Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (10 page)

He shrugged.

John moved first. He left Katrynn’s side and came to Tina, smiling and holding out his hand. “Tina
Corti
. Of course! Hey, welcome.” As they shook, John turned to face the family. “You know everybody, I think. Except maybe Rosa’s husband. Eli, this is Tina Corti. Her family owns the market.”

Watching his brother take over the introduction and welcome, Joey didn’t know whether to be grateful or resentful. He could not have done what John was doing so smoothly, and Tina might have felt even more awkward waiting for him to get through an explanation. But John had just taken over…no. He would be grateful. No more finding reasons to feel displaced in his own family. No more self-loathing.

Besides, it was obviously helpful for Tina. She was easy with people, open and friendly and charming, and by jumping in when he had, John had helped her fold seamlessly into the party.

Joey got lots of meaningful looks from each and every member of his family old enough to have an opinion about his love life, and every time somebody walked past him, he got an arm-squeeze or a back-pat.

Usually, he would have thought it all offensively condescending. But today, he understood it as something else: love. They were happy for him.

His father sat at the table, his walker at his side and his cannula in his nose. Joey went and sat down, too. “Hey, Pop.”

“Tina Corti.” Pop’s voice had lost a lot of power in the past few months, and he had to take in oxygen every few words. Joey remembered that struggle from the first days and months after he’d been shot. He’d gotten better, at least to a degree; Pop never would.

“Yeah. Few…weeks now.”

“Wondered where…you’d been going.” He reached his hand across the table and put it on Joey’s. “Good for you…I want…you to be happy.”

Joey looked over at Tina, who was holding Rita, Rosa and Eli’s four-month-old daughter, and talking with Rosa, Carmen, and Katrynn. Everybody else was belly up at the buffet. No one had waited for him, the man of honor, to eat before they’d all gone neck-deep in the food. There’d probably be nothing left by the time he got up there. For once, he didn’t care.

“I’m…getting there, Pop.”

~oOo~

“So you
don’t
live at home.” Tina looked around the cellar at Adele and Pop’s house. His birthday had been held next door, over at what would always be just ‘the house.’

“With my pop…Same thing.”

She flipped through a shelf of Blu-Ray discs. “Is this your room?”

“Sleep…upstairs. Spend…some time here.” The finished cellar was, for all intents and purposes, Joey’s living room. Other than occasionally calling him from the top of the stairs, nobody bothered him down here. His bedroom, on the other hand, was on the second floor, right across the hall from Adele’s. Pop slept in his recliner these days, and the den had turned into his bedroom over the past few months. He couldn’t do more than a couple of stairs anymore.

Joey felt self-conscious, having Tina down here, but she’d wanted to see ‘where he lived,’ and he wasn’t about to parade a girl past his father and stepmother up to his bedroom. That was just a touch more adolescent than he could deal with.

But now that they were down here, the cellar didn’t seem much better. These weeks with Tina had been fantastic—and increasingly frustrating. His libido was not one of the ways in which he was defective, not even his meds seemed to have affected it much, and it had been a long, long time since he’d had a girl who wanted to be close to him—or since he’d been willing to take the risk to be close.

Since the shooting, there was nothing that stole his breath more quickly or completely than sexual excitement. He could jack off without much stress—and boy, did he—but add a woman to the mix, and his lungs shut down.

It was fucking mortifying to go beet red and even blue just as foreplay was about to shift into actual sex, and it was just about as mortifying to use his damn oxygen while he was messing around with a woman. In fact, that was pure conjecture: he’d never even considered using the tank during sex. It was about the least sexy thing he could think of.

He’d only tried at all a few times in ten years, and none of them had been successful.

The last time he’d tried, more than three years before, he’d nearly lost consciousness. The woman he’d been with had called him a ‘fucking retard’ and literally kicked him from the bed while he was still desperate for air. His tank had been in his car, and he’d had to get to it himself. He’d barely made it, and he’d taken the time only to get his boxers on and grab his jeans, with his keys in the pocket. He hadn’t even grabbed the rest of his clothes. It had been winter, with snow on the ground.

Two weeks later, he’d landed in the hospital with double pneumonia and almost died four times in ten days.

That had pretty much been the death knell for Joey’s hope of having anything like a decent life.

Until now.

And here he was, in the cellar of his father’s house, with a woman he liked very much, and who seemed to like him as much. They had done nothing over the past few weeks but kiss. He couldn’t even say they’d made out.

He wanted more, and he thought she did, too. But he knew that he was far too limited to give her more.

He was up to twelve lengths in the pool, without stopping, and only needed a couple of minutes of oxygen after, and he’d lost nineteen pounds. His weight training was going well, and he’d noticed some tone returning. He was getting stronger. Yet three minutes with his tongue in Tina’s mouth, and he needed a break.

He and Carole, his shrink, had been talking about why sexual excitement was so much harder for him to manage, and she’d suggested that it might be a combination of body and mind. In other words, he was weak and crazy. But it made sense, he had to admit. He had a lot of reasons to be particularly stressed out in that situation, and, especially with Tina, he had a lot of reason to be particularly excited as well. Those two states working together made breathing all but impossible.

But he wanted her. He wanted to feel her skin against his.

Leaving behind her study of his movie and television collection, she came to him and picked up his left hand, drawing her fingers over the new brown leather band on his wrist: her gift to him.

“I hope this really is okay. I was worried it might…I don’t know. I wanted you to take it the way I meant it.”

The band was a medic-alert bracelet, with a sterling silver plate woven into the leather. She’d had it engraved with the information on his old bracelet, a cheap steel chain thing he’d ordered online ten years ago. It was a nice piece—and Joey took it as she’d meant it. He had to wear one, and this one looked good.

Also, he liked how attuned she was to his issues. She didn’t obsess about them or try to be another of his therapists. But she understood, and she did things that made life easier for him. The bracelet was an indication of that.

“Love it. Thank you.” He bent his head and kissed her.

She tipped her head back before he could make the kiss more than a touch. “I want to give you something else for your birthday, but I don’t want it to be the wrong time.”

“What?”

A blush came over her cheeks. “I like that we’ve been going slow. I like everything about how we’ve been. But…” She faded out, and her cheeks had turned bright red.

Joey could tell the direction she’d been headed—he’d been thinking similar thoughts—and he didn’t like her ending on ‘but.’ He lifted her chin so her eyes would come up to his, and he waited for her to continue.

“I want to put my hands on you. And my mouth. I think about it a lot. You’ve been getting a lot stronger. If you use the tank…how would it be if I went down on you?”

Christ. Jesus Christ. He went fully hard at once. But it was so much more complicated than just the tank—which he did not want to use. No way he had the words to explain. This was not something he’d shared with Tina—or with anyone ever, except, recently, his shrink. He wasn’t afraid to say them to Tina, he trusted her, but he’d be lying if he’d said he didn’t see the risk.

He let go of her chin and pulled his phone from his pocket. She nodded and took her phone out of the little black bag strapped across her chest. This was a thing they’d started to do when he needed to say more than a few words: he texted them to her. It was like writing a note, which he generally hated, but with Tina, they texted so often anyway, half their relationship was happening on a screen.

Their relationship. Beginning his message, Joey smiled. He typed for a while, hesitating over a few words, and then hit send:

First thing: I want you so bad I’m about to pop. But I don’t know what I can do. I’ve got some bad history with women since I got hurt, made me feel deformed, and I haven’t fucked since. That’s a long fucking time of not fucking lol. You know how quick I get winded when we kiss. If things are more intense, I don’t know what will happen. But I want to. I want to do everything with you. I just don’t know.

She read it on her phone and looked up. “That’s why I was thinking the tank.”

“…Mood killer.” Nothing screamed I’M A WEAK BITCH like sucking on oxygen during sex.

“What if it wasn’t?” She stepped up to him and set her hand on his chest, pushing her fingers under the placket, between the buttons. “What if it was part of it?”

“Please?” The word was mostly gasp. Fuck. Already, his chest was feeling tight.

She undid a button. Joey focused on drawing air into his lungs and pushing it back out.

“What if you keep it close, so you know it’s there if you need it. Then you just sit back and feel me feel you.”

Another button, and she took off her hat and tossed it toward the coffee table. Her bag came off next; she dropped it to the floor at her feet.

Holy fuck, she was seducing him.

“We go slow. We can do what we’ve been doing, where we breathe in time with each other. If you need the tank, you use it, but I won’t stop unless you want me to.”

Another button. His shirt was mostly open now. She leaned in and pressed her perfect, dark red lips to his chest, at the notch just under his breastbone. When she leaned back, Joey saw the mark of her mouth, rendered in her lipstick, on his skin.

“If it’s too much, we stop. That’s okay with me.” When she looked up, she saw him through her long bangs and bedroom eyes. “Can we try?”

He nodded. If he could have this with her, if it could be good? Jesus. “Slow.”

Her smile suggested that she thought slow would be just fine. “Very slow. Are we private here?”

“They…won’t…come down.” His brain resisted making words. It had more important things to do. Like feel. And tell his lungs to breathe.

With her hands on his chest, Tina pushed him back to the sofa, and he sat. She picked up his tank from the floor and set it next to him. She arranged the tubes for ease of use.

“Cannula or mask?”

How had she made that sound
sultry
? “Mask.” If he’d need it, he’d really need it.

She nodded and set it up. When it was ready, she opened the last button of his shirt and settled herself on his lap, straddled and facing him. She ran her fingers over his chest and belly.

His body wasn’t in peak shape, or even close, but it was a lot better than it had been a couple of months earlier, so when self-doubt and self-loathing tried to get hold of his thoughts, he shoved them aside, focusing his attention on her fingers on his skin, her body’s weight on his lap, the rhythm of her breath.

She traced a fingertip over the scar he hated. “This is it.”

He nodded.

She bent forward and traced the same path with her tongue. The skin there was numb, but Joey felt the thrill of her touch nonetheless.