want another beer. And I’m not hungry for food.
The fear twists and combines with the lust creating an explosive combo. What if after everything I’ve been working on, I let us both down again?
“Um… Cora?”
Her heels click on the tile floor but then stutter to a stop as she sets the items down on the coffee table. “Yes?”
“I have to tell you something. Something important.”
I stare at her, not because she’s so damn beautiful, but because she’s Cora. She’s the person in this world I hate disappointing the most. And I’m about to tell her something huge. And she may or may not forgive me for not telling her sooner. Seems like all I’ve been doing since adulthood with her is making mistakes and regretting them. But I guess that’s what happens when fear takes the lead and pushes all the positive emotions to the side.
She rushes toward me. “Blaine, you’re scaring me.”
I flick a wrist and exhale, feeling the weight of the moment settling into the air and then lingering between us. “No, it’s nothing to be afraid of. Come and sit down.”
She sinks into my leather recliner and it’s not lost on me that she’s choosing to keep her distance from me. But then again, I’ve been cold and quiet ever since we tried a version of small talk in my SUV that bombed into silence. I thought I could do this. I did. And I want to. But the possibility of failure lingers at the back of my mind, tormenting me. I saw those tears in her eyes that night after it was over too soon—the ones she refused to let fall until she dissolved into the hiccups that racked her body. And her holding back her pain makes mine even more acute.
She tugs her full lower lip into her mouth. “Will you just tell me already before my heart explodes?”
The memories slice me open like a serrated knife. “You know that night… last time… when we…”
“When we had sex?” she says in a rush.
The emotion is palpable. “Cora, being intimate with you was hardly just having sex.”
“But it wasn’t making love either, was it?”
I scrub a hand down my face. She’s always calling me out on my shit and I never get away with anything with her. “It was for me. Are you saying it wasn’t for you?”
Her head falls, and I rise and move toward her so I can pull her hair back from her face. I don’t want her hiding from me. Not about something this important.
“Maybe this is going to be too hard.” Her voice contains a cry that about takes me down.
“What do you mean?”
She flings her arms wide. “This. Us.”
No. I won’t let her say that. I won’t let her think that. “It’s only hard because we’re making it hard. Cora, I love you. I’ve loved you since grade school I think, but the first time I knew it was for sure was that day we won the Frozen Four. Do you remember that day?”
She nods and my heart cracks open. “Yes. I’ll never forget it.”
“Well, despite what you think, I’ve been saving myself for you. The reason… the reason… oh, fuck it. I was horrible our first time because I’d never had sex before.”
She tugs on my shirt. “Blaine, I was a virgin too.”
How could you not have known that, Rice? Waves of sweet relief flow over me when I realize she wasn’t comparing me to H & R Block, and I came up lacking. She wasn’t comparing me to anyone.
I shove away the annoyance rising at her admission because I have no right to feel it. “Dammit. I needed to know that! I would have been gentler. I would have gone slower. Fuck it—I don’t know what I would have done but I would have done something!”
She gives her head a violent shake. “But I didn’t want you to know it because I feel… well, I feel a little less-than in your world. You always have all those perfect puck bunnies floating around you and I’m not them.”
“Do you really think I would ever be attracted to that kind of girl? That’s not the way I was raised, Cora.” I reach down and take her hands in mine. “I’ve been working on my breathing.”
Her brows knit together. “For work or something?”
As she starts to open up a bit, my heart trampolines in my chest. “No. For you. What happened last time, that’s not going to happen again. I came