Page 4 of It's Always Been You
Gabe pinches my clit at the same time he tweaks my nipple, and I explode around him, tremors wracking my body as I chant his name. I yank against my restraints, desperate to get my hands on him, to give myself an anchor in the swirling vortex of pleasure so acute it’s almost painful. My orgasm goes on and on, and Gabe sticks with me, riding me through it until his hips jerk and his cock swells inside me. He slams into me and groans out the pleasure of his release into my ear, holding me tightly as he unleashes, burying his face in my neck as his hips slow.
“Fuck me,” Gabe gasps out, his heart hammering against my back.
“Yeah,” I manage, trying to control my breathing.
He recovers first, leaning over and untying my hands, letting the toe shoes drop to the floor. Pulling me down to curl up in his lap, he lifts each hand, inspecting my wrists closely for marks. When he’s satisfied there aren’t any, he kisses the inside of each wrist and wraps his arms around me.
“I fucking love you,” he says, pressing a kiss to the top of my head.
“I fucking love you right back.” I kiss his chest and feel his arms tighten around me. “You can tie me up and fuck me in a ballet studio any time that pleases you.”
He snorts out a laugh, which makes me laugh, and then we’re both howling, sprawled out mostly naked on the floor of the studio. Our laughter is so loud it takes us a few seconds to realize Gabe’s phone is ringing.
“Who the fuck is calling me at ten at night?” he mutters, pulling up the joggers still tangled around his ankles and digging his phone out of his pocket.
“Hello?”
I hear a woman’s voice on the other end, but I can’t hear what she’s saying.
“Yes, this is Gabriel Sullivan.”
He pauses, and then his face turns ashen, twisting into an expression I’ve never seen on him before. Fear curls into my stomach as I watch Gabe jump up, one hand pressing the phone to his ear and the other coming up to tug on his hair.
“Are they okay?”
The raw terror in Gabe’s voice has me jumping up too. I stand next to him, and he wraps an arm around my waist, bringing his forehead to mine and squeezing his eyes shut. His entire body trembles and I hug him back tightly, giving him an anchor. I don’t know what’s going on, but whatever it is, it’s the worst kind of bad.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Gabe’s phone drops from his hand, landing with a thud.
“It’s my parents,” is all he manages.
He collapses to the floor, silent for a few seconds before he bends forward, sobs wracking his body.
The logical part of my brain that is great in a crisis tries to engage, but for the first time in my life, it fails me. Because this is Gabe. My best friend and the love of my life. The happiest, mostcheerful man in the universe. He is on the floor, crying like his world is ending, and there’s nothing logical about that. I drop down and wrap my arms around him, helpless to do anything but hold him as he breaks into too many pieces for me to be able to put back together.
“What the fuck?” Gabe yells, one hand gripping the phone he holds to his ear and the other tugging at his hair. “My parents were killed in a fucking helicopter crash, and you want me to do paperwork? You’re the fucking lawyers for their estates. You do the damn paperwork.”
For more than three years, I never heard Gabe raise his voice. Since the helicopter crash that killed his parents a month ago, that’s all he’s done.
His voice is permanently hoarse. There’s no gentleness left in him. He is all sadness and grief and pure, unadulterated rage.
“God, Gabe, shut up and stop yelling at the woman. It’s not her fault.”
Amelia, Gabe’s middle sister, comes stomping into the kitchen of Gabe’s parents’ house, eyes flashing with disdain aimed exclusively in his direction. Olivia, the youngest of the Sullivan siblings, is at her heels, staring down at the floor and clutching a stuffed bear under one arm and a dog-eared paperback under the other.
They are twelve and eight, parentless, and now, according to Gabe’s parents’ extremely complicated and very difficult to unwind estate planning documents, his to raise.
Gabe takes a breath and speaks through gritted teeth. “When you can explain to me what all these documents mean and whyI suddenly need to care about federal taxes I didn’t even know existed before a month ago, call me. Until then, go to hell.”
He stabs the button to end the call and hurls his phone against the kitchen wall, the screen shattering on impact. His second broken phone since the funeral.
We should be at Berkeley, finishing our senior year, partying with our friends, studying for final exams, and making plans for our future. Instead, we’re at Gabe’s childhood home in San Francisco, where the walls are soaked in grief, and Gabe has to parent a third grader and an almost teenager when he’s basically still a teenager himself.
I come up behind him, laying a hand on his heaving back. He flinches at my touch. He flinches every time I touch him now. I’ve tried to hold him together. I’ve made funeral arrangements and spoken to extended family and made sure everyone was fed. I’ve kept up with my classes long distance and gotten Gabe a semester of bereavement leave from his and held Amelia and Olivia while they cried themselves to sleep.
I’ve done my best to wade through the legalese to help settle his parents’ estates. But much to my dismay and irritation, my genius level IQ and all the math classes in the world didn’t prepare me for the very nuanced particularities of federal transfer tax law.
