Choosing Henley(43)

I hide my face in the crook of his neck as he pulls a blanket over us. It takes nearly half an hour for me to calm down.

“What happened, baby?” he asks when I finally seem as though I can speak again.

I clear my throat, sitting up to look at him. “He left.” I chew nervously on my bottom lip. I’ve never had to tell another person this. Everyone who knows was around when it happened. “The night before my thirteenth birthday, my dad left us for his other family.” Jami’s jaw clenches as I continue. “We were happy, you know? Like TV-fucking-family happy,” I say, bitterness staining my voice. “But it was all a joke. A lie. Some sick charade.” I laugh without humour. “We were like contestants in some twisted game show. You know, like who’s the better family? Or something equally as fucked up… Not that it matters anyways, because we lost. I thought for the longest time, if I just missed him hard enough, he would come back, but he never did. We weren’t enough. He didn’t love us enough to stay.” I work up the nerve to say the worst part of it all… The ringer. The knockout punch. “Turns out, he’d had another family for almost my whole life. Two daughters, a wife, and a motherfucking golden retriever and everything. I loved him more than anything on the planet, and he left. He left us for them.”

Sometime during my rant, my gaze drifted across the room, and now that all my ugly truths are finally out there, I draw it back to Jami. His hands are fisting at his sides and he’s grinding his teeth.

“I’m going to fucking kill him,” he grits out through clenched teeth. His entire body is radiating with anger.

I reach out, running my hands through his hair before locking them behind his neck. “It was a long time ago, Jami,” I say weakly.

He tightens his hold around me, piercing me with his chocolate stare as he speaks. “Listen to me, beautiful girl. That man...” He clenches his jaw again. “That sorry, sad, pathetic excuse of a man didn’t deserve you or your mother.”

I know it’s taking everything he has to stay calm. He’s always been incredibly protective, but now that we’re…whatever we were, his protective instincts have quadrupled.

“I don’t know why he did what he did, but I know that it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t because you weren’t good enough.”

I close my eyes, a lone tearing escaping. He leans forward to kiss the sadness on my cheek away.

“Lennon, you have the most beautiful heart out of anyone I’ve ever known. A man who can’t see that doesn’t deserve the love you are capable of giving. I know you feel like you’re broken. I know you’re scared, but listen to me, Beatle.” He puts a finger under my chin, dropping his forehead onto mine. “I will never hurt you. Never. That’s a promise. Okay?”

“Okay,” I respond. I mentally curse my inability to not say more than that.

“I have another promise,” he growls seriously, pulling away so he can see my face. “I will kill that fucking piece of shit if I ever see him.”

I give him that, because the look in his eyes tells me that he means every word. Somehow, this man I didn’t see coming is putting together the wounded pieces of me. I only wish I had the guts to tell him that, but I don’t.

“You’re quite possibly the best thing that has ever happened to me, Jamison Henley.” It’s all I have to give. It’s not what he wants to hear and it’s not even a fraction of what I feel for him, but it’s all I can manage to say out loud. I press my lips against his in a slow kiss, hoping that it does a better job of expressing my feelings than my words do.

He responds, his lips still attached to mine. “You’re absolutely the best thing that has ever happened to me, Lennon Montgomery.” He touches a kiss to my lips. “I love you,” he says before crashing his mouth against mine again.

My lips part greedily, wanting to deepen our kiss. It feels different than it has before. It feels raw and exposed, like he’s really seeing everything I am. For once, it doesn’t send me running to the hills, —quite the opposite, actually. It has me craving more.

His rough hands dig into the soft skin over my hipbones as he lifts me to straddle his naked body, my pussy dripping as I slide over his cock. I moan into his mouth, our feverish kissing only growing more passionate as the seconds pass. Then he slides his hands up my back, tangling them into my hair, as I grind against his hard length. It can’t even possibly be categorized as dry-humping with how wet I am. When I reach down between us, wanting to feel him inside me, he grabs my wrist.