Turn Your Face

Mad Love

A/N: This chapter comes with a very strong trigger warning regarding drug abuse and overdose. Please skip the flashback if that may be triggering for your mental health.

Also just a heads up that this flashback goes to the summer before the girls' Freshman year of high school, before Emily and Alison dated the first time around. I think I make that clear, but just in case.

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I could feel myself wavering beneath her lips. For as much as I wanted to take her on this couch without a second thought. For as much as the love I have for her pulsed through my veins more than maybe even oxygen itself. For as much as I could feel her timidity breaking the longer my hands rested on her body. I couldn't shake the feeling that our hardships were far from over.

I had told Alison four different ways that I wasn't dropping this relationship out of fear that I had lost her trust forever. She knows me and knows that I will do anything and everything to be by her side. But she hadn't done the same. I repeated myself multiple times and yet she mimicked my dedication with a brief squeeze of my calf. It didn't feel right, as though she still needed to rationalize her fears with some outside source before she would be able to claim that I was fully pardoned.

Conviction.

The one tool Dr. Ives stated in the therapy was my best chance at fighting. Conviction was the one source of fire that turned me from being submissive to Alison to instead being an aggressor. It was the drive I had four years ago when I pursued Alison all over again. It was a power that I had lost in the death of my father. Conviction and the fight that beyond everything else, I believed in this relationship. I believed in my abilities to be the best possible woman in the world for Alison. It was my responsibility to protect this relationship with all that I had.

As my brain caught up with my body, I found myself back mid-embrace with Alison. Her hands, once floating in limbo between our laps, had moved to my upper thighs, both pinning me down and also massaging my skin in her grasp. My left hand still cupped Alison's face radiating desire while my right had settled just between Alison's collarbone and breasts eagerly grasping for her skin while our lips moved in tandem. Stopping the kiss to move up and down Alison's jawline, Alison began tracing her hands down my legs in attempts to separate them from their crisscrossed position so she could settle herself on top of me on the couch.

Her lips had gained fervor as though the realization of my sobriety had only increased her urgency to feel my touch on her skin. As soon as Alison was able to lie flat on top of my body, she brought her hands up underneath my shirt settling them on my abs, still taut from years in the water. My hand on her face moved to gather her hair in my hand providing better contact with her neck while my other hand wrapped around her waist to secure her on top of me. Lifting my head off the couch to reach her pulse point, Alison turned her head further to the right causing her to gasp as my lips made contact.

"Fuck..." she exhaled panting as she took in another shallow breath.

The wheels in my head began spinning again. At face value, this is what Alison wanted. She wanted the ability for us to be intimate without second-guessing. She wanted to know that I was vulnerable and honest and loving because there was no place else in the world I would rather be.

But below the surface, this isn't what Alison wanted at all. She had just claimed that she didn't trust me, that she needed time, that our relationship would be different. Her heart and her head were seeking different things. As much as I would have loved to continue: hear her cry out my name, feel her fingers trace over my body like igniting a flame, and see her eyes roll back in ecstasy, I wanted her to feel like her words were respected more.