Page 31 of Giving Grace

“But what?” Whatever she’s about to say, I don’t want to hear it. I need to but I don’t want to.

“But maybe it’s for the best.” She sighs and gives me a crooked smile. She opens her mouth to say something else but whatever it is, she decides against it with another hand squeeze. “Besides, you’ve got bigger fish to fry than Ryan O’Connell,” she reminds me, using one of our mother’s favorite saying. “You and Molly are better off without him, right?”

Yes.

Right.

I have a daughter to raise.

An education to get.

A career to pursue.

I don’t have time for the kind of mess that letting Ryan into our lives brought to my doorstep.

So I give her hand a squeeze back and force myself to smile.

And then I lie.

“Right.”

Twenty

Ryan

Five months later

I’m on a strict schedule these days.

Up by 4AM.

In the gym by five.

In the tank for a session by seven.

Downstairs by nine, on most days, to help Henley open the center.

The hour between is for showering and what my therapist refers to self-exploration.

Which is a therapeutic code for jerking off.

Guess what time it is?

Eyes closed, jaw clenched, I lift a hand off the bed and settle it on my chest and press it against my pec, feeling my heart and it picks up the pace, starts to thump harder and louder under my hand until the rush of blood in my ears is all I can hear and the heavy push and pull of my breath in my lungs is the only thing I can feel.

The hand on my chest starts to move. Slides down the slats of my ribcage and over my abs, contracted in anticipation. A soft hiss of breath escapes my parted lips when the callused tips of my fingers reach my bellybutton, brushing against the engorged head of my cock before sliding down the thick, rigid length of it.

I’m hard today.

Sometimes I’m not.

Sometimes I just lay here for thirty minutes and feel like a failure.

Wrapping my hand around it, I give myself a testing stroke, slowly pumping my shaft from tip to base, and back again, gentling squeezing the head of it in my grip to gather the steady stream of pre-cum leaking from its tip. I keep stroking, my fist sliding up and down the length of my cock until I feel a familiar loosening in my chest, a shifting over from feeling weird and self-conscious about the fact that a mental health care professional actually prescribed me mandatory masturbation sessions to not giving a shit because this is the only time of day that I let myself think about her.

The only time I let myself remember what she felt like.

How she smelled.

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