Page 23 of Caleb's Salvation
Then there was everything else about her. She’d never had a sip of beer. Never had sex outside an encounter or two with a guy who hadn’t protected her and left her with his responsibility.
Her naiveté should have been a turn-off. I didn’t need young. I didn’t want inexperience.
And she had fucking freckles all over her face. Why did I fucking want to touch every single one of them with my tongue?
From the moment she’d gotten off the damn plane, she’d been in my head and in my dick.
And she wasn’t leaving! No matter how many times I told her she couldn’t stay. Which meant this…whatever this fucking was…wasn’t going away.
The jealousy. The wanting. The way my heart started beating out of my chest just because I rubbed my thumb along her wrist.
I pounded the shower wall with my fist as the realization hit me hard.
She. Wasn’t. Leaving.
And I was so fucking hard for her I didn’t know how it was going to stop.
“Fuck!”
I grabbed my dick. Fucking my fist furiously, squeezing myself almost to the point of pain. I hadn’t had the willpower to resist, but I wasn’t going to let myself fucking enjoy this. Not any more than the relief of coming would bring.
I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to see her face as she’d been leaning toward me, a spot of beer foam on her top lip. I had been so close to touching her, to touching that lip.
How would that have looked to Sarah?
How would this look now? Me, in the shower, jerking off to a woman who was not my dead wife.
My balls got tight and I could feel it coming over me. I didn’t try to prolong it, just pushed myself to come. Hard spurts pouring out of me as Vivienne’s face swam before my eyes.
When it was over, I bent my forehead to the shower wall and closed my eyes.
“Sarah, what am I supposed to do?”
There was no answer. There never was. Because she was dead, and I was still alive.
That was never going to change.
I turned off the shower and got out. I dried myself off and got into bed naked, which was how I slept. It was one of things that actually annoyed Sarah.
She thought it was uncouth or something to sleep bare-assed naked. That civilized men wore pajama bottoms at the very least.
I smiled remembering how I would wake her up in the morning with my naked, morning wood pressed against her ass and she would shriek like something had bit her.
Almost every damn time, she shrieked like that.
It was strange, but for the first time, I felt like I could have that memory without being sad. That I could remember without the pain that always seemed to come with those memories.
Did that mean I was ready to move on?
How could I do that when I promised I never would?
“A need sign, Sarah,” I told the ceiling. “I need a goddamn sign.”
Because I started to realize, just like I hadn’t been able to stop myself from coming tonight, it was getting harder and harder to resist going after what I wanted.
And what I wanted was fucking Vivienne.
7
