Chapter 7 Wilder #2
“I’m just a nurse.” Her voice is soft. So soft.
And there’s a slight tremble in the undertone.
“My mom’s the therapist. I shouldn’t be saying things like this.
It’s none of my business, but I’m also not qualified.
I’m so na?ve that I didn’t even realize you and Alicia weren’t actually a thing.
I know you guys didn’t see each other often, and you only made a few appearances a year at stuff, but that’s what happens when both people are celebrities, sort of, and they’re busy. ”
“You’ll never be just a nurse.” That’s the most important part of anything, so I get it out first. “People say I wear my heart out there for everyone to see and for everyone to own a part of and share in, but you’re all heart too.
You’re smart, generous to a fault, and humble.
You don’t have to be a therapist to just talk to me. ”
She’s looking at me like I have every answer in the world.
Like I’m the key to everything. Like I’m everything.
It’s a lot of pressure to be looked at that way, but I also feel seen in a way I haven’t been since my grandma died.
Even though Carissa knew it would hurt, she gave me that love in whatever measure she could.
It was never unethical. She always kept a distance between us.
If she hadn’t given her notice, I know she would never have allowed herself to blurt out what she did today.
All those years, I couldn’t imagine what kind of torture it was for her.
She bites down on her bottom lip like I’ve just put my thoughts out there. Over the past years, I’ve shut myself down on the sexual front. It’s not that I’m not a sexual person, but as I just said, trusting myself with that when it comes to another person wasn’t ever going to be a thing.
All those years of stuffing it down, being too busy to think about it, or indeed thinking about my most intimate moments getting splashed all over the internet in a tell-all that may or may not have truth to it, and how absolutely libido-shriveling that is, it all roars to the forefront now with just that tiny motion.
I’ve been celibate for years. My dick is barely even acquainted with my own hand.
Watching Carissa’s teeth sink into her plump lower lip is pretty much like having them bite straight into my cock. Why I would even want that, I don’t know, but I do. With her. In ways I can’t even comprehend. I can’t remember the last time I had sex.
Seriously.
For real.
For absolute one hundred percent, real.
There’s a lot of past testosterone packed into this moment.
Popping a boner in tight leather pants is inadvisable as there’s nowhere for it to go.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, her eyes shooting straight to her feet. She’s adorable in those ripped-up shorts and that cray T-shirt. I like the pickle riding the eagle. My pickle would like to do the same. Except the eagle is her.
Jesus Christ.
This is not going to be a thing. Not when she just apologized.
“It’s not your fault. Please don’t say you’re sorry.
” I’m currently having a blood-to-brain-cells ratio problem.
I think. And a leather pants problem, which I don’t think, because I know for a fact.
“If I kissed you, would that make it worse?” Fuck.
Fuck, shit, damn, fuck it all to fucking fuckery.
That was not what was supposed to come out.
But I’m a little unnerved to find that it’s what I want.
I want it badly.
So, so bad.
I want to fold her into my arms, tilt her face up, and kiss her until neither of us can breathe. I want to taste her lips, I want her tongue in my mouth, and I want her breath to become my breath. I want the taste of her embedded into my brain cells.
If my cock were an engine, that kind of thinking would only serve to rev it up, not tone it down.
And that’s exactly what’s happening. These already impossibly tight leather pants are getting tighter and tighter.
My balls are zipping up into my body and somehow also hanging so low that they’re probably visible in my pants too.
I’m harder than these countertops. They’re only butcher block, and mere wood has nothing on me.
Not when I’m granite, or quartz, or goddamn diamond-level bonering.
“Undoubtedly yes. A hundred thousand unfathomable amount of times worse,” she confirms in a squeaky pitch.
My heart plummets, and my dick throbs. There’s something seriously wrong with that equation. The wrongest part of wrong is that I’m going to have to leave this house with a hard-on from hell. What am I supposed to do? Shove the top hat in front of my crotch?
“It doesn’t mean I don’t want you to do it,” she clarifies, grasping the counter a little bit harder. “Even if it’s just once, and you have to leave.”
Fuck. That’s the keyword. Leave. Not just once.
I can’t focus on that. Not when we both know that just once is never just once.
I have never wanted to kiss someone just for the sake of it.
Even before I was famous, I never had casual sex.
I treated people with respect, as my grandma always advised me to, plus I was kind of shy.
It was hard to trust and put myself out there.
I think I might be the only man in the world who isn’t really attracted to someone until I know them. I didn’t figure that out until I was already well into this business, and after that, I didn’t stand a chance of having a normal relationship, even if I wanted one.
But I know Carissa. Not as well as I should, but what I do know is a massive turn-on.
“You can’t show up here in skintight, crack-bearing red leather pants, massage my roast…”
Lumbering loons on a lumberjack, why does that sound so hot?
Massage my roast…
Massage my pork…
Pork my roast…
Bro, she definitely didn’t say that.
I raise my hands in surrender and apology, and in a second apology for where my mind just went.
“I just wanted to say I was sorry. I am. Sorry. For all the things I knew about, and all the things I didn’t.
” She gapes at me, and it only makes me want to kiss her more.
It makes me want to taste her lips, her neck, and her skin beneath that T-shirt and those shorts—
Stop.
Her eyes practically cross, but even that’s sexy. “Would this be a sorry kiss? Pity kissing? Mercy kissing?”
“I’d like to kiss you because you’re beautiful, and you’re real. I like that. I like you.” My voice drops, and it’s low and gravelly. If kissing has a voice, we’re making out already.
“I’ve been lying to you for years about how I felt,” she points out, her hand grasping the hem of her T-shirt and balling up the extra fabric, pulling it tight over her breasts and the slight curve of her hips.
“Trying to save someone from themselves isn’t lying to them.” I snap my eyes back up to her face.
She frowns. “Was I saving myself?”
“I meant me.”
“I… how did I do that?”
Her eyes don’t stay on mine. They leave and slowly trace down. Lower and lower. Lower yet. We’re on the same side of the island now, so there’s nothing to hide the very obvious red leather pants problem.
My pulse spikes. She asked me a question, and I need to focus and answer.
“With your friendship, your loyalty, your laughter, your smiles, and being an integral part of our team. Not to mention your patience, your sacrifice, and your songs. You learned how to play guitar. You wrote me songs like I’ve never seen anyone write songs.
You used the language that transcends words and goes straight into feeling. ”
“You write songs all the time,” she protests, her cheeks immediately staining a bright pink that keeps getting darker and darker.
Ahh, we’re both notoriously bad at getting compliments.
She digs her bare toes into the floorboards and locks her hands in front of her waist, studying them.
“I’m pretty sure it’s actually just an overblown crush.
I’ll get over it. As soon as you leave here, which has to be soon, because of dinner.
Buns. Roast. Potatoes. Carrots. Gravy. My mom. She’s coming home soon.”
“If I kissed you, would we still have time for all that?”
Her head snaps up, and she gulp-gasps, sucking in air in a not-so-classy manner, but even that is sexy as hell because it’s her.
“I might, but I don’t know about you,” she answers. “You’ll have to have enough time to glue your fake beard back on before you leave.”
“Is there a reason your mom can’t meet me?”
“Yes. She’d realize in a second, as soon as she saw us together, how I feel about you, and you’re not…
we’re all wrong in all the technical ways.
” She gestures wildly back and forth. “She’d turn into therapist mom—not in a bad way, but it would still happen—and she’d help me realize all over again why this would never work.
It would be so real. The ending of the tour and my job all over again.
Or even worse, she might talk about wanting something bad enough, and compromise and solutions.
Too many positives that would throw me into a tailspin and make me question everything. ”
That doesn’t sound so bad to me. I do realize she’s not panicking, and what she just said might contain more than a little bit of satire. “Your job doesn’t have to end. I’d hire you back in a second for whatever I have coming next.”
She winces. “That’s not the problem.”
“I know it’s not.”
“The real problem is that once is never once, and goodbye is never a proper goodbye. Even if I never saw you again, you’d linger. It’s been the worst and best form of torture, being so close to you for all these years. If you kissed me, you might wreck me.”
Oof. Okay. No satire there. Just honesty that slays me.
Her lips purse. She takes one step back, but then they purse extra, and she steps forward. Then she takes one more step forward, this one bringing her closer. Her eyes are so big. So blown. Her tongue slicks across her bottom lip, and I realize this is it.