Page 96 of Brewbies
“Because I like how you taste now.”
Darby was briefly distracted by the feel of his tongue tracing the shell of her ear. Her eyelids fluttered. “Like tequila sweat and gossip fodder?”
“Like…cotton candy.” He nipped at her lobe. “And gossip fodder.”
Darby’s breath caught in her throat as Ethan skimmed his palm over her ribcage to cup her breast, brushing his thumb over her scar before jerking away as if burned.
“It’s okay,” she said quietly. “We can talk about it.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” he said.
But strangely, Darbywantedto talk about it. She wanted to give him this piece of her personal history that knitted together the disparate threads of her life.
“It was the summer after my first year of law school. I’d quit an internship at my father’s firm after his letch of a partner made a pass at me and I started bartending at this Irish dive in Boston.”
Darby drew in a deep breath, grounding herself by the steady thrum of Ethan’s heart between her shoulder blades.
“A couple of the waitresses also did burlesque, and I’d always been curious, so I gave it a shot.”
“And you were amazing at it?”
Darby’s cheeks warmed at the compliment. “Hardly. I spent the first month covered in bruises and rope burn, but I was hooked.”
Ethan’s large, warm foot pressed against Darby’s like the punctuation to her admission.
“It was the first time in my life I felt…free. Free from the expectations of my parents and their money. Free to wear what I wanted and move how I wanted without judgment or criticism. Free to be myself without apology.”
Darby closed her eyes, tracing the calluses on his hand. “Needless to say, fall rolled around, and I didn’t want to go back to Boston College. Which was”—she paused, searching for the correct words—“an unpopular decision with my parents.”
“I could see that.”
“But,” she continued, “I’d already met Aidan by that point and was thoroughly entrenched in the neurochemically stupid phase of a new relationship.”
Ethan’s stomach tensed against her back at the mention of another man’s name, but Darby rolled on, too far down the road now to stop.
“We were on the couch Netflix and chilling one night”—much like she and Ethan were doing now, Darby thought but didn’t say—“and he felt it.”
Her heart skipped as the moment returned to her in a rush. The screen’s glow flickering on the ceiling and walls of the apartment they’d just moved into together, their boxes not even fully unpacked. Darby’s lungs refusing to inflate as his fingers guided hers to the spot.
What’s this?
Thiswas a frag bomb that divided her life into two distinct periods.
Before, and after.
The during, she preferred not to think about even on a spring morning beneath sun-dappled sheets and lunatic birds calling for mates outside her camper window.
“I knew what it was,” she said. “Even before the doctor confirmed it. I’d lost my insurance when I dropped out of BC, and my parents and I weren’t exactly on speaking terms.”
Ethan’s chin shifted atop her snuggle-smashed hair, and Darby could practically feel his jaw tightening.
“I honestly had no idea what I was going to do, but all my performer friends banded together to raise money for my treatments.” Her throat ached as tears threatened to well over her eyelids. “One of them even let people staple money to his skin.”
“That seems…extreme,” Ethan said.
“Not really,” Darby replied. “Usually it was lollipop wrappers. It was sort of his thing. Performance art and all that.”
Ethan gave a noncommittal grunt.
