By the time I come down, Shay’s movements slow until finally, he pulls his fingers away and carefully pulls my sweats back up.
For a few minutes, as I silently lay there, I’m overcome by mixed emotions. I’m so confused, I have no idea what to say. What just happened? But before I can really dwell on it, Shay shifts me up, turning me in his lap so that I’m facing him, and gets to his feet. Much like when we were dancing, he holds me against his chest, my eyes at level with his chin as he walks, my feet hanging in the air. He doesn’t say a word as he carries me down the hall to my room, and I don’t either. My heart is still racing in my chest, and because I’m crushed against him, I can feel that his is, too. He’s still hard, and presses into my hip.
My arms are around his neck as I steady myself, but they really don’t need to be. I know he’d never let me fall.
I avoid his gaze, suddenly overwhelmingly shy, but I can feel him watching me closely.
In my room, he sets me down on my bed and rolls me onto my stomach and yanks my sweats down again.
“Shay, what are you-”
“Just need to tend to the area, Sweetness,” he says in a low rumble as he opens my bedside table drawer and pulls out my bottle of coconut body lotion. “This will help.” I reach for it, but Shay ignores me. Instead, he squirts a healthy amount into his hands, and starts gently rubbing it onto my backside. I hiss a little from the small stinging, but he’s right, the cool lotion is soothing as hell. I clutch my pillow and turn my face away, embarrassed to be so intimately touched by him.
As good as it feels, I’m still dazed and flustered by what just happened. Why did he do that? Why did he like doing that? Why did I? As my sanity comes back to me, I feel an overwhelming urge to cry, and soon several tears leak from the corners of my eyes.
Shay’s hands leave me and I can hear him moving around my room and close the bedroom door. Seconds later, the bed shifts beside me and his arms wrap around me, rolling me towards him. He’s in his boxer-briefs, ready for bed, and once he settles me against his side, Shay leans over, turns on my nightlight, and turns off the bedroom light.
He rests on his side, facing me, and cuddles me close, one hand running through my hair, the other rubbing my back, comforting me. I feel him press kisses to my temple before he murmurs, “I love you, Mina. You know that, right? I’m here for you. I’ll always be here. I won’t abandon you. I won’t leave. I’ll take care of you. I promise.”
My lungs give out from his whispered vow, my breath shaky and uneven. I huddle against him, so grateful for it. I’ve lost almost everyone and everything I’ve ever cared about or wanted… it’s all gone. But Shay, he’s here. He’s all I have. I don’t know exactly what that was tonight, but he’s here with me, and right now, that’s all I need.
The Past…
Mina: Twelve Years Old
June
“I want my party at the club,” I tell Mum over breakfast.
It’s been an ongoing argument this last week… where are we going to celebrate my thirteenth birthday? James, Shay, and I all want it at the Beasts clubhouse, a place where I’ve spent more than half my childhood hanging out. Mum, however, has decided to be a major buzzkill and wants us to go to some fancy Italian restaurant in the city of Ashland, which is half an hour away from our little town. I mean, the food there is good. But they don’t take reservations, and any time we’ve gone in the past, we’ve had to wait over an hour to get a table.
“It’s not appropriate, Mina,” my mum has her back to me, but I can see how tense she is as she leans against the counter, drinking a huge cup of coffee. She had a late night last night and stumbled home in the early hours of the morning. When she finally emerged for breakfast, she looked like a train-wreck with her makeup smudged over her face and dark bags under her eyes. Her dark brown hair was a knotted mess and she stank of booze and cigarettes. Guess she hadn’t looked in a mirror yet. I wanted to shove her into the shower and scrub the makeup, grime, and stink off of her so I could see the mother I’d grown up with, rather than this sad, pitiful, and tragic woman in front of me.
“I always have so much fun there,” I say resentfully, hating how she was such a downer all the time. “Uncle Shawn and Uncle Marty said they’d get me a-”
“Those men are not your uncles!” Mum snapped and turned, her eyes practically blazing at me.
I sat back in my chair, troubled by her reaction. Since when did Mum hate Shawn and Marty? I mean, she was right, they weren’t my uncles, but they were as good as. Every time I stopped by the clubhouse to drop off brownies or some other dessert I’d baked up for James and Shay, I always made sure I had enough for them, too. They showed me how to play foosball with the machine in their game room. Until I was ten, Uncle Marty, or Blade as some of the guys at the clubhouse called him, carried me around and showed up alongside my stepdad at all my ballet recitals. Shawn and his old lady, as he sometimes called her, Raya, showed up at my elementary school Christmas performances and my latest school play, which was a weird collaboration of Dr. Seuss stories. I played Thing 2. They were always around, and they always treated me like I was a member of the family. All the guys at the clubhouse, and their wives, treated me that way. Of course I wanted to spend my birthday with them. And because there were so many of them, having it at the clubhouse just made sense.
“Em, it’s her birthday,” James finally spoke up on my behalf and I sighed with relief. I loved my mum, but in the past few years, she’s seriously become a mopey drag. She was so tense all the time, and I rarely saw her smile. She makes it to less than half of my dance recitals, and I can’t remember the last time she showed up at a parent/teacher conference. It was always James and Shay. “And as it’s her thirteenth birthday, I think it should be her choice where we spend it. She wants to do something at the clubhouse? I say she couldn’t have picked a better spot.”
“Do you really think any of her friends’ parents would allow their children to attend a birthday there?” Mum’s voice was like ice. The weird tone she used made it seem like she was sending James some sort of underlying message in her words. I looked back and forth between them, confused. My two closest friends, Becca and Ashley, had never been allowed to visit the clubhouse. James’ rules. For a brief moment, I wondered if he would let them just for my birthday. But if I had to choose, I’d rather spend the birthday with Shay, Mum, James, and the Beasts than with my only two friends. Becca and Ashley were great, but I often felt like a third wheel in our little group. I knew they were closer to each other than with me, and I tried not to feel resentful when I found out they’d hung out and not asked me to join them. So I didn’t feel too badly about the idea of not being allowed to invite them.
“She’ll have all of us,” Shay spoke up then and came around from the opposite side of the table. He grinned at me and ruffled my hair. “And the kids of the other members. They’re all around her age. She doesn’t need any of those losers from her school coming.”
“Shay!” I scrunched up my nose and smacked his hand away as he dug it deeper into my skull. He could be so annoying sometimes. “Don’t call them that!”