35. Chapter 35
Chapter 35
David’s words seemed to echo for a millennium before finally dying away, leaving an uncomfortable silence hanging over the kitchen.
In utter disbelief that David had made himself known, and in such spectacular fashion, Paige picked up the top half of a bagel and took a bite. “Cinnamon raison bagels are my favorite. Thank you for—”
“Fuck the bagels,” Jules said, her voice deceptively calm. “Was that David?”
Paige forced herself to swallow the bite she’d just taken, but didn’t answer the question, treating it as rhetorical.
“He spent the night?” Jules prodded. “Again?”
“Yes, he did,” David answered, coming into the kitchen. He was wearing his jeans, but nothing else, and looked thoroughly fucked, himself. He gave Paige a quick kiss, then took the coffee from her hand and took a long sip, making a face when he realized it wasn’t straight black coffee, and handed it back. “Is that a problem?”
Paige wasn’t surprised when Jules answered with her usual blunt-force trauma honesty. “Yes. And you couldn’t have put a shirt on?”
“I could have, but it’s … dirty,” he said, with a flick of his eyes at Paige, before turning his attention back to Jules. “And I’m not running out to my car to get my concert T-shirt, so you’re just going to have to deal with my bare chest. Now … why is my spending the night a problem?”
“Because you’re not supposed to,” Jules replied.
“I’m not?” This was news to him, considering he’d spent the night at Paige’s several times and she’d never once mentioned this. “Says who?”
“Says me. She’s not supposed to stay at your place, either.”
David plucked the bagel from Paige’s hand and took a bite, his dislike for the conversation growing exponentially. Jules had some pair of balls on her, making a rule that wasn’t hers to make, and while it cheered him to know Paige had obviously ignored it, he was pissed off it had been made in the first place. It also made him wonder if there were any other rules he didn’t know about that might possibly be working against him and his plan. “Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that rule—or whatever you want to call it—has never been followed. By either of us.”
Jules turned to Paige. “You’ve stayed at his place?”
“Yes.” Paige squirmed a little under the weight of Jules’s displeasure. “What? He got a new bed.”
“That’s not the real issue, and you know it.”
“What is the real issue, then?” David asked. “Because I’m confused as hell.”
“Intimacy,” Jules told him, succinctly.
He frowned. “Intimacy?”
“Yes. Spending the night is too intimate, given what the two of you are doing.”
“And what’s that?”
“Sex, plain and simple. And I don’t want her thinking what you’re doing is anything more than that.”
David crossed his arms and gave Jules his best You’re really pissing me off look, who responded by crossing her own arms and returning the look.
Fearing they were going to start scrapping like wolverines, Paige held up her hands. “Stop. Both of you.”
“You know what, Jules? You need to stay in your fucking lane,” David said rudely. “What Paige and I are doing is none of your business—”
“Wrong. This concerns her well-being, so that makes it my business. I don’t want her getting hurt.”
“Jesus Christ, neither do I.” He looked at her, incredulous, and his voice rose. “All I’m thinking about is her well-being. Everything I’m doing is for her well-being.”
“Everything?”
“Yes.”
“How is spending the night contributing to her well-being? Because as I see it, that takes ‘plain and simple’ sex and turns it into something not so ‘plain and simple’, and you can’t do that to her. Because when this arrangement has run its course, Paige needs to be able to walk away—”
“No, she doesn’t,” he bit out, only to stop, appalled.
Jules stared at him, speechless for several moments before asking, “What did you say?”
Paige turned to stare at him, too. “Yeah, what did you say?”
David’s heart was pounding like a jackhammer, and he took a deep breath, wishing like hell he could rewind the last sixty seconds of his life. But he couldn’t, and since there was no going back, he had to push forward. “She doesn’t need to walk away,” he told Jules, this time very softly.
“That was the agreement you two made. So … yeah, she does,” Jules countered, just as softly.
“No, she doesn’t.” Then, deliberately giving Jules his back, he turned to Paige. “You don’t.”
Paige blinked at him. “I … don’t?”
“No. And I don’t want you to walk away, to be honest.”
Paige didn’t know what the hell was happening, but it felt like all the oxygen had just been sucked from her lungs, making any attempt to do her breathing exercises impossible. David looked utterly sincere as he stood his ground, ignoring Jules while she gave the back of his head her Vlad Putin stare.
“What’s going on, David?” Jules asked.
He held up a hand, not turning around. “Nope. This is now between Paige and me.”
Paige caught Jules’s eye over David’s shoulder, which was sporting a bite mark. “Um … I think it might be a good idea for you to … go.”
Looking like she was on the verge of disputing that, Jules hesitated before backing down; it appeared to take some effort. “All right,” she relented. “But I won’t be far if you need me.”
With one long last look at David’s back, Jules grabbed her go-cup of coffee, a bagel, and her purse, then turned and left the kitchen.
“Fuck,” David muttered, barely waiting until he and Paige were alone. “Seriously … fuck. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”
“What’s going on, David?” Paige asked, repeating Jules’s question.
This was happening now, whether he liked it or not. “I don’t want you to walk away. That’s what’s going on.”
“Huh? Are you serious?”
“Yes. I’ve never wanted you to be able to, actually.”
“But this—” she waved the hand not holding the coffee cup in the air between them, to indicate what had been going on the past two months, “—was never meant to become long-term.”
He nervously cleared his throat. “Yes, it was.”
“It was? I don’t remember that being part of the arrangement.” Paige tilted her head. “Or did I miss something?”
“No, you didn’t miss anything. I kept that part to myself.”
“Uh huh. Why?”
This was where things could get a little tricky, and he hoped she wasn’t going to punch him in the balls. “Because I knew you wouldn’t agree to it, otherwise.”
“So, you decided to trick me.”
“I don’t like the word ‘trick’. It makes me sound … sketchy.”
“How about ‘manipulate’, then? Does that make you sound less sketchy? Because I don’t want your feelings to be hurt, or anything.”
He overlooked her sarcasm. “I don’t like that one, either.”
“Then what would you call it? You got me to agree to an arrangement based on false pretenses.”
Technically, she was right, but there was more to the story than that. He took the coffee cup from her and set it down (so she wouldn’t throw the contents at him), then reached for both of her hands, partly because he needed the connection and partly to keep her from bolting. “Just hear me out, please? Yes, I had an ulterior motive when I suggested our arrangement, but it …” he trailed off. “It was inspired by something you said.”
“Something I said? And what was that?”
“The night we talked about your recovery, you told me you wanted to find a man who was going to make you want sex so much, that you wouldn’t be afraid to fuck his brains out. Remember?”
She did remember. Paige felt herself flush at his unflinchingly direct gaze and slowly nodded, pretty sure she knew where this was going.
“Your words were extremely bittersweet. On one hand, I wanted you to find this man because you deserved him, but on the other hand, I knew that when you did, it wouldn’t be me. And that hurt like hell. It haunted me, to be honest,” he clarified softly. “To the point that I was wishing it could be me, and wishing pretty hard. It was like a seed got planted in my head and grew with each passing day. Every time we exchanged a text, or FaceTimed, or got together, it was like throwing down … fertilizer.”
“Fertilizer?”
Even though he knew her question was rhetorical, since she obviously knew what fertilizer was, he answered anyway, because it was part of his analogy. “Yes. And the make-out session in your hallway after our divorce anniversary ‘date’, was nothing but fertilizer. Pure. Fucking. Fertilizer.”
He took a deep breath. “It changed everything. It changed me from the man who was only wishing to be the man who made you want sex so much you weren’t afraid to fuck his brains out, to deciding I was going to be that man. It also obliterated the boundaries we’d maintained as friendly exes, changing the future landscape of our relationship, so there was no going back to that, even if I wanted to. Which I didn’t. For me, there was only one direction to go and that was forward, for real.”
“Big risk,” she murmured.
“Not if I did it right,” he countered, shrugging off the enormity of the decision he’d made, before turning serious again. “I tossed and turned in bed that night, unable to sleep, thinking about how I was going to be the man you wanted, and also how I was going to make it long-term. I knew you’d probably resist, since you can be stubborn—” David halted as her eyes narrowed, and then with a quirk of his lips, he continued. “Anyway, around 3 a.m., a plan started to finally take shape … and, ironically, I had you to thank for it, because I ended up drawing inspiration from something else you’d said.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep. You’d said you didn’t want to get in a sexual situation, only to have it fall apart like it used to and find out you still weren’t able to enjoy sex.” He lowered his voice. “You also didn’t want to put another man through what I went through and make him feel like I did.”
“So, when you sold our deal as being about my healing, that was—”
“Totally legitimate. Now, I’m not going to lie and say that wasn’t my foot in the door, too, because it was.”
Paige thought back to the ‘bullet points’ of their arrangement. “So … our ‘fake’ dating?”
“There was nothing fake about it. I did think it would make you feel comfortable about what we were doing, which would make success more likely, but I mostly wanted what we were doing to be as close to the real thing as possible.”
“And the ‘sexual baby steps’?”
“What? We needed to start from the beginning,” he said, all innocence. “Plus, I wanted to be able to enjoy every little thing we did. And you, too, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Look, I know you think I was deceitful for doing this, but doing nothing wasn’t an option. I had to try. Even though there was a chance you might not take the bait, so to speak, and nothing would come of it—beyond your ‘healing’, that is—I had to try. And if nothing did come of it, that was something I could live with. What I couldn’t live with, was not taking the chance at all.”
She started to ask him something, then changed direction. “How long was this going to go on for?” she asked. “You know, if Jules hadn’t—”
“Fucked things up? A month, maybe two, but it was going to depend on you.”
“So, until I took the bait, you were going to just keep … fishing?”
He nodded. “I planned on asking for next month’s work schedule on Monday. We’d never set a specific end date, so I would’ve kept asking for your monthly schedules until … whenever.”
“What if I’d told you on Monday I thought another month wasn’t necessary? That I thought my recovery was complete?”
“I would’ve told you I disagreed, that you were being hasty, and there were still several positions we needed to try, before you could even think about calling your recovery ‘complete’.”
She couldn’t help but chuckle softly at his quick response. “And after we’d tried those positions?”
“I would’ve had us work on a few more. There’s over sixty positions in the Kama Sutra, so that could’ve kept us busy for a while.”
“I feel like at some point I’d have questioned your … thoroughness.”
“If you did, I would’ve told you it was the only way to make sure your recovery was absolutely complete.”
“You were really going to keep selling that?”
“If that’s what it took to keep this going until you were on the end of my hook, yes.”
“Even though my recovery was supposed to be for another man?”
“It wasn’t, though.”
“But I thought it was.”
David paused and cleared his throat, before speaking again. “Paige, the night you gave me the massage and we had sex for the first time—and I’m not counting the very first time, obviously, when I was handcuffed—”
“Obviously. So, let’s forget about that.”
“Anyway, that’s when I realized that the thought of another man experiencing what I was experiencing with you was unfathomable to me, and I vowed we’d have sex as often as possible, until it was unfathomable to you, too.”
Paige blinked at him, his confession squeezing her heart. “And what if it didn’t become unfathomable to me? What if I really wanted it to end?”
He could see her anxiety was starting to really ramp up, so he decided to dial things back a little. “Well, that probably would’ve put a dent in my plan, that’s for sure.”
“So, the night you said you didn’t have a plan, except to let things happen ‘organically’, you were lying, because you did have a plan.”
“That’s kind of a gray area, because I was lying about not having a plan, but I did want things to happen organically, otherwise my plan wouldn’t work.”
Paige pulled her hands out of his and went to stand at her kitchen window, needing a little space. When she felt like she could resume the conversation, she turned back around to find him calmly eating a strawberry. “What are you doing?”
“Eating strawberries,” he replied, then picked another one up and shoved it in his mouth. “I’m hungry.”
Silence stretched out between them, and while he seemed completely impervious to it, it became too much for her. “You really want us to try again?” she asked, even though she knew the answer already.
He didn’t even hesitate, speaking with his mouth full. “I do.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I think we have a future together, that’s why,” he said gently. “And before you bring up our divorce, let me point out that you and I are both very different people now. We’re also different together.”
“That doesn’t mean we’ll be able to make it work this time around.”
He bit into another strawberry. “It makes our odds better, though, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’m trying to be serious, here.”
“Me, too. I seriously think we should try again.”
She pursed her lips, her thoughts whirling like a tornado. In the space of ten minutes, her life had been flipped on its ass. The arrangement she’d thought was temporary had been something else entirely to him, and she was struggling to reconcile the lengths he’d gone to. Thinking back over the past two months, she couldn’t deny they’d been really amazing, and continuing on down that path was very tempting, but … “There’s more than just you and me involved here,” she said quietly.
“I know. What I’m suggesting will include Jacob, so you’ll have to think about that when making your decision.”
“What if I say no? You said you couldn’t go back to being friendly exes.”
He paused for a long moment, because the thought of her saying no was something he didn’t want to think about. “We’d have to become something else, then.”
Paige wasn’t sure ‘something else’ was possible, but she pretended it was, for the moment. “Okay.”
“You don’t have to decide right now,” he told her as he picked up another strawberry, before adding, deadpan, “Just don’t make me wait a week.”
He watched her expression go from uncertain and pensive, to shocked indignation almost instantly, and he felt the energy in the room become less charged. Then, as if they hadn’t just had an insane conversation, he proceeded to grab several bagels and the bowl of strawberries.
“What are you doing?” she asked, sounding scattered, only to amend it to, “Where are you going?” when he started to head out of the kitchen with his hands full.
“To have breakfast in bed. Why don’t you bring that cup of coffee that doesn’t taste like coffee and whatever that pink shit is, and join me?”
Her indignation was back. “It’s pink fluff, and you dip fruit in it.”
“Oh, okay. Well, we can certainly use it for that, too.”
“What else would we—”
A low chuckle that was quickly muffled, came from the vicinity of the living room, making both David and Paige stop in their tracks and glance at one another. A few seconds later, quick footsteps could be heard in the hall, followed by the unmistakable sound of Paige’s front door opening and closing.
“I’m going to fucking kill her,” David said.