“What are you doing?” she asked sweetly, but she knew exactly what I was doing.
“I’m going to make you feel good,” I said. “Get in the tub.”
I flung my shorts to the side as she slipped into the water.
“Do you want to see what you do to me?”
She nodded, and I flipped the view on my camera, giving her a view of my abs, my hard cock as I took it in one hand and squeezed. I groaned at the feel of it, wishing it was her hand instead as I stroked myself and watched her eyes on the screen.
“Fuck, Jamie,” she whispered, sinking deeper into the water. She grabbed one of her breasts, massaging it as I ran my hand over my shaft again.
“Pretend that hand is mine,” I instructed. “Touch yourself the way I would if I were there.”
B bit her lip, dragging her hand down into the water and letting the camera follow. It was hard to see through the water, but I knew her hand slipped between her thighs, that her fingers rubbed her clit as she arched into the touch with a deep moan.
It was sweet torture, watching her play with herself as I rubbed out my own release. We took our time, panting and moaning and sweating before we both came. I cleaned up while B drained the tub, and then we both crawled into bed, halfway across the country from each other, but it somehow felt like she was right there.
“Be with me,” I whispered.
“I am with you.”
“No, I mean, really be with me. Be my girlfriend.”
Her sated smile slipped, eyebrows furrowing.
“Why do we have to put a title on it? Can’t we just… I don’t know. We’re friends, Jamie. Best friends. I love talking to you, I miss you, I like making you feel good.”
She blushed, and I tried not to curse at the way she’d called us friends.
“Exactly, so why does it freak you out so much to be official?”
“It’s not that it freaks me out,” she tried to explain. “It’s just that this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever been completely on my own, Jamie. I need to just be myself for a while. You know how the last few years have been for me.”
I had to fight not to scoff at that, because I didn’t know. She’d refused to let me in. She’d shoved me out of her life, and had I not walked into that bar that night, I’m not sure she would have ever let me back in.
“Let’s just exist, and let it go where it will go. No sense in putting pressure on either of us right now.”
I swallowed, heat claiming my chest. “Are you hooking up with other guys?”
“What?” B balked, shaking her head. “No, of course not. I don’t even know any other guys out here.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I know, but I’m just saying.”
I gritted my teeth. “Would you be okay if I hooked up with other girls?”
Her face paled, and I knew before she answered that she would hate it just as much as I would. “Yeah. I mean, I guess. I get it. You have needs.”
Liar.
“Again, that’s not the point.” I sighed, running my hand through my hair. I didn’t know how to make her understand. “I know it sounds stupid, but when I lost you three years ago, I told myself I’d never let that happen again. It’s important to me to be with you, B. But I can’t be if you don’t let me.”
B was quiet a moment.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she finally said with a smile. “But I can’t give you my all right now. I’m here to work, to get my graduate degree, and to find the rest of myself that’s still floating just out of reach. I want you, I do,” she promised. “Just give me some time to figure out my new surroundings, okay?”
My heart broke with that, because I wanted her to have her dream just as much as I wanted to have her. I knew it was important to her.
I just hated that I wasn’t top of the list.
“Whatever you need, I’ll give it to you,” I promised.
But it was me who was the liar that time.
• • •
The summer flew by in a wicked heat stroke, it seemed. And I tried to stand by my promise, all the while feeling like a disease was festering in the pit of my stomach.
On the good days, B and I would watch movies together from afar, or talk on the phone all night and I’d pretend it was enough. She even came to visit me for a weekend — though, even then, I had to share her with her mom and her mom’s new boyfriend, Wayne. Still, I cherished any time I had with her.
But it always left me wanting more.
And soon, the bad days began to outweigh the good ones.
I couldn’t understand why she was fighting it, fighting me, why she wouldn’t be mine the way I wanted her to be. I was young, selfish, and I didn’t understand how hard B had worked her entire life for the opportunity she had at Rye Publishing.
I also didn’t understand how important it was for her to be building a life on her own after everything she’d been through. That city, that job, they were just the beginning. This was her stepping into her independence, making it through a tumultuous childhood and excruciating period of grief.
I’d been so privileged with my own childhood and family, I just didn’t understand.
“Maybe it’s time for you to ask for what you want,” my youngest sister, Sylvia, told me one night.
We were sitting on the beach, the wind on our face as I poured my heart out to her. Although, Santana was closer in age to me, Sylvia and I had just always understood each other in a way my other sister and I never did. Santana lived in New York now, but Sylvia was living at home with Mom and Dad for now, and I selfishly loved still having her close.
“I have. She knows.”
Sylvia shook her head. “I don’t mean tell her what you want and then accept when she says no. I mean, tell her that you need something more concrete than what you have now, or you need to walk away. Because, Jamie, this in-between you’re stranded in?” Sylvia shook her head. “It’s killing you.”
She was right. Over the summer, I’d found it harder and harder to eat right and treat my body well. I was drinking way more than I should have been, and never finding a restful night of sleep.
It was a special kind of hell, and yet the thought of walking away from B made me double over with a fierce stomachache.
“What if I ask her to be with me, and she says no again?”
Sylvia sighed. “Then you let her go.”
I mulled over that conversation for days before I finally got the guts to tell B we needed to talk. I hated sending that text, knowing it would likely have her wheels spinning, but there was no other way around it.
I couldn’t pretend anymore.
As you know already from reading her side of our story, timing was never kind to us. And while, in that moment, I felt completely valid in everything I felt and was asking of her, I see now how selfish I was, how I couldn’t see past what was right in front of me to the potential future we could have together.
She wasn’t asking me for anything but time and space, but giving it to her felt impossible.
She called me on the night she found out she’d been promoted at Rye Publishing. Of course, I didn’t know that yet, and so with my sister’s words in my ear, I begged B one last time to give me what I needed.