All the Things We Need Page 26

  I didn’t text him again.

  CHAPTER 35

  One week. Not a word. Then another week as deathly cold and silent as the first. Niall’s silence seemed as clear an answer to me as if he’d told me to my face he never wanted to see me again.

  I don’t make good decisions when I’m upset. Hell, I don’t make good decisions when I’m happy. As far as shitty choices went, I was in no frame of mind to figure out if trusting Niall had been one more in a long string of them, worse than a tattoo could ever be. All I knew was that I was hurting, and the last person who’d done anything to make me feel better in any way had been Esteban. So I made another stupid decision, and I called him. I’d never called him before. He’d only ever called me. He answered, sounding distant and wary, but he answered.

  “I need you,” I said.

  He sighed. “Querida…”

  I wasn’t crying, but close to it. I closed my eyes. My fingers gripped the phone, and I pressed it hard enough to my ear to hurt. And because I knew him well enough to know what buttons to press and how hard to press them, I pushed them. Hard.

  “Esteban,” I whispered. “Por favor.”

  * * *

  Esteban met me, as I knew he would. I was the one who got there first, waiting for him, and when he came inside, I didn’t make him get on his knees. I didn’t toss down a bag of toys. I simply took his hand and led him to the bed, where I pushed him gently until he sat. Then I straddled his lap and took his face in my hands, and I kissed him on the mouth.

  “What do you want,” he asked against my mouth. “What do you need?”

  “I don’t know anymore,” I whispered.

  Esteban pulled away to look at me, his dark eyes clouded with concern. He stroked a thumb under each of my eyes then tucked it into his mouth. I licked my lips and tasted salt. Then he nodded.

  He rolled me over and moved me up the bed like I weighed nothing. He kissed my eyes. My cheeks. My jaw, my throat, my chin. He unbuttoned my blouse and caressed my breasts, bare beneath, cupping them in his hands. He sucked gently at each nipple until they stood up, tight and red, then flicked them with his tongue until I writhed.

  He undressed me and covered every inch of me with kisses. He moved between my legs and parted me, opening me to his mouth and tongue, the press of his teeth shielded by his lips. Esteban knew my body. He didn’t need my commands. His worship went on and on until I came, gasping, and then he left me only long enough to put on a condom before he was on top of me again.

  He pushed inside me with a low grunt. He bent his face to the side of my neck. At first he fucked me slowly, and then he moved faster, harder. He came with a shudder and a low shout and fell on top of me.

  He rolled off me a moment or so later and lay staring up at the ceiling with his hands folded on his chest. I lay in a similar position next to him. I listened to his breathing slow. I still tasted salt. Tears, sweat, it didn’t matter.

  “We’ve never done it like that before,” Esteban said. “Me on top.”

  I didn’t move. “You didn’t like it.”

  He turned his head to look at me. “I always like it with you.”

  “Then why—” I stopped myself with a shake of my head and turned away from him on my side. I didn’t want to ask. As always with him, I didn’t want to know.

  He spooned me from behind, his lips pressed to my shoulder. “I missed you.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have gone away.” It came out harder than I meant it to.

  He sighed. “I’m sorry. I had to. I thought it would be easier if I did it that way. Because I knew if I told you, I would not be able to do it.”

  I covered my face with my hands, weeping in silence. Quaking with it, while he held me. The thing was, I couldn’t tell if I was crying because of Esteban, or Niall, or that other one whose real name I never said. For all three, I guessed. And for myself, who kept making the wrong choices over and over again. Like hurt was all I was ever destined to have.

  We lay there until his phone blared, startling us both. He didn’t answer it or even look to see who was calling, but I felt the tension in his muscles. I sat up and excused myself to the restroom, where though I ran the water, I still heard him murmuring into the phone. When I came out, he’d dressed and was sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “I know,” I said. “You have to go.”

  “Come. Sit.” He patted the edge of the bed.

  I did. He took my hand. Our fingers linked. We sat like that for the time it took the numbers to change on the clock.

  “I can’t see you anymore,” Esteban said. “I thought it would be easier not to say it to your face, but it was not. I’m sorry I didn’t do a better job of it. And I’m sorry about whatever happened to you that made you so sad.”

  “Thank you for telling me and not making me have to guess it. Again,” I added, just to watch him wince. But then I kissed him. “It was the agreement. Thank you for telling me.”

  “I was bad at it before. I’m sorry.”

  I leaned my shoulder into his then put my head on it. “I’m going to miss you.”

  Esteban made a small noise, and when I looked at him, he’d covered his eyes. All I could see was the downward curve of his mouth. When he reached for me, I held him. Tight.

  “You’ve been so dear to me,” I told him. “I cherish you, Esteban. I’m sorry I never said it before. I know you wanted to hear it. I’m sorry I never gave you that.”

  “You gave me much,” he said.

  I smiled, still tasting tears. “You gave me much, too.”

  He leaned to kiss me, but at the last moment, I turned my face. Not out of spite, but because I could not bear it. That our last kiss should taste of tears. He kissed my cheek instead, and the corners of my eyes. I wanted to hold on to him harder before he left, but I didn’t.

  I let him go.

  CHAPTER 36

  Niall was waiting in my driveway when I got home.

  I hadn’t showered. I wore the stink of sex on me like a cloak; my hair was mussed. I was sure my lips were swollen. But so were my eyes, because I’d cried the entire way home. I pulled in beside him and thought, oh, fuck.

  I got out of the car. So did he. I waited for him to speak, and when he didn’t, I headed for my front door.

  “So,” he said from behind me on the porch.

  I turned. “What do you want?”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  I stared at him without speaking. I wasn’t sure what I had to say. Oh, I had plenty of words, but none seemed willing to force themselves out of my mouth. I wanted to fall into his arms and kiss him, but I didn’t move.

  “We can talk out here,” I said.

  “What, like strangers? Like I’m trying to sell you a vacuum cleaner?”

  I crossed my arms. “You have something to say to me? You’d better start talking, because in about a minute I’m going to go inside and ignore you the way you were ignoring me for two weeks.”

  “Is that what this is about?”

  “No,” I told him. “This is also about what happened in Baltimore, and how you acted there, not just the fact you haven’t answered a single fucking text in two weeks. You just disappeared, Niall.”

  I started crying then. He moved toward me, but I blocked his embrace with my shoulder. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Can we not do this on your front porch, please?”

  I swiped at my face. “You don’t want the neighbors to see?”

  “I don’t think you want the neighbors to see,” he said under his breath, looking over his shoulder then back at me. Everything in his expression screamed misery.

  I wanted him to be miserable. I also wanted him to be wrong about me, though he wasn’t. I unlocked my door and went inside without inviting him in.
He was already in anyway, in every way that counted.

  “Where were you?”

  “Out.” I tossed my bag onto the chair and went into the powder room to rinse my mouth and smooth my hair. I turned my face from side to side, trying to see if he would know I’d been with Esteban. Not sure I cared.

  Niall was waiting for me in the kitchen. He’d helped himself to a glass of water and set one out for me. I sat, but didn’t pick up the water. He was wrong this time, I thought meanly. I wasn’t thirsty.

  It didn’t make me feel any better.

  “I just don’t understand why you got so upset,” Niall began, and I stopped him with a look.

  “I don’t understand why you don’t understand.”

  He looked mad then sad. “I’m sorry. Okay? I’m really sorry. I’m trying to apologize.”

  “You made me feel like shit. About us. About me,” I said. “You don’t understand why?”

  “No. Not really. But I’m sorry I did.”

  I shook my head. “How can you be sorry if you don’t really think you did something wrong?”

  “I can be sorry I hurt you,” Niall said.

  I started to cry again. No sobs. Just tears leaking hotly down my cheeks, myself incapable of holding them back. I sat in front of him and let him see me weep, not caring if I looked ugly, if he saw me breaking, if he saw by watching how much he’d made me come undone.

  Because that was love, at least the only kind it seemed I’d ever have.

  Niall reached for my hand, and I let him take it. “Let me make it up to you. Please?”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “Dinner? Flowers? You name it,” he told me. “Whatever you want, whatever you like.”

  “Would you let me tie you up? Blindfold you? Would you get on your knees for me, Niall, or let me dress you in lingerie or fuck you in the ass?” I took my hand from his and got up. My chair screeched on the linoleum. “Would you come for me, if I ask you to?”

  “I don’t… Elise.” He shook his head, looking pained, lip a little curled.

  “Because I like those things. A lot. I like to have a man on his knees for me, worshipping me, doing whatever I tell him to do. I like lingerie on men. Hard cocks in lace panties damp with precome, because he’s so fucking hard for me that not only would he come for me if I told him to, I wouldn’t have to fucking touch him.” The words tumbled out of me, cold and hard and somehow emotionless. I heard myself saying them, still felt the scald of tears on my face, but inside I felt…nothing. I’d gone numb.

  Niall recoiled. “You want to know why I wouldn’t do it? Why I wouldn’t just come for you on command, like I was your lapdog?”

  “Yes. I want to know why my asking you to give me something you seemed really eager to give me was such a huge, enormous deal. Tell me.”

  “Because all I could think about was how many other guys you’d probably done the same thing with. Your lovers, whatever the hell you called them. All I could think about were those pictures of you, and how beautiful you looked in them, and how content, and how I was never going to be able to do any of that stuff for you. I was never going to be that guy, and I was never going to like that sort of thing, and how you were going to keep asking me to push my boundaries, and I didn’t want to do it. Okay? I didn’t want to try and measure up to something I just don’t have in me. I’m never going to make you happy, Elise. Not like that. If that’s what you need, I just can’t.”

  “So then why bother?” I asked him. “Why fucking bother with the dinner and the flowers and all that other bullshit? If you really think you’ll never make me happy?”

  He didn’t say anything, but that was exactly what I expected him to say.

  “You want to know why you’ll never make me happy?” I didn’t want to look at his face, but I made myself stare him right in the eye. “Because you don’t know me.”

  “I know you,” he said, but I cut him off with a shake of my head.

  “You can’t possibly. If you’d ever listened to me, all along, you’d know. But I don’t think you’ve listened, Niall, because it’s obvious you believe there’s only one way for me to be, and it’s something you don’t want. Did it ever occur to you that there’s more to me than any one thing?”

  Again, nothing.

  “You’re so caught up in what you think I want that you have no idea who I am,” I told him. “But what you don’t seem to understand is that I love you, Niall.”

  In Baltimore I’d told him I loved him, and he had not said it back. I’d taken a chance and said it again, and if that made me desperate and pathetic, well…if you can’t make yourself a fool for love, you don’t deserve to have it. I waited for him to answer me.

  He stood. “I’ll just go.”

  I’d jumped, but Niall did not catch me.

  CHAPTER 37

  I told myself it was for the best. I’d already gone down the road with someone who would not give me what I wanted, and it had left me shattered. Better to end things now, I thought, before I got in too deep.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I told Evan, who’d only given me a look and hadn’t said anything at all about it. “Things end. It’s just what happens sometimes.”

  “Shit, you got that right,” he said bitterly and dumped sugar in his coffee with such vehemence a bunch of it scattered across the table.

  I added cream to mine, waiting patiently for the sugar he was abusing. “What’s going on?”

  “I told her to get the fuck out,” my brother said quietly and far more calmly in tone than his words suggested he felt.

  “Oh.” I stirred my coffee.

  “She said you knew.”

  My heart sank. “I’m sorry. I thought it was her place to tell you.”

  “Yeah. I’m not…well, I am sort of pissed at you. I feel like an asshole. How long?” He sat back in the diner booth, his hair standing on end from where he’d run a hand through it over and over.

  “I don’t know. And I didn’t know for a long time, Evan. I promise. I mean, I thought she was acting weird—”

  “Yeah, right? Shit.” He shook his head. “I thought it was just stress about the Bar Mitzvah.”

  “That might’ve been part of it. Did she say that?”

  My brother hunched forward, both hands wrapped around his mug. “She said a lot of things. It doesn’t really matter. She’s in love with the other guy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We got married too young. Had a kid. I’d never have married her if not for William, you know. We weren’t really all that good together. I just thought it was the right thing to do. And then after a while it’s so much easier to be with someone than it is to even think about trying to start all over. At least, that’s what I thought. I guess she didn’t.”

  “How’s William?”

  “He’s okay, actually. He joined the cross-country team and got a part in the school play. Keeps him busy after school pretty much every day. And maybe it’ll be good for him, get his mind off it. Gives Susan time to look for a place. We’ll have to refinance, get a home equity loan so I can buy her out. It’s going to fuck us financially.”

  I winced. “Ouch. I’m sorry.”

  “Hey. Better now than in ten years. Or twenty. I’m trying to look at it practically.” My brother cut a square of his chicken parmesan and chewed.

  I poked at my cheese omelet, but didn’t feel like eating it. “What did Mom say about it? Jill?”

  “Jill was a dick about it, of course. Mom was more understanding. She said Susan was a good mother and she’d be sure to do the best thing for William, and that’s all that mattered. I didn’t tell either one of them about the other guy, though.”

  “Probably better not to. How are you about that?”

  Evan
scowled. “Well. I don’t like it, that’s for sure. But let’s face it. Another guy wasn’t the real problem. Happy people don’t cheat. She wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy. Maybe we both have a chance to you know, get happy.”

  “You’re a lot more understanding about it than I would be.”

  He laughed. “I punched a hole in the wall in the den when I found out.”

  “No way!” I gaped.

  He nodded. Then looked sad. “It nearly fucking broke my hand. Didn’t make me feel any better, and it cost me a hundred and some change to fix it.”

  “Moral lesson, don’t punch a wall. Got it.” I gave him a sympathetic smile. “You sure you’re not mad at me for not telling?”

  “Would it have made it any better?”

  “I don’t know. You might’ve found out a little sooner.”

  “She’d have lied about it. She flat-out told me so. Then it would’ve been ugly between you and me. Nah, it’s okay. Susan told me what you said to her, about how she needed to get her act together. She said it was why she came clean.” Evan cut another piece of chicken and chewed slowly. When he opened his mouth to show me the disgusting mess inside his mouth, I knew he was going to be okay.

  “You’re such a pig.”

  Evan grinned. “Love you, sis. It’s going to be okay. One way or another.”

  I nodded, hating the tears threatening again and forcing them away. “Yep. One way or another, everything always is.”

  CHAPTER 38

  It had been a long-standing summer tradition for me to take William to as many street fairs and carnivals as we could find over the summer, but so far we hadn’t managed to get to even one. When I heard about this fall’s Fireman’s Carnival in Mechanicsburg, I knew I had to take him.