“Holy fuck!” He sets me back a little. “I made you come like crazy and you expect me to keep it to myself?” He’s joking. I can hear it in his voice. He sobers. “I won’t say a word,” he tells me quietly. After a minute, he jostles me. “Besides, you were so loud that everyone in the fucking hotel heard you coming. I don’t need to keep it a secret.”

“I was not loud.”

“Oh, you were loud,” he tells me.

“That was amazing,” I breathe, as my heart slows. We’re wet and Josh is getting prune-y, but he just holds me. “Thank you.” I suddenly realize that he hasn’t gotten to come at all. I know he was hard beneath me, and I wiggle my bottom on top of him. He still is. “Your turn?” I ask.

“Not right now,” he says. He picks up a bottle of shampoo and holds it out to me. “Wash my hair?”

So I do. I wash his hair, and his back, and his front, and his feet. And he giggles when I spend a lot of time on his toes. “You know I can’t feel that, right?”

I stop. “Oh, yeah.” I go back up to his hands and start to massage them.

He unties his shorts and starts to shimmy them over his hips. But I think he’s just taking them off because doing it here in the water is easier.

His dick is still hard so I grab for it. He brushes my hand away. “Not tonight,” he says. He kisses me.

“Why not?”

“Tonight was for you.”

“Oh.” My heart thuds. “Okay.”

He smiles at me. “Want to watch a movie?”

I get out of the tub and wrap myself in a towel. “Sure.”

I leave him in the bathroom to get himself out. A few minutes later, he comes out with a towel wrapped around him. He dries his hair with another. “That was the best bath I ever had.” He laughs.

I put on a pair of pajamas and he puts on some sleep pants. But he doesn’t put on a shirt. He sits on the bed, resting against the headboard. His chest is covered in tattoo ink, and I want to trace the lines of each tattoo and hear the story behind each one. He pats his lap and I lay down across him with my head on his legs. I roll onto my back. He lifts the edge of my shirt and lays his hand on my belly.

“You’re pretty amazing, you know that?” The words tumble over my lips and I regret them immediately, but they’re what’s in my heart.

His face gets hard. “Hold your praise until tomorrow. You might not think that after you meet my past.” He studies the TV hard. I cover his hand on my belly with mine and he smiles down at me for a quick second.

No matter what happens tomorrow, I’ll always be thankful for what he gave me tonight.

Josh

“Are you sure you want to go with me?” I ask her. She’s standing at the bathroom sink putting on her makeup.

She looks at me in the mirror. “Unless you don’t want me to.” Her eyebrows rise in question.

“No, no,” I protest. I don’t want to go in there alone. I’m afraid. More afraid than I have ever been. “I want you to go.”

She smiles at me. “Then I’m going.” She purses her lips in the mirror, applies lip gloss, and blows me a kiss across the palm of her hand. My heart squeezes in my chest. That’s such a normal thing to do. Like a boyfriend and girlfriend kind of thing. But we’re not. Sure, she came on my face last night, but that doesn’t imply in any way that she’s in this for the long haul.

“What should I expect today?” she asks as she walks across the room and picks up her purse.

“I have no idea. I haven’t seen Lilly since right after the accident.”

She stops cold. “You never came back after she woke up?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“Oh,” she breathes. “Well, you’re here now.”

I am. And I’m abso-fucking-lutely terrified to see her.

***

We enter the long driveway and I drive really slowly, taking in the scenery, because there’s a small part of me that feels like this is home. I spent as much time here as I did at my own house when Lilly and I were growing up. We slept in a tent in her yard on warm summer nights. And we spent nights in sleeping bags on her playroom floor. This feels even more like home than my own house would, if I were to be welcome there for a visit.

I put the car in park, and Star reaches over and squeezes my knee. I can’t feel it, but I don’t tell her that. “You got this,” she tells me, like she’s putting me in a football game.

“What if she hates me?”

“What if she doesn’t?”

I slide into my chair and then I see Lilly’s mother standing on the porch. She’s put on some weight, but she still looks the same even with her silver hair and her wider waistline. I freeze. I don’t know what to do or say.

“Josh,” Lilly’s mom gushes as she suddenly runs down the steps to meet me. She bends at the waist and embraces me, and it feels good. Really good. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“I’m glad you called.” I am. I am. I am. If I say that enough, I’ll believe it. “How’s Lilly?”

She shrugs and avoids my eyes. “About the same.”

“Can I see her?”

She nods. “Let’s go to the kitchen and have some cookies first, shall we?”

Star coughs into her closed fist and I realize that I haven’t introduced her. “Mrs. Jameson, this is my good friend Star. I conned her into driving all the way down with me.”