Chapter 10
TEN
SADIE
Two more days passed in the same way, though Gideon began to come home for dinner.
Still he kept his distance from me, both physically and emotionally.
We hardly spoke, but we moved around the cottage in mostly comfortable silence.
It was for the best. Slowly, day by day, we were finding an equilibrium.
The burning passion of our wedding night was becoming a distant memory.
Sort of.
Except when he was in the kitchen, cooking with that intense, serious competence that never failed to make me squirm.
Or when I caught him watching me sew from his usual spot on the couch.
His gaze prickled between my shoulder blades, and I struggled to focus on my projects.
His attention was an aphrodisiac, and I found myself thinking of him when I lay in the bed at night all alone.
If I listened closely, I could hear the couch springs complain as he moved.
The soft grunts he let out as he tried to get comfortable.
The creak of the floorboard and the sounds of the pipes when he got up to get himself a glass of water.
He was so close, and I wanted him so badly. But that wasn’t meant to be.
Still, I burned.
My restless legs clenched together, and I finally gave in and touched myself, remembering how it had felt to be in this very bed with his weight atop me.
The desperate rasp in his voice when he spoke dirty promises to me.
The way my body had bowed toward him, one line of ragged tension from head to toe.
I bit my pillow to muffle my whimpers. When I was done, I lay in the silence of the night, breathing heavily. I felt no better than I had before. If anything, I felt worse. Needy, restless agitation made me toss and turn when I should have been lax and satisfied. Finally, I sat up.
Buried at the bottom of one of my drawers was the dilator kit. I stared at the pale pink silicone devices as my heart thrummed. The smallest was about the size of my ring finger, the biggest a little smaller than most penises I’d seen. They all had a finger loop at the end to grip.
I took the smallest one out of the case and bit my bottom lip. I was supposed to use them regularly to try to stretch things down there, but I’d gotten lazy. Or maybe I’d become resigned to my sexless, painful fate, and I hadn’t believed my body could actually change.
But now, there was no pressure. Gideon didn’t want me, and there was no other man tapping his foot as he waited for me to fix myself so he could get inside me.
I’d had a week and a half of solitude, rest, and decent food.
No one had asked me for a thing, other than Lola wanting me to make her a pretty dress.
I was more relaxed than I’d been in years.
And that made me curious. What if my therapist had been right? What if the problem wasn’t really me? It wasn’t some innate failure of mine as a person, it was just my brain being a brain, getting its wires crossed. What if I was fixable?
In the still darkness, I reached for my lube and winced at the noise of the cap opening.
It sounded like a gunshot in the silent house.
Then, heart pounding, I squeezed some clear goop onto the smallest dilator and lay back on the mattress.
With my knees bent, I forced myself to take deep, calming breaths.
Just beyond the door, Gideon slept. It felt indecent to be doing this in the same house as him, even if he was my husband. Indecent—and exciting.
I pushed the dilator inside.
The little silicone shaft was no bigger than my ring finger, but it still burned as my body clamped around it. I stopped, letting my muscles adjust, while my ears strained for any noise from the living room. Was that a creak of the couch? A deep murmur from beyond the doorway?
I breathed through the burn and let the silence pulse around me.
It would have been better to imagine anything else, but the only thing that came to mind was my wedding night.
I imagined what it would’ve felt like not to stop.
To invite Gideon into my body. To feel him shudder and gasp as he slid inside me.
To watch him come apart, and to be able to chase my pleasure wherever it would lead.
The burn lessened as the minutes passed, and I began to move the dilator in and out in long, slow strokes. My breaths were ragged. My other hand moved to my bud, and a fine sheen of sweat covered my body as I touched and stroked. I sucked in a hard breath, and a whimper escaped my lips.
Pleasure tightened in the pit of my stomach.
Shock warred with delight inside me; this didn’t usually feel good.
My brain tried to tell me that it wasn’t anything worth celebrating.
After all, wasn’t it the smallest dilator?
Barely the size of my third finger? And it had taken me almost ten minutes to even feel okay with it inside me.
Longer than any man would wait, that was for sure.
But even my most judgmental, self-acrimonious thoughts couldn’t win this battle.
Not when I remembered the look in Gideon’s eyes, or the way his hands had felt on my breasts and my waist and my core.
The bitter thoughts dissolved like the smoke of a blown-out candle, and pleasure crested inside me.
I gasped, half-laughing, arching on the mussed sheets of my bed.
I couldn’t quite help the low moan that escaped my throat.
For the first time in my life, I’d orgasmed with penetration as well as clitoral stimulation. I hadn’t had to stop from the pain. In fact, at the end, it hadn’t been painful at all. I’d felt full and stretched and wonderful.
I lay on the bed in shock, squirming at the sensation of the dilator still inside me, and tested the limits of my body by shifting the end of the shaft against my tender flesh.
Stretching. Exploring. Learning the new limits of my body.
Little sparks coursed through me, and I wondered how it would feel to move to the next size up.
A scandalous thought. Thrilling. Unheard of.
And then, to my horror, I heard the soft snick of the bathroom door, followed by the patter of water hitting the shower tiles.
Gideon was awake, and he’d been just outside my door when I’d finished. There was no way he hadn’t heard me.
GIDEON
Hell. I was in hell.
I’d survived the warehouse fire and its scars, my rocky childhood, my ex’s cruelty, and my grandmother’s schemes.
I wasn’t sure I’d survive this.