told me to get rid of him.”
You didn’t tell me not to marry Dylan.
Her earlier words echoed between them.
“I wanted what was best for you. Whether you believe that or not. I did. And if it wasn’t... This, then...”
“Why?”
“You know how it is for me. I don’t share. My life is mine. In... Look, I give to people all day every day. It’s part of my job. And when I come home, I do what I want. I don’t rely on anybody, I don’t ask for anything... And that’s the way I like it. Somebody in my position can’t ask someone else to give up the future, to give up a marriage for...”
“For what?”
“There’s not a name for it, is there?”
“Friends with benefits?”
The words made her stomach feel hollow. Because they couldn’t just be that.
“Yeah. Friends with benefits.”
“You know, you actually could have asked me to do that,” she said, her throat getting tight. “The first time I saw you... I felt like my world turned over on its head. But I was a coward, and I couldn’t understand what my life might look like if I stepped off the path that I’d carved out for myself. And more than that, I was afraid of it. So I... I ignored it. I ignored that I felt that way. I ignored that I wanted something else. But I knew that something changed. Forever when I first met you. And it did. Because you gave me the confidence to do what I did the other day. You gave me the confidence to walk away from Dylan, not because I could have you instead, but because... I have our friendship. And you made me feel something about myself that he didn’t. You made me trust myself in a way that I never did before. But it’s taken me all this time to realize...that I could remove those supports and I would still stand.” She cleared her throat. This next bit felt important. “I’ve only been with one person.”
“I figured as much,” he said.
“I might be bad at sex.”
He chuckled, and the warmth that spread through her body sent tingles all the way from her scalp down to her toes. “You will not be bad at it.”
“How do you know? Maybe I am inept when it comes to handling penises.”
“There’s no way that you could be inept when it comes to handling me.”
And he was the one that closed the space between them, and she was grateful. He came right where she stood and wrapped his arm around her waist, and the air rushed from her lungs.
And there were words that hovered on her lips that terrified her, so she swallowed them. Didn’t say them. She looked up into his brown eyes.
She suddenly wanted to cry. Because it felt like fate. Because it felt like the answer to a thousand prayers that she had never been brave enough to say. Because she felt like a new woman in a way that she hadn’t, when she had decided to leave Dylan at the altar.
That woman had been afraid. She’d been numb. And she hadn’t known what the next step was. Hadn’t known what she wanted or what she was going to do.
And all right, she still didn’t know the answers to all that, not in a broader sense. But she wanted him. She really, really wanted him.
And she felt like if she could be this brave, brave enough to reveal the secret part of herself. Brave enough to expose just how deep her desire for him ran...
Then maybe she could be brave enough for anything.
She put her hands on his face, finally touching him the way that she wanted. She smoothed her fingertips over his stubble-roughened jaw, and ran her thumbs beneath his bottom lip. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she whispered.
The fire in his eyes burned brighter, and he didn’t let her speak again. Instead, he lowered his head, kissing her, hard and deep. Stealing her breath. Stealing her reservations.
It was a revelation, this kiss. And any concerns she had about being bad at sex or undesirable were burned away by the heat in it.
Because she realized then that it actually didn’t matter what kind of experience she had. Because there were kisses, and then there was kissing Laz.
Because there was sex, and then there was just the act of wanting him, which touched somewhere deeper than any other sort of desire ever had.
He was big and muscular, and when he held her