He pointed at his now latex-covered dick which he was pressing down with his thumb and then at my backside.

“You want to move this party into the bedroom or you want to rough it?” He lifted both his eyebrows at me and waited for my response.

Well shit. I was usually prepared for any situation, but sex over dinner was not one of them … hell, sex anywhere but in the confines of my very comfortable bedroom wasn’t really one of them. It wasn’t like I kept a bottle of lube stashed in every drawer around the house.

“Uh, rough it.” There was no way I was going to shift the momentum we had going and let fear rear its ugly head back up.

“You sure?” He was always the caretaker and that was love.

“I’m sure. Now get inside of me.” Going rough and raw wasn’t my favorite, but anything that got this man inside of me I could handle. I turned back around and waited for the slow burn, the stretch, the automatic tightening of muscles against the invasion … it never came. Instead, there was the warm and damp lap of a tongue, there was the gentle probing of something much smaller and far more flexible. He would never hurt me, not when it could be avoided with a little love and care even if the pain was only temporary and well worth it for what came after.

Suddenly one of his hands was on top of mine on the table, his strong chest was up against my back and his free hand was around my still aching cock moving up and down as he pressed into me.

“Easy has its place, Dom. Not everything all the time needs to be hard.” It was a fair point, one that he made over and over as he started to slide in and out of me in an elegant rhythm that juxtaposed the rough and erratic way he was working my dick in his hand.

It was a lot of sensation, a lot of different kinds of touching happening, but my favorite was probably where his lips rested against my ear so I could hear every pant, every gasp, every sigh that was ripped out of him as my body pulled at him and squeezed him. If what he was doing between my legs and behind me wasn’t enough to get me off, the sounds he was making in my ear would be. To me, that sounded a lot like love … not like fear at all.

It didn’t take long for his whole body to tighten behind me or for mine to quake in response. When he came, he whispered my name. When I came, I shouted his so loudly that I was pretty sure the neighbors could hear it.

We stayed like that for a long minute. Breathing hard and trying to figure out who won the fight … fear or love. As soon as he pulled out of me and there was distance both physical and emotional between us, it kind of felt like a toss-up.

“Sorry, I ruined dinner.” He sounded sheepish and unsure.

I snorted and surveyed the mess we had made of dinner and of each other. “You made up for it in spades but don’t tell my mom what we ended up using her tablecloth for. I’m gonna tell her I stained it and tossed it in the trash.”

He laughed and our eyes met. Love was there, bright and clear, but that dirty bastard fear was still hanging on for dear life in the background. It looked like the battle had been won, but the war continued to rage on.

Chapter 12

Lando

It was already a tough day before I even met with my first client. Today Dom was going in for his last physical test to get his badge back and even though he never asked, I could see it in his eyes when he left my apartment that morning that he wanted me there. It was a victory we had worked towards together, but no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t bring myself to celebrate with him and it hurt me to hurt him. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even wish him good luck as I kissed him good-bye.

Not only was I disappointing Dom, which sucked, but I was also feeling slightly heartbroken for another, unrelated reason. My client for the morning was a little girl who was going to be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life because her younger brother had found their father’s gun and accidentally discharged it right at her within close range. It was a heartbreaking case because she was so young, but also because every day she came to see me her mother came and brought the little brother.

They were obviously a family in crisis. The little girl tried so hard every day to go through the exercises I gave her so she could keep her upper body strength and her core strength intact, but the mother, instead of being encouraging and helpful, instead of praising her daughter’s courage and strength, spent the session fighting back tears and casting hateful looks at the little boy, who couldn’t be any more than five or six. He never spoke, never uttered a word, but he also never left his sister’s side. It was obvious the mother blamed him for the accident and her daughter’s condition. I wanted to ask her why she didn’t put that anger and blame on the grown-ups in the house who were responsible for gun safety, but I didn’t want to cause any more of a rift, and taking care of the girl was my priority.

But, like always, I couldn’t stand to see anyone in pain and hurting, so the following week during their session I asked the little boy to help me with some of the exercises. At first he balked because his mother told him to stay away from his sister, but when I cut her a look that indicated I was a hot second away from kicking her out of the room altogether, she changed her tune. I moved the little boy in front of the girl where she was sitting on the floor with her immobile legs in front of her and handed him a heavy length of rope.

“You ever play tug of war?” He looked up at me with serious, sad eyes and nodded. “Okay, well, that’s what you’re gonna do with your sister. She’s gonna pull as hard as she can and I want to you pull back without moving, okay?” He nodded again. “Once she’s back as far as she can go you help pull her back until she’s sitting just like that.”

It took a minute for the siblings to figure it out, she was obviously not pulling as hard as she could and the little boy was terrified of doing something wrong. The rope kept falling out of their hands and landing on the mat between them, but eventually that innate rivalry all siblings have kicked in and they started actually tugging and pulling the way I wanted them to. It only took a couple times of the brother yanking the little girl back up into a sitting position for them both to be laughing and having fun with it.

I crossed my arms over my chest and looked out of the corner of my eye at their mother. “He could be an instrumental part of her healing process. She’s going to need help for the rest of her life, including when you and your husband are no longer around. Trying to take him away from her isn’t going to help anything at all.”