Surviving the Pain (A Baby Saved Me Series Book 1) (5 page)

So, she gave him the only answer she was comfortable with. “We can try.”

Six months later…

Sitting down in the chair that Grey held out for her, Ember smiled up at him. Tonight, her parents were keeping Hudson. For the first time, she could relax some. Terrible two’s were not something that happened just when they were two. Hudson was now eighteen months old and the fits that kid could throw over nothing would shame any actor in the habit of temper sprees. Ember could let him go for a night. She could do it.
I wonder if Mom remembered that he needs a bath before bed
, she wondered to herself as she stared at her phone.

“He’ll be okay, sweetheart.” Grey’s soothing voice pulled her from her panic.

“I’m sorry. It’s hard,” she blushed as she put her phone away.

He reached across the table and grabbed her hand, squeezing reassuringly. “There’s no one out there more capable than your parents. Look how well you turned out. And beautiful. Did I tell you how incredible you look tonight?”

Once again, she blushed only this time from head to toe. His soft laughter filled her ears. Just like that, she’d forgotten about how she wasn’t with her son right then. Smiling, she opened her menu. Through all of their date, they talked about everything from work to a game he watched, but carefully avoiding the Hudson topic. She had to admit that she was actually enjoying herself. Wednesday had been her eighteenth birthday. She was eighteen. God, she felt so much older than that. Maybe it was having an almost two-year-old? Whatever the reason, she certainly felt older than her eighteen years.

Before long, they were walking up the walk to her apartment building. Things with Grey have been… comfortable. They’ve kind of been the same only with added kisses that they never shared before. He never pushed Ember to take it further, and she was grateful for that. She was going against everything that she promised Hudson in the hospital room after he was born. Though, some days, she wanted to tell him she couldn’t do it anymore and others she wanted to be able to feel more, be more, do more. It was hard to let go of something that lived and breathed every single bit in her body. But she was trying, and she’d keep doing it until she knew she couldn’t do it anymore. After all, it has been over two years since her heart was shattered. It was not as if he’d ever come back. To be honest, if he did come back, she’d only see him to kick his ass. She stopped clinging to the memory of Sage and did like Grey asked her to do. She stopped holding on to the past and focused on the here and now, the future.

Looking up at Grey as he helped her out of her shawl, Ember smiled. Grey was great to her and to Hudson. She needed to stop punishing him for what Sage did to her. Leaning down, he kissed her lips softly.

“What is that smile for?”

“You,” she replied.

“Me?” A small smirk began to form on his lips.

“You,” she breathed before rising up on her toes and kissing him.

His arms were immediately wrapped around Ember’s waist. A loud groan filled the space around them as he pulled her tightly against him. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she lessened the space between them even more. The deeper the kiss got and the more his hands touched, the more the need that she’d long forgotten began to come to life. Brazenly, Grey moved his hands to her butt and pushed his erection into her stomach, another moan filled their joined mouths. This time, she didn’t pull back. Instead, she rocked forward into his hardened member. Removing her hands from his hair, where she stuck them on her own moan of pleasure earlier, she ran them down his chest, squeezing his pecs before she moved lower.

Grey pulled back and looked longingly at her. His eyes were full of lust and something else that she was too nervous to decipher. “Emmy?” His voice thick and husky.

“I need you. Please,” she whispered, her cheeks heating slightly.

Ember waited for him to answer her for a few moments before she took action. She pulled his shirt from his slacks and pulled it up his toned and tanned torso. Slowly, Ember kissed her way over the valleys and crevices as she continued to lift the shirt up. Grey’s hands tightened in her hair as she toyed with his nipples before biting them gently. That seemed to be all it took to break him from whatever held him still. Before Ember realized what was happening, he lifted her from the floor, took her to her room, undressed her, and laid her out on the bed. His eyes moved slowly up her body, from her feet to her face, as he undressed himself the rest of the way. When she saw his erection smack against his stomach as he pushed his boxers down, she moaned.

“Condom?” Ember somehow remembered through the lust that fogged her brain.

Bending down, he removed a condom from his pants. “I’ve been carrying one around with me for the past five months, just in case,” he smirked before sliding it over his length.

Slowly, he crawled up her body, kissing, licking, tasting her as he went. When he arrived at the apex of her thighs, she let out a loud, long, moan when she felt his tongue slide from the bottom to the top and circle her clit.

“Oh,” she moaned as he continued to feast on her until she soon came apart on his tongue.

Kissing his way up her stomach to her breasts, he stopped and feasted on her nipples for long enough that she was wound tight once more. His hands pushed onto the bed on either side of her head, taking his weight off her. Shifting down to his forearms, he moved his hips slightly before he pushed into her, quickly and hard.

“Yes,” he breathed. “I’ve been dreaming of this. You’ve had me constantly hard for so long. Damn, you feel incredible.”

Wrapping her arms around to his back, she lifted her hips to get him to move. She needed to come. The feeling was consuming her. It was all she could feel. She needed this orgasm. Taking the hint, Grey thrust slow and deep. Each thrust seemed to push her closer and closer to a bliss she didn’t know she wanted until he showed her what she could have. After a few minutes, his thrusts picked up. Ember wrapped her legs around his waist and dug her heels into his ass trying to push him deeper, deeper to the spot she knew was there, and he just wasn’t hitting it. Soon, no thoughts filtered through her head because her body clamped down on his as another orgasm ripped through her body, pulling Grey right along with her.

He collapsed on top of her, huffing from the shudders that still coursed through his body. Rolling to the side after a few moments, he pulled Ember into his hold, her back to his chest. Kissing the top of her head several times, silence filled the room, and Ember started to doze off. His whispered words were almost missed as sleep began to take her.

“I love you, Ems.”

Just like that, just by using the nickname that
he
called her, she was pulled back into all the pain of the past. A pain she apparently hadn’t pushed past after all. A sob escaped before she could stop it. Grey tightened his hold on her and whispered that everything would be okay. He told her that he’d wait for her to see she loved him too. Ember wasn’t sure of a lot of things, but one thing she was. She knew she liked Grey, a lot, but she didn’t love him. She wanted to, but she didn’t. Ember prayed silently that she could fall in love with Grey instead. As she fell asleep, those were the last thoughts she had.

Please let me be able to love him back. Let me forget Sage and need, want, only Grey.

One year later…

As much as Ember tried to love Grey, she couldn’t. About six months after their special night together, she sat down with him and talked to him about how she felt, or in this case didn’t feel. He took it hard, even cried. It hurt Ember deeply. She wanted to love him. Ember even told him that. She wanted to, but she just couldn’t. In the end, Sage still held her heart even though she didn’t want him to have it any longer.

It took a little while, but Grey and Ember were back to being friends. There were times when she’d catch him looking at her with that sadness and longing in his eyes. When he’d see that he was caught, Grey would give her a sad smile and wink at her. He was a great guy, and she prayed he found the love he was meant to share his life with.

Today she was running late. She ran from work and was headed to the store that Grey now worked at, to get the things that Sanchez – a friend of her father’s – had for Everett. Everett and Kimberly had a plane to catch, and she was cutting it close. The restaurant had been so busy today causing her to lose track of time. It wasn’t until Bexley rushed over to tell Ember to leave, that she’d realized how late she was running.

A lot of things have happened over the past year. Aside from Hudson being two and a half now, Ember had a run in with some pricks. They beat her up pretty good, hospitalizing her for a week, all to steal one hundred and ten dollars in cash and her debit card – that her father had immediately canceled.

Since then, she’s been struggling to make ends meet, which was why Ember was even at work today. She needed the cash. Her bills were piling up, but she’d never let anyone know that. No one was going to pity her. It took months to get her mom and dad to finally go on their vacation that they’d been about to leave for when she was mugged. There was no way she’d let them know her struggles now and ruin their plans again. They deserved to get away from everything and be just them. Since Hudson was born, they’d been by her side. In Ember’s mind, they were just waiting for her to be strong enough for them to be able to step away.

Running up the sidewalk to the front of the store, she ran head first into a hard wall of a man. Her body tingled and hummed just from that little contact. Ember’s heart raced in her chest.
What the hell has gotten into me today
, she wondered as she fought to catch the breath she’d lost in the collision and proceeding fall on her butt.
Fighting to get the hair from her face, she grabbed the hand that was stretched out for her, pulling herself from the ground with their help. A zing of awareness shot through her causing her to pull her hand quickly from the person’s grip.

“I’m so sorry. I…” All her apologizes died on her tongue. Anger filled her, and she swore she could spit fire.
Yes, anger is good
, she thought to herself. “You!” That one word came out as almost a growl filled with so much hatred that even her eyes widened in shock for a moment matching his.

“God, I’ve missed you,” his voice was quiet and filled with… nerves?

“You asshole!” she screamed not caring who heard. “Get the hell away from me,” Ember seethed as she went to walk around him.

Reaching out, he grabbed her arm, stopping her escape. “Wait, please. Let me explain,” he pleaded.

Whirling around, she punched him… hard… in his rock hard stomach. “Fuck,” she cursed. “I’m not letting you do anything,” she spit out at him as she tried to shake the pain from her hand. “You get nothing from me.”

“Baby, please,” he begged, and there even seemed to be tears in his eyes.

“No!” Ember shouted just short of at the top of her lungs. “You don’t get anything. You left me! You pushed me aside like I was a piece of trash. For three years since you walked away, I have been fighting to stay together! I have been doing a pretty good job of it too. Even though every day my heart broke more and more as that night played over and over in my head. So many times I tried to convince myself that there was something I was missing. In the end, I,
me
, had to pick myself up and move forward. NOT. YOU. You didn’t help heal me. You were the one that broke me!”

She shoved him hard, but he grabbed her hand before it could leave his chest. Through his shirt, she could feel his heart beating rapidly. His eyes pleaded with her for a moment of her time. The longer he held her hand, the closer she felt herself slipping. The hard walls she’d built to stop this from happening so she could protect Hudson were slowly crumbling in just moments of running into Sage again.