“Fucking… hell… this is embarrassing,” Dean stutters out with a groan through the last of his orgasm, making me laugh around his cock as he mutters about how fast he just came.
I am laughing with this man’s dick in my mouth, and nothing could be more perfect.
Dean’s hands are quickly wrapping under my arms and hauling me up from the floor, until my head is buried in his neck and his arms are wrapped tightly around me.
“Where the hell have you been all my life?” Dean whispers while he pants, the same thing he said to me when we were having sex in the office, and hugs me to him as tightly as possible, making my heart thump wildly in my chest.
This is just a fling. This is just a fling.
“Everyone is finally gone, and your garage is back in order.”
Glancing up from my spot on the floor, I quickly swipe the tears from my cheeks when Dean walks into my living room, having completely lost track of time.
“You okay, sugar?” he asks softly, the worry and concern on his face making my eyes sting with more tears, but I quickly blink them away.
After our little fun in the bathroom, I squirmed out of his arms before my emotions got the best of me, washed my hands, gave him a quick peck on the cheek, and left him alone in there to rush back out to the garage. I told myself it was because I didn’t want everyone to see us walk in together, knowing what we’d disappeared to do, but that was a lie. I just needed some space. I needed to breathe, and think, and get my head back on straight without his arms around me or his eyes on me.
I spent the next fifteen minutes keeping myself busy—and my mind off what’s going to happen to me when he leaves—by rushing around the garage, refilling people’s popcorn boxes, grabbing them drinks, and anything else I could think of to stay moving. Until I walked by the loveseat Dean relaxed on when he came out of the bathroom. He grabbed my hand and tugged me down to sit next to him, pulling me against his side and cutting off my protests with a kiss.
We watched the ending of Bridesmaids and all of The Wedding Singer with me snuggled into him, his arm draped around my shoulders. After movie night was over and everyone left, Dean forced me back into the house to finally get out of my work clothes and take a shower, while he and the boys cleaned up my garage.
“Just looking at some photo albums,” I finally answer him as he toes off his boots and pads across my living room in his socks.
Moving behind me, Dean sits down on the floor and leans his back against the couch. His long, jean-clad legs stretch out on either side of my bare ones, since I changed into a T-shirt and cotton shorts when I got done with my shower. Wrapping his arms around my waist, he tugs my butt back across the carpet until I’m nestled into him with my back resting against his chest, the photo album laying open across my thighs.
“Show me,” he speaks softly against the side of my ear, resting his chin on my shoulder.
I’m supposed to be reminding myself this is just a fling, but my emotions are out of control right now. And I made them even worse with the decision to look through some old photo albums while I waited for Dean to finish up out in the garage.
I slowly flip through the pages, pointing to pictures of the girls growing up, telling him where we were and what we were doing in the pictures, until I feel another tear slip down my cheek.
Four-year-old Wren sitting on the couch with her hair up in two pigtails, a huge toothy smile on her face as she holds an infant Birdie in her arms. Birdie sitting in a highchair, hands and face covered in pink frosting from her first birthday party. Wren wearing a purple-and-white polka dot dress with a Scooby-Doo backpack, standing in front of my cottage door on her first day of school. Me kneeling in the sand with both girls wrapped up in beach towels and in my arms, the three of us laughing hysterically as someone’s dog raced down the beach, the blur of his furry body in the shot when he ran right in front of us just as the timer on my camera went off. Both girls sitting cross-legged in front of the Christmas tree on Christmas morning in their matching pajamas, happiness and excitement shining on their faces with brightly wrapped presents surrounding them. If I close my eyes, I can still hear their squeals and the tearing of paper, their little feet smacking against the tile in the kitchen as they laugh and run around the room with new toys in their arms, Christmas music playing softly from a radio in my kitchen….
“God, it feels like just yesterday they were sitting on my lap, and now they’re getting married and having babies.” I sniffle as Dean squeezes me harder when I run my fingers over a picture of five-year-old Birdie sitting on my lap on a hay ride at a farm we went to when she was in preschool. I have my arms wrapped around her tiny body with our cheeks pressed together and huge grins on our faces. “I feel like I’m losing them. My baby is getting married tomorrow, and I’ll never get these moments back, and I just wish I could. I want to hold them on my lap again, and I want to brush their hair after a bath again, and I want to hear their little-girl giggles while they play in their rooms together again. I should be happy that they’re happy, but I’m just sad. I just want to go back and do it all over again. Have them be little again and need me again.”
The tears fall steadily down my cheeks as I continue flipping through the album, my two beautiful girls growing up right in front of my eyes as I turn the pages, almost as quickly as they did in real life.
“They adore you. You can tell in these pictures, and you can tell just by spending five seconds with all of you. You’re a good mom. A great mom. And they aren’t going anywhere,” Dean reassures me, just making the tears fall harder. “They will always need their mom, no matter how old they get.”
“You should have been a dad. You would have been an awesome one,” I tell him, swiping at the tears and sniffling as I rest my head back on his chest, trying to lighten the mood. “Shit Ass and Die Already really adore you.”
I feel the rumble of Dean’s laughter against my back when I say the only name my grandson has called his baby all day.
“Wasn’t in the cards for me.” He shrugs around my body. “Found out a few years into my marriage that I couldn’t have them. So, my ex decided to screw our neighbor and have kids that way instead.”
My heart clenches when he says these words so casually, like he’s reading a grocery list. I knew he was married at one point, and I knew his wife left him, but I didn’t know all the details. Anger washes through me, drying up all my tears and making me want to hunt this woman down and beat the shit out of her for hurting him this way.
Dean removes one of his hands from around me to flip to the next page in the photo album. “Is that the girls’ dad?”
I just nod as Dean points to a picture of Alex sitting in a chair in the corner of the hospital room, holding a newborn Wren in his arms, looking down at her with nothing but fear in his eyes. Something I never noticed back then. I got rid of most of the pictures of him not long after he left the island and never came back, but I kept a few of him with the girls. Even though he wanted nothing to do with us, he still existed. He was still the man responsible for fathering them, and I wanted them to at least have one or two photos of him. Even if they did nothing but give his picture the finger when they would flip through the albums themselves. He’s still a part of their history and fifty percent responsible for giving them life. But I have never been more grateful that when I look at my girls, I don’t see any traces of that man. The Bennett genes are strong in this family.
“You don’t have to talk about him if you don’t want to,” Dean reassures me gently, pressing a kiss to my cheek and making my stomach flop.
I never talk about Alex. I don’t even say his name out loud, sticking to calling him “sperm donor” instead, since that’s all he turned out to be. But my mouth opens, and the words come tumbling out of me easily with Dean’s arms wrapped around me, the solid weight of him at my back making me feel safer than I ever have in my life.
“I should have known what kind of person Alex was from the very beginning, but I guess I just didn’t want to. I was a nineteen-year-old who’d just lost her parents and suddenly became a business owner, and he was a twenty-nine-year-old tourist who swept me off my feet. He made me a bunch of promises I kept holding on to, even as he was making excuses for why he couldn’t move to the island to be with us. By the time Birdie was born, he was barely coming to the island once a month,” I tell him, waiting to feel the usual tidal wave of anger and resentment flow through me. Waiting to feel like a fool that I convinced him to have another baby after Wren was born because I wanted her to have a sibling, and I thought it would make him want to be here with us more. But none of those feelings show up.
“I take it he didn’t want to be a family man.”