Page 35 of His to Cherish
“You can’t take advantage of someone if they’re willing, Aidan.”
His head dropped and turned in my direction, and what I saw sucked the breath out of my lungs.
I needed oxygen. I needed a cooling fan to dissipate the heat blasting from his eyes and his tightened jaw.
Aidan looked away quickly, but that same swirling mass of heat was pooling between us. It traveled from my fingertips up my arms to my chest, where my heart miraculously and thankfully started beating again.
I could feel it pounding against my chest.
“I just stopped by for pizza with a friend.”
A move I would never be stupid enough to make again. The cupcakes and scones and bagels soothed the pain. Slightly.
“I don’t have anything to give you,” he said, and my heart clenched again. His voice rumbled like a thunderstorm. “Not anymore.”
“The good thing about friends is that they’re there for you when you don’t have anything. I already told you I’m here for whatever you need.”
One eyebrow slowly rose. “Anything I need?”
Oh God. When he put it like that…
I flashed him a playful look, knowing he was teasing and trying to lighten the subject. He didn’t mean it the way I thought he did. He couldn’t, not after just telling me he didn’t have anything to give me. “Not like that and you know it.”
As his lips pulled into a light grin, the thoughts of what it’d be like took off like a runaway train inside my head.
I would love to know what it was like to be surrounded by his warm, thick arms, strong from daily hard labor. He was all man. I could only imagine his chest hair, probably as dark as the hair on his head, and what that coarse hair would feel like scraping across my nipples.
They hardened and tingled at the thought.
I gulped, clenched my jaw, and avoided looking at Aidan as I reached for my second cupcake.
“Want one?” I asked, offering him a vanilla one when I saw he hadn’t touched the strawberry.
But nobody was getting my chocolate.
“Yeah,” he said, leaning forward and taking the sugary confection out of my hand. As his fingertips brushed over mine, his eyes pierced mine. “I’d like this.”
—
We spent the day in conversation, drifting back and forth between the inside of my house and my backyard. As the day passed, Aidan started to talk.
Not much, but he told me about his dad’s death and taking over the construction company. He talked about what it had felt like when Derrick’s mom, Mandy, had left one day, waking up and declaring, “I’m too young to have a kid.” She walked out the door, duffel bag in her hand, leaving a screaming two-year-old behind, and apparently hadn’t looked back except for the random times she showed up with a birthday gift for her son, usually a few months late.
I already didn’t like the woman, but now I despised her. She didn’t even know her kid had died.
Thick sludge filled my gut when Aidan told me. Eventually she was going to just randomly show up at his house, expecting to see a son she barely had a relationship with, only to find out he was dead. What would that be like for Aidan when she appeared, gift in hand for a son who wasn’t there to take it from her slimy, selfish, and probably manicured, fingertips?
I told him about Cory. I told him about not being able to have kids, but only because he asked. I didn’t give him the specifics about my endometriosis, lack of normal periods, and the ovary I had to have removed at the age of twenty due to a large ruptured cyst. It simply wasn’t something you shared with a man you weren’t seriously dating.
He let me give him what I could, just like I did for him.
By the time the sun began to dip behind the trees and the yard was shaded and cooling, Aidan offered to build a campfire so we could stay out back.
I let him and loved watching him bend over in his perfectly fitted jeans while he arranged the logs, started the fire, and then pulled two deck chairs over to the fire pit near the back of my yard. I used it frequently in the summer, sometimes by myself with music playing from my phone when I needed to relax, but mostly when I had the girls over and we drank too much wine and made s’mores like we were still teenagers. Last summer, Declan and Tyson also joined us when they could.
There were nights I craved the quiet paved and landscaped area—alone with my thoughts, my music, and the crackling of firewood.
It relaxed me in a way nothing else could, but nothing could beat the sight of Aidan walking out of my sliding door, holding a bottle of wine and two glasses.
