Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (14 page)

His hand eased over her shoulder and down to take hold of her breast. At first, he simply cupped it, as if testing its weight, but then his thumb passed over her nipple, and she shivered and gasped at the pleasure.

He’d touched her before, but not like this. Before, his touches had been play—the end themselves. Now, it seemed—Tina hoped—that this was foreplay, and her body zinged with anticipation. Just having his bare chest against hers was nearly more than she could stand and remain calm, remembering her breath so that he could remember his.

“Beautiful,” he said again, his lips moving on hers, before he moved downward. He kissed her neck, her collarbone, her shoulder, her chest. When he got to her breast, he sucked, deep and hard, not taking it slow at all, and she arched off the bed. She heard the
hem
in his exhales, but with that deep suck, while his suit pants rasped against her stockings and his belt buckle pinched her thigh, while she felt his cock, hard as steel again, she had lost control of her own breath and couldn’t focus on him.

“Joey!” she gasped and clutched at the bunched muscle of his shoulders.

He couldn’t see it—he only saw that his body wasn’t the way it had been—but he had become quite fit since he’d started his fitness and diet plan. His weight loss was marked, and his muscle was obvious. It was different—before, he’d been broad but lean, what the guys called ‘shredded.’ All of his muscles had seemed separate from each other. Now, he was brawnier. Fewer distinct bulges but still defined. Rather than veins popping all over, he had one pronounced vein down each bicep.

She’d thought he was beautiful back in the day. But now he was perfect. This way, as he was now, he seemed more real.

That perfect body moved downward again, and Tina couldn’t think. His tongue made a wet trail along her ribs, over her belly, into her belly button, and down.

He’d never gone down on her; she hadn’t expected that he ever would. He needed his mouth and nose to breathe. But he was headed there, and worry gave her focus. She tugged on his hair, and he looked up.

His breath was ragged with strain, yet he seemed surprisingly calm. She almost asked him if he needed his tank, then held the question back. He needed to be in charge of that. But she was worried what would happen if he settled his face between her legs. There were few things in the world that she wanted more just then, but she was worried.

“Joey—you don’t…I don’t need that.”

He smiled, and it was the first time all day he had. “Just…taste. Want a taste.”

“Oh fuck.” She released him, and he dipped his head.

The cry that leapt from her mouth when his tongue touched her clit carried with it years of love and desire—and need. God, what it was like to be so close with someone. To be so close with Joey.

For Tina, oral sex was the most intimate experience there was. She’d only shared it, giving or receiving, with two other men, the only other men she’d loved. Someday, she’d tell Joey that, so he might understand what it meant about the depth of her feeling for him that she’d gone down on him as their first sexual encounter.

He flicked lightly at her clit until her legs trembled, and he drew his tongue once, firmly, all the way through her folds. In his groan, she could hear that his lungs were stiffening, but she held back her worry and felt him.

He eased his body up again until they were face to face, and she could see in the moonlight that he was sweating. His chest heaved, and his smile was gone.

“Taste…taste…sweet.” The halting cadence of that sentence was due to his gasping more than anything else. But he tried to put his smile back on.

She set her hands on his cheeks. “Joey. It’s okay.”

He shook his head.

“Yes, it is.” She kissed him and reached her arm toward the nightstand.

He grabbed her and pulled her arm back, then went for his mask himself. As he turned on the air and settled the mask over his mouth and nose, still looming over her, his slacks and the hard bulge inside them pressed between her legs, Tina pushed her hands between them and opened his belt. Over his mask, his eye widened in surprise as she undid his pants and slid her hand inside them.

“Fuck.” His groan was muffled by the mask.

She pushed his pants and boxers down his hips, off his ass. She took hold of his cock, thick and solid, and flexed her hips, bringing the tip of him to her folds. Holding him there, she looked into his eyes.

“I love you.” Lifting her head from the pillow, she kissed his chest, over his scar, and stayed there.

Joey thrust, once, hard, and sank deep. They groaned together, in harmony, and were still. Tina could feel the tension of his body as she wrapped hers around him. He wasn’t shaking; he was vibrating.

“Don’t…move,” he commanded from inside his mask. His eyes were squeezed shut in concentration.

Tina was still. She would have been anyway—it had been a few years since she’d had a man inside her. She hadn’t expected the stretch and sting, and she needed a minute to get used to him. Half of her groan had been surprised pain. The other half had been nearly orgasmic joy.

They remained perfectly still but for the heave of their breaths until he tossed his mask to the side and said, “So…tight. Jesus.”

His mouth slammed over hers, his tongue charged into her mouth, he pushed one hand under her to take punishing hold of her ass, and then he thrust with clear, sublime intention.

The sting was gone; all Tina felt was Joey inside her—finally, at last, deep inside her. It seemed she could feel all of him, every ridge of his cock, every vein, his balls hitting her with each deep thrust, the roll of his muscles between her legs, around her body, under her hands as they clutched his back.

As his breath roughened, he tore his mouth from hers, but he didn’t stop moving. When Tina began to flex her hips, too, he gasped, “Stop!”

She stopped, and so did he. Unexpectedly—shockingly—he pulled out, and Tina nearly protested, except that he moved her onto her side and lay behind her. Grabbing her leg and lifting it high, he pushed back into her. The feral sound he made at her ear as he went deep made her clench—and that made him speed up. It had only been a few minutes, but he was close. Tina didn’t expect to come this way, certainly not their first time; she already had everything she’d hoped for. So she flexed her hips and reached her arms back to hold his head, trying to help him on his way.

But then his hands were on her—one between her legs, on her clit, the other plucking at her nipple—and as he found the precise spot of greatest intensity on her clit, she came, out of the blue and with harrowing force. He was right there with her, groaning hoarsely at her ear.

As soon as Tina could focus on anything at all but the white-hot, sparkling afterglow of her own orgasm and the rich, warm, happy knowledge that she and Joey had breached this wall together, she heard his distress. At the same time, he pulled quickly out of her and then was suddenly just gone.

Still out of breath herself, she rolled and saw him sitting on the side of the bed, his inhales coming in as if through concrete, and his exhales barely going out at all. Turning onto her knees, she grabbed his mask and reached around, holding it near his face. He didn’t take it.

“Joey. Baby, here.”

Nothing. She got off the bed and went to her knees in front of him. His hands were over his face—that wasn’t going to help him breathe. She took hold of them and pulled them away.

He was crying.

He hadn’t cried yet since his father’s death. His lack of tears had surprised her, and now these, that seemed to come from nowhere, surprised her more. She didn’t understand. But whatever it was, they’d work it out.

“It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s okay.”

He shook his head, still barely breathing, fighting for every molecule of oxygen, but seeming not to care.

“Joey. You need your mask.” She set it on his face, and he swiped it away. Grabbing his hand, she tried again, and this time, at least, he didn’t resist her. The awful choking quality of his attempts to inhale or exhale didn’t seem to improve, however.

After maybe a minute, he took the mask from her and held it himself. She got up and sat at his side, leaning on his arm.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she repeated, almost crooning.

Joey sat and cried into his mask, struggling for air even with it, shaking his head.

She didn’t know what was wrong.

~ 11 ~

He didn’t know what was wrong.

Everything was wrong.

The inside of his head was nothing but chaos, loud and unfocused. The inside of his chest felt packed with broken glass. Tina was worried, but he couldn’t ease her mind because he couldn’t get enough control of his head to make even her name into sound.

The fucking tears would not fucking stop, and he couldn’t understand where they came from.

He’d come inside her, and she’d come—the first time he’d had successful sex in more than ten goddamn years—and then he hadn’t been able to get a breath. And then he’d been crying, and he
really
hadn’t been able to get a breath.

He couldn’t grab a coherent thought, either. It was just riot and pain all through him. Thoughts were like air, and he couldn’t get hold of anything.

He was ruining this—that was the first thought that stuck, as his tears finally ran their course and made a sliver of room for breath. He was ruining what he and Tina had just shared. He was ruining it. He was fucking
destroying
it.

As the tears abated, and his respiration finally began to be productive again, the chaos inside him ebbed to a rumble. His head ached horribly, each throb of his rapid pulse like a spike through the center of his skull. It wasn’t unusual for a breathing crisis to leave behind a fucker of a headache, but it didn’t help his thoughts or, therefore, his speech any.

Tina had been quiet, at his side, holding him, almost rocking him. Now that he was calming, she kissed his bare shoulder and asked, “What can I do?”

He pulled the mask from his face and took his first unassisted breath in what seemed like hours. “M’okay.”

“You are not okay.”

He shook his head; his neck positively ached from all the shaking his head had been doing, but he had no way to articulate the unknowable chasm he’d fallen into. And holy fuck, his head hurt. Agony blasted out from the center of his brain, each throb harder than the one before it.

He dropped the mask and grabbed his head in both hands. “Fuck…Hurt…Fuck.”

“Joey?”

He meant to lean over and rest his elbows on his knees, but he missed and fell off the bed.

“Joey!”

The pain closed off any path he might have had to think, much less speak. He needed something, but he didn’t know what. He felt Tina’s hands on him, then he heard her talking, but he couldn’t understand her.

~oOo~

They rolled him back into the room with all the noise, and Joey closed his eyes against the bright lights in the ceiling. He had the vague impression that he’d lost a lot of time, but he felt better. His brain didn’t work right, but it wasn’t trying to kill him any longer. Not at the moment, at least. He could feel the cannula in his nose—that was an upgrade from the mask, anyway.

His throat hurt, too, in an unpleasantly familiar way. Like he’d been intubated. He wasn’t now. How much time had he lost?

He heard voices, but his eyelids were still too heavy to bother lifting, and he couldn’t understand them anyway, so he ignored them.

Then the room got obviously darker, and he felt a small hand slide into his. He knew that hand. That was worth prying his eyelids up for.

Tina was smiling down at him. “Hey. You back with me?”

It was like he had to translate her words from another language. He remembered this—from when he’d first been hurt, and again when he’d had pneumonia. When his own language, the only one he had, stopped making sense. Fuck. What had happened that he’d lost so much ground?

He eventually understood her, though, so he nodded and was rewarded with a kiss.

“Are you feeling better?”

When he’d worked that out, he nodded again.

“You scared the piss out of me, Joey Pagano.” She frowned and peered closely at him. “Do you understand me? The doctor said the pain meds they’re giving you might worsen your aphasia until they wear off.”

He mulled her words over and was relieved when he got to the end and understood—the loss of ground was only temporary, then. He wanted to explain, and ask questions of his own, but his word bank was empty, so he nodded again, and she smiled.

God, she was beautiful. She looked a little rumpled; her hair was mussed, her makeup was smudged, and her black dress was badly wrinkled, but she was like an angel hovering over him.

“Do you know what happened?”

When he figured out those words, he considered the question they made. He remembered Pop’s funeral and the wake after it. He remembered being in his room alone and why he’d gone there. He remembered Tina coming over.

He remembered sleeping together, and he remembered being together after they’d woken. It had been…the most important thing that had ever happened to him.

And he remembered afterward—his fight for control over every single part of himself, feeling entirely overwhelmed, emotionally and physically, all at once.

But he didn’t know how he was here, in what was obviously the St. Gabriel’s Emergency Room—a place he knew far too well.

Finally, he shook his head. He didn’t know what had happened.

“Severe headache due to hypoxia. Kinda best case for the symptoms you were presenting. I was afraid you were stroking out. But they got you oxygenated again and did a bunch of tests, and everything’s okay. I guess you slept through all that, huh? The drugs put you right out. They’re going to release you as soon as they wear off and you’re clear.” She picked up his hand and kissed it. “You’re okay, baby. You’re okay.”

He closed his fingers around her hand. The pulse oximeter on his finger made his grip awkward, but he didn’t care. To hear her call him ‘baby,’ like she’d claimed him for her own—it brought him a feeling, like peace, which scattered the self-loathing for his weakness that had wanted to cloud up his mind.

She kissed him again, and this time he kissed her back, lifting the hand she wasn’t holding and cupping the back of her head. After a few seconds, she broke away and turned to study the monitor near the bed. He wanted to tell her to ignore it, but he couldn’t.

“Carlo was just in here, when the doctor was here. Practically your whole family is out in the waiting room. I had to tell Adele after I called 911, and she called Carlo, and now the place is overrun with Paganos. You want me to see if they can come in? A few at a time, maybe?”

He’d followed along in time with her words fairly well—well enough to understand. He shook his head and tried to find at least one word that would be spoken.

“You…only… …Stay.” The words hurt as they came up his throat; yeah, he’d been intubated.

“Okay, baby. I’ll stay. As long as you want me to.”

He hoped so. Because forever was what he wanted.

~oOo~

Gayle stared at the scattered cards and the upended box on the floor. “So, we’re done for the day, then.” She closed the cover on her tablet. “You can pick that up before you go.”

She stood and walked away, across the room to her desk.

While his speech pathologist ignored him, Joey sat at the table and seethed.

He
had
lost ground after his recent ER adventure. A lot of ground. Two weeks had passed, and he was struggling to come anywhere close to speaking a sentence. He’d even lost some writing fluency, and that pained him more than anything—his texts with Tina had built their relationship. Without those, he was just a silent, inscrutable lump. Dead weight.

Dr. Turillo had referred him to a Boston neurologist, who had studied his CT from the night of Pop’s funeral and determined that, in fact, there was some fresh, albeit slight, scarring after all. Now they were talking about seeing a new dimension to his aphasia.

Great. More brain damage.

It would have been easier if he’d also lost the ability to think. At least then maybe he wouldn’t have been so fucking
aware
. But no—inside, all alone in his head, he was as sharp as he’d ever been. Fully capable of analyzing all of his deficiencies.

He stared at the mess he’d made when he’d shoved the box of flashcards—he was back to the goddamn flashcards—off the table like a two-year-old having a tantrum. Then he turned his head and stared at Gayle’s back. She was doing paperwork like she didn’t give a shit what he did.

And why would she? Nothing was happening. Not only had he not made any progress with his speech in almost five months of regular therapy, but now he’d fallen back to the very beginning. And all because he’d committed the horrible sin of fucking his girlfriend and had paid for it with hypoxia. He’d forgotten for half a second that he was defective. He’d thought he might have had a chance at being happy.

Lesson fucking learned.

He was done with this useless bullshit. “Done…this,” he muttered and stalked out of Gayle’s office. He didn’t stop at the desk; he stormed right out of the RTC.

As he stepped into the elevator and turned to push the button for the lobby, Tina was coming down the hallway toward him. They were supposed to have lunch at what she called ‘their’ coffee shop after his session with Gayle.

But he was done. With everything.

No point.

“Joey?” she called as the doors closed.

~oOo~

She was waiting for him in the lobby, standing right in front of the elevator when the doors opened. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was panting; she’d run down the stairs to beat him.

It wasn’t like he could have a fight with her. He could barely say her fucking name. So he tried to go around her—stupid and immature, yeah, but his other option was to stare meaningfully.

She sidestepped and kept in his way. Then she put both hands on his chest and shoved. She was little, and he wasn’t, but she’d surprised him, and he took a step back. The elevator doors had been trying to close again, bouncing on their tracks; Tina came into the elevator and let them close.

With no button pushed, and apparently no one calling it from another floor, the car was still, and they were sealed up in a private box for the moment.

“No, Joey. Don’t even pull this crap.” She pushed him again, but this time he was ready for it, and he didn’t move. “I know what you’re doing, and
fuck
you. I love you, and I know you love me. We’ve been making something. I deserve better than just getting bailed on because now you want to give up on everything.”

“No…point.”

The car began to move upward; someone had called it. Tina looked over her shoulder at the buttons and then back at Joey. She shoved him again, and he took a step back as the car settled at its floor, just one up from the lobby. “That is such
bullshit
! So what if words are hard! You’re still you.”

The doors opened, and an old man with a walker and his wife with a four-footed cane inched their way into the car. They pushed the button for the lobby. Tina and Joey stood silently, him with his tank between the wall and his back, her right in front of him, her angry expression saying everything she wasn’t saying aloud.

When the elderly couple got out at the lobby, Tina pushed the floor for the RTC. “Here’s the deal: I am with you for the long haul, if you want me there. I love you, and I want you. Just as you are. If you want to keep working, I will help you get as well as you can, improve as much as you can. I’ll be your cheerleader, your therapist, your lover, whatever you want me to be. If you feel like you’re as well as you’re going to be, then that’s okay, too. But if you want to just give up trying to have a life at all, if you can’t see the things that are good—
like us
—if you won’t even try to be happy, then you do that alone. This is the only time I’m ever chasing after you.”