Blessed Fate (20 page)

"If you say so. Give me a few minutes and we can head out." The tone of her voice had cooled considerably since she had gotten home. I left her alone to finish dressing and let the guys know we were taking off.

Overall, the day was great. We rode down the coast for a while before stopping at a small, out of the way diner. It felt good to get away, to feel like just another young couple on a date. No one knew us; we didn't have our friends around giving us shit. It was awesome.

I could tell she was upset when I cut the day short after lunch. I wanted to keep going, but sitting on the bike seat combined with fighting the hard-on I had from feeling Rain's body wrapped around me had me in a lot of fucking pain. By the time we got back to the beach house, she refused to speak to me and I still hadn't figured out how to bring up what was really going on.

I didn't try to stop her when she grabbed the keys to the Challenger. I needed to figure out what to say to her by the time she got back because I could see the confusion festering into anger, which meant full-out rage wasn't far behind.

"What the fuck is that!" I had started to wake up when I felt Rain's body pressed against mine and jolted upright in the bed at her shrieking. Confused, I rubbed my eyes, looking around to see what was wrong.

"What's wrong?" I asked, still trying to figure out what in the hell was going on. Rain wasn't the type of girl normally to freak out.

She threw back the sheet on the bed at the exact moment our bedroom door flew open. Had I not taken a sleeping pill since it was nearly impossible to fall asleep with the sun blazing through windows, I would have freaked at seeing two of my best friends standing in the doorway staring at the cock my girlfriend had just exposed to the world.

"Dude, what the fuck did you do?" Jon laughed, trying to decide whether to take a second look at the cause of Rain's outburst or to look away.

"What? Someone want to tell me what the fuck is going on?" I was starting to come out of the fog from my pill and knew whatever was going on wasn't good.

"You okay in here?" Jon asked Rain, avoiding eye contact with either of us.

"Well...uh...yes Jon, you can go." I looked over to Rain, still fairly out of it and trying to figure out why everyone was in our room. Seeing her eyes glued to my exposed cock, I yanked the sheet up to my waist, mortified that what was supposed to be something private turned into a public displayed, quite literally.

"Dude, get the fuck out!" I threw a pillow across the room and listened as Jon and Travis burst into giddy laughter as they walked down the hall.

"What were they doing in here?"

"They came up to see what was going on. They're gentlemen like that; they come running when they hear a woman freaking out." She pursed her lips trying to stifle the laughter. Had anyone else been in my shoes, yeah, I would have seen the humor in it, but this was just not cool.

"Yeah, what was
that
about anyway?"

"You're kidding me, right?" She pulled back the sheet, taking another look below my waist.

"Oh, that..." I was speechless. She had actually freaked the hell out when she saw it. Like little girl sees a spider freak out.

"Uh, yeah. That. What in the hell did you do?" Her body started to relax, but not much. I really regretted not telling her sooner since it was suddenly this huge ordeal.

"Well, I thought about it for a long time, but it seemed stupid to put myself through that pain if there was no one in my life to enjoy it."

Her jaw dropped at my admission. Sure, it was a bit strange, but really, it made perfect sense in my mind.

"So, I agreed to see where things will go with us, and you rushed out and had someone ram a barbell through your dick? That's kinda fucked up." She sprung out of the bed and started pacing along the wall of windows, not looking back at me.

"Baby, it's not like that." I pulled on a pair of sweatpants and joined her by the windows. I had done enough not talking to her; it was time to make things right. "I didn't do it as some freakish way to keep you happy. I will admit, I'm looking forward to that too, but I've been thinking about it for a long time. But face it, that's not the type of thing you do when the only action you're seeing is your own palm."

She buried her face in my chest, trying to stop laughing. "Okay, so I'll try to forget that part. But why didn't you tell me? And when did you do it? And how did you plan to keep me from finding out?"

"I did it the day you left." I leaned my head against the cool glass, struggling to find the words. "I had no desire to keep it from you, but let's just say it hasn't healed as quickly as I would have liked. I was actually hoping to surprise you with it when you got back."

"Well, you managed the surprise part of it all right." We stood there wrapped up in one another, finally able to laugh at the absurdity of the entire day.

Rain and I spent the next two weeks getting to know one another on a deeper level. After so many years as close friends, you would think there wasn't anything left to learn, but there were parts of our lives both of us had never shared.

I told her about growing up as the only male in the house once my dad left and about how that shaped my life. I wanted her to understand that side of me now that we were together. I'd had issues in the past where women thought they were getting the badass I try to make myself out to be, without realizing that I had spent entirely too much time listening to my mom and sister talk about how they wanted men to treat them. Sometimes I wondered if they were the minority or lying, because most of the women I knew didn't want someone who was sweet, romantic and worried about their happiness. The women I knew wanted someone to take control, show them a good time and little more.

She told me about her childhood and why she thought running away after graduation was the answer. That was one of the most soul-shredding talks we had ever had, and we had covered some deep shit over the course of five years. I think it helped her to get it out, but it didn't change the fact that she would never have that time back with her mom.

Late at night, after everyone finally decided to turn in for some sleep, I would lead Rain to our room and show my appreciation for her in every way possible. Even on the nights where blue balls compounded the tenderness I was already fighting, it was totally worth it to have that time with her. I felt like a fucking pansy when I came to the realization that not jumping into a physical relationship had some serious benefits. If it was possible, I loved Rain even more than ever before.

"Hey man, are you gonna make use of that bed before we ship out?" Jon asked at breakfast, the day we planned to leave for Memphis. Every morning started the same, coffee and listening to the guys giving me a hard time about the lack of sex in my sex life.

"That's between me and Rain. Fuck off." They didn't know that my plans for the last day in our oceanfront home included little other than spending the day wrapped in Rain's silky body, feeling her nakedness pressed against me, wrapped around me.

"No, I think that's the whole point, man. That's the one thing that apparently
hasn't
been between the two of you since she got back." I threw a biscuit at Travis, who felt the need to jump in. It was no wonder none of us had had a long-term relationship. Even if there had been someone we had been interested in, not many women could put up with us; and yes, as much as it irritated the shit out of me to listen to them every day, I knew I'd have been no better if I was in their place.

"Shut the hell up, Trav. Not that it's any of your business, but what he's lacked in using and abusing, he's more than made up for in other ways. Amazing ways. Ways I'm pretty sure none of you twisted bastards could even think about pleasing a woman." Rain shot him a look of death as she rounded the island to get her morning coffee. The guys had made a fatal tactical error when they decided to start in on me before she'd had her first cup. If there were a way to attach her coffee to her alarm clock, I would gladly do it because Rain was the epitome of "not a morning person."

Poor Jared sat in the living, just as he did every morning, trying to stay out of it. He still acted as if he was an outsider, but not comfortable hanging with the group of roadies who was staying at the house either. I looked at Rain and saw that she was watching him as well. She probably knew better than any of us what it was like to be in his shoes, so I decided I would talk to her later about reassuring him that he belonged, just as we'd had to do with her at first.

"Hey Jared, you wanna help me with something?" I looked over at Rain, wondering what she was up to when she called out to the kid.

She walked over to me, wrapped her arms around my waist and kissed the top of my head. "Don't worry, just giving him a little space. We'll be back." Damn, I loved that woman.

"Uh, sure." Jared tipped back his coffee mug, draining it and putting the empty in the sink before following Rain to the garage.

"What's up with that?" Travis asked once they were gone.

"No clue," I said as I watched both vehicles pull out of the driveway. "Hey, I need to talk to you guys about today..."

After looking at maps and figuring out how much time we really needed in order to get to Memphis before the meeting we had scheduled with Virtuosity, the band we were going to be following for the summer, the three of us realized it was possible to spend one more night sleeping in real beds before hitting the road.

When Rain and Jared got home, she was acting strange, trying to hide something from me. I wanted to question her about it, but figured I really had no room to talk given the secrets I had kept from her not that long ago. I followed her to the bedroom with every intention of locking the door and not coming out until it was time to leave.

She crouched on the other side of the bed, trying to shove something into her suitcase. I locked the door behind me and started making my way to her. "That Jon, he's a smart guy."

"Yeah, how's that?" She started crawling across the bed to me, giving me a view of her pert breasts hanging free inside her top.