would both enjoy, but I keep being drawn back to You’ve Got Mail.”
I groan. “You’re not going to make me sit through some romance movie, are you?”
“Okay, okay. How about Guardians of the Galaxy? I haven’t seen that one yet, and I can deal with watching Chris Pratt on screen for a couple of hours.” She grins.
And so I suffer through watching her eyes light up at the screen every time Chris Pratt comes on. I end up watching her more than the actual movie. Who wants to watch a movie about a stupid fucking space adventurer anyway?
Isla’s yawning by the movie’s end, so as soon as the credits roll, I click the movie off and stand.
“Let’s get you to bed. I don’t want Ford bitching at me that his press secretary is falling asleep on the job.”
She gives me a lazy smile and holds her hand out for me to help her out of the chair. I yank her up out of the chair pressing my shoulder into her belly to lift her over my shoulder.
“Oh my God, Garrin!”
I chuckle and smack her ass as I carry her to my bedroom. “Now why’d you go put your underwear back on?” I ask.
“Put me down!”
She wiggles on my shoulder, but not enough to make me think she really wants me to put her down. I reach my bed and plunk her down on the mattress. Her hair sprays out around her flushed face. My T-shirt rode up, so her white lace panties are visible.
I strip down to my boxers and join her in bed, motioning for her to come over to my side and join me under the covers. Once she’s settled with her head on my chest, I bring my arm around and gently stroke her arm.
“I had a really good time tonight,” she says.
“Same.”
Her index finger comes to my chest and traces a pattern over my skin. “Until tonight, I’d never enjoyed sex, not really. With you I’m able to get out of my own head and be in the moment. I wasn’t thinking about whether or not someone could be taping us, or what people would think if they knew I was doing this, or a million other things that have always gotten in the way of me being intimate with a man.” She props her chin up on my stomach. “Thank you. I know this was probably just sex to you, but for me it was more than that. It was a breakthrough. It showed me that I can be the woman I want to be. After the sex tape scandal, I didn’t think that would ever happen.”
She presses her lips to my chest, and I cradle the back of her head with my hand.
Fuck. The guilt’s like poison slowly eating away at my insides. There was a time when I told myself she deserved what happened to her. Now, the knowledge of what I did is like an unbearable weight pressing down, about to crush me.
It’s now or never. If I continue to keep this secret, it will only be disastrous.
There’s so much I can’t tell her, so much I’ll never be able to tell her. I decide that if I can’t be honest with her about everything else, I can at least be honest with her about this.
I hope she’s the same understanding and forgiving person that she was in high school.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I say.
She pushes up off my chest onto her elbow to look down at me.
“It’s about what happened to you senior year.”
“Okay…” A crease forms between her eyes.
I swallow hard and push up so that I’m leaning against the headboard.
“The Classholes and I used to have this game. It was stupid and immature, but so were we. Basically, the way it worked was one guy would dare you to do something and assign it a certain number of points, and then if you did it, those points added to your tally. Whoever had the most points at the end of senior year won.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
I sigh. “Because Carter dared Asher to have sex with you.”
She jerks back like I slapped her. “He… he only asked me out to win a bet?”
I grab ahold of her hands and squeeze them with the hope she’ll hear me out “I didn’t know until recently, I swear. And I still don’t understand why he’d do that since he was the only one I’d confessed my feelings about