Page 84 of What He Doesn't Know

“We don’t have to figure that all out tonight.”

“I have to go home,” I said, breaking a little with the words. “At least, to grab some things. But, I could come back… if you want me to.”

Reese pulled back again, sweeping my hair behind my ear. “You want to come back?”

“If you’ll have me.”

He smiled then. “You’re kidding, right?” But the smile fell just as fast as it had come. “What about Cameron?”

Hearing his name come from Reese’s lips pained me, a sick ache hitting me square in the chest. Maybe guilt was still out to get me, yet.

“He’ll be in the office tomorrow, or should I say, today.” I smiled a little, knowing it was well past midnight now. “I just want to go home in the morning to grab some of my things, then I’ll come back. At least for the weekend. Monday night is the spring concert,” I reminded him. “After that, I’ll go home. I’ll go home to talk to Cameron.” I swallowed. “At least that gives us a few days to figure things out.”

Reese nodded, hands sliding down my arms until his fingers found mine. He intertwined them, kissing my knuckles with his eyes still on me.

“Are you sure? Is this… Am I what you want?”

I squeezed his hands, never more sure of anything in my entire life.

“Yes.”

He let out a breath, possibly a laugh of disbelief, possibly a sigh of relief, most likely a combination of the two. Then, he kissed my hands again before letting them go. His grip moved to my hips, and he slid his hands down the crease between my legs, gently pushing my knees apart.

I sat on the piano in front of him, legs wide and trembling, blanket gathering at my hips. My toes banged out a clumsy note on the keys, but I couldn’t find it in me to laugh — not with Reese looking at me the way he was.

Reese kept my gaze as he bent to kiss my left knee first, and then the right. His lips moved upward still, caressing my inner thighs, and when he swept his tongue over my still swollen clit, I arched into the touch with a raspy moan.

There were still so many questions, so many things to figure out, but we shared an unspoken vow not to think about any of it that night. Until the sun came up, Reese and I only spoke through our fingertips, through our lips and our sighs and our trembling legs. He told me he loved me, and I echoed my love for him. I told him I was sorry, and he apologized just the same.

He asked me to stay, to make a promise in the candlelight, and I answered his request with a silent vow.

But if I was a river, and he was the ocean, then Cameron was the storm that raged over the point where we met.

And lightning was about to strike.

Cameron

I knew my wife was cheating on me.

I’d known for longer than I’d admit — to her or to myself. Maybe it was because I should have seen it coming. I should have known it the first night I’d met the man who would steal her away from me. It was me, after all, who had shown my wife the dance, the moves, the steps and turns of infidelity.

It was me who’d betrayed her first.

And it was my fault she was in his bed right now.

I rarely drank, but it seemed like the right thing to do as I ordered my third scotch of the night at a bar not five minutes from our home.

Ourhome. It felt strange to refer to it that way when it hadn’t been a home for years. It was merely a house, a building with a roof and walls and floors and material things that we once thought would make us happy. It was the shelter for a man and a woman who once loved each other so fiercely they were blind to all other things.

It was a house that was once a home, one where my wife and I would end every night together — no matter how good or bad the day had been.

Until now.

I’d been at the bar all night, ever since she left. I’d sat there at the very last bar stool, staring at my hands, fighting the urge to call her phone, knowing she wouldn’t answer — knowing I wouldn’t have the right words to say even if she did.

I never had the right words.

My voice had been stolen by an abusive father before I hit middle school, and I’d struggled my entire life trying to find it again. Sometimes I wondered how many times my father had hit me before he beat the words out of me completely, before the idea of telling him — or anyone — how I felt seemed so pointless I couldn’t fathom it any longer.