3. The Grace I've Known Ch. 04-06

She came to a stop between his legs and knelt down.

"Let's see what we have here," she purred.

She undid his belt and the front of his jeans. Nicholas wanted to protest but he couldn't find his voice. He should have moved to stop her but he was too stunned. He knew his cock was engorged, he could feel the blood coursing through it. Mariko reached her manicured little hand into his boxer shorts and pulled it out.

"Oh... this is a nice one Nicky," she said as she stroked her hand up and down his shaft.

"Ah, Mariko... I don't think...I mean... I don't want you to..."

Mariko smiled wickedly and then she opened her mouth and sank it around his cock.

Oh god that felt good. That felt amazingly good. Her mouth was so warm and wet and dynamic, she must have been moving her tongue around or something.

Nicholas knew that he didn't want this. He knew that he wanted sex to be special, and in his mind oral sex counted as sex. He did not want kinky sex. He did not want sex with someone he wasn't in love with or who wasn't in love with him. No matter how much his cock wanted this, he did not.

"Mariko stop," his voice sounded distant, like it belonged to someone else.

She ignored him and started bobbing over him more quickly.

"Mariko, please stop." Things were starting to come back into focus. He needed to make her stop.

Mariko was either so caught up in what she was doing that it wasn't computing that he wanted her to stop, or she didn't care what he wanted.

He tried to push her away gently but she resisted. He shoved her shoulders roughly and she fell backwards onto her butt. She looked up at him, the shock evident on her face.

Nicholas' cock stood erect between them, glistening with her spit. He closed his eyes and forced his heart to slow down. He concentrated on his breathing and the feeling of his blood pumping through his body, and drew it all back to his center. He opened his eyes and tucked his now limp penis into his pants and zipped and buttoned them back up.

Mariko was looking at him in stunned silence.

Nicholas didn't know what to say to her and so they just sat there looking at each other for what seemed like an eternity. Finally she broke the silence, but it wasn't good. She started crying.

Fuck. First she attacks him and then she starts crying like he's done something horrible to her.

"Mariko..." He knelt down on the floor and sat beside her. "I'm not ready for that yet."

"You think I'm ugly," she sobbed.

He put his arm around her shoulders. "No. You are beautiful. You are very beautiful."

"Then why don't you want me?"

"Of course I want you, but I don't think I'm ready for that yet. I don't know you well enough... I don't even know your middle name."

She looked up at him, her eyes damp with tears. "I don't have one."

He smiled, trying to bring the mood back to something approaching normal. " No middle name? You want one of mine? I have a million."

"What are they?"

"Are you ready? I have a long name."

She nodded.

"I am Nicholas Amir Chandrasekhar Galloway Gray."

She scrunched up her nose. "Why do you have so many?"

"I don't know. My mom just kept on adding names as I got older." He did know why he had so many names but he didn't feel like getting into that with her now.

"Hey, why don't we go out and walk by the river?" He asked. "It's a full moon tonight."

"Okay."

She put her clothes back on and they walked along the river. It was a warm night, the air thick with humidity. He tried to make conversation with her but she kept on going silent. Nicholas loved being outside in the middle of the night. He loved the stillness of the usually busy world around him, but Mariko didn't seem to be enjoying this. He looped them back past her apartment to drop her off. She didn't invite him inside and he was glad.

He hugged her on the front stoop and nuzzled into her neck.

"Don't be embarrassed Mariko, it's just me, I'm not going to tell anyone."

"Not even Grace?" She said it so quietly that he almost missed it.

He pulled back and looked down at her. "No. I wouldn't tell that to Grace. I don't talk to her about you."

Mariko nodded. She refused to make eye contact with him.

"Gym in the morning?" He asked.

"Okay."

He rubbed her arms. "Okay. I'll see you then." He kissed her on the forehead and let go of her.

She still hadn't made eye contact. She turned around and entered the building without looking back at him.

Shit. Nicholas had a feeling that he had lost her. Not that he really had her in the first place. They practiced martial arts together almost every morning but he didn't really know her that well, he only knew the surface of her.

He was upset about it, but what could he have done differently? He didn't want to have sex with her. He shouldn't have gone in the first place. He hadn't felt comfortable going, he should have listened to his instincts.

When he got home the apartment felt big and empty. He missed Grace. She'd been gone for four days but it felt like four months. He had been missing her for weeks before she left though. He missed her body beside him in the bed at night, he craved that physical contact with her.

He missed the way she took her socks off in the middle of the night. Every night Grace put socks on to go to bed and every morning he would wake up and her socks would be on the floor on her side of the bed.

The next morning at the gym he was relieved that Mariko showed up, and that she acted like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Maybe they would be able to get over last night after all. It was Saturday and usually he tried to do something with her on Saturdays but she told him that she had made plans with her friends from school and so she would just see him at the gym again the next morning.

It was fine with him. He wanted to clean the apartment before Grace got home anyway. Usually she did the cleaning and he did the laundry but he didn't want her to get home and feel like she had to clean up when she hadn't even been there for the past five days.

When he was done cleaning he decided to surprise her by changing some of the photos. Nicholas had access to thousands of photos that his dad had taken over the years. His dad always had a camera with him and he stored all of the photos on a server in their basement, a server that Nicholas had remote access to.

He logged on and started browsing through the albums. The files were indexed by date but Nicholas had software on his laptop that could recognize faces, so he started browsing the photos that the computer recognized as having Grace in them. It wasn't perfect, every now and then it would misidentify her and he was sure that it was missing her in a lot of them but it was easier than sorting through by date.

God his dad took a lot of photos. There were photos from every conceivable event or milestone. He flipped through photos of Grace in the high school musical, opening presents beside multiple Christmas trees, learning how to ski, canoeing on an alpine lake, carving Halloween pumpkins.

As he sorted through them he confirmed the correct matches and denied the incorrect ones and it started to pick up photos from when she was younger. Nicholas was in a lot of these photos of young Grace. Their parents had shared childcare responsibility so that all of them could work. His mom was the only one who had always worked full time, the other three had worked part time and looked after him and Grace and later Matthew, Lucas, Micah and Ollie.

There were photos of them at the park, at the zoo, playing with his train set, and then he found one of her playing dress-up with Cassie, his family's dog. He opened the album from that date and looked through them. They were so cute. He looked at the date on the folder, they would have been three years old. They had obviously had a pretty good selection of dress-up clothes, there were heaps of photos and they were wearing several different outfits throughout the time that his dad had taken the photos.

He wanted to print one of these out and put it in a frame for her. He chose the one in which she was dressed in a ballerina tutu with cowboy boots on her feet and a fireman's hat on her head. Cassie was sitting obediently beside her with a matching tutu around her neck. Grace had some sort of fairy wand in her hand and Nicholas was in the background with a bridal veil on his head. It wasn't the cutest photo, but it was the one that was most likely to make her laugh.

He transferred the file to his laptop and then a data stick and walked down to the local CVS pharmacy to print it out.

It didn't take her long to notice it when she got home and she was delighted by it.

"Where did you get that photo? I've never seen it before."

He told her about his dad's server full of photographs and showed her how to use his laptop to search through them. She sat there for hours looking through photos. He got his guitar out and played while she sat glued to the computer. Every now and then she would giggle or squeal and motion for him to come and look at a funny photo.

He showed her how to transfer the file onto his computer and made a folder for her on the desktop.

A few minutes later she started laughing. "I can see your willy," she giggled.

"What?" He got up to look at the photo. Sure enough, there was Nicholas, naked as the day he was born, playing with a bucket and spade in the sand at the beach, his little boy penis dangling for the world to see.

She grinned up at him. "It's not very big."

"Gracie, I was..." He checked the date on the file... "Four years old... And I was probably cold. It looks cold in that photo."

Grace laughed. "Yeah, right. You were cold in San Diego in the middle of summer."

"Two can play that game," he countered. "There are photos on there where you can see your who-ha."

Grace burst out laughing. "My who-ha?"

Nicholas felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment. "Yeah, you know, your private parts."

Grace was still laughing at him. "I never knew I had a who-ha."

"Okay, whatever." Nicholas didn't feel like being teased anymore about his lack of knowledge of the correct terminology for a girl's pubic region. "I'm going to start dinner."

Grace gasped, suddenly serious.

"What?" He asked.

"I forgot to tell you, I invited Adrian over for dinner. I hope that's okay."

"Yeah that's fine. I don't care."

Nicholas tripled the amounts of everything that he was cooking. If Adrian was anything like his or Grace's dads he would consume an exorbitant amount of food.

It wasn't long before there was a knock at the front door and he heard Grace letting Adrian in.

They were in the living room and she was showing him photos of her family on Nicholas' computer. He could hear her explaining who everyone was.

After a while he said, "It smells good, what are you cooking?"

"Nicholas," Grace called out, "what's for dinner?"

He wanted to mess with her to get back at her for the who-ha comment. He walked out into the living room and said, "Zach's chili."

Grace's eyes went wide and she looked at him as if he were some sort of monster. He couldn't help but laugh at her. "I'm only kidding. It's tacos. Hey Adrian."

"Hi." Adrian looked up at him.

"Grace told me that you got third place, congratulations."

"Thanks, it was a good race." He seemed cheerful.

They chatted amicably over dinner. Adrian was a nice guy, not the sharpest stick in the forest, but a nice guy nonetheless. He was born in New York City, same as Nicholas was, and his family had moved back to Massachusetts when he was young. He had an older brother named Paul.

Grace had brought doughnuts back from Canada and they ate them for dessert. Nicholas got the fruit bowl out of the fridge to go along with them. He figured he'd better try and balance the crap out with something healthy.

Grace said that she and Adrian would do the dishes so he took his guitar and went back into his room to play a bit more. Nicholas didn't have much of a voice but he was a decent guitar player. He'd often thought about joining a band, maybe he would this year. Now that Grace was essentially independent there was no reason for him not to go out and get himself a social life.

He went back out into the living room to get his computer and Grace and Adrian were nowhere in sight. They must have gone back to her room. When he brushed his teeth he listened carefully for noises coming through the wall that separated the bathroom from her room. He was reassured when he heard their voices. She was okay.

He trusted Adrian, that's why he was surprised when he heard her voice later that night calling for him frantically.

"Kolya! Kolya!"

He didn't put clothes on and he didn't knock on her door, he just ran straight in there.

His first instinct was to beat the shit out of Adrian. Obviously he'd tried to make her do something she didn't want to. But she was almost fully dressed, curled up on the bed crying and sobbing loudly, and Adrian still had his jeans on. He was sitting back on his knees looking at Grace as if in shock. The confusion in Adrian's eyes turned to fear when he saw Nicholas, and he put his hands up in the air as if in surrender while he tried to scramble away from Grace.

Adrian hadn't been trying to force her into anything. She'd just gotten spooked, like the time with Micah in her parents' living room.

Nicholas sat down on the bed and pulled Grace into his embrace.

"Hush milaya, it's okay, you're safe."

Grace put her arms around him and buried her face into his chest.

"It's okay Gracie, it was just a nightmare. You're at home. I'm here. Everything is okay." He rubbed her back.

She was calming down. She wasn't wailing anymore, she was just breathing unevenly and sniffing.

Nicholas felt that familiar sadness settle over his heart. She hadn't had a fit like this in months, and he had been hoping that she might be over them. It had been almost a year since the assault, but as far as he knew this was the first time she'd been in bed with a guy. Apart from him of course, but that didn't count.

Much as it saddened him, he knew that Adrian would be the one who would get to help her through this next phase of her recovery. Adrian was what Grace wanted in a man. Nicholas was what Grace wanted in a friend.

"Open your eyes milaya."

She opened her eyes and looked up at him. Her eyelashes clumped together with tears.

"Look," he nodded over at Adrian. "It's just Adrian, he's not going to hurt you. Look at him."

Grace looked over at Adrian who was perched on the opposite edge of the bed, his eyes wide and his mouth gaping open with shock.

"He's harmless, just like a big teddy bear. Mariko could beat him up with one hand tied behind her back."

Grace let out a funny sound that he guessed was a laugh.

"It's okay baby," Nicholas reassured her as he stroked her hair. "He'll sleep out on the couch and you can talk about it in the morning."

She nodded.

Nicholas motioned with his head for Adrian to leave the room. He got off the bed and picked his shirt up off the floor then walked out. Nicholas pulled the covers over Grace and rubbed her back for a few minutes.

"Sorry Kolya," she croaked.

"Don't worry about it milaya, it'll be okay. Just go to sleep now."

Adrian was waiting for him on the couch.

"Just give me a second," Nicholas said. He went into his room and put clothes on. He had been naked that whole time. Now that he and Grace weren't sleeping in the same bed anymore he slept naked some nights.

"She didn't tell you did she?" Nicholas asked when he came back out. He sat down on the desk chair.

"No. I don't know what the fuck that was in there. I hardly even touched her." Adrian looked tired and upset.

Nicholas nodded. Adrian wasn't a bad guy he just hadn't known to be careful with her.

"Grace went through a... traumatic experience."

"What happened?" He asked.

Nicholas shook his head. "I don't know how much she wants you to know, I think it's better if she tells you herself."

Adrian breathed out heavily and looked down at the palms of his hands. "That's why you're so protective of her?"

"Yeah."

Adrian shook his head slowly.

"I don't know what to tell you Adrian. If you want to be with her you're just going to have to try and work through it with her."

Nicholas got up and went to the hallway closet to get their camping gear. The couch was nowhere near big enough for Adrian, he would be way more comfortable on a sleeping pad on the floor. He threw his sleeping bag to him and blew up his thermarest, moved the coffee table over and laid it down for him.

"Goodnight," Nicholas said and started to walk away.

"Nicholas?"

He turned back to him.

"Thanks for not beating me up." He was serious.

Nicholas sighed. "That thing with Carl... let me tell you, Carl is not a nice man. Outside of sparring I've only ever hit two people in my life and both times were in self defense."

Adrian looked away and nodded. "Goodnight."