Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
W es rubbed Grace’s back as she cried snotty tears into a lumpy hotel pillow.
“Explain it to me again.”
“I lost everything.”
“Everything meaning…?”
“Three days’ worth of everything,” Grace amended feeling maybe a little melodramatic.
“Ah, back to the book. It’s a crushing blow, Gray , but you wrote it once. You can write it again.”
“You clearly don’t understand,” Grace grumbled, although Wes understood better than she’d like.
“I don’t understand the part where he renovated an entire bathroom in his own house so that you, who will be leaving in a week, could take a bubble bath and you?—”
Grace groaned. “ I think maybe I overreacted.”
“Do you think so?” Wes asked, and only she could manage to sound sincere when they both knew she was being sarcastic.
“I told him I can’t orgasm,” Grace admitted in a tiny voice. “ I thought he was taking it as a challenge, and I had this visceral sort of… panic attack.”
Wes brushed Grace’s hair out of her face. “ You mean you can’t reach the O with P in V ?” she asked sympathetically.
God, this was humiliating. There was a reason Grace had never told anyone, including her closest friends. “ I mean at all.”
“At all with a man?” Wes repeated, her voice so gentle you almost couldn’t hear the confusion.
Why was this such a hard thing for people to grasp? They must think she was a total freak. “ I mean at all,” she said again.
“Well, no wonder your relationships crash and burn, Gray . How can you tell them what you like if you don’t have a clue yourself?” she asked, reducing more than a decade of frustration to something so simple it stunned Grace into silence.
It made her mad, but it also made a sort of sense, which was doubly infuriating.
“Is it a purity-culture-in-your-head thing because you’re not married? Or more of a physical vaginismus-type thing?”
“I don’t… know what that means,” Grace admitted.
“What does your OB - GYN say?”
Grace hid her face in the pillow. “ That it’s normal for woman to find sex painful.”
“Then your OB - GYN is a dick. Come on,” Wes said, unfolding from her perch on the edge of the bed and pulling Grace by the hand.
“Come where,” Grace moaned into her pillow.
“We’re going out.”
Grace groaned louder in protest, but she washed her face and put on shoes.
When she had run away that afternoon, she’d texted Wes who showed up in the back of the sole island cab minutes later, a cab driven by Bryan’s sister Elspeth , of all people. To her credit, El offered Grace a sympathetic shrug but didn’t say a word. Grace had burst into tears the moment she sat down in the car, and she pretty much hadn’t stopped since.
“Pick up the pace, the whole town shuts down at five,” Wes urged.
“Pubs don’t,” Grace argued.
Wes didn’t respond. Instead of stopping at the pub, she led the way to a general store with a bell that jingled jauntily as she threw open the door, and Grace kind of wanted to rip the bell down and throw it into the sea. How dare it jingle at her when she was miserable.
“Hi, Mal ,” Wes called, and Bryan’s mother came scurrying out of the back to tend the register. God in Heaven , was nowhere safe from the damned MacNeils ?
“Nice to see you again, Wes ! And you Grace ,” Malvinia MacNeil added, her smile flickering for a second as she took in Grace’s tearstained face and scraggly hair.
Wes made straight for Aisle 2: Personal Care . She flitted past the shelves of toothpaste and deodorant, hovering in the section chock full of condoms, snagging a few bottles before Grace could read the labels, and then she sidled back to the register.
“Mal,” she said in a low, conspiratorial stage whisper. “ Have you by any chance got a vibrator for sale?”
If Grace could have spontaneously combusted on the spot, she would have done so. A vibrator, for god’s sake?
“Only one brand, I’m afraid, dear,” Mrs . MacNeil answered cheerfully, “but it’s the highest-rated one in Scotland .”
“I’m sure it’s perfect,” Wes agreed.
“I keep them in back, so the kids won’t try to steal them and the Karens won’t clutch their pearls. Just a tick,” she said, scurrying off to the back again.
Grace tried to speak, but her voice cracked immediately like an adolescent child. “ You really just did that?”
“Somebody had to.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not true.”
“Trust me.”
“Wes, I don’t think?—”
“Shut up,” Wes said. “ My treat. Happy birthday. If you hate it, give it back to me.”
Grimacing at the idea, Grace couldn’t decide which was worse—her best friend buying her a sex toy, or her giving it back in disgrace.
“I know they always say the best way to get over a man is to get under one, but in my opinion, the best way is to take care of things yourself.”
Grace literally wanted to die.
How high was the heat turned on in this store? She needed to sit down. Her ears were buzzing, and— oh no . She felt like she was going to faint, and this time she wasn’t overreacting. She swayed a little and put her hand on the counter to steady herself.
“When’s the last time you ate?” Wes asked, and she sounded far away.
“Don’t remember.” Grace tried to catch her breath, but her lungs didn’t want to cooperate. The edges of her vision were starting to get black, like the storm clouds rolling in off the bay.
“That man didn’t feed you?” Wes muttered. “ He seriously had one job.” She dragged Grace around the counter and pushed her onto a stool. “ Drink .” A bottle of cold blue sports drink materialized out of nowhere, along with a bag of salty crisps.
The next few minutes were a hazy blur as Wes paid for their purchases and Bryan’s mother fretted over Grace , bundling both of them into Elspeth’s car for the short trip back to the hotel. In the front seats, mother and daughter kept exchanging meaningful looks, so Grace rested her head on her friend’s shoulder and shut her eyes.
“Gray,” Wes began, rubbing her arm tenderly just like Grace’s mother used to do when she was ill. “ I know the book’s important, I know you have a deadline, but you have to take better care of yourself. You can’t expect to keep going on hopes and dreams alone.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” When Grace didn’t answer, Wes took her hand and asked, “ How much of it did you actually lose?”
“It doesn’t matter. It was mostly garbage.”
“Maybe he did you a favor, then.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Grace admitted.
“Does he know that?”
Grace started to cry again. She was pretty sure she’d told him in her haste to get out of there, but whether he believed it was a whole other thing.
Back at the inn, Wes tucked her into bed with a promise to wake her at eight for dinner. Then she took herself off to who knew where.
The room was too quiet without Bryan’s incessant hammering, and too empty without his essence, but eventually Grace drifted off to restless dreams.
When she awoke, she rolled over, right onto the brown paper sack from the general store. Inside , she found no less than three different bottles of lube— good lord, Wesley —and a rather scary looking vibrator. How was it supposed to work?
She opened the box to examine it more closely. It seemed aggressively large, but it already had some charge in the battery which was… thoughtful.
Glancing at the time, she noted Wes wouldn’t be back for more than an hour. She almost put it all away rather than risk the inevitable disappointment, but curiosity got the best of her.
The first attempt was terrible: painful, uninspired. Grace couldn’t help crying all over again. Even Scotland’s highest-rated sex toy was too much for her. She wanted to throw it across the room, but she didn’t have the energy. Instead , she just laid there and cried.
Probably, she was trying too hard. Overthinking almost certainly made it impossible to relax in the slightest. It was way too much pressure. Why was she doing this? She didn’t want to do this.
She put it all away and vowed to make Wes take it home with her.
But then her mind drifted back to Bryan , to that soft beard and those biceps, and his bee-tattooed forearm. He never had explained what it meant. She would remember to ask in the middle of kissing, and then his tongue would do something clever and her mind would go pleasantly blank.
Contemplating his kisses made her sad, but her body didn’t know to feel sad, so she was flushed all over too, and there was no point trying again, but at the same time… she hadn’t been accused of being stubborn her whole life to quit now.
* * *
By the time Wes returned with takeaways from the pub, Grace was flushed and somewhat satisfied. It hadn’t exactly been life changing, but at least she finally understood the rising tension followed by a brief euphoric rush when, once again, her mind went too blank and still to overanalyze things.
And maybe she wasn’t quite so broken after all.
Wes took one look at her and said, “ Fucking finally. Now what are we going to do about your Stoic Scot ?”
That killed the glow a little bit, if Grace was being honest. “ He’s not my Scot .”
Wes gave her an oh please look. “ Pretty sure he was yours the moment you climbed up on that roof with him.”
“What’s the point of starting something when we’re just going to leave in a few days?”
“Practice?” Wes asked. “ The very best kind of no-strings-attached, remember-it-fondly practice?”
How Grace wished she could be a no-strings-attached kind of girl. Anyway , one afternoon with a new toy was not going to suddenly cure everything.
“It wouldn’t be fair to him,” she told Wesley .
“Maybe not. Or maybe he should be the judge of what’s fair to him. Besides , I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s this amazing new invention called the telephone. It even works over Wi - Fi now!”
“I came here to finish my book,” Grace muttered. “ I have a few days left to actually do it, and then we go home.”
But she didn’t write that night. She and Wesley watched a movie, and then Wes went out to a party on the beach, and Grace tried out the bottle that said not for use with toys. It had the most exquisite, satiny feel she could have ever imagined and a small part of her mourned the years she’d lost by not realizing synthetic lube existed and was created by God Himself , because she was still Grace , and heaven forbid she just enjoy a thing totally guilt-free.
Still, she was starting to get the hang of it. The earth didn’t move this time, either. She’d been right to assume the teen movies had massively oversold the sensation, and it still wasn’t completely painless, but there were nice feelings too. Her mind was sort of reeling at the possibilities.
Grace’s first college boyfriend had been so annoyed when she couldn’t get wet, he insisted on giving her excruciating oral in what she had perceived as punishment. After several failed attempts with her second boyfriend, he had suggested fingering her and then penetrated her with three of them like some kind of exploratory mission in search of water on Mars . When that approach inexplicably didn’t work, he said she must be a lesbian, because he’d never had trouble making a girl wet before.
Now Grace was beginning to realize Bryan might have been right about at least one thing—her doctor and those boys were bullshit. She wasn’t completely broken. Maybe there was hope for her yet.
After another round, she fell into a deep, uninterrupted sleep.