by Aly Martinez
I nodded even though he couldn’t see me, yet he somehow understood.
He resumed his tortuous rhythm, driving into me in the hunt for his own release. “Fuck, Charlotte,” he groaned, his breaths coming quicker, his shaft swelling inside me.
He was close.
I was closer.
Circling my hips, I ground against him. “Baby,” I called in a whisper.
“I’m right here, Charlotte,” he swore. “Always.”
My release climbed higher until I wasn’t sure I could hold on any longer, and when I felt Porter step off the edge, I eagerly followed him over.
He folded forward, burying his face in my neck, his hips never faltering as we rode our orgasms out together.
Lazily, I trailed my fingertips up and down his back, his large frame hovering over me, both of us panting.
“Jesus,” he breathed.
I smiled.
Righting himself, he gripped my hips so I didn’t teeter off the edge of the counter and grumbled, “Why is there never a fucking bed in the darkness?”
There was no way I could have stopped the loud bubble of laughter that came from my throat.
His shoulders shook as he joined me. Cupping the back of my neck, he pressed his smiling lips to mine in a kiss that meant more to me than he would ever be able to comprehend. Sans the incredible sex that had preceded it, there was nothing special about that kiss.
But maybe that was what made it so perfect.
It was easy, and it made the overwhelming world outside my apartment feel easy too.
“Close your eyes. I’m gonna turn on the lights,” he whispered.
My stomach sank, and I gripped his shoulders tight. “Nothing’s going to change when you do, right?”
He caught my hand and folded his around it, intertwining our fingers before bringing it to his lips. “Everything’s going to change, Charlotte. And I swear to you, no matter what happens, we’re going to do that together, okay?”
My nose began to sting. Fucking Porter and his hand holding.
God, I loved it so much.
“Okay, baby. Turn on the lights.”
“I didn’t know!” I defended.
Porter smirked across the kitchen, his hip propped against the counter and his long legs crossed at the ankle. “Seven?”
“I didn’t know!” I repeated.
After we’d cleaned up, which was surprisingly convenient when you have sex in the bathroom, we’d gotten dressed and begrudgingly left our private sanctuary. I hadn’t been eating much over the last few days, and with Porter securely holding my hand, making my mind blessedly quiet, food had become a priority. On the way to the kitchen, I’d stopped at the bedroom door, cracking it open to peer in at Travis, as I had done so many times over the last few days. Every time I’d done it before, half of me had expected him not to be there. That fear had become a reality only hours earlier, after he’d climbed out the window in an attempt to escape me.
But that escape had become the precipice that had brought Porter back to us.
“Seven though?” he teased, lifting a piece of pizza to his mouth.
I glared at him, all the while smiling on the inside. “Well, he likes mushrooms.” I waved my hand at one box before amending, “Sometimes, anyway.” I swung my hand toward another box. “But then I wasn’t sure about Hannah, but all kids like cheese, right?”
He swallowed a bite and washed it down with beer before saying, “So that’s two. You got five more to go.”
I took a sip of my wine. Not the warm one from the end table. Porter had poured me a new glass. “Well, I figured, with you being a grown man, you’d probably want yours to be a little heartier. I’m sorry to say they didn’t have your precious Wagyu on the menu, but I got you all the other meats.”
He smiled wide and counted off, “Three,” before taking another bite.
“Seriously, Porter?” I huffed, not even the least bit annoyed. “Fine. I like supreme, but I remembered you picking the onions out of your salad that night at The Porterhouse, so I got one with onions and one without in case you wanted a piece of mine.”
He lifted three fingers in the air and, one by one, flipped up two more to show five. “For the record, I like onions, but you didn’t order onions that night, and I had high hopes of my mouth being on yours by the end of the evening, so I made the sacrifice in the name of onion breath.” He winked. “Two more.”
My stomach got all warm and fluttery at the thought of our first kinda-sorta kiss. He’d only brushed his lips with mine, and even before I had known how perfect his mouth truly was, I still would have killed for more. He could have eaten a field of onions and I wouldn’t have cared.
Rolling my eyes, I finished with, “Then I thought maybe Travis wouldn’t like mushrooms, so I got sausage. Everyone likes sausage. Except…then I thought maybe it was ground beef that everyone liked.” I shrugged. “So I ordered both. There. Are you happy now?”
He set the rest of his crust aside and prowled over to me. “Happy to be standing here, surrounded by seven pizzas that had to have cost you at least a hundred bucks and are now more than likely going to go to waste? No.” His hand came up to my face, his thumb trailing back and forth across my cheek. “Happy to be standing here, listening to you pretend to be annoyed with me while rambling on about ordering at least a hundred bucks in pizza because you weren’t sure what kind we would like, but you knew I needed that time alone with Travis as much as he needed it with me, and you didn’t want to interrupt to ask what kind of toppings we liked on our pizza and, instead, just ordered the left side of the menu? Yeah. Charlotte. I’m really fucking happy.”
I bit my bottom lip. “It was only seventy dollars. I had a coupon.”
A wide, breathtaking smile split his face. “Beautiful and thrifty. I knew I was falling in love with you for a reason.”
“Porter,” I whispered, my whole body warming. “Don’t say you love me.”
His hands went to my hips where he tugged me against him. “I didn’t say I love you. I said I was falling in love with you. And it has nothing to do with pizza and everything to do with the fact that you called me tonight.”
“He needed you.”
“You needed me too, Charlotte. And believe me, that is not something I take lightly. Because I really fucking needed you too. You are the strongest woman I have ever met. You’ve lived through hell, and I know you think you were barely surviving, and maybe some days you were, but you kept holding on when others would have let go. You never needed me to stop the world for you. You simply needed someone to accept you for who you were. But, tonight, after a week that’s shaved years off my life and left me questioning everything I’ve ever known, you stopped it for me. And you stopped it for Travis too. I don’t know what’s going to happen when the sun comes up tomorrow. And I don’t know what the judge is going to say in two weeks. But because of you, I have tonight. So yeah, Charlotte. My last confession of the night is that I’ve been falling in love with you since the first day I met you.” He settled his hands on either side of my face and bent at the knees so we were eye to eye. “And, sweetheart, you have to know that, with a woman like you, it’s a really short trip.”
“Don’t say that,” I pleaded, but my heart was swelling.
He tipped his forehead down until it was resting on mine. “We can pretend if you want. But it’s still true.”
“We still have a long way to go, Porter. Don’t complicate this any more than it already is.”
Smirking, he asked, “Sweetheart, our road has never been smooth. Not for a single second since you brought me that fucking pickle jar at the spring fling. And yet you think me loving you is going to change when the road gets bumpy?”
“It could.”
“It won’t.”
“But it could, and I think the two of us have suffered enough heartbreak to last a lifetime. Don’t add this to the list.”
“Charlotte, your name had been carved on the top of that list for o
ver a month.” He sucked in a deep breath, released me, and strolled back over to the counter, where he resumed his position. Lifting a piece of supreme pizza (with onions) out of the box, he smiled. “But, if this is what you need, I’ll give it to you. Just let me know when you’re done pretending.”
“I’m not pretending,” I lied. I absolutely was. It was what I did best.
I wasn’t ready to absorb what he was saying. Okay, that wasn’t true. I wasn’t ready to set myself up for disappointment again. All good things came to an end eventually. Even love. Not that I knew. The only person I’d ever truly loved had gone missing for ten years and now hated me.
“It’s just—”
“Pepperoni,” he interrupted, waving a slice of pizza in my direction.
“What?”
“One pepperoni and one whatever the hell you want. I’ll eat either. Hannah likes cheese, but Travis likes pepperoni, so I pick them off for her when she isn’t looking and voila: instant cheese pizza. That’s what you order in the future.”
I swallowed hard, unsure whether to accept the out he’d just offered me by changing the subject. But the fact that he was offering me the out meant everything.
So much so that I smiled at him and said, “I’m falling in love with you too. But, with a man like you, it’s a very long trip. I’m still not completely convinced you aren’t a serial killer.”
Porter smiled. “You’re such a liar.”
“I speak nothing but the truth.”
He cocked his head to the side, a mischievous glint shining in his eyes. “Oh yeah? Nothing but the truth?”
I made a show of crossing my heart.
“Okay, then. How many times have you listened to my voicemail?”
Oh shit. “Your voicemail?” I played stupid and got busy packing up the smorgasbord of leftover pizzas.
“You know, the one when I told you I loved you, like, a week ago. The one you confessed to only getting last night.” His arrogant smile stretched wider. “The one you are now pretending you don’t know about. And the one, I have no doubt, you listened to at least two dozen times because you love me too. And you missed me, most especially my sexy body.”
I barked a laugh. “Wow. You are quite full of yourself tonight, aren’t you?”
His heat hit my back, and his arms looped around my stomach. “No. I’m right.”
“I listened to it once,” I lied, resting my hands on top of his.
He chuckled and dipped low to press his lips to my neck.
My head lolled to the side to give him more room as he peppered kisses up to my ear.
“What happened to the truth?” he teased before nipping at my earlobe.
I purred, tracing my hand up his strong shoulders and into the back of his hair. “It got lost with your humility.”
His chuckle turned into a full-blown laugh.
And then, as his hand slipped over my breast, mine turned into a full-blown moan.
Moments later, after a quick check to make sure the kids were still asleep, it turned into a full-blown repeat performance in the bathroom.
Only, this time, we left the lights on.
* * *
“Hannah!” I hissed. “Leave her alone!”
My daughter turned to look at me, her face filled with awe as she stood over Charlotte. “She’s still asleep.”
“I know!” I hissed, waving an urgent hand to make her come back into the bedroom.
We’d been tiptoeing around her apartment all morning, trying to let her sleep. This included eating three bowls of cereal in her bed at six thirty in the morning, after Travis had woken up for a breathing treatment. Charlotte hadn’t even budged as I’d crawled out from under her on the couch and headed down the hall to help my son. The hum of the nebulizer was loud, but we did our best to keep it quiet by going into the bathroom in Charlotte’s bedroom and shutting both of the doors. I supposed she hadn’t been sleeping any better than I had over the last week, and pair that with a night of awkward yet completely incredible sex in a cramped bathroom and I figured she was down for the count.
It made me an epic weirdo, but I could have watched her peacefully sleeping for hours.
And it seemed my daughter shared the infatuation.
“Get over here!” I whisper-yelled, silently snapping my finger and pointing to the floor beside me.
Smiling, she skipped over and took my hand.
Shaking my head, I guided her back into the bedroom and quietly closed the door behind us.
“Travis, your new mommy sleeps a lot,” she said, heading straight for the bed, where she climbed up to sit with her brother.
He didn’t even look up from his iPad as he replied, “She’s not my new mommy.”
“Yeah. She is, Trav,” I corrected.
His head never moved, but his eyes lifted to mine. “I already had a mom. She died. I don’t need two.”
Hannah’s eyes lit. “I’ll take her! I never had a mommy.”
My gut twisted. “Hannie, you did have a mom. She’s in heaven now.” Or more likely hell, but my lies knew no bounds when it came to my children.
I walked over to the bed and sat on the side. Hannah crawled into my lap, while Travis watched me out of the corner of his eye, pretending he wasn’t. I had to smile. Maybe he was more like Charlotte than I’d thought.
“Put that down for a second,” I told him, shifting Hannah to one of my legs.
“Fine,” he huffed and begrudgingly obeyed.
“She is your mom. And she loves you very much. When I first met Charlotte, she missed you so much that she was still struggling, even ten years later. I know this is weird and it’s hard to understand, but she loves you more than you can ever imagine.”
“She won’t even let me see you though.”
“That’s going to change, okay? It might take a little while before we get everything set up. But I promise you we’re all working to make that change.”
“Not that Brady guy!” he exclaimed. “He’s an asshole.”
Hannah gasped so loudly I had to bite back a laugh.
“Hey!” I snapped my fingers. “Watch your mouth.”
I set Hannah on her feet, and she wandered away, flashing Travis a pair of wide you-are-in-so-much-trouble eyes.
He sheepishly looked away. “Brady’s always saying that it’s best that I don’t talk to you anymore. And he’s mean to Charlotte too. He told his wife the other day that Charlotte was too weak to be a mom.”
My jaw turned to granite. Yeah, I’d hated Brady before. But my son was right: He was an asshole. But, now, he was talking shit about my woman…in front of my kid? Fuck that.
“Don’t worry about Brady,” I clipped before getting my anger in check. “Charlotte and I are going to work together to make sure you’re taken care of. But I need you to drop the attitude, okay? She thinks you hate her.”
His sad eyes lifted to mine. “I do hate her.”
I shook my head. “No, buddy. You just don’t love her yet. There’s a big difference.”
He stared up at me with haunted eyes and asked, “Do you love her?”
“Yes,” I answered curtly. “But, before you read into that, I don’t know what’s going to happen between the two of us. There’s still a long road to the future.”
“Does she love you?”
I grinned. “Well, Charlotte is currently pretending she doesn’t love me.” I shot him a pointed wink. “But come on. We both know she does. I mean…look at me. How could she not?”
He giggled, and it eased the ache in my chest.
“She showed me a picture of you kissing her while we were at the police station.”
“Oh yeah?” I drawled, shock and pride settling inside me.
“She said that you would trust her to do what was right for me.”
I hooked my arm around his shoulders and pulled him into my side. “I do. And proof that I was right is that, last night, when you truly needed me, she called and told me to come over.” I kissed the
top of his head. “Give her a chance, Travis. I promise you won’t regret it. She’s pretty amazing.”
He nodded, but he didn’t quite seem convinced. Instead of harping on him about it, though, I decided to change the subject.
“Okay…now, let’s—”
“Daddy!” Hannah shrieked, terror sharp in her tone.
I lurched off the bed and rushed toward her voice. She came sprinting out of Charlotte’s closet until her body got tangled in some of the hanging clothes, and before I could reach her, the whole rod came down on top of her.
She cried, kicking and screaming under the mess.
After digging her out of what had to be Charlotte’s entire winter wardrobe, I scooped her up to sit on my hip. “Hey. It’s okay. Everything’s fine.”
Suddenly, the bedroom door flung open and an honest-to-God zombie came stumbling in.
Her hair was in tangles and sticking out in all directions, and she fought a losing battle with her lids in an attempt to open her eyes in the bright light. “Travis!” she called, sleep muffling her voice.
“Right here.” He laughed, swinging a humor-filled smile my way.
She clutched her chest. “Are you okay?”
He laughed louder. “I’m good. You…uh…slept late.”
“Jesus, what time is it?” Her gaze slowly slid to me, and then her whole body jerked. “Shit. I forgot you were here.”
“And good morning to you too, beautiful.” Chuckling, I walked over and kissed her forehead. Using my free hand, I smoothed her hair down. “You look particularly stunning this morning. You sleep well?”
She curled into my side. “I don’t even know what day it is.”
“That’s a good sign.” I glanced up and found Travis watching us closely, his eyes aimed at her hand casually resting on my stomach.
And then, like a lightning bolt had struck her, she jerked again. “Oh my God. Did you go all night without a breathing treatment?”
“I took care of it,” I announced.
“Oh.” She peered up at me. “You should have woken me up. I tweaked his medication last—”