Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,155
wasn’t sure how long they’d been lying there panting and staring at the ceiling. She was about to answer Jay’s question with a vehement no when she had a sudden realization. “Hey! I’m not cold.”
She rolled on to her side to face him, and he did the same. She pressed her room-temperature, bordering-on-warm palms against his chest briefly and then did a silly jazz-hands gesture with them.
He smiled and enclosed her hands between his.
She and her warm hands thought about his question. “You are uptight in the best possible way.” There was something about the way he asserted himself in the bedroom, ran the show with his signature intensity focused entirely on her, that undid her a bit. No, it undid her a lot. “Anyway, I never said you were uptight. You’re always talking about how people say you’re uptight, but I am not one of those people. I think you’re driven. You have high standards. It’s a good thing.”
He looked way too self-satisfied at her pronouncement, so she pulled her hand out of his grasp and swatted him. He grabbed it back and then shocked her by bringing it to his mouth and kissing her palm tenderly.
Then he shocked her again—he seemed to be really good at doing that—by saying, “I want to meet your friends.”
She quirked her head, merely from surprise, but he must have thought she was recoiling, because he said, “Too soon?”
“No, no. You just…sound serious.”
He shrugged. “I’m decisive. I don’t waste time when I know what I want.”
“Jay Smith, are you asking me to go steady?” She kept her tone light to show she was teasing.
But she kind of wasn’t. She was holding her breath. Because she wanted him to be. She could see now exactly what Gia had been saying. Jay made her better. Happier. And in fact, because of the whole radical honesty thing they had going, he helped make her more herself.
He didn’t seem to think she was teasing, either, because he just said, “More like telling. But yes. I’m not into sharing.” Then his face lightened a little, and he smirked. “I’m uptight that way.”
He wasn’t into sharing. And he was talking about her. That was…totally thrilling. “So, what? You’re my boyfriend now?”
Please say yes. She held her breath. Funny how fast one talk with her girlfriends and one scorching session between the sheets had her changing her tune on the topic.
“Yes. I’m your boyfriend now.”
She hadn’t thought she was looking for one of those, but now that he, he specifically, was here, she understood that she’d been looking for him.
She exhaled.
“Unless you don’t want me to be,” he added.
She shook her head, suddenly weirdly shy. “I want you to be.” Her voice had gone embarrassingly squeaky, so she burrowed into his chest. She didn’t want to have to look at him while she asked her question. “You don’t mind that I’m basically out of commission for two or three days a month?”
“No.” She felt the surety with which he uttered the word. It rumbled through his chest. “I mean, I mind because I don’t want you to be in pain, and I think we should try to figure out a way to cut down on that, but I don’t mind in any elemental way.”
This. This was what the girls had meant. Jay was going to be someone she could rely on. But what she hadn’t seen was that that wasn’t the same thing as being dependent on someone.
“Having sex all the time is going to be exhausting, anyway,” he went on, laughter in his voice. “It will be good to break for a couple days for board games.”
“And you don’t mind…”
“What?” He levered her off him, and, using his hands to cup her face, forced her into eye contact with him.
God, this was so mortifying. But radical honesty, right? “You don’t mind that I can’t have kids?”
He smiled so tenderly. “Which means you’re basically my dream girl, because I never wanted them.”
“But why?” It seemed an important question, suddenly. He had said that once when they were talking about their parents, but she needed to make sure he meant it. That he wasn’t settling.
“I’d be terrible at it.”
“I don’t think you would be. Are you sure? Do you understand what you’re missing out on? Or if you only want me because I can’t have them, that makes me feel kind of—” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s way too early to be talking about this stuff.”