know I would like dancing so much.” It was on the tip of her tongue to say they should go again. That she wanted to make it a regular thing. But there was no point to that. None at all.
“I didn’t, either,” he said. He took her hand and led her out of the club, back into the crisp night air. It felt cool and dry on her skin after the moist heat of the dance floor. “I didn’t know a lot of things about life until you, Jada,” he said, pulling her close, kissing her lips. It was tender, sweet. Frightening.
“I want you to teach me,” he said, his voice rough.
“Teach you what?” she asked.
People were leaving clubs all along the street, weaving around where she and Alik were standing. But she didn’t want to move, didn’t want to break the spell of the moment.
“Teach me what it means to make love.”
No. Her heart screamed in denial. The request, so simple, was scarier than anything else she’d faced with him. And now she wondered if she should have simply been content with their encounter on the couch. If she should never have told him she needed more. Because this was too much. Too close to her deepest fear.
She’d been with him so many times, and yet, this was the time she feared might break her. Because he wasn’t asking for her body. He was asking for her soul. Asking her to go deeper than she felt she could.
The further she went with Alik, the more distant her past became. The less her image of the past appealed, because the woman she was turning into wouldn’t fit into it.
She was terrified of losing it, of dishonoring it. Of what it would mean if she took another step away from it, another step toward becoming this person who seemed almost entirely different than the one she’d been with her husband.
All she had were her memories, and the way she saw those was changing, too.
She was trembling inside, but as she looked up into Alik’s eyes, she knew she could deny him nothing. “Yes. I’ll teach you, Alik.”
He had the strongest desire to get drunk. To ask Jada for a reprieve when they got back to his town house so that he could stop by the bar and down a few shots.
But when he stopped and looked at Jada in the bright light of the entryway, in her short red dress that revealed her tanned, toned legs, he was grateful for his sobriety.
Still, when she approached him, he shook like an adolescent. He couldn’t recall ever feeling nervous before sex. Not even his first time. He’d been too filled with the kind of bravado a teenage boy who’d spent his life on the streets needed in order to survive.
But he felt on the verge of coming undone now. Yet if he did anything to dull the experience, he knew he would miss something. Because with Jada, he always wanted to feel it all. Hot, rough, perfect. And every time she left him hungrier for more.
She was already beneath his skin in a way no other woman had ever been. Was there any point in fighting? Not tonight. Not now. Now he was going to embrace it, because this was the kind of feeling he’d been chasing all of his life.
There was no drug, no alcohol, no beautiful woman, who had ever brought him this close to the edge of ecstasy. Just looking at Jada put him there. And it wasn’t just the promise of physical pleasure. It was all-encompassing heat. Like standing in front of a fire, warming every piece of him, burning inside and out.
He had tried to create something like this for most of his life. Had tried to heat the frozen spaces, tried to bring to life parts of him that were dead.
Here he was now, and he was afraid. Afraid he couldn’t handle it. Afraid she would be displeased with him. When all of his protection burned away, and left only Alik, would she still want him?
He didn’t have time to dwell on that. He couldn’t. Because she was walking toward him now, and her eyes were focused on his. As though she saw into him. As though she saw everything. It was impossible, of course. Because if she could truly see into him, if she could see all he had been, if she could truly understand the pain, the damage that was beneath the stone walls around