Page 75 of This Might Hurt

I growl, loud and deep in my chest. He chuckles and slips two fingers in the corner of my mouth to join his dick, not moving them, just filling up the space more, making me drool. It’s what he does when he thinks I’m not letting go enough.

“Don’t worry, I corrected him. He was mortified. Anyway, then I went over to the admissions office at the school to talk to them about transferring my credits from community college. They said they have a very generous system, so there shouldn’t be any problem.”

I make a vaguely triumphant noise through my nose and offer a thumbs up.

“I know. I don’t want to start until I get used to these meds or whatever, but it’s cool.”

A tranquil silence falls, only the sound of a plane buzzing overhead through the cracked-open window as he relaxes and plays idly with my stud earring. Eventually I grunt again and make a couple of incomprehensible gestures.

“I did find daisies, no thanks to you, and she thinks they look perfect.”

Satisfied, I make a humming noise and close my eyes.

On the best days, he lets me doze like this for hours while he reads a book.

If we miss even one afternoon, he says I turn into a raging bitch.

I’m sure that’s not healthy, like sleeping with my face in his used underwear when I’m stressed isn’t healthy, but I can’t seem to figure out what normal people do instead.

Lena and Jude both have dreams and plans, while I’m just existing.

My whole life, I never thought to ask myself what I would do if I had all the choices in the world.

Now I’m wishing I had fewer choices, like maybe only one choice again.

Between my trust fund, my investments, and the company shares I liquidated, I’m sitting on a level of wealth that most people seem to find unfathomable, and I have nothing to do with it.

Jude and Lena let me contribute a few things that don’t totally negate our attempts to live a normal life, like buying our wheelchair van and covering the rent, tuition, and medical bills that aren’t accounted for in Lena’s scholarships.

But fundamentally, no one wants the only thing I know how to give.

Jude says there’s an answer waiting somewhere for me.

He also says I really need that therapy appointment.

“Say…” Jude pipes up when I’m almost asleep, in the same careless voice he used to describe his college credit transfer. “Do you want to have a kid with me?”

I choke violently on his dick and come up hacking and spluttering, drool hanging from my chin. “What the fuck?” He hands me some tissues as I struggle to clean my face off and stop coughing. I can’t think of anything that sums up my thoughts better than saying “What the fuck?” again, so I do that.

“Not now,” he clarifies, like that’s the part that made me almost aspirate my own spit. “Right now we’re probably the dictionary definition of two people who shouldn’t be in charge of another human.”

“Speak for yourself,” I grumble.

He blinks at the way I’m sulking mostly naked in a pile of my husband’s dirty clothes, blowing his precum out my nose into a tissue.

Then he dissolves into hysterical laughter.

I yelp as he tackles me off the bed and we thrash around on the floor, wrestling uselessly until we end up gasping for breath in a puddle of sweaty limbs on the carpet.

“It’s just, I’ve been thinking,” he continues like the conversation never stopped, biting the side of my neck.

“Maybe the universe gave us both shitty families who didn’t love us because it wanted us to figure out what love is for ourselves.

Then we’re supposed to find a kid with a shitty family and show them what we learned. You know?”

I was going to say something nasty, but now the words won’t come out.

I banked my sperm three years ago because my family said that even if I did nothing else right in my sorry life, I had to produce an heir.

As I was jerking off into a cup, I remember imagining how this kid would be carried to term by some random woman for a paycheck, sent to a boarding school where I wasn’t allowed to see them, and groomed to become everything I failed to be.

By the time I put the lid on the cup, I had decided that no matter what they said or did to me, I would never have children.

It hadn’t occurred to me until right now that I could reconsider.

Jude cocks his head, studying my face, then sits up and nips my still-wet lower lip. “I’m going to shower. I love you, and I promise all of this is gonna get easier, okay? I won’t let you get left behind.”

“I love you, too.” I sit there on the floor and stare after him like the lost puppy I am.

Everything feels terribly difficult and overwhelmingly wonderful.

I can see it on the horizon, the thing he’s trying to show me.

The part where we stop escaping and start living.

Later tonight, when we’re intertwined in bed in the dark and I can pretend we’re the only two people in the world, I think I know what I’ll say to him.

I’ll tell him Maybe. Because your capacity for love is so vast that a child deserves to feel it.

And by the time we’re ready, maybe my love will have become big enough, too.

Luckily for me, Lena’s wheelchair has a slow enough maximum speed that I have time to throw on jeans before she reaches the bedroom door Jude left open.

She just shakes her head at my bare chest and rolling-around-on-the-floor hair.

“Can you please take my brother’s dirty underwear off the bed so that I can come in? ”

“It’s my room,” I sulk, flinging laundry at the hamper. Though to be fair, Jude and I have the biggest TV. Once the underwear is gone, she rolls in and parks in her spot at the foot of the bed.

“Do you have the bracket?” she asks as we wait for Jude to get back from the shower.

“Oh, yeah.” I dig around in the drawer of Jude’s desk and fish out a box of colored pencils and a very large, very battered piece of paper covered in multicolored lines and my careful handwriting.

About a week after I came to Ramona’s, the three of us started watching this TV show full of hot vampires, werewolves, and witches.

It began with us playing fuck/marry/kill every episode and noting our answers on this giant sheet of paper.

That devolved into some kind of ultimate hotness bracket for the entire show that has grown so large and deranged over the last three months that I don’t even know what half of it means anymore.

I’m the official scribe, so I spread it carefully out on the bed next to me and work on pulling up the current episode.

Jude appears a moment later in gym shorts and his new Montana State hoodie, smelling like fresh mint.

He kisses me again, then plops down on the floor next to Lena’s chair and rests his head on the arm where she can reach him.

I sit on her other side, on the bed, and spread a blanket across my lap and hers before starting the episode.

“Please tell me when I need to update the bracket. I got lost when you added the part where we assign the characters into imaginary threesomes and rate them on smut potential.”

“I’m sorry, do you not understand what a threesome is?” Lena exclaims, bristling with frustration, while Jude shakes with laughter because he knows I’m mostly winding her up.

The part of the day I need most is when I hold Jude gently in my mouth and listen to him tell me all about his dreams and his frustrations, while he touches me so that I know I’m safe, and his, and he knows that he’s mine.

The part I need second most is this, where Jude and I take turns teasing Lena while she explains paranormal romance tropes to us with unbridled passion.

Where Lena brushes fingers over her brother’s hair sometimes and holds his hand other times, where I lean across and put my head on her shoulder or wrap my arm around her while she eats cookies.

It’s the time of day where I can practice loving, wholly and without fear, and feel them love me back.