46. Lilah
46
LILAH
I was happy to sit in the back next to Nolan on the way to the beach. I wasn’t humiliated that Jude had found me naked, post-fucking with Rafe. Not exactly. But I would have preferred to tell him — and Nolan — in a more elegant way.
And it was obvious he had told Nolan, because when I came up from the gym wearing my workout clothes, Nolan had grinned and said, “Good workout, sweetheart?”
Damn it.
The back seat gave me some space to process what had happened with Rafe, and I definitely needed a minute.
He’d said he was sorry. Finally. They were the two words I’d been determined to hear, and after the fog had cleared from my sex-addled brain (who was I kidding, there was no brain involved in what had happened between Rafe and me in the gym), all I could think was… now what?
I’d thought I’d feel differently about everything that had happened if only Rafe — the lone holdout among the Bastards — would admit that what he’d done was wrong, that it had hurt me.
If only he’d say he was sorry.
Except now that had happened and nothing had changed. I mean, something had changed. I’d been fucked to within an inch of my life, for one. Been fucked in a way I’d never been fucked before. It wasn’t necessarily better than sex with Nolan and Jude, it was just… different.
Nolan was a gentle lover. Jude was earthy and sensual.
But Rafe? Rafe had been an animal.
Even more surprising, I’d been an animal too. My cheeks heated and I had to press my thighs together as I remembered the way he’d shoved his hand inside me, the way I’d loved it. I’d been in a place without thought, without reason, a place where there was only the primitive demands of my body and its determination to see them met.
But there had been no magic wiping of the slate like I’d imagined.
No closure .
What he’d done to me in high school was still there. What was I supposed to do with that?
“You’re not going to surf, are you?” I asked, incredulous, when Rafe turned toward the beach.
It was after nine p.m. and already dark. I’d assumed when Jude said we were going to the beach he’d meant it in a general geographical kind of way, that we were actually going to Breakers.
Plus, the Bastards hadn’t loaded their boards onto the top of the Jeep.
Jude turned around in the passenger seat to look at me. “Wouldn’t be the first time, boss, but no. No surfing tonight.”
“Then why are we going to the beach?” I asked.
He grinned. “Bonfire, bay-bee!”