Chapter Text
“It’s a blood flow issue,” the doctor says as the ultrasound technician moves his device across James’ abdomen as if he were a pregnant woman. “A major vessel leading into your groin was severed, either by the bullet or during the emergency surgery right after.”
James didn’t consider himself sexist, but he had really been hoping to talk about this with a male doctor. As it stands he’s lying on the exam table with a paper sheet barely covering him from his private bits down to his knees. He isn’t sure how he even has it in him to be embarrassed about his body anymore after being exposed to literally dozens of medical workers during his recovery.
“Can it be fixed?” he asks.
The doctor waves the technician away leaving the pair of them alone in the exam room. “Well, we can give it a go,” she says crossing her legs on her stool. “The process would involve removing a section of vein from somewhere else, probably your thigh, and patching up the damage. We could do it laparoscopically, so any additional scarring would be minimal. Of course, if you’re fine with how you are now, there’s no need to go through with it.”
Before Alyssa, James almost certainly wouldn’t have bothered. It wasn’t that the thought of sex squicked him out or anything. It was just plainly uninteresting.
Things were different now, though.
“Okay,” James says.
“Okay, what?” the doctor asks.
“Okay, let’s do it.”
———Three weeks earlier———
“Pull your trousers down, I want to see.” There’s no build up to it. Like so many of the things that come out of Alyssa’s mouth, the words shoot out abruptly and vaguely out of context.
James had been talking to her about how he had to lean on his dad when he was learning to walk again. He’s growing to like talking about his dad.
“What?” He feels a hard lump building in his throat.
“I want to see where you were shot.”
They’re sitting on the bed in her Aunt Leigh’s cabin which she’s renting to James on the cheap. Alyssa’s mum is none too happy about it, but he thinks Alyssa may have begged her aunt to take him in. He has enough cash now that his dad’s life insurance policy has come through, to stay there for a while if he’s careful. After that, shit, he supposes he could try to sell his old house. It’s not like living there feels like an option for him anymore.
“It doesn’t really look all that bad on the outside, most of the damage was internal.” His belt buckle clinks as he hesitantly unfastens it.
“Yeah, I figured,” she says sounding unimpressed.
He stands and cautiously slides his jeans from his hip revealing the scars. There’s two long, thin ones from operations that disappear into his underpants and then a more circular one on his side where the bullet went in.
Alyssa brings a hand up to grip his hip running her thumb gently around the edges of the gunshot wound. “Do they hurt?”
James shakes his head, “Not the scars, no.”
She moves her hand lower and strokes the scars from his surgeries, “What hurts you then?”
He feels like he would need an encyclopedia’s worth of words to give a complete answer to the question, so he goes with a short response. “There was a lot of damage to my hip joint and the muscles there. It’s what caused me to have to learn to walk again.”
She looks up at him with eyes full of concern and tilts her head up to kiss him. James bends down to meet her lips and puts his hands on her waist. Kissing Alyssa never gets old. You never know exactly who she is going to be that day. Besides, he thinks he might be getting better at it. It’s a soft kiss this time, their lips lightly brushing together in tandem movements. Then he feels her hand move suddenly down to cup his privates.
He immediately pulls his face away from her. “What are you doing?”
“You said you hadn’t tried.” She doesn’t squeeze him, just holds him there in her palm. “Can you still feel it?”
His hands fly up to cover his face in shame, “Alyssa, I don’t think- ”
“Can you feel it, when I touch you?” she demands.
James takes a deep breath, “I can feel everything fine. I just don’t think it works.” His voice sounds harsher than he means it to.
“For fuck’s sake, James, just let me try!” she snaps at him. She hasn’t snapped at him in a while.
He tilts his head up toward the ceiling not wanting to look her in the eyes as he nods. “Okay.”
His mind flashes back to that night. That terrible night before everything went belly up. The night he’d killed for her. He’d thought he’d been a psychopath. He was so full of shit. Now when he looks back at that moment, all he can see is an innocent boy, dancing with a girl while on some reckless adventure. He was tipsy and Alyssa had tried to suck him off, and at first, he had thought he should just let it happen. He had gotten hard then, just from the feeling of her mouth on him. Honestly at the time, he had been a bit surprised.
It’s okay for women. They can just lie back; think of England.
That’s what his dad had told him.
Us men, we have to be England.
Now as her hand tries to work him over his underpants, he can’t be England. He can’t be France. He can’t even be Malta. His body is tense as a wire, and he knows the impression he’s giving off isn’t of someone who is enjoying this.
James has always been aware he appreciates women in a way that other men just didn’t appeal to him. The thought of touching a specific one just never meshed right with him. So, when he wanked himself off as a teenager, he had just focused on the feeling of his own hand, not even bothering to try to imagine himself with someone else.
Alyssa stops her motions and looks up at him with a pouted lip, “Are you sure this isn’t just because you don’t want me?”
James reaches down and clutches the back of her head, the fingers of his good hand lacing with his bad one. “How can you even ask that? The only thing I’ve ever wanted is you.” Fuck, he hates how pathetic it sounds, but it’s true. She’s the only one who has ever done anything for him. Now she’s touching him in the way he’s thought of for the past two years and he can’t do anything about it.
“Alright,” she says releasing his sensitive bits.
In that moment, he’s terrified; terrified that she might mistake his physical issues for feelings, but then she wraps her arms around him resting her cheek against his scars. “You know, people have sex lives that look all sorts of different ways.”
“Yeah,” he says unhelpfully. The warmth of her feels pleasant against the unmarred stretches of his skin.
As suddenly as the moment began, it ends. Alyssa releases him and stands up. “I have to get dressed for work,” she says collecting her jacket from the back of a chair. “Is it alright if I stay here with you tonight?”
James pulls his trousers back up leaving his belt dangling unfastened. “Yeah, of course.” It had been about a month and a half since he’d moved in, and she’d never spent the night with him before. Maybe she thought it a bad look for a married woman. The divorce had only gone through the previous week.
-------------------------------------------------
Alyssa spends a lot of time working at the cafe these days. More than she did before. She says she wants to pay her mum back for the wedding, and then she and James could get the fuck out of there. She’s never said where exactly it is she wants to go next. It probably hasn’t occurred to her yet. Three times a week, she has a visit with her psychiatrist. It seems like rather a lot to James, but she’s been quite a bit more stable lately, so probably best to leave it to the professionals.
James saw a therapist when he was younger after his mum died. He saw one again while he was still in hospital. They had come and sat down by his bed and asked him if he had any mental health concerns. He had no idea where to start. He permanently disfigured his hand in a fryer. He used to kill animals just to be able to feel something, but now the notion makes him violently ill. He paid some guys to beat the shit out of him. He was sexually assaulted in a bathroom a few days ago. Oh, and he had been plotting to kill his girlfriend, but not anymore. All of those were things he probably needed to talk with someone about, but that’s not what he decided to lead the conversation with.
“Do you think that killing someone can make you a better person?”
The therapist gaped at him, obviously a bit blindsided, “How do you mean?”
“It’s like it flipped a switch in me. Like suddenly, I felt things that I hadn’t been able to feel in years. Almost normal, you know? I mean, still fucked, but fucked like a human being.”
The rest of their session together hadn’t gone well. James isn’t sure if they were a shit therapist or if he was just above their paygrade.
He has a lot of free time these days. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he drives into town and goes to night classes. He figures his money is going to eventually run out someday, and he’ll have to find a job. Manual labor probably isn’t an option for him now with his injuries. Best to have as much education as he can.
James is not really sure where the rest of his time goes when Alyssa isn’t around. Sometimes he sits by the water and just clears his mind. Sometimes he sees her ex-husband there as well out rowing. James knows he must spot him too. It should make him feel awkward, but really, he just feels bad for him.
-----------------------------------------------------
Alyssa bursts through the door of the cabin like hellfire that night, still in her waitressing uniform. She grabs James by the front of his shirt and walks him backward until he hits the edge of the bed and falls over onto it. Straddling him, she crawls up his body and starts kissing him so roughly he thinks their lips might start bleeding.
He gasps for breath when she finally pulls back. Her hand is pressing against his chest pinning him down. “I want you to finger me.”
He thinks that’s probably a normal thing for someone in a relationship to ask for. “Okay.”
She pulls the bottom of her dress from under her knees and lifts it off over her head. When James thought about Alyssa, he rarely ever thought about her actual body. Seeing her like this, that feels quite silly now.
Surprising himself, he reaches around her back and grabs the band of her bra. He fumbles with it for a moment before he remembers something his dad had told him once after too many beers on the couch.
You’ll think you’ll need to pull them apart, when what you should be doing is pushing them together.
The hooks on the edge of the band come loose and he pulls the straps from her shoulders. “Thanks, dad.”
“What?” Alyssa asks snapping her attention to his face.
Shit. Did he say that out loud? “Nothing.”
She flings her bra off the edge of the bed and crawls off him, “Whatever.”
James is worried he’s put her off, but then she lays down beside him in nothing but her panties. “You’re a little overdressed, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yeah,” he says sitting up to take off his shirt. Her eyes immediately look to his scars then flicker back up to him. “Everything okay?”
“I thought you’d be touching my tits by now.” She sounds disappointed.
“Do you want me to?”
“Do you even like this?” she asks.
“I do.” James nods vigorously. His hand rises quickly and palms her breast. He realizes too late he wasn’t thinking and used his bad hand.
Alyssa rolls her eyes at him. “God, I dunno if I should let you poke around my fanny now.”
He drops his hand to the bed, “Sorry.”
“I’m only joking,” she says sliding her thumbs into the waistband of her panties. Without ceremony, she slides them down her legs and lays on her back naked beside of him.
James allows himself a few seconds to just look at her. He’s actually done it; she really wants him.
She reaches over and grabs him by the wrist. “Do you know what to do?”
In theory, yes, he understands the basic mechanics. He’d even searched a few videos on the internet in the past out of curiosity. Now he’s thinking maybe he should have watched more. “Will you show me?"
“Alright.” Alyssa guides his hand down and presses his index finger into the right spot. “There,” she says and begins moving his finger to rub herself with. “Like that.”
She continues the rhythm for a bit before releasing his hand and leaving it up to him. He tries to continue exactly as she had showed him. “Is this right?”
“Don’t press so hard, it’s fucking sensitive down there.”
“Sorry,” he says lightening his touch which makes a small little moan escape her throat. His heart nearly explodes in his chest. “Do I just keep going like this?
“Yeah, it can take a while sometimes.” She turns to look at him. “You should kiss me, it might help.”
The thought of trying to multitask while doing this is intimidating, but he doesn’t want to let her down. He bends forward and takes her mouth in his.
She was right though. It doesn’t take too much longer, and he can feel her getting slicker. Her body starts to writhe under his touch, but she says to keep going. It’s almost more than he can bear. He wants more. He wants to be with her the way men are supposed to be with women.
But he can’t.
He’ll never get the chance.
Alyssa climaxes with a chorus of “Oh fucks” and “Shit, shit, shit.” James wouldn’t have it any other way. She pulls his hand away from her and lies panting on the sheets. The skin on her cheeks and chest are flush in a way he’s never seen.
“Did I do okay?” he asks.
“Not bad.” From her that might as well be high praise.
It’s over now. They should still be going. Moving on to other things. But they aren’t because it’s over.
Alyssa seems to sense his despondence. She turns over toward him and puts a hand on his face. “It’s alright, you know. If all we ever have is this.”
“Is it?” he asks blankly.
She pulls him closer pressing her face into his chest and he wraps an arm over her.
“Sometimes I hate myself,” she says. “For not letting you have sex with me that night on the beach.” Her voice is shaky, and James thinks she might be about to cry. He’s usually the one who cries.
“Don’t feel bad about that, Alyssa,” he says stroking her hair. “You never have to do anything you don’t want to. Besides, we had been through a lot.”
“I just… I thought we had time.”
The thing is, they have time now. As far as he can tell, they have all the time in the world. It doesn’t matter.
He has to change things. At least he has to try.