What I was letting myself believe was the beginning of something amazing is only the end for her.
“So that’s what this is?” Her eyes dart away. “Get it out of our systems?”
Is she so damn stubborn that she thinks this is what I want? Was her riding my dick a thank you for purchasing and gifting her mother’s house to her? The possibility makes me sick, my stomach literally turning sour as I watch her straighten her shirt.
I know her body felt pleasure. She came too hard to deny that, but if her heart wasn’t in the same place mine was, that changes everything.
“Tinley!” I snap again, hands trembling to touch her but knowing it wouldn’t be welcomed right now.
“Yes,” she says, the word weak as she turns to walk toward the front door. “Getting it out of our systems.”
Then she leaves.
I don’t know how long I stand in the middle of the demolished kitchen with my dick out waiting for her to come back.
She doesn’t come back.
She didn’t take the check either.
Or the paperwork for the house.
But as I place them back into the envelope, I refuse to imagine a world where we aren’t together.
Chapter 32
Tinley
I’ve made more mistakes in my life than I care to admit.
Saturday, going to him, doing what we did was just another one to add to the list.
But I can’t stop thinking about it. Can’t stop living it again.
And it’s not just the sex that infiltrates my mind making it impossible to focus. Yeah, it was hot. Mind-blowing. The best experience of my life.
But it was also tainted with anger and lies and false hope.
Do you think that would stop me from fucking you if you offered?
He said those words to me shortly after showing up on my doorstep.
He’s a man. Sex is what they do. They wield it as a weapon, and despite it being damn good sex, it was a mistake. I knew it the second he tried to kiss me after I came. Before, all I could think about was him. How I needed him. How my body craved him. How he made me feel safe.
Then reality came slamming back into me.
I went there to confront him, not fuck him.
Best laid plans and all that.
“Mom?”
I snap out of my head, finding Alex already in the car with me.
“How was school?” I ask, wondering how long it’s been since the final bell rang.
They don’t have practice today, the coach giving them a few days off after the tournament from the weekend.
“I thought Dad was going to pick me up.”
“Nope,” I say as I put the car in gear and head out of the parking lot. “You’re stuck with me today.”
The drive is spent with Alex telling me about a fight that happened in the cafeteria at lunch. I’m just grateful he was a bystander this time and not in the thick of it.
I do my best to pay attention, hoping my random noises match up with the highs and lows of the story because I can’t concentrate to save my life right now.
I left the check behind because it feels like tainted money. Despite it being owed to me, it feels like it comes with conditions attached to it, and that really sucks because I needed that money to relocate, to get us out of this neighborhood.
The deed to the house was left behind too. I can’t take that from him. I don’t care if he called it a grand gesture. There have always been conditions to every gift I’ve ever been given. This one is no different.
“Looks like I’m not stuck alone with you after all,” Alex says, a smile in his voice.
Ignacio is standing on the front stoop arms crossed over his muscled chest, and my body’s first response is heat, but not the angry kind.
I know the power he holds in those arms and thick thighs. I know that he can easily hold the weight of my entire body aloft while he fucks himself into me. I know he can make me come on his dick with a few well-aimed jabs. The man was good at sex. I thought so before when he was the only one I had been with. Not that I have much experience outside of him, but he’s one of a kind.
“Mom? Are you going to get out?” Alex is standing outside the car, bent at the waist looking at me.
I nod, turn off the ignition and climb out.
The man can’t take a hint, and each time I see him, he manages to break down just a little bit of what I’m trying to build up against him. When Alex walks up to him and wraps his arms around him, both giving the other a quick squeeze, those walls crumble just a little more, and I’m left nearly helpless at this point, out of ideas of how to protect myself and my son from the inevitable where this man is concerned.
Alex disappears inside before I make it to the stoop, but Ignacio doesn’t move to the side to let me pass him. My back straightens as I look up at him, daring him to challenge me again.
“You can’t keep doing this.”
Those are his first words as if I’m the one to show up at his house this time.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You can’t keep on with this push-and-pull bullshit, Tinley.”
“Me?” I chuckle, something I manage without the hint of a smile on my face. “I started this? You’re the expert at push and pull or have you forgotten the reason I never told you about Alex in the first place?”
“I thought we weren’t playing games.”
“There’s nothing about this situation that’s a game, and that’s the whole damn point.” I keep my voice low, but the words still come out on a growl. “I’m trying to protect myself, protect our son.”
“From me? You think you need to protect him from me?” His fist hits his chest with each angry word.
“You hurt people. It’s only a matter of time.”
His head tilts back, hands running over his face as he takes a deep breath, and I can admit this man is different from the one I used to know. Years ago, teenage Ignacio would just explode. He would take a breath before letting his rage fly, but calm or outraged, the outcome would always be the same.
“You’re hurting me,” he says, his voice eerily calm, and I can tell from the sadness raging in his eyes that it takes a lot for him to admit that out loud.
What I can’t tell is if he’s using that pain as another form of control, power he’s trying to exert over me.
“I want you, Tinley.”
“You want your son under your thumb,” I counter. “I’m just the obligation that comes along with that.”
“I swear, you—” He snaps his mouth closed, the muscles in his jaw flexing. “Okay.”
He turns around, heading into the house, and the five-minute confrontation leaves me exhausted. My body sags to the steps, unable to hold the weight of everything upright.
He can’t want me now. He didn’t want me then. Then things were much less complicated. We were practically kids. We had no money and no real jobs, not that it’s much different for me in my current situation, but I always power through.
I can make it through life without him, but his insistence that I don’t have to keeps that voice in the back of my head urging me to take a chance on constant repeat.
I want to trust him. I want to be his. I want him to love me the way I thought he did long ago. I want it all. I want to dive so far deep into him that it takes me a lifetime to crawl back out, but I don’t have to worry about just myself. I have Alex to think of, and if things go south with Ignacio and me, then that will alter what they have. I already stole nearly thirteen years from them. It would be selfish to take more, and I don’t see an outcome where Alex isn’t put in the position to have to choose between us. Either way, one of us loses and Alex loses most of all.