Page 34 of Between Brothers

Blue remained silent, and though I couldn’t look him in the eyes, I could feel him watching me. His thumbs never stopped making those soothing motions, lightly encouraging me across the backs of my fingers back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

“I wasn’t popular, so we had to keep it a secret… or so he said and I believed him. You know? I didn’t want to cause him trouble and I certainly didn’t want the wrath of the mean girls. I was seventeen, and high school was everything back then.”

I pursed my lips and closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I let the breath out slowly and bucked up, this was so painful. “He was my first and it was all a trick to get me into bed with him. There was a bet going around inside his circle of friends that he couldn’t get me to put out and…” Tears sprang to my eyes. I hated this part. I hated even more what I’d done because of it.

“We used his room, his parents were out of town and I thought it was beautiful, right? It only hurt for a minute, but I bled, you know, and it got on the sheets and when I went to school on Monday,” the tears fell, I couldn’t stop them… “The sheet was flying from the top of the flagpole and everyone was laughing at me and calling me a slut.”

I pulled my hands from his and pressed them to my face which was burning with fresh shame. The horror and embarrassment was unreal. I missed my mom, my dad wasn’t doing the best and was all about the diner. I fell into a deeper darker depression that I couldn’t get out of on my own. I was alone, and lonely, and two months before my eighteenth birthday I slit my wrists in a hot bath and tried to make it all disappear.

Blue held me to him, his arms around me, hand in the back of my hair kneading my scalp as I wept bitterly into the front of his leather jacket. It’d been years before I let another man in, and the results then weren’t pretty either. I’d loved him. We’d even been engaged… until I found out that he had been cheating. His excuse? I was perfect wife material, good breeding stock, but I was boring and didn’t make him happy. I made his parents happy though, so I guess there was that.

My dad had gone after him with a knife from the kitchen and had chased him all the way up the street. He’d spent the night in jail for it, but I’d never seen Beauregard again.

Blue weathered the storm of my past beautifully and dried my tears. The look on his face and in his eyes one of admiration. I didn’t understand that.

“Let’s go inside,” he murmured. “We don’t need to do anything tonight, but I would really like to hold you, and I’d really like to have you in my bed regardless of how many clothes we do or don’t have on.”

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