.

“Yeah.” I kiss the strong line of his cheekbone.

Earlier tonight he held me in bed for the first time in my life, because I’ve never had a boyfriend for longer than the span of time between erection and orgasm.

But now he curls softly against me, still shirtless, and presses his face deep into my neck.

The music is perfect, suspending me in an empty space where there’s nothing holding me down.

I can smell his hair, chlorine and the eucalyptus shampoo from Ramona’s guest shower.

This is good. I don’t know anything else, any of the things he thinks I know, but I know that.

When I’m two seconds from sleep, Andrew comes up on his elbows, jolting my arm. “Jude.” In case I wasn’t bothered enough, he pries the earbud roughly out of my ear. “Jude.”

“Whatthefuck,” I croak, groping out the contours of his face with my fingers, poking him in the eye on purpose because he deserves it.

He catches my hand in his. It’s clammy, sweaty between his fingers. “Let’s go.”

“Huh?”

“Please come with me.”

I pull away and struggle into a sitting position. There’s nothing to see, but I think better with my head the right way up. “Go where? What are you talking about?”

“Anywhere,” he whispers, rocking back and forth on his knees. He sounds distraught. “Canada, Italy. Australia. I don’t care.”

“I—” Groaning, I rub my face in my hands. “Why are we going to Australia?”

His hands grip my shoulders, pulling me in until our foreheads are touching. “This whole thing is a mistake. I can feel it. I’m so sorry.”

“Seriously?” I push him back gently, out of my face. “We got fucking married and now you have second thoughts? Besides, I can’t leave Ramona or my sister.”

“We can come back,” he pleads. “Once everything blows over.”

If I hadn’t been so close to sleep. If he had given me a second to think.

If I hadn’t been so bull-headed and torn up on the sharp edges of how desperately I need some man I barely even like half the time.

If all those things were true, I probably wouldn’t have said something I would come to regret so fucking much.

“Hey.” I stroke my fingers through his still-damp hair.

“Take a breath. You don’t want to run away—you’re just tired and scared. It’s gonna be okay.”

In the deep silence I can hear his breath, uneven and confused. “Is it?” he whispers, like a genuine question.

“Of course it is.” Maybe the words come easy because I’ve said them to myself every day for two years despite the fact that it has never for a moment been remotely okay.

“Of course it is,” he echoes dully, his shoulders sagging. “Fuck, I’m sorry I’m such a mess.”

“It’s okay.” I poke him with my foot, ignoring that weight in my chest, the primal foreboding animals feel before a natural disaster. “I got too many bodily fluids on you. I can’t return you now.”

He pinches my leg viciously hard. “Asshole.”

“Go to sleep, or else you’re gonna be such a bitch tomorrow.

” We’re joking around, but it doesn’t sound like either of us is smiling.

Tomorrow hangs there like a heavy, black thunderhead waiting to break.

“Come here.” Too groggy to play games, I wrap myself around him and drag him down with me.

Even though he’s bigger, he draws himself in and tucks up against me like he wants to be the small one.

I bite the back of his neck, then lick it, then bite it again, harder, and he shivers.

There’s a few minutes of body heat and confusion and teeth and spit, slow and quiet, then nothing but darkness.

When our alarm goes off, I wake up on my back, overheated and strangled in the neck of my hoodie.

My phone ended up right next to my pillow, so I slap it quiet in the gray light of a way-too-early morning.

I have to drive us an hour to the airport before we meet this private plane at eight.

I guess Andrew could drive us, but now that I spat in his mouth and bit him, I have a visceral desire for him to be my pissy, gorgeous passenger princess drinking expensive coffee while I take him where he wants to go like a feral chauffeur.

When I look down, I realize why the fuck I’m so uncomfortable.

Andrew’s curled up in a ball with his entire head and one of his wide shoulders jammed all the way up inside my giant hoodie.

The crushing weight on my chest is his head, his cheek mashed somewhere between my pecs.

I can feel dried drool along my ribs and his long arms wrapped around me, his hand curled in the sweat along my spine.

I drag at my twisted collar with two fingers, trying to get some air.

When it loosens, I can angle my head and see a mess of coppery hair down the neck hole.

Sighing, I drop my head back against the uncomfortably warm pillow and try to make a graph in my head that compares minutes-arrived-late-at-the-airport with Andrew’s bitchiness level.

I’m looking for the sweet spot of how long I can stay right here without wanting to kill him the rest of the day for being fucking nasty.

The answer is not very long, but I let my cramped muscles go slack and trace my fingers up and down his bare back for a little while.

When the bitch axis of the graph gets too high, I knock gently on his shoulder blade until he twitches and I hear his breath come awake.

I brace for him to panic and try to jerk his head up, strangling me again, then scoot out backward with no care for almost kneeing me in the nuts, then sit up with a red face and glare at me like this was my idea. After it all happens exactly like I predicted, I raise my eyebrows at him. “Hi.”

Every memory of why we’re here and what we’re doing today leaks one at a time across his eyes, their smoky depths becoming more and more dull.

That line from yesterday comes back between his eyebrows as he runs fingers through his matted hair and checks the time on my phone.

“I’m going to take a shower. Use whatever bathroom you want, just hurry up.

There’s no time to make coffee; we can drive through somewhere. ”

My back spasms as I pry myself out of the dent in the mattress that his giant body crushed me into.

He doesn’t notice I’m following him until he climbs to the second floor, heads into a gleaming bathroom the size of Ramona’s entire upstairs, and almost slams the door on my face.

“Excuse me?” he snaps, taking a couple of steps back as I shoulder past him and turn in a circle in the middle of the room.

It has a deep freestanding tub and walk-in shower, three sinks for some reason, and a huge window that shows off the distant mountains we couldn’t see last night, tinted pink with the sunrise.

“You said I could use whatever bathroom I wanted.” I gesture him toward the shower. “Carry on.”

He slaps his palms on the gray marble countertop and glares at me in the mirror, his wide shoulders hunched with tension. “If you think we’re having shower sex this morning, I will literally take you out to the swimming pool and drown you with my bare hands.”

Clearly my time-to-bitchiness estimation was a little off.

“I have zero intention of having sex with you.” I bite the inside of my cheek to hide my laughter at the way he turns around looking offended. “Just get in the shower.”

Shooting me agitated glances, he turns the water on, yanks his joggers down while it heats up, then steps inside.

I couldn’t see him clearly that night at Ramona’s, just flashes in the moonlight.

It’s better than I even imagined—the ridges of his pale hips, a sweet, soft ass, everything waxed.

His hard cock felt thick and solid in my hand, but now it’s barely three inches, which means he grows like crazy.

I undress and slide open the glass door so I can step into the dark-tiled space with him.

He retreats to the left rainfall shower head, leaving me with the right one, but I crowd over into the same one he’s using.

There’s no master plan in my head, just instinct.

I want him to remember that I’m going to let him be a dick because I want to, not because he has the right.

That I understand today is going to be awful but I’m here, and he’s mine.

I put my hand on the lovely slope between his shoulder and his neck and press gently.

He sucks in a breath, blinking at me through messy rivulets of water, his eyelashes wet.

“I don’t want to suck your dick right now either,” he insists plaintively, even as he lowers himself down to his knees on the slick tile at my feet.

“Jesus, give me a little credit, princess.” I rub my wet thumb soothingly between his eyebrows. “Remember how good it was when you trusted me?” I get no answer, so I flick his forehead with no force at all. “That wasn’t a rhetorical question.”

“Yes.” Need leaks into his troubled eyes, all the fear he’s holding in his chest like a storm. “I remember.”

“Perfect.” I touch underneath his chin, angling it up slightly, then let go. “So just be quiet and wait your turn.”

I clean myself thoroughly, like he’s not even there.

It would be hard to ignore him except the shower itself is so interesting.

It has shampoo and body wash built into the wall somehow, with futuristic little dispensers, and when I pump some out the whole bathroom floods with a cloying, smoky wood scent.

“That’s really excessive,” I complain, proud of him for seeming to understand that he’s not allowed to answer.

“The car is gonna reek of this by the time we get to the airport.” I use it anyway, soaping up my soft dick an inch from his face, then rinsing and scrubbing rough fingers through my hair until all the white suds spiral away down the drain.

“Okay, come on.” I step back and watch him get slowly to his feet.

His knees look flushed where he was resting on them, and his ears and the back of his neck have gone red.

He shoots me a quick look through his eyelashes, then starts washing himself with his back to me, his ass cheeks clenched like not showing me his crack is the last piece of dignity he has.

I lean against the glass and watch, even though the shampoo smell is giving me a headache.

I’m starting to wonder if that game meant anything at all to him, if he hates me now. But when he’s done, he turns around and stretches out an uncertain hand, shaky in the air between us. “Would you kiss me?” he mumbles without meeting my eyes, ashamed but much calmer.

He takes it so differently from last night, holding still and pliant as he grips my hand.

In return, I keep it short, so that we don’t become any later on his arbitrary schedule than we already are.

Dropping one last kiss on the corner of his mouth, I grab a huge, fluffy towel from the heated rack.

“So to impress your family should I wear my UFO cow abduction t-shirt or my Beatles t-shirt. I’m pretty sure I’ve been gifted every Beatles t-shirt ever made on account of, you know. ”

A vague half smile catches on his mouth for a second as he dries his hair. “I remember. Jude like the song, who doesn’t make anything better. And I don’t give a shit what you wear because the first thing we’re doing in New York is going to Brunello Cucinelli.”

I have absolutely no idea what that is, but I can guess that I’m not going to have a very good time there.