“No, it’s not.” It’s her turn to give me a comforting squeeze. “My life would suck without you in it. And the Owens.” She shakes her head against my chest. “I don’t want to think about it.”
“You don’t have to, Firecracker. I’m not going anywhere.”
Two things happen then. First, Vivian’s question from a few nights ago pops into my head. The one about how I’d feel if Cris were to marry someone else. Devastated. That’s how I’d feel. I’d be a miserable, sorry sack and virtually inconsolable. Even now, the idea of her leaving me carves an ache deep in my chest.
Second, the phone rings again, bursting our bubble. Reality barrels in on our fantasy world. There’s work to be done. A job we do together. We pull on our clothes in our respective corners of my bedroom and barely make eye contact while doing it. She answers the phone, first putting on her “work voice.” I smile sadly as I realize I know she has a “work voice” to put on.
Reality is a world away from where we were an hour ago, shucking our clothes and our inhibitions and talking about the things you talk about when you’re lying skin to skin with someone you care for very much. Caring for her was never up for debate. I adore her. But there’s something different about the way I care about her since we started sleeping together.
When I propositioned her, I told her, as well as myself, that it was just sex and I was providing a service. Once she gave me the go-ahead, I dove in tongue-first, content to give her everything she wanted out of her first time. Her third. Her tenth.
I sit at my desk, frowning at the screensaver on my laptop—photos of me with Nate and Archer on a golf course. One of William and me shaking hands after I accepted my high school diploma. Another of me kissing Lainey on the cheek on her birthday while she holds a giant bouquet of flowers.
Cris’s musical laugh from the other room slices me open and reveals the ugly parts I’ve been trying to keep hidden for decades. I haven’t successfully relegated what we’re doing to “just sex.” I can’t categorize what she means to me as “just” anything.
When this ends and she’s here every day, clothed, and not kissing me by the coffee pot or flirting with me when she strolls by my desk, how the hell am I going to handle it? Before we had sex, I thought we could chalk it up to fun and move on. Now, though… Knowing what I know…
How the hell am I going to let her go?