by Robin Leaf
“Not all of them, just the first one. I’m sorry I snooped and invaded your privacy, but I saw my name and couldn’t stop. I read how you fell in love with me, Jase.” I swallowed. “It was beautiful to witness in your words.”
He came around the island to the stool where I sat and situated himself between my legs. He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me close.
“Darby, I have a condition called myocarditis.”
“Myocar-whatis?”
He smiled. “When I was a freshmen in high school, I contracted some viral infection. We didn’t know it at the time, but it attacked my heart, because a year later, I suffered a major heart attack.”
I blinked. “Holy shit, Jase.”
He nodded. “I was on the track team, and I collapsed practicing for the four by four relay.” He pulled me closer. “Dex actually saved my life. He performed CPR on me until the paramedics got there. They said if he wasn’t so quick to react, I would have died.”
“Thank Asclepius that Mom insisted we take that Red Cross course.”
“Asclepius?”
“Greek god of medicine, but go on.”
He smiled and kissed my forehead. I melted again, just like I did every time.
“The doctors said since my health was at risk, they put me on a strict regimen of no exercise, a restrictive diet, I had to avoid anyone who was sick…”
“Which explains your germ thing,” I added.
“Yes. My parents pulled me out of school and kept a tight watch on me.”
“Understandable.”
“Your brother and Freddy were the only people on the planet that my parents allowed around me, and that’s only because they both saved me… Freddy called the paramedics. Any other people were not allowed anywhere near me. They treated me like I was…”
“…made of glass. I read that.”
“Mostly, but my father treated me like I was a burden. He felt it would hurt his political career to have his son be the freak-show sickly kid, so he carted me away to the college, picking my major and assigning me a babysitter.”
“Noah.”
“Nope, he wasn’t the first one. Rusty came first, but he was fired after I had another myocardial infarction while having sex with my first and only real girlfriend.”
I smacked my forehead. “Shit, Jase. How awful.”
“It wasn’t a bad one. And it wasn’t the first time I had sex, either.” He smirked. “I kinda went a little crazy since it was the first time away from my parents. I hadn’t had an incident since that major scare, so I had sex… a lot. I mean I was very careful, but I wasn’t very discriminant.” He shrugged one shoulder. “I’m not very proud of it, so I won’t bore you. But this little baby heart attack scared me, and it scared the girlfriend away, or maybe Dad paid her to go away. All I know is I never heard from her again.
“So Dad hired Noah, who was already a SEAL complete with CPR and some medical training, and gave him a new list of instructions, including reporting anything I did. He was to oversee everything I ate, everywhere I went, and he came up with a heart-healthy exercise regimen. Dad even had him trained in how to administer my medications, of which I had plenty. I had to take them in front of Noah like a child. I stopped taking them when Rusty was my sitter so I could drink a lot of alcohol, which is what led to my second issue.
“Then I met you, younger sister of my savior. I don’t know if it was love at first sight, but it felt like it. I had to play it cool around you, since you were jail bait. Your graduation party was my first temptation. I convinced myself you were a lesbian so that I wouldn’t make a move on you. Then you had to go and fuck with my head.”
I grimaced. “Sorry about that.”
He kissed my nose. “Don’t be. It was the beginning of us.” He stepped back from me, keeping his hands on my thighs. “Over the course of the next four years, I fell so deeply in love with you. It drove me absolutely crazy. I made the decision to not tell you about my condition. I wanted to…”
“Feel normal. Yeah, I read all about it.”
He smiled. “Fine, then I’ll skip ahead. I got this idea… if I couldn’t have sex with you, like I really wanted to so badly, I could watch you with someone else.” Looking down at the floor, he continued. “I became obsessed with it… for six months, I thought of little else. So, after careful deliberation, I mentioned it to you, thinking you’d turn me down and that would be the end of it, but you didn’t. I wanted to back out, but you seemed to be so for it, so I asked my best friend, who, indirectly because of me, was into this sort of kink.” He swallowed and looked back up at me. “It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.”
“No it wasn’t…”
He grabbed my hands. “Yes. It was, because it only made me want you that much more. I saw you, when it clicked for you, I watched you realize you loved me. I saw how much you wanted me. I wanted to make you mine, and I couldn’t. It was so fortunate that my dad’s scandal broke that next morning because it gave me something else to occupy my thoughts.”
“Jase, I always wanted to ask… Did you turn in your father?”
He shook his head. “No. I had Noah investigate him so that I could blackmail him to back off, but I didn’t turn over the information. It came from a different source entirely, someone my dad screwed over. I swear I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
I nodded. “Okay. Good.”
“You believe me?”
“Yes, why wouldn’t I?”
He looked down again. “My dad didn’t, even when proof was staring him in the face. I haven’t spoken to him or Mom since.”
Tears filled my eyes. “Jeez, Jase, you’ve been alone over here this whole time without your family’s support?”
“For all the good they would do. Noah came to be with me during my treatments.”
“So every time he went out of town on business?”
“He was here with me. So I have Noah, you, and Tillie who are my family.”
I smiled. I liked that.
Then a thought came over me, and I became a bit miffed.
“Jase, why didn’t you tell me then? I could understand not telling me when we were just friends, but after that… Why?”
He sighed and ran his hands over his head. “I tried, Darby. I was going to tell you when you were to spend the weekend with me, but you caught that woman in my apartment and assumed the worst.”
“Which you allowed me to assume. You didn’t come after me.”
He smiled sadly. “That’s because when you left that day, I had another little incident.”
I took a second to absorb his words. “Holy fuck, Jase… but you were okay.”
“Yes, but it just solidified that I needed to get away from you. We could not be together.” He moved that errant piece of hair one more time, running his fingers across my forehead. “When I said being with you would kill me, I meant it literally.” He smiled. “I was willing to risk it for me; God knows you were worth it, but I couldn’t hurt you that way. I couldn’t ask you to take care of me, to stop living your life because you had the bad sense to fall for someone who could drop dead at any second.” He grabbed my hands. “Plus, I couldn’t love you the way you needed. I was basically a eunuch.
“By chance, I found this super-secret clinical trial in Switzerland.” He cleared his throat. “I am still bound not to tell anyone about it except family, so…” shrugging, he added, “Hell, Darby, you’ve always been my family, but I didn’t want to tell you before just in case it didn’t work. They did some aggressive stem-cell replacement therapy to heal the damaged tissue in my heart. It took three years, two for the treatments and one for the healing.”
“Stem-cell research is nothing big,” I scoffed.
“At the time, this method was pretty controversial, and it has since been shut down. I was the only one involved in the heart experiment. You don’t want to know how the stem-cells were generated.”
I blinked and let it go. “But three years? That means you w
ere…”
“Yes, I was better, completely healed, when we offered Allison the gym.” He looked deeply into my eyes. “I was going to tell you everything then, to offer myself to you. But…”
“You thought I was in love with Allison.”
“Darby…” he looked down. “I saw it. I knew you were.”
Staring back at him, I couldn’t mask my anger. “Only because you and Noah pushed me toward her.” I pushed him back and jumped off the stool. “Newsflash. I never was in love with her, Jase. I loved her as a friend… a roommate… as someone who had grown on me over time who was always close… close in proximity, never in my heart.” I paced. “She couldn’t be in my heart, because you took it with you when you left me.” I stopped and pulled at my hair. “You fucking left me!” I screamed. “You left me to do this all on your own. Without me. Fuck, I was miserable without you. I was only with her to attempt to fill the giant chasm you left behind.
“And what’s worse is that I could have been here to see you through it all, but no, you had to ‘protect me’ or whatever other bullshit you’re going to say, relying on that big protective jerk, Noah, to take care of you and keep your fucking secret.” I stomped back and forth. “You wasted ten fucking years that we could have been together because of your foolish…”
“There’s nothing foolish about loving you enough to let you go, Darby.” He stopped my pacing, pulling me to his chest. “I could not ask you to stop living so that you could live for me.”
“Goddess, Jase, you never let go! And I lived for you anyway.” I sobbed. “And the kicker is by not telling me, you took that decision away from me.”
He pulled back to look at me, his patient brown eyes searching my face. “I didn’t do that lightly, love.”
“So why now? Why this year?” He looked nervous. “What has changed?”
He blinked, and it told me volumes. He was about to lie to me.
“Whatever you have cooking in that brain of yours, Jason Patrick Heywood, better be the entire truth. Do not fuck with me right now.”
His blank expression morphed into a smile. “God, I missed your sass.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Tell. Me.”
His smile faded, and he rubbed the back of his neck. “Fine. I figured out that you were planning to have a baby with Allison and I had to get there before it happened.”
I looked at him skeptically. “Is that it?”
He stared at me blankly for a second, then he looked down and shook his head.
“It seems as though the treatment might be in the beginning stages of reversing itself. It was a possibility, which is why I didn’t come for you sooner.”
I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach, and my knees got weak. “So, you could…”
He caught me before I face planted. “No, Darby. No. I have time. A lot of time, actually. It’s possible that nothing further will happen. Nothing has in months, but if the damage gets bad enough…” he sighed, “I’ll have to be placed on the heart transplant list.”
“How long?”
“Over the past three years, I only have lost about eight percent function. And in the last three months, nothing has changed.”
“Has anything with you changed?”
He smiled. “Just deciding to fight for you.”
I rolled my tongue across my teeth. “Well,” I said through the emotion clogging my throat. “I guess you’re stuck with me, then.”
Crushing me to his chest, he sighed. “I was planning to come and get you later this afternoon anyway, and then someone informed me last Saturday of Bryan’s affair with Allison.”
“I’ll fuck Noah up the ass if he knew about that and didn’t tell me.”
“You and fucking up the ass.” He chuckled. “But actually, the email came from a dummy account.”
“So, it had to be Bryan.”
He pursed his lips. “It came from the IP address of the computer at your apartment.” At my confused look, he added, “When I was in college, Noah taught me how to trace an email.”
I raised my eyebrows. “So Allison sent it?”
“If it wasn’t you…”
“Based on how she set me up, I don’t think it was her.” I frowned. “Why were you waiting until today?”
He blushed. “Because I needed to delegate the details of this project at work so I could take an extended amount of time off. I was going to do some ridiculously romantic gesture.”
“Ridiculously romantic, huh? What were you planning?”
He smiled. “I had something delivered to Noah. It is supposed to arrive today.” He pulled out his phone and pressed a few buttons. “I need to ask him to hold on to it for us.”
I grabbed his cheeks and made him look at me.
“What is it, Jase?”
He pursed his lips together, wondering if he should tell me. I raised my eyebrows as a warning. “Fine. It’s a book I’ve been making with Tillie’s help.” He pulled up a picture on his phone. “It contains our story.”
I looked at his phone. A black book with a picture of the two of us taken sometime during the beginning stages of our friendship embedded in the cover. “Darby and Jase” was painted or stitched into the cover.
“The idea is that he would get you by yourself, show you the book to remind you what you mean to me. Then you would ask to come see me, but I would already be there. You would run into my arms, profess your undying and everlasting love, and we’d ride off into the sunset together.” He smiled. “I even considered getting a horse, but I don’t know how to ride one, so I rented a convertible Mustang that I need to cancel.”
I laughed. “I can’t wait to see this book.”
“Honestly, I couldn’t be happier with the way we worked out.” He kissed me sweetly, a kiss that quickly turned less sweet and more desire-laden.
Next thing I knew, Jase had me bent over the couch, with one hand rubbing my clit and the other pinching my nipple, as he slowly fucked me from behind, explaining, in detail, what he wanted to do to me later.
Life was good.
Forty Eight
“Sunshine of Your Love” – Cream
“Jesus, why did we wait so long to do this?” Jase whispered in my ear while catching his breath.
I tightened my arms around him. “I don’t know, but we ought to get dressed and leave the house. We haven’t been outside in four days.”
He lifted his head and kissed my forehead. “That’s probably not a bad idea.”
I blinked. “Jase…” I began skeptically. “How have you not had sex in so long?”
He smirked. “I was wondering when you were going to ask.” He rolled over, pulled me to his chest, and stroked my hair as he spoke. “After I returned from the trip to L.A. when we gave Allison the gym space, I tried to resolve myself that you were with her. So, after about a year of sulking, Tillie encouraged me to move on.” He moved my hair out of my face. “I went on three dates with three different women.” He sighed. “I felt guilty each time, like I was cheating on you.”
“But…”
“We weren’t together, I get it. It just felt… wrong. I stopped trying after that.” His arms tightened around me. “About a year later, I met a woman who stirred something in me on a purely physical level. We went on a sort of awkward date, awkward for me because I don’t think she even needed the date… she just wanted to have sex. So, I went back to her place, and…” He looked down at me. “Are you sure you want to hear the next part?”
“I know you didn’t have sex with her, so yeah.”
“We didn’t even get in her doorway when she immediately went down on me.” He stopped, closing his eyes tightly, clearly pained by his admission.
“Jase, it’s okay. I never expected you to be celibate. You were allowed…”
“No, Darla. Hang on, because you don’t understand. I couldn’t get it up, no matter what she tried. Finally, I closed my eyes and fantasized about you.” He ran a hand over his head. “It helped…
a lot. After a couple of minutes, I looked down at her, forgetting for a minute my fantasy wasn’t real, and when her brown eyes looked up at me,” he swallowed nervously, “my stomach cramped and I immediately…” Sighing, he continued, “Well, let’s just say that it turns out I had bad fish for dinner. Several others who ordered the fish from the restaurant got sick that night, too.”
A giggle bubbled up from my chest, and I tried to suppress it. It was no use. I couldn’t stop it. I laughed, rolling away from Jase and doubling over until tears poured out of my eyes.
“You know, that was pretty humiliating, so having you laugh right now is doing nothing to help.”
“Holy shit, that poor woman.”
“Yeah, well, that poor woman got all new carpet courtesy of me.”
That just made me laugh harder.
“Jesus, Darla, this really isn’t funny. It kind of traumatized me. Both of the last two times I had sex…”
“Oh my goddess, Jase, did you…” I snort laughed, “did you have post traumatic sex disorder?”
He stared at me for a minute before he got out of bed. “I’ll be in the shower while you laugh at my pain.”
“Wait, I’m sorry.” My apology to his back did no good.
I took a minute to collect myself before joining him in the shower. I dropped to my knees and wrapped my lips around his cock, which immediately hardened in my mouth.
I pulled away, stroking him with my hand. “Think of this as therapy. Now tell me all the things you fantasized about while she was sucking your cock. Tell me what made you hard.” I took him in my mouth again.
He cupped my cheek. “I’ve lived out all those fantasies this weekend.”
I smiled. “Then we’ll need to think of some more.” I sucked him once more. “I can guarantee you I’m game. One of mine is you coming down my throat, which you’ve yet to do.”
He threw his head back and moaned. “God, I love you.”
~~~
“I need to go back,” I announced over an early dinner at a quaint little restaurant close to the townhouse.
“I know,” he smiled. “I’m going with you. I already booked an eight o’clock flight for us in the morning, so no keeping me up all night again.”