Reese offered a crooked smile, shaking his head as if he didn't believe me - or maybe as if he'd believed the words long before I'd spoken them. He wrapped his arms around me again, his head buried in my chest, and I folded over him under a wave of emotion.
It was one of those moments, one of those life-defining snapshots of time I'd never forget.
"What do we do now?" I asked, voice barely a whisper.
"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.
Our home. 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.
Charlie had been the one - the only one - to ever understand that about me.
She'd let me love her with my actions, with my hands, with early morning breakfasts and bookshelves built in her honor. She read between the lines, finding the words I could never speak aloud, and for so long, it'd been enough for her.
How stupid I was to believe it always would be.
Charlie and I used to be completely in sync. I could read her mind with one look, could feel her sadness or joy with a simple touch, could heal her by just existing.
When she got pregnant, that connection only intensified.
What we had was rare, it was special, it was unlike any kind of love I'd ever seen in my life. I sure as hell never saw it with my parents, and even my grandparents had a strained relationship. But me and Charlie? We were magic. We were made for each other, plain and simple.
And all I ever wanted, for the rest of my life, was to be her husband - and to be the father to the boys growing inside her.
Losing them changed everything.
Suddenly, I couldn't read Charlie with just one look, or heal her with a touch. I didn't know how to touch her anymore, or what to do to make her feel okay. I didn't know the right questions to ask, or the right words to offer, and no matter how I tried to show her I cared, I always fell short.
I brought back her library, hoping it'd bring back her happiness - but in the process, I'd hidden away evidence that our boys had once existed. I'd done the same thing with offering to buy another bird when Edward died. But it wasn't that I didn't understand that those things didn't fix what had happened. I did know that. But I also knew Charlie better than she knew herself.
I knew that she could get lost in books for entire days, that her eyes would light up at dinner that night as she told me about the adventures she'd been on between the pages. I knew that those birds meant more to her than anything else other than me. I saw her smile when she sang with them. I heard her laugh when she taught them new words. And whether she knew it right now or not, I knew a part of her would be missing without them now that she'd freed Jane, too.
I knew Charlie, but I couldn't reach her.
When our sons died, the hardest part of all of it was that Charlie didn't realize that she wasn't the only one who lost them. I may not have cried the way she did, and I may not have spent weeks in bed, and I may not have had the right words to tell her how I was feeling - but I was hurting, too.
I lost them, too.
And I'd be damned if I'd lost Charlie.
I knew Reese was a problem the first night I met him. It's one of those things you're tuned into with your significant other. I knew when a guy sees her with respect and as a friend and when a guy wants more from her, when they desire her.
Reese was the latter.
But I tried to trust, tried to give Charlie space. The last thing I wanted to do was demand her not to be friends with someone she grew up with, someone close with her family, someone in the picture way before I ever was.
I tried to play it cool, and it backfired.
"Another one?"
The bartender who had been taking care of me all night interrupted my thoughts, the ones that had been torturing me all night like a horror movie on repeat.
I simply nodded, sliding my empty glass toward her. She topped it off with a sympathetic smile.
///
"Want to talk about it? You know, bartenders do have a reputation for also being therapists."
I couldn't even find it in me to chuckle. If I had words, I would give them to Charlie.
"No, thanks. I'll take my check when you have a second."
She smiled again, this time tapping her knuckles on the bar. "I'll grab it for you now."
I sipped the amber liquid she'd just poured, letting it take me back into the spiral of doubt, the spiral of truth. It'd been too long that I'd ignored it, too long that I'd let myself pretend everything was okay.
I hadn't been a good husband.