Filed to story: If He Had Been With Me Book PDF Free
“I’m glad you didn’t,” she says, and a smile cracks her worry briefly. “So you liked the book. Obviously, you’re biased.”
“You remember how furious I was last night? I thought you’d recorded my devotion in perfect detail and then dropped it in my lap without considering my feelings. And I still loved it as a story. You’re a good writer, Autumn. You’ve always been good.”
Autumn shrugs and looks away, but her smile is back. “Thanks,” she whispers.
I can’t take it anymore. I lean over and kiss her deeply. A few minutes are lost to that, and then I gasp as I feel her fingers close around me.
“We can’t double our chances of you getting pregnant,” I say, even though I’m kissing her neck now and doing nothing to stop her hand.
Autumn pulls away and puts her other hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t worry,” she whispers. “I know what to do.” Autumn pushes me down on the bed, and for some unknown period of time, I am entirely at her mercy.
thirteen
“How much longer do we have?” Autumn asks.
I don’t want to think about it, but I glance at the clock anyway. We’ve kissed and dozed the afternoon away.
“In an hour, I should take a shower,” I say. When she went to the bathroom earlier, I quietly checked my phone and saw the text from Sylvie, confirming I can pick her up at her house after seven.
Autumn presses her back into my chest, and I stop stroking her arm to hug her. I raise my head and kiss her cheek. We’ve been lying like this for a while.
After Autumn charmingly tortured me with her hands and then triumphantly ravished me with her mouth, I tried to return the favor. I needed more coaching, but Autumn’s enthusiasm remained throughout.
Again and again this afternoon, Autumn has looked at me like she’s trying to believe I’m real. It was such a strange mirror of my own feelings.
Over and over, Autumn has told me she loves me. She’s said it breathlessly between kisses. She’s growled it before biting me softly on the shoulder, making me gasp in surprised pleasure. She’s said it smugly after destroying me, while I was still trembling in her hold.
It’s starting to settle into my brain as fact. Autumn loves me in return.
“Tomorrow,” Autumn whispers.
“What about it?” Tomorrow is going to be wonderful, and the day after and the day after, because I am hers. Tonight is the only concern, and that’s mine alone.
“What if you waited until tomorrow?”
I tighten my grip on her and bury my face in the back of her neck.
“No, it’s the right thing to do.” I kiss her shoulder. Somewhere in the back of my brain, I’m still amazed that she wants me to touch her.
Autumn rolls over, and we settle in, facing each other.
“Tell me a story,” she demands.
“What kind of story?” I try to hide the amusement in my voice because she’s being very solemn.
“About us,” she says. “Something true. Something that happened when we didn’t know we loved each other.”
“Hmm.” I think I understand what she’s asking, and I wonder if she has stories of her own. “Do you remember that tiara my mom got you one year for Christmas? She said, ‘Finny picked it out.’ I bought it. I saw it at a store and knew you would love it. I gave it to Mom and asked her to say it was from both of us.”
Autumn’s mouth is hanging open.
“Oh, Finny,” she says. “You could have told—“
“No,” I say. “I couldn’t have. We hadn’t gotten each other Christmas gifts for years. It would have been weird.”
“Oh, Finny,” she says again, but this time, she’s agreeing with me.
“Now you tell me a story,” I say.
“Well,” she begins, “remember the Valentine’s Day right after that? You were sick, and I brought you that note from…” She stalls at that part, but I don’t need her to continue.
“I remember.” The agony I’d felt that day stayed fresh for the rest of that winter. I had obsessed over that embarrassing conversation for weeks.
“You were so hot,” Autumn moans, looking away from me, and I blink in surprise. She scrunches up her face and closes her eyes against the memory. “You were shirtless and sweaty and flushed and—” She breaks off into a frustrated growl. When she looks back up at me, she says, “But you saw me checking you out, right? You had to have. It was so obvious.” She’s smiling like she expects me to agree.
“I thought you had brought me a Valentine. I was confused and happy and then a different sort of confused when it was from Sylvie.” I find myself faltering again. “I thought you could see my mistake, and I felt so sick and gross in front of you, and you were so beautiful like alwa—“
“You thought that I—How could I have—Finny, no,” she says.
We’re staring at each other in amazement.
“I wish I could go back in time,” she says.
“Why don’t you just go back to telling me I’m hot?”
Autumn laughs. She tells me about both loving and hating going with The Mothers to my soccer games. She says my muscled legs in my running shorts drove her to distraction, and it blows my mind that she’d lusted after certain parts of me from a distance the same way I had after her.
As if picking the thoughts from my own head, she tells me she was always secretly aware of any movement my body made when I was near—at the bus stop, on the couch as we watched television, at the holiday dinner table—just as I memorized every detail about her.
I stroke Autumn’s hair and her arm as she talks, and I watch her face as her eyes close in pleasure, then open to look at me as she speaks.
“I want another story,” she says.
I try to remember my most intense memory of longing for her. I move my strokes down her back and she sighs. I’m getting this right. I’m learning the rest.
“Last Halloween,” I finally say. “I was watching you the whole night. I couldn’t stop myself. You were—” I sort through all the vocab words I’d used her to help me remember. “You were splendiferous that night, Autumn. Like, if I’d had one of those new phones that take pictures? It would have crossed my mind to try and take one. Not that I would have!” She’s smiling at me as I confess how horrible I am; I guess I should be glad she thought
Wuthering Heights was romantic.
“I wasn’t even wearing a sexy costume.” Autumn giggles.
“You were radiant,” I tell her.
I was particularly moonstruck that night. Her pale skin and the dark shine of her hair have always had the power to hypnotize me. That Halloween, she was particularly bewitching, her laugh dazzling and her every movement like an alien ballet.
“I couldn’t keep my eyes off you,” I confess. “Before you ran into me, I looked away so you wouldn’t see me staring, but I misjudged your speed and we—“
We both laugh at the memory.
I can see her reaching back in her mind. “You were worried Jamie and I would have sex that night.”
“Yeah, well, that’s because, if I had been in Jamie’s position—“
She bites her lip as a smile creeps up. “I guess we know now what would have happened,” she says.
“Well, I can’t imagine how we could have possibly reached that point.”