by Chloe Liese
“Why?” I’m sex-crazed, tugging at his shirt, trying to get it over his head.
“Because Dr. Dietrich said we can’t.”
“She what?” I freeze, dropping my hands and his shirt. “That Birkenstock-wearing Twister sadist is cockblocking me?”
Aiden drops his forehead to mine, exhaling slowly. “That’s what she said after you left the office. She told me we’re an overhaul, not a redecoration.”
His words sink in, dragging me back to reality from my lust-soaked fugue. I clutch my arms around my waist and fight a shiver. Embarrassment heats my cheeks, and Aiden sees it immediately.
He steps closer. “Freya, I—” He cups my face, forcing my eyes to meet his. “Freya, I want you. Please don’t doubt that.”
“No,” I whisper, as tears slip down my cheeks. “Why would I ever doubt that? I’ve felt so wanted.”
Aiden’s eyes fall shut as he presses his forehead to mine again. “I want to show you. I want you to know, but I don’t want to do something that hurts us right now.”
“I understand,” I whisper. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not. I can tell.” He wraps his arms around my waist, before his touch drifts down, cupping my ass and hoisting me closer. “I hate when you’re sad,” he whispers. “It feels like I’m being gutted. All I want to do is take that sadness away, Freya. For you to smile and sing and be happy.”
Aiden slides his nose along mine, gives me a faint, worshipful kiss. My hands fist his shirt reflexively, tugging him close, before they drift beneath the soft cotton of his T-shirt. Dancing along his hard stomach, my touch finds the soft hairs that lead to what I want deep inside me.
His breath hitches, then he groans softly and leans his hips into mine. His breathing is rough and fast as his mouth claims mine. One kiss. Another. His hips nudge mine harder, and our mouths open, sharing air and soft, hungry sounds.
But then he pulls back and kisses the corner of my mouth, scrunching his eyes shut. Desire looms, thick and crackling between us, like ozone filling the air before a storm.
“Some couples therapist,” I mutter, burying my face in the crook of his neck and shoulder, hiding my messy emotions, my fear of what comes next. “Telling us not to get our freak on.”
Aiden laughs softly. “I think she’s concerned that sex might do more damage than good. Maybe it’s like with your therapy clients. Walking too soon on a broken bone could set back healing.”
“And sometimes it’s that first painful step that helps them remember that healing is painful, and that’s okay,” I counter, trailing my lips down his throat.
He smiles softly as his head tips back, dark lashes fanned and casting shadows across his cheekbones. “You could have been a lawyer,” he whispers.
A reflexive smile tips my mouth as I lick his Adam’s apple. His hips lurch into mine. “Law school was too sedentary.”
Aiden’s hands dive into my hair, and he tips my head until our mouths are crushed together again, his chest pressed to mine. He gives over, unraveling under my touch, and it feels so good, to be wanted like this—passionately, recklessly.
He groans as I palm him over his jeans. “Freya—” He kisses me harder, his hands slipping beneath my shirt, tenderly tracing my belly, then my breasts. I gasp as his palms rough my nipples.
Hooking my legs around his hips, I nudge Aiden closer as he eases me back on the counter. He clasps my chin and drags his teeth down the length of my throat, his pelvis grinding into mine. I gasp as he shifts my hips until I’m beneath him, as he leans over me, giving me the weight of his body. His hands frame my face, his tongue coaxing mine in a rhythm that I want our bodies sharing, not just our mouths.
“Please,” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer me, and I know he’s torn. In the rational corner of my mind, I’m torn, too. But it’s been so long since we slowed down and felt each other like this, played and petted and kissed each other. Why did we stop? When did we stop? What if we lose it before we’ve even fully found it again?
Aiden’s hands wander beneath my shirt again, his thumbs circling my nipples until they’re hard and so deliriously sensitive. An ache builds between my thighs as he rubs himself against me, and my hips start rolling into his. Cupping my breasts, he teases my nipples more, kisses me deeply. The ache builds, urgency growing. I throw my head back and gasp and then—
The blare of Aiden’s phone shatters the moment.
No, that’s not quite right. It’s not the phone that shatters it. It’s the immediacy with which Aiden pulls away and dives for his phone in his pocket.
Humiliation burns through me, red hot and staggeringly painful. I sit up slowly and tug down my shirt as he stares at his screen, his fingers flying as he answers whatever message he got.
“I’m sorry about this,” he mutters to his phone. He can’t even look at me and apologize.
And every faint, delicate, good thing I felt this evening, the tiny flame of hope that flickered to life as he swept me away with ice cream and pizza, as he told me he loves me and confided in me about his dreams, his fears, is snuffed out.
A new creeping desolation settles beneath my skin as I stare at him. Even if Aiden and I survive this, even if he opens up to me the way he used to, will it really be better, knowing what he’s working on, if he’s still married to his work instead of me? Or will it only be a different kind of pain? A new way of feeling alone, second best, runner-up to the god of his smart phone and professional success calling him away from me.
I don’t dignify his actions with a response. And Aiden doesn’t seem to notice.
Slipping off the counter, I grab my pizza, snag a bottle of wine, and call the cats, who run and follow me to the bedroom.
At least someone still finds me worth chasing after.
11
Aiden
Playlist: “Bad Things,” Rayland Baxter
It’s one of those days, when the weight of my anxiety is a vise grip around my ribs, when I can hear my pulse pounding in my ears and my heart feels like one big palpitation. There’s nothing to pinpoint, no particular reason.
Except that you were two seconds away from going down on your wife in the kitchen, then Dan texted you, and you jumped off of her like her skin had caught fire.
Fuck. Fuck. I just keep replaying it, like many things I’ve screwed up throughout my life. Moments I made an ass of myself or felt embarrassed. When my clothes were worn out or too small. When I was so tired from the landscaping work I did on the weekends in middle school that I fell asleep during homeroom, then woke up with drool on my desk and a dick on my face that someone drew with Sharpie. Which I noticed in the bathroom mirror during fifth period.
It plays on a loop in my brain.
Sometimes it keeps me from sleep. Other times, I wake up and I’ll fixate on that one time I messed up explaining a term in lecture and had to email my entire 300-person class, telling them what I’d gotten wrong. Another time when I found a typo in my section of a co-authored academic journal article, and I spiraled into worry that it was somehow going to get me fired.
It makes my skin crawl. Sometimes it gets me on the verge of throwing up.
And today is one of those days. Fuckups front and center in my brain. On the razor’s edge of a panic attack. I can’t lie, I feel the tug of despair. That choking, tear-out-my-hair anger that I’m stuck. That anxiety is managing my life, instead of me managing it.
So when I have a break between classes that doesn’t involve office hours, I walk, trying to breathe and distract and steady myself. Squeezing my hands, then flexing my fingers, breathing through my nose, out of my mouth. There’s a small, less trafficked bit of green space outside my building that I walk like a track, probably looking like any professor around here, strolling while working out an idea.
On my way back from another lap, I slow as I spot Tom sitting on a nearby bench. Ready for work in his gray janitor’s uniform, he sets down a small Igloo cooler, probably packed with his dinner, and
sips from a thermos. When my path takes me a few yards from his bench, he peers up through dark sunglasses beneath his usual faded black ball cap, and waves politely.
I slow to a stop. “Hey, Tom.”
“Afternoon,” he says, lifting his thermos. “Doing all right?”
My expression falters. “Sorry?”
He sips from his thermos, then sets it between his legs. “You look like you’re trying to win the powerwalking Olympics. Thought maybe you’re stressed. But I could be projecting. I walk when I’m worked up.”
“Oh. Well…yeah. With anxiety, sometimes walking helps.”
“Ah, that it does.” He says it like he gets it. I wonder if he does. If maybe that’s why he puts me at ease. Because he’s unfazed by me, because we’re a little more alike than I thought. “Well, I don’t want to keep you if you need to keep walking,” he says.
“Actually…” I find myself eyeing the spot on the bench next to him. “Mind if I—”
“Please,” he says, scooting down to give me ample room.
Once I sit, my legs start bouncing. And it makes me miss Freya. She never sets her hands on my thigh or tries to make me stop. Her fingers simply slip through mine, followed by a hard, reassuring squeeze.
Fuck, I love her.
I scrub my face and sigh. “Sorry. I’m in my head today.”
“Doesn’t bother me.” Tom rolls his shoulders back and folds his arms across his chest. I catch the faint whiff of menthol cigarettes on him now that we’re this close.
“You smoke?”
He nods. “Yup. Not on campus of course. I like getting my paycheck.”
I knot my hands tightly between my knees, breathing against the tightness in my chest. “You shouldn’t.”
He shifts on the bench. “I’m aware. I’ve been doing it since I was thirteen, though, so it’s a little late to clean up the act.”
“What? How’d you get that past your parents?”
He half-glances my way, before staring straight ahead again, and saying, “Well, uh…they weren’t around much. And when they were, they reckoned I was trouble and there was no changing me.”
“Stubborn?” My legs bounce steadily but my heart’s started slowing down. I suck in another breath through my nose and focus on listening to Tom.
“Yep,” he says. “I was and am incorrigibly stubborn. Well, until I met a girl who made me straighten things out. She was the first person I ever wanted to bend my life around. And I did. But, of course, eventually I screwed that up real bad.”
“How?” I ask, shutting my eyes, focusing on my breathing.
He shifts on the bench and coughs wetly, then says, “I drank. I was addicted. And I chose it over her. Over…everything.”
Those words send a chill over my skin. I chose it over her. Over everything.
“But uh…for the past three years, I’ve been sober,” he says, “so that’s something I try to celebrate. Well—” He laughs, husky and thick. I can hear the tar coating his lungs. “‘Celebrate’ might be a stretch. I remind myself when I walk by the bar I used to get lit in every night that I don’t actually want that drink; my brain just wants the calm that alcohol gave me. And then I go home and read instead.” He sips from his thermos. “That’s when I celebrate.”
Maybe it’s because he looks about the same age I imagine my dad would be. Maybe it’s because my mom says Dad was one of those people who was brimming with potential but who could never slip out from under addiction’s thumb pinning him down, but it makes me grateful that I get to see someone who did. Someone who made it.
“Sorry,” he says, scratching his beard, “for dumping my sobriety story on you.”
“I don’t mind hearing it at all. It’s something to be proud of.”
He shrugs and tugs at his ear, hurtling me into whatever place that is where we experience déjà vu. I do that, too, when I’m feeling self-conscious. Tom’s hand drops from his ear, and I’m yanked back to the present.
“Mind my asking how you ended up in academics?” he says, picking at his work-hardened hands. He catches a cuticle and tears it sharply. A thin streak of blood wells to the surface.
Blinking away, I ease back on the bench and draw in a deep breath. “I was good at math in school, and I was pretty much obsessed with how successful businesses operated, how people got rich and how wealth worked.”
“Why was that?”
“I grew up without much. When I learned there were formulas to apply, logical steps I could take so I wouldn’t have to live how I’d grown up, it appealed to me for obvious reasons. And then I realized I could teach people, help them learn about it, too.” I shrug. “Just sort of went from there.”
“So you…didn’t have much growing up. Yet you got here? How?”
“Classic underdog story. Hustled. Took under-the-table jobs. Worked my ass off. Had enough smarts to snag some scholarships. Met a woman way out of my league who, for some reason, wanted me, who believed in my goals and supported every one of them. And now here I am, on the cusp of huge success, with all my baggage about to drag me down and pull us apart before I can even share it with her.”
Well. That last bit wasn’t supposed to come out.
Tom frowns. “Your baggage… You mean your past.”
“I’ve always been really fixated on work and climbing the ladder here. People can say I’m just living as a slave to my past, that I’m caught up in some toxic capitalist lie that you’re nothing if you don’t earn, but those people can kiss my ass, because they have not known what I’ve known, and neither has my wife. And it’s going to stay that way.”
Tom clears his throat. He peers over at me, then away. “I’m sorry… I’m sorry it was hard when you were young, that it’s bled into your adult life. I—” He scrubs his beard. “That’s damn unfair.”
Self-consciousness tugs at me. I just verbally vomited on the janitor. I just cornered him on a bench, while I was brimming with anxiety, then blabbed about my childhood. I stare down at my fingers, tugging and knotting them between my knees. “That’s okay.”
“No,” he says firmly. “It’s not. But you can’t change it. You can just move forward as best you can and tell yourself you’ll give your kid better.” After a beat he says, “You got any kids? Not yet, do I remember right?”
I shake my head. “We’ve been trying, but I’ve been having a tough time—”
Christ. I almost said it. What is wrong with me? Even though I didn’t finish my sentence, it shouldn’t be difficult for Tom to intuit what I meant. A flush of embarrassment heats my cheeks.
Tom tips his head, and as the sun jumps out from behind the heavy clouds, I see the faint outline of his eyes through his dark lenses. But before I can process what they look like, he peers down.
After a quiet moment, Tom says, “You talked to your wife about it?”
“Freya?” I shake my head. “Hell no.”
Tom laughs faintly. “Can’t say I blame you. But uh…sorry, if this is overstepping, it’s more common than you think. It’s just part of life. So, maybe she should—Freya,” he says, like he’s trying out her name. “She should know.”
I stare down at my feet. “Yeah. She should.” Sighing, I rake a hand through my hair. “We’re about to go on vacation with all of her family, though, and she’s pretty desperate to keep up appearances in front of them, doesn’t want to worry her parents since it’s their celebration. So now’s not a good time.”
Who’re you kidding? There’ll never be a good time.
Tom tugs his ball cap down as the sun grows even brighter and bathes us in hot, glaring light. “That sounds stressful.”
“It will be.”
“Just flying itself.” He shudders. “I hate those tin-can death traps.”
I peer over at him. “Yeah. That’s…how I feel.”
“But you’re going,” he says. “For her.”
“I’m going, yes. For her. And I do like her family. I love them, actually. They feel as close to family
as I’ll ever get.”
“Because it’s just you and your mom?”
I glance up at him, a prick of unease tingling along my neck.
Easy, Aiden. Your anxiety’s high. And when it is, you’re suspicious and jumpy.
But I still ask, “How do you know I don’t have siblings or a dad in the picture?”
Tom shrugs, then glances away. “You don’t have any pictures in your office besides your wife and your mother. Not that I’m looking, but I do clean in there, you know. And I read between the lines. That underdog story has ‘deadbeat dad’ written all over it.”
My stomach drops. “That obvious, huh?”
Tom stands abruptly, glancing at his wristwatch. “Shit. Lost track of the time. Gotta clock in.” Thermos in one hand, Igloo in the other, he turns as if he’s going to leave, but then he stops and turns back my way. “I didn’t mean offense when I said that. When I said it was obvious, I meant it’s clear that you had the odds stacked against you, because the man who should have been there for you wasn’t. Obvious, as in, you’ve achieved incredible things despite struggling against the quicksand of poverty and a rough start in life.”
My throat tightens. “Oh. Well…thanks.”
“Your old man failed you,” Tom says, staring down at his work boots. “That caused you to struggle. Which is wrong. But…well, if it means anything to you, I’d say you can be sure he’s somewhere struggling, too.”
“Can’t say I care, Tom.”
He nods, like he was expecting that. “Yeah, and I don’t blame you. He’s paying his penance, now, though. Mark my words.”
I join Tom in standing, slipping my hands into my pockets. We’re almost the same height. I have maybe an inch on him. He keeps his eyes down, shifts with his cooler and thermos. “How so?” I ask.
“Because he’s spent every day since he hit the road missing out on you. He’s got to live with the consequences of his choices. He didn’t get to see you grow up or take pride in how great you turned out or witness how strong you are. He won’t get to recognize himself in you or meet your wife or hold his grandbabies.”