Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 128260 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 641(@200wpm)___ 513(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128260 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 641(@200wpm)___ 513(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
After dinner, she got out a frying pan and told me to sit while she made a quick dessert. I drank my wine as she stirred a few ingredients together and chopped some bananas. A few minutes later when she brought it over to me, I saw what she had made and my heart squeezed. She’d remembered. “Bananas Foster,” I said.
“Your granny used to make it for you. I hope mine compares.”
“You remembered that all this time.” I was slightly floored. We’d talked about a lot that weekend, and I thought that I recalled so much of it because I’d had hours and days where I was trudging through deserts and sitting in caves to relive it all. But it hadn’t just been me.
She nodded. “I remember every part of that weekend,” she said quietly.
I leaned forward and took her face in my hands and kissed her lips. “Thank you.”
After dessert, we got in the hot tub again and the combination of wine and wet, naked Grace had me drunk in more ways than one.
We fell into bed a damp mess of tangled limbs. She climbed on top of me and I lost myself in her as she rode me, her head thrown back, her breasts in my face as I sucked and licked them, the sounds she made my undoing. I thrust myself up into her tight heat and came so hard I thought I might pass out.
After I got rid of the condom I had somehow remembered to put on, I pulled her body into mine and felt her smile against my chest, nuzzling into me again. Moments later, I noted that she was breathing slowly and deeply against me as I too drifted into the world of dreams.
__________
“Carson, wake up, baby. You’re dreaming,” I heard whispered.
I shot up in bed. “Wha’?” I looked around, trying to orient myself.
“You were dreaming,” Grace said again, urging me back down to the pillow.
I sank back down to the pillow and ran my hand over my sweaty hair. My mom. Ara. I had been having that damn dream again.
“What was it about?” Grace whispered, pressing into my side and laying her cheek on my chest.
“My mom…then Ara. I’ve been having it a lot lately. I’m not sure why.”
“Tell me,” she said, pressing her lips to my chest and then bringing her hands up, so that her chin was propped on them.
I could just make her out in the darkness, those eyes that I knew were clear blue in the sunlight now deep, fathomless pools in the dark room.
But I felt her warmth against me, I breathed in her scent, and I heard the concern in her voice. It comforted me and made me want to share the pain that came to me in the darkness of the night.
I told her about the dream, about sneaking out of the back room, about watching my mom “perform,” about her suddenly morphing into Ara.
She kissed my chest again. “Both were traumas for you, baby,” she said softly.
“Yeah,” I said. I knew she was right. I knew that that was the reason I combined them in my mind, why one turned into the other. I’d thought my mom was being victimized. To me, what I’d witnessed looked like violence, and even later, when I understood the context, that feeling of wanting to protect her but being defenseless never left me.
We were both silent for a minute. Just telling her about my dream and having her comfort me felt like a weight lifted off of my heart. “It’s part of the reason I haven’t been with anyone since you,” I said quietly.
I felt her still. “What do you mean?”
I paused. “When I returned home from our weekend in Vegas, I looked at everything differently. I had never experienced sex as something that wasn’t just physical but emotional. It helped me define things for myself in a way I never had—or at least, begin to. It brought up a whole slew of questions that at the time, I had no answers to. That weekend changed everything for me, Grace.”
She squeezed me again gently. I could tell that she was waiting for me to go on.
“It’s like, with my mom, the thing that was always so confusing to me was that she’d come home from the set looking… broken. Every damn time. I felt so fiercely protective of her, but I was just a kid, and she was the one who was obviously in pain but kept going back for more. She did what she did at the expense of her own soul. I’m not saying it’s like that for everyone. But for her, it was. I could see it and I couldn’t do fuck about it. It hurt. And I didn’t get it. And so later, I don’t know, maybe I went into the sex trade myself as a way of gaining some kind of control over something that I had had no control over in the past. At the time, I told myself that it didn’t matter, that it was just a way to make some easy money, but deep down, I think I knew that was a lie. Because one weekend with you and the whole house of cards I’d constructed came crashing down.”