Page 70 of Accidental Vegas Vows

Her fingers dug into my back, my neck, as she briefly pressed her lips to mine. She’d had her release twice already, and in her desperate pleas for me to give her a second to recover, she’d begged me to be inside of her at least.

“I need you,” I rasped.

“I’m right here,” she whispered, her voice cracking as I hit that spot inside of her that she liked so much. Her words turned to gasps. “I’m—I’m right, right here.”

Using my nose, I turned her head just enough that I could kiss her jaw, her neck, the soft spot beneath her ear. “Thank you.”

My thrusts grew erratic, and I shifted the hand on her hip and tucked it between us instead, drawing whimper and cries from her as I met her swollen, oversensitive bundle of nerves. She built quickly and drastically, her body locking, her breaths too fast, too desperate.

“Need this,” I groaned. “I need this, Liv, fucking always. I…shit, I need you, need you just like this, need?—”

A beep came from beside us and both of us froze, shifting only to check the baby monitor on the bedside table. Heavy breaths wracked my body as I stared at it, Noah’s unmoving form lighting the screen. It was meant to alert when there was excessive movement, but all I could see was the rise and fall of his chest.

“It’s okay,” Liv breathed, her hand reaching out to point in the darkness toward the top of the screen. “It’s the battery alert. It’s okay.”

I couldn’t tear my gaze from it.

She took my face in her hands so fucking gently that they almost didn’t register until she was softly pulling my gaze back to her. “Dame,” she whispered. “He’s okay. It’s just the battery. He’s okay.”

My throat closed in. I didn’t deserve her, no matter what I did, no matter how many lifetimes I lived, she was too perfect to me.

“He’s okay,” she repeated, pushing the sweaty strings of hair that clung to my cheeks out of my face. “You’re okay, and he’s okay.”

She kissed my lips, my jaw, my nose, both of us unmoving below our shoulders and both of us locked to each other. She comforted me, she held me, and when I needed it, needed the distraction but couldn’t bring myself to do it, she moved for me, pitching and shifting her hips.

“You’re okay,” she said, over and over and over, interspersed with replacements of he’s instead of you’re. She pulled me out of the haze of panic as if she knew exactly what would work, exactly what would make me feel okay, exactly what I needed.

But she was what I needed. Her and Noah. They were all I fucking needed. And as the temptation to speak words I hadn’t said in over five years bubbled up, I found myself stuffing them down, burying them, demolishing them before they could take shape. I distracted my lips with hers. I said it in the way I moved, in the way I put her first in that moment.

I told her I needed her, and nothing else.

Chapter 25

Olivia

Having a private office, no matter how small, had improved my time at the office tenfold.

I wasn’t sure if it was a silent gift from Damien or if it was simply a result of him putting pressure on my manager to curb the stares and whispers, but either way, it gave me space to escape the house and bury myself in work without worrying about whether or not Noah would get himself into trouble. But of course, even with Caroline watching him, even with the privacy to keep myself focused, and even with the pretty view out of my singular floor to ceiling window that looked out toward the Angel Island State Park, I hadn’t been able to stop worrying about the possibility of Noah having another seizure, and a private office wouldn’t fix that.

I knew deep down that it wasn’t my place to worry about him as extensively as I was. I was in charge of him when Damien or Caroline or his new school weren’t, but even still, I’d found it difficult to turn that off or put it out of my head. It was always there, a constant fizzling anxiety that Damien and I would need to rush to the hospital again.

Or Damien. Just Damien. I wasn’t guaranteed a spot there.

I sighed and deleted the last two paragraphs I’d written in the email I was drafting. Maybe a private office out of the house wasn’t the answer to all of my problems, considering I could barely fucking focus. I wanted to call Damien, wanted to ask him if he’d heard from Caroline, wanted to check up on Noah. I knew I needed to get through the emails that were piling up, but I just couldn’t bring myself to shift my attention.

I spun halfway around in my office chair and plucked my purse from the table behind me. My phone sat sideways inside up against the handful of just-in-case tampons I’d shoved in there this morning, and when the screen lit up as I lifted it out, a text notification sat there unattended on my lockscreen. It couldn’t have been that important if it hadn’t notified me out loud — Damien’s and Caroline’s calls and messages would have bypassed silent mode.

The moment it recognized my face and my brother's name replaced the Text Message notification, though, my stomach sank.

James: What the fuck is this? Are you married? [Attachment: 1 Image]

Oh, fuck.

I opened up the messages and there, clear as fucking day and as nauseating as Noah controlling the spinning teacup at Disneyland, was a photo of me and Damien exiting the chapel in Vegas. I could barely remember him carrying me like that, like I was genuinely his bride — tucked up against him, an arm beneath my knees and another under my waist, my hair and makeup a mess and a cheap netted veil falling off my head. I was clutching a bottle of champagne in one hand and my heels in the other, and Damien, with the mismatched buttons on his shirt and his pocket square unfolded and hanging limp from his jacket pocket, was pressing a kiss against my temple.

If it wasn’t the most horrifying evidence of what we’d done, I might have actually found it adorable. But it was, and my breakfast was coming back up.

I reached for the little trashcan beside my desk and nearly threw my phone across the small, enclosed space in the process, my head only barely making it over the lip of the flimsy, carbon-neutral bag. I spilled the small amount of cereal I’d managed to down this morning into it and dry heaved once before placing it back down on the ground.

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