Holding_Playmaker Duet Read online

  Before settling though, I did take off my brace.

  I lay on my back, one hand on my stomach and the other lying uselessly between the two of our bodies. With as big as the bed was, I was happy that Asher didn’t leave a wealth of space between us. Asher, only inches away, was on her back and, with a quick glance in her direction, I saw she had both hands on the upper part of her stomach.

  I shifted my head on my pillow to try and make out her face.

  She was staring up at the ceiling, her eyes open.

  Maybe in the dark, it wouldn’t be so hard for her…

  I moved my hand slightly, just enough so my fingers could brush her outer thigh, before saying so quietly it probably didn’t even qualify as a whisper, “Talk to me, Asher.”

  I watched as she took a deep, slow breath.

  “I promise, beautiful, that whatever you’re holding back, it’s not as bad as you think it is,” I vowed to her, my voice still quiet.

  Her breath caught in her chest, but still, I waited.

  Would she do it?

  Could she?

  Could she finally, truly, lean on me? Let me take what she had to give? She didn’t need to hold on to it all on her own.

  Her eyes still fixed to the ceiling, she started shaking her head. “It will change everything.”

  I rolled to my side, pushing up on my elbow, but when I went to place my hand on her stomach, Asher visibly shuddered. I snapped my hand back and instead, placed it on the mattress between us. I licked my lower lip, contemplating her below me. Still, her eyes didn’t shift to mine. She was locked somewhere…

  “Asher, I know you now. Nothing you say,” I started, before taking a breath and offering her a truth of my own, “will change how I feel about you. You can put as much distance as you want between us, but I will not stop loving you.”

  This time, her eyes drifted over to mine. In the dark, I couldn’t make out the colors that haunted my dreams, but I could see the pool of tears at the bottom of her lids.

  I was fully prepared to get into another stare down with this woman, when she softly admitted, “I liked what he did to me.”

  I had to force myself to not frown in confusion. Before I could ask her to elaborate, she did on her own.

  “My body reacted to him,” she scoffed, one of her hands leaving its place on her stomach to brush down her side, in an offhanded showing. “It liked what he was doing to me,” she said, her voice cracking. “Even though I knew it was wrong.” She closed her eyes, tears falling from the heavy pools. “I liked what he did to me,” she sobbed quietly.

  “Asher, no.” I shook my head and scooped her into me, rolling to my back and cradling her to my chest. I threaded my hand into her hair and held her to me. “No, Asher. You didn’t like it,” I tried reassuring her.

  “But my body—”

  “That’s chemical,” I tried telling her. “A physical reaction. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “My body—”

  “No, Ash,” I said firmly. I shifted so I could put my hands on her face, moving her from my chest so her eyes had no choice but to meet mine. “If you had truly liked it, you would not be so broken up about it. It was a physical response, Asher. It was a power control on his part. If was not, is not, you.”

  “Everyt—”

  “It was just your body, Asher,” I pleaded with her quietly, not so what I said would be true, but so she believed it. Even if she had, in her words, liked what her foster father did to her, it wouldn’t change my opinion of her. But the fact was, she was raped, she was scared, and her body reacted. I would never hold that against her. “It’s like fight or flight. A race to the end so it’s finished. It. Was. Not. You.” I shook her head gently. “You didn’t ask for it.” I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to calm down when I realized my voice was no longer the soft whisper it was at the beginning of this. “It wasn’t you,” I promised her, my voice quiet once again.

  And, once again, I held her sobbing body against mine, wishing I could do more to prove to her that she was whole, that she was worthy, and that she was loved.

  My God, she was so fucking loved.

  When the tears finally dried, I sniffled softly. The steady thump-thump of Porter’s heart, paired with his gentle hands sliding up and down my back, was therapeutic.

  I kept replaying his words in my head, but I couldn’t get past the fact that my body reacted when I was being raped. So, he was okay with that, but would he be okay with the knowledge that I willingly put my mouth on that man?

  This time, it wasn’t tears that rose up, but the need to vomit.

  I pushed away from Porter frantically, and jumped out of the bed.

  I wasn’t going to make it to the bathroom.

  I reached for the wastebasket beside the nightstand and bent over, throwing up water and acid.

  “Asher.”

  His voice was concerned and soon I felt Porter’s hands in my hair, pulling it away from my face. I continued to dry heave into the basket, as one of his hands went to my back, rubbing between my shoulders.

  “Did you eat tonight?” he asked and I shook my head. There had been hors d'oeuvres but nothing appealed to me. I fought another bout of dry heaving, my retching causing my eyes to water.

  Finally, I put the basket down and moved to sit on the edge of the bed, my head hanging low. Porter sat right behind me, his bad knee out to my side as he squeezed my shoulders. “You okay?”

  I nodded.

  “You gonna talk to me about it?” I could hear the slightest of edges to his voice.

  I put him through so much.

  I squeezed my eyes tight and whispered, “I sucked him off so I could get our phones back.” There wasn’t a delicate way to say it. No matter what words I used, it made me a terrible person.

  Porter’s hands stilled on my shoulders and I knew it, I just knew, that those were the words that would push him over.

  I hadn’t even gone down on him in our time together, because such negative memories of when James tried to get me to do it when I was living with him. But I willingly did it to James not even two months ago.

  Surprising me, Porter banded his arms around me, one around my stomach and the other under my neck, as he pressed his mouth to my ear. “I love you, you know that?”

  “How?” I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand him. How could he…

  “You’re the strongest person I know,” he whispered into my ear. “You’re stubborn to a fault, but you are so goddamned strong, Asher. Will you do something for me?”

  Confused, I pulled away from him enough so I could look over my shoulder. “Okay?”

  “I want rules.”

  Now I frowned. “Rules?”

  He nodded before unwrapping his arms, moving back to his side of the bed and reaching over to turn the lamp on. I squeezed my eyes shut at the bright light, and soon Porter was sitting, his back to the headboard, with a pen and pad of paper in hand.

  “I promise you, I am not going anywhere,” he told me, his eyes locked on mine. “Not now, not tomorrow. Not twenty years from now. But I need to know if there’s anything else that might scare you away.”

  I moved to sit next to him and, trusting my gut, rested my head on his shoulder so I could watch as he wrote.

  “I’m not pushing you too far.” He tapped the end of the pen on his thigh. “I want to work on your boundaries. I would love to have you under me again, but not if the result is you pushing me away like you did. I need to know where your boundaries lie.”

  His acceptance…

  I had a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

  “First, have you told your therapist what you told me?”

  I lifted my head so I could look at him. “She knows most of it.” She knew I was raped. She knew my rapist was my kidnapper.

  “You should tell her all of it.”

  I pinched my lips together and averted my eyes. “We’ll see.”

  I could feel in the tensing of his body that t
hat wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but to be completely honest with Trinity…

  Avery couldn’t be there.

  I didn’t want Avery to know the full extent of it. I didn’t want her pitying looks, no matter what Porter said about it not being my fault. It was going to take time for me to get there, if I ever did.

  Porter’s acceptance was one thing.

  My believing it was another.

  I could schedule a one-on-one session with Trinity.

  Yeah. I could do that.

  I would do that.

  I pushed up enough to press my lips to the stubble on Porter’s cheek, the first contact my lips had with him in…God, how long?

  “I will,” I told him, settling back down at his side.

  “Thank you.” And then he returned my gesture, turning his head toward mine and pressing his lips—holding them—to my forehead. “And I need you to know you can come to me with anything. Everything. I will never judge you, Asher.” He broke the silent tension in the air by tapping the back of his pen against the notepad, the sound louder in the quiet room than one would think. “So. We know you like to be on top. We know I can’t box you in. For the record, I like you on top too.” He winked down at me and with that, he made the impossible happen—I relaxed and accepted this.

  True or not, meant to be comical or not, that statement just went to show how well this man had grown to know me over the years.

  I tried to think of what I could tell Porter, what I could give him for his list. Did he want reasons why things were no-gos? Or did he just want what I thought were going to be my absolute limits?

  Reading my mind, he said out loud, as he doodled on the upper corner of the paper, “Just tell me things that you think would be important for me to know.”

  “I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to go down on you,” I whispered quietly. “I know I did with—”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Don’t explain. You don’t need to explain why something makes you uncomfortable, or try to make me feel better. I trust you, Asher. Whatever you say, goes. You don’t need to explain yourself.”

  “I want to tell you,” I admitted softly.

  I watched as his chest rose slowly. “Okay.”

  “It was one of the first things he tried when I was…back when I lived with him. I didn’t let him, I was too scared.” I looked down at my lap. “And then when he had me and Avery, I knew that I could maybe get him to drop his guard if I…if I did it.”

  His hand slacked around the white and blue pen before he said, “I hate that you felt you had to, but I get it. And I understand it.”

  “You don’t have to go down on me,” I told him. “Because I don’t know that I can—”

  “Nope. I enjoy it.” His words held a dismissive tone as he wrote No BJs on the pad of paper.

  “Maybe somed—”

  “If it happens, it happens, but it’s on your watch, Ash.”

  “Stop cutting me off!” I growled, pushing away from him.

  Porter, surprising me, palmed the back of my neck and pulled me close, his lips on mine suddenly in a quick, possessive kiss, before he returned me to my earlier position.

  “Not letting you say something stupid.”

  “You’re stupid.”

  “Cute comeback.”

  I growled again, which only served as comedic to Porter, who was chuckling again.

  “I’m glad this is funny to you,” I pouted, not truly put off by it. If anything, this entire scenario was lightening the mood considerably.

  “You being upset with me cutting you off? Yeah. Funny. This?” He tapped the ball-tip of his pen into the paper more times than I could count. “Not funny. This is serious. I am going to do my damnedest to ensure you are comfortable from here on out. You want to someday try and stretch your sexual wings? Then, by all means, I’ll be your guinea pig. But I’m not about to do something that’s going to have you running away again, not if I can help it.”

  And that right there, ladies and gentlemen, was when I knew without a doubt that Porter Prescott was meant to be in my life.

  Past, present, and future.

  I was stupid to think otherwise.

  “What else?” Porter prompted, moving us along.

  “I don’t want to feel powerless.”

  I could hear him grumble something but watched as his manly penmanship wrote No Powerless.

  “You probably know this, but I need to be awake.” Even though I knew he knew, saying it out loud was helpful. I contemplated that point a moment, before moving my head so I could look at Porter’s profile. “The first time…I was asleep the first time he, um…” I swallowed and Porter shook his head.

  “I get it.”

  “Before that, he only touched,” I whispered. “It started out over my clothes, then eventually he grew bolder, touching me under them. It was a few weeks of touching, before he touched other places, before he…”

  Porter looked away from me briefly, tossing the paper and pen to the ground before looking back at me, his eyes an odd mix of concern and sadness. “I hate him.” The words were a silent venom in the quiet room. “If he wasn’t dead, I’d fucking kill him myself.”

  I couldn’t hear any more.

  I wanted her demons, I wanted the shed light on her ghosts, and what I heard made me fucking ill.

  What fucker got off on taking control from someone?

  I had to be done with the list making. What I knew about her past now would never leave my memory. It was amazing to me she even let me fucking touch her.

  I was reminded of our first times…

  The time I kissed her awake and she freaked under me.

  The first time heavy hands turned into something more, and the terrified look in her eyes as she stared up at me.

  Hell, even the last time, when she begged for me to be on top, even though I knew damn well it would send her somewhere dark.

  I vowed to be the most attentive lover in the history of all men making love to their women, if it meant keeping Asher comfortable.

  Right then though, I just needed to hold her.

  I hadn’t slept.

  I sighed quietly and looked over Porter’s body to the clock.

  Three-thirty.

  He held me through sleep, his arm hardly slacking around me once he fell off that edge of sleep, as if he was afraid of me leaving. I couldn’t blame him.

  His arm was protective, and if it weren’t for the extremely soft snores coming from his parted lips, I would think he was awake.

  I missed him.

  I missed him in every sense of the word.

  I still wasn’t convinced that I was normal, though. I’d been with two men in my life, one by choice, the other, not. I knew that my body was better prepared for Porter’s, but beyond that…an orgasm was an orgasm.

  Even though it screwed things up last time, I wanted to try…

  I wanted Porter over me, I needed him surrounding me. Only this time, I would force my mind to stay here, to not go somewhere else.

  Porter deserved my full attention.

  It was easy to get lost in the memories, but I was tired of them taking up my energy. If Porter was sticking around…

  I had no room for the memories.

  What was done, was done.

  They were in the past.

  It was time to accept the future.

  I trailed my fingers over the ridges of Porter’s abdominal muscles. “Porter,” I said quietly.

  He smacked his lips in sleep, before sighing again. He was such a heavy sleeper.

  “Porter,” I said again, leaning into him and whispering in his ear.

  I was nervous.

  Before, I would wake him up by taking him in my hand…but we weren’t there anymore. Honestly, I wasn’t sure where we were.

  We couldn’t just pick up where we left off.

  Could we?

  Could we just ignore these last ten weeks?

  I didn’t think it was possible.
Those weeks were there, and as much as he seemed to accept everything I told him, part of me was still terrified that he’d want to hold the brakes a little bit longer.

  I should just let him sleep.

  We could talk about it in the morning.

  I, however, wasn’t sleeping anytime soon.

  Resigned, I pushed up to sit on my knees. Porter’s arm dropped down, landing on my foot. He sighed in his sleep again and his hand twitched against my foot before it made purchase with my ass.

  I couldn’t help but lift my brows and shake my head at this man.

  The covers were down to his waist and I took the time to take him in.

  God, I missed him.

  I saw so much of me, in the art on his body. My eyes dropped to his ‘mom’ tattoo and I had the terrible thought—I was more than two letters on his body. What would he have done if I truly left him? How would he cover me up?

  Tears burned behind my eyes as I leaned forward to reach over his body, my fingers light on the lotus that now served as the starting point to his sleeve.

  “What’s wrong?” His sleep heavy voice broke the silence.

  Semi-amused, I moved my eyes to his still-closed ones. “How is it you never hear me call your name, but you can feel me watching you?”

  Now, he lifted his eyelids and, although it was dark, I watched as he focused in on me. “I don’t know. I just do.” He squeezed my ass in his palm before moving his hands to his sides and pushing up to sit beside me.

  “Why the tears, Ash?” He snaked a hand into my hair, holding my head carefully. I turned my head so I could press my nose into his palm, taking my first true deep breath in weeks.

  “Just thinking.”

  His fingers flexed against my scalp and I could feel his need to pull me in, to kiss me, but he held back.

  That killed me.

  “I know I screwed up last—”

  “Asher,” his voice warned.

  “Shush a second.”

  His scarred brow rose but he quieted.

  “I know you said you like me being on top. I know sex was never boring for you. And I know I messed things up when I asked you to be on top last time. That was…” I swallowed and forced myself to keep my eyes on his. “That was my need to try and rid myself of the memories.” His hand flexed against my head again but then it loosened, running through my hair and dropping to the bed beside me, not touching me.