Sweat rolled down the small of my back and into my ass crack as his fingers pressed deeply into it. I was hanging nearly off the bed as he stood, holding me easily in his hands as he slammed into me. Our voices rose in a melody of ecstasy, and he came, exploding in me and locking stock still as he filled me, and my satisfied pussy throbbed.
21
EVERETT
When our breathing calmed and her head rested on my chest, I felt the bubble of laughter coming up from my stomach. I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. It burst out of me, eliciting loud guffaws, making Helen sit up and glare at me.
I knew she thought I was laughing at her or the sex itself, and while it was wildly untrue, it only seemed to make the situation funnier. I covered my eyes with one hand and tried to squeeze them shut, wiping away the tears that were forming there. I hadn’t laughed so hard in a long, long time.
“What the hell are you laughing at?” Helen asked, looking like she was on the verge of becoming angry.
I tried to stop myself, pulling her back down onto me so her head lay on my chest. “Just give me a second,” I said between laughs. “I promise it’s not you.”
“It better not be,” she said.
Finally, the laughter slowed, and I squeezed her tightly to me and sighed. I had needed that. I’d needed all of that, from the sex to the laughter. I didn’t even realize how much tension I was carrying until it was all gone.
“Look, I didn’t know what was going on when you left,” I said.
“I told you—” she started.
“No,” I interrupted, “you didn’t. You told Rebecca. Who told Deacon. Who told me. And a message like that coming from two sources before it got to me, it seemed like you were just giving me a line.”
“Oh,” she said, her body stiffening a little.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I tried to just get on with things, but I’ll be honest, I thought maybe you weren’t coming back. Like I was that bad or something, or you just didn’t want to see me anymore, enough that you were willing to bolt to Chicago.”
“It definitely wasn’t a comment on you,” she said, huffing a laugh out herself. “Maybe you just have some abandonment issues you need to work out.”
“Heh,” I said. “Maybe. I didn’t tell you much about my parents, did I?”
“No,” she said, the humor dropping out of her voice.
I sighed. “I don’t want to get things too heavy.”
“If you don’t want to talk about it, it’s fine,” she said. “But I would like to hear about it, if you want.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. She nodded. “Alright. But you asked.”
“I did,” she said, propping herself up on my chest, her arms folded, and her head rested on one of them. Her beautiful green eyes stared so deeply into me I felt like she could see my soul.
“I told you I came from a family with money,” I said. “My parents would often up and leave, heading who knew where for who knew how long. It wasn’t uncommon for me to wake up to them having left before I got up and they would be gone for a week or two. I might get a call that first night, then another midway through their trip. Then one day, they would show back up with a bunch of presents. Like that made up for them being gone.”
“That’s terrible,” she said.
“It was,” I said. “But you know, my uncle was there all the time. He made sure that I had actual family around. My grandparents were old and living in another state, and Mom didn’t have any siblings. So, it was just my dad’s brother, Uncle Harry. He came down one time to visit his brother and saw that I was essentially home alone with the help and stayed the entire time. After that, if I woke up and they weren’t there, I could call him. He would drop everything to come to me or would send someone to fetch me and bring me to him.”
“He sounds like a good man,” she said.
“He is,” I said. “It was because of him that I was able to start the logging business with the guys.”
“Oh really?” she asked.
“Yeah, I hate to break this to you, but I don’t have any of my folks’ money,” I said with a laugh. “They cut me off when I joined the Army instead of going into the family business.” I was interested in how she responded to that. It was a test and a big one.
“I don’t care about that,” she said, and the tension in my neck disappeared.
“Good,” I said. “But yeah, Uncle Harry invested in the business simply because I told him I believed it could work. He didn’t even ask any questions, just said he would check in every once in a while, and that I could buy out his investment as soon as I wanted. If I ever wanted to.”