23. West
CHAPTER 23
WEST
Nora looks away quickly, reaching for the bags of snacks instead of answering me. “We’ve spoken about this,” she says, and tears open a small bag of chips.
“Not enough.” I brace a hand against the leather couch opposite her. She’s leaning back against an armchair, white silk pooling around her curled legs. “Why have you never found a guy that interests you?”
She eats a chip and looks over at the bookshelves, where the cat has disappeared. “It just hasn’t happened for me.”
I shake my head. There’s more here. There has to be. She was clearly intrigued by the sex we witnessed tonight. Affected , even. “You’re not attracted to men?”
“No, I am.”
“What is it, then?”
“I have issues.” She shrugs a little and stretches out her legs beneath the coffee table. “You know that. I’m working through them. I’m just not very good at feeling something quickly. It seems like everyone else just knows right away. Sometimes, at least. And I feel like I almost never know.”
“Know if you want someone?”
“Yes.”
My hand tightens around the leather armrest. “It’s not a contest. You don’t have to know right away.”
“I guess not.” Nora rests her head against the armchair. “Once I’m comfortable with someone, I don’t think I have a problem. But I struggle with the getting to the comfortable part. You know? Like opening up, talking about emotions, dating, all the expectations…” She shrugs, her movements just as languid as her voice. “Having all those conversations freaks me out. I don’t do it, so I don’t end up in relationships.”
I take a deep drag of my whiskey and think of what a fucking travesty it is that this woman has been taught that her mask is more valuable than what’s beneath it. That showing her teeth means someone might not want her.
“Say something.”
“Like what?”
“Anything. React to what I just told you, or I’m going to imagine that you’re thinking the absolute worst.” She laughs a little. “I mean, you already do. I know that.”
“You’ve had sex before?” I ask her. The idea that she might not have, and I took her to the party tonight… What she saw. The practice lessons. Being Rafe’s sister. My hand tightens around the glass. Please don’t be a virgin.
It would make me far shittier than I already am.
“Of course I have,” she says with a small laugh. “I’ve had moments where the stars aligned. I can get turned on.”
“Thank god.” I run a hand along my jaw. “You’re outspoken in other areas. With me, all the time. And you’re clearly ambitious. You work on your designs every day. I’ve watched you while you work.” When she’s not pretending for someone. “It consumes you.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. With you, well, we’re not dating .” She looks back over at the cat, where a twitching nose emerges out from a bookcase. “And when I’m designing, it’s just me. Me and the clothes. I don’t know… It’s like people always want things from me, and I’m not always willing to give it.”
“Because you’ve been taught that relationships are either-or,” I say. It feels right, the words. “Either you present the image you think they want, or you don’t bother at all. Because the middle ground, of having hard conversations? You don’t know how to do that.”
“Yes. You and Zeina should talk. You both have it all figured out.”
“Your therapist?”
“Yes. Identifying an issue is great and all, but I still have to do the work, and the work sucks.” She reaches for another of those little bags. “Nuts! Sure you don’t want one of these?”
“They’re all yours.” I walk around the couch and sit in front of her. “So your therapist also wants you to practice. Your list isn’t just your own.”
“Yes. It’s called exposure therapy.” She says the term ironically and then laughs a little. Her hair has all fallen to one side, exposing her long neck. I pretended to kiss her there tonight. Caught the warm scent of her skin and grew hard beneath her thighs and still somehow kept my lips from ever touching her.
Now, curled up against the dark leather and oriental carpet, she looks distractingly good. A light in this dark space. “It freaking sucks, though. Sometimes I think that life itself is just one long exercise in exposure therapy. God, these cashews are good.”
My lips curve. “You really are drunk.”
“Oh, yes. Very,” she says, and chuckles again. “I can’t believe you aren’t.”
“I’ve been to those parties before.”
“Right. When you were younger and dumber,” she says.
I stretch my legs out and ignore that. It’s too true. “So all the stuff on your list. It’s not so much practice as exposure therapy.”
“Yes.” She shrugs a little and turns toward the bookcase fully. My eyes trail down the length of her back and the soft skin on display there. The silk curves all the way down to the small of her back, and with the way she’s moving now, it gapes a little.
I look away.
She lowers so she’s eye level with the cat and makes soft little cooing sounds. A gray paw emerges, and then a small gray face too, the pink nose twitching carefully. “Hey, aren’t you pretty?” she says in a low voice. She switches to French, murmuring to the cat.
It walks out in full view and carefully sniffs her hand.
“Look at your cat,” she tells me.
I shake my head. “Still not mine.”
“Your roommate, then. He’s living here rent-free.” She scratches the cat behind an ear, and slowly, it comes closer. Rubs itself against her bent legs.
“Tell me why it freaks you out.”
“I’ve told you already,” she says. Her voice lowers. “Oh, you’re so soft.”
“Tell me again,” I demand.
Nora sighs and turns to look at me. “It stresses me out when a guy is into me,” she says. “It just does, and I can’t explain it more than it makes me feel like he’s expecting something from me, and now I have to perform, or let him down. And between those two emotions, there’s no space for me to actually feel attracted to him.”
“You care too much about what people think.”
“Yes, obviously.” Her voice rises. “I don’t know how it’s so easy for everyone else. It’s like somewhere along the way, my friends got so cool with it. They learned how to do it, you know? How to fall in love and how to have fun dating. How to get to know someone. And I just never did.”
“It’s not easy for everyone else.”
“It sure seems that way.” She takes a deep breath. “Anyway, that’s why I avoid dating most of the time. It takes so much time and energy. I’m trying to navigate how to make them happy while trying to figure out my own emotions, and most of the time I can’t bother.”
“Which is why you turn down all men.”
“Yes,” she admits. But then she strokes the cat’s back, and a smile crosses her face. “Except you, of course. If you are a man. I’m not sure yet.”
“I assume you’re not talking to me,” I say and lift my glass to my lips.
She laughs. “No, I’m not. I’m very aware that you’re a man.”
I brush my hand over the edge of the couch. The leather is well worn beneath my fingers, but it’s nowhere near as soft as her skin. “You want it, though. A relationship. Love.”
“Yes,” she says softly. “I do.”
“So you’ve thought about it. There’s a version of it you think you’d like.”
Her summer green gaze wanders over to mine. “Yes.”
“Tell me,” I say, “how you would want to be courted. How you’d like to be kissed.”
“How would I prefer to be kissed?” she repeats softly.
“Yes. Tell me what your ideal date would be. How you’d want it to end, if it was a man you were attracted to.”
She bites her lip, considering. “I… I’m not sure I can put it into words.”
“Try,” I urge. She’s never going to be able to get what she wants from men if she doesn’t know what that is herself.
The whiskey burns going down my throat.
I deserve it. For this night. For this conversation.
“I guess I’d want it to be slow. Like we’re both savoring the moment, not rushing to claim a prize.” Her gaze drops to the cat in her lap. “I’d want it to be… a bit teasing. Like it might end at any moment, instead of a race toward…”
“A finish line.”
“Yes.” She smiles a little. “Like you kissed me earlier tonight.”
There’s an old grandfather clock in this library. In the sudden quiet, I can hear it ticking loudly. Once. Twice. Three times.
I can’t look away from her.
Nora breaks our staring contest first, a blush rising up her cheeks. “Please forget that?—”
“Like I kissed you,” I say roughly. “What about it?”
She lifts a shoulder in a shrug and looks down at the cat now purring in her lap. He’s going to ruin her pretty silk dress, and she doesn’t seem to care at all. “You started slow, and then it grew deeper. Better.” She shakes her head and presses a hand to her forehead. “I need to shut up.”
“You’re drunk,” I say. “I won’t hold you to this.”
“But you will remember it. That’s the part you’re not saying.”
I can’t forget it even if I tried. And there’s not a single part of me that wants to try. Triumph flows through me, dark and heady.
Like you kissed me.
“If you want to feel what it’s like to date, to be courted, to be in a relationship? To kiss? I’ll give you all of it. On your terms.”
Another smile ghosts across her lips. “Exposure therapy.”
“You ask for what you want with me,” I say. She’s had so little of that in her life. If I can be the one to give that to her, it’ll all have been worth it. “So that when you go out into the real world later, you know what you want, and you stop wearing a mask. A man who wants you to pretend for him doesn’t deserve you.”
“Okay.” She tilts her head and looks at me like I’m a surprise. “How come you’ve always been able to see through it?”
“You’re not the only one who’s perceptive,” I say. And because I’ve looked far, far too much at her over the years.
And once I saw the real her, it was the only version I wanted.