like her world had been burned to the ground. But not in a bad way. She had just been standing there watching everything go up in flames around her, and it had seemed beautiful and warm and wonderful.
She had gone up right along with it, and it had still seemed wonderful.
It made her feel different about the whole thing. About him. About his offer.
They were friends after all. Maybe they could manage to be friends with benefits. Maybe they could be friends who had that kind of sex and a baby between them. She had avoided him after dinner, which was maybe a little bit mean. But she was mounting a campaign. She had an idea. Then the very thought of what she was about to do made her feel sick inside, but it had to happen. Because she had to know. Before she made any kind of decisions about whether or not he would be the one. Before she decided how much she was willing to bend and break with his demands...she had to know.
She dotted the insides of her wrist with perfume and looked in the mirror. She didn’t have any makeup on, but she often skipped makeup. Instead, she pinched her cheeks and wet her lips, fluffing her hair and looking at the woman in the mirror.
The woman who was about to take a step with her friend that she wouldn’t be able to take back.
Last night was that step.
Or maybe it was several steps ago. When she had asked if he would be the father of her baby.
Or maybe before that when she had told him about her plan in the first place.
Maybe it had all changed sometime before she could even remember. Maybe there had just been the slow, inevitable walk toward something new. Something different. Maybe no matter how badly you wanted to stay in one place, the way things moved around you meant you couldn’t.
She was filled with maybes and she didn’t have a lot of answers. But that was the story of her life.
She was on a quest for something more concrete; if she wasn’t then she wouldn’t have embarked on the whole baby endeavor to begin with.
Ryder was the strongest, most solid man she knew. And so on that score she could see the value in agreeing to what he had asked her to agree to.
But beyond that... Beyond that was the way he’d made her feel, and when had anyone in her life touched her and made her feel that good? They hadn’t. Not ever.
Didn’t she deserve that?
Buried in all those thoughts was a concern about the way he had called her selfish. And if maybe this line of thinking was selfish, as well. But she wasn’t sure she cared. She wasn’t sure she could afford to care, not now.
Because now that the idea was in her head, that it should be him, now that he had touched her the way he had, kissed her...
And none of it was simple, because it was all bound up into many things. Because he was her friend, and because they had never done anything like this before. Because she had never felt anything like that before with anyone, because all of this was linked to the idea of having a baby together, and then because of him, the idea of maybe getting married...
Yeah, it was a little bit complicated and she wanted to reduce it right now.
To sensation.
To the way that he had made her feel, because it was new, and it was amazing, and it was different from anything she had ever felt before.
She opened the door to the caravan and walked outside, the warm summer evening washing over her skin. Her nipples pebbled beneath her thin top. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She often didn’t wear a bra; she didn’t have breasts that were much of anything to write home about, so there wasn’t a point when she wore tank tops. No use fussing around with strapless bras and things like that when she might as well just forgo.
But she happened to know tonight that the white tank top she was wearing was a little bit see-through. As was the skirt that she had put on.
She had put on underwear, but only because she had a pair of very cute white lace panties that she thought he might like.
The idea sent an arrow of pleasure shooting straight through her core.
She didn’t think she’d ever thought about sex and attraction in these