Chapter Nineteen – I Want to Be the One #2
Her eyes closed as I trailed my finger over her cheek, down her throat, and along the swell of a breast peeking out of the tank.
Goosebumps broke out over her skin, and her nipples pebbled just as they had earlier in her room.
It had taken all my strength to walk away from her then.
I simply let myself revel in it now, indulging myself by brushing a hand over a hard little tip.
She gasped, hands going to my wrists as if to push me away, but she didn’t.
“Look at me, Maisey,” I demanded.
Her lids popped open. The soft sage of her eyes had turned to deep forest green.
“Tell me you want more. Let me touch you,” I demanded. I searched her face for an answer as she searched mine in return. She didn’t move away, but she didn’t respond either. “Do you want what I can give you tonight?”
She gave me a nod. A hardly perceptible move.
“Say it.”
“I want you to touch me.” Her voice was unsteady. Breathy. Delightful.
I didn’t have to be told twice. I slid my hands under the hem of her tank, coasting slowly over her warm stomach and upward until I was brushing those beautifully hard pebbles.
My chest tightened. My own anticipation grew, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t take her fully the way I really wanted to tonight.
Not after she’d been drinking. If and when we went all the way down this path, she’d be completely sober. Drunk only on me.
I stroked and twisted and flicked, and her lids slammed shut again.
“Nuh-uh,” I said. “You want this. You watch.”
She dragged her eyes back open.
I skimmed my palms downward, coasting under the waistband of her yoga pants, exploring the sexy curve at her belly button and the wide breadth of her hip bones.
She shivered again, lids fluttering shut and then back open.
I dragged her forward until her butt hit the edge of the counter, and the position forced her to lock her legs around my waist.
My breath caught. And I had to take a second to steady myself, to gather the wisps of control that remained. I hungered for her mouth. I wanted my tongue thrusting inside her at the same tempo as my fingers, but I wasn’t sure I trusted myself to stop if I lost myself in her completely.
If she were sober, it would have been different. But until she was, until we’d already put new ground rules in place about this new game we were playing at, this would have to do.
So, I satisfied myself by doing what I’d fantasized about all week. I curled my hand farther into her yoga pants, past the tiny excuse for underwear she wore, and gently stroked the warmth at her core.
I was rewarded with the absolute wrong emotion crossing her face.
Not lust. Not desire.
Panic. Pure panic.
She put both hands on my chest and pushed as hard as she could.
I took three steps back, tucked my hands into my pockets, and waited while confusion and disappointment swept through me in equal measures. And below it all was a stab of pain. A stab of rejection. A stab of fear that I’d already destroyed something beautiful.
“I. No. We can’t.” She shook her head.
“Why not?”
She jumped off the counter and moved farther away. “Friends. We’re friends. We can’t complicate things that way. Friends are friends. Lovers are lovers. You were the one to tell me that. And you were right. We can’t be both.”
I hated I’d told her that. Hated more that I’d thought it was the truth at the time.
I hadn’t been ready for more with her then.
I wasn’t sure I was ready for it now either, but I wanted her.
I wanted her in my house, greeting me with a kiss when I walked in from the station.
I wanted her in my bed, telling me about her day.
I wanted her spread across my sheets with me feasting on her.
But just because I’d taken that leap in my head to something more than what we’d been before, didn’t mean she had. With nothing better to say, I told her the only truth I could. “I was wrong.”
Shock flitted over her face, and she rubbed her forehead.
“I can’t…” She shook her head again. “I can’t do this with you, Beckett. I need you in my life too much to risk losing our friendship by doing something stupid like mixing it with sex.”
“Believe me, there’d be nothing stupid about what we’d do. But tell me why it would risk me being in your life if we did?”
“You know why!”
“No, I really don’t.”
“Because friends and sex never end well! Do you think I could have you…have you like that and then watch while you flirted with another woman? While you left Frank’s with someone else at your side? It would destroy me.”
“And you’re assuming that’s what would happen. That I could have you, taste you, claim you as mine, and then be able to move on to some other woman?”
The truth of my words astonished her as much as me.
What was I expecting? Asking? What did I really want?
Whispers of dark fumes swirled through me, trying to fill my lungs, trying to hold me in their grip a bit longer.
But I fucking wanted out. I wanted out of the bedroom I’d been trapped in for twenty years.
I wanted to forget bloody wrists. I wanted to escape it all and lose myself in her sweetness, in the utter goodness that was Maisey.
It hit me that this wasn’t really a new desire.
It wasn’t a new wish. I’d just buried it.
I’d denied it for too long simply because I believed I was broken.
Because I believed the abandonment of my youth had left me brittle and hard so all I would ever be able to do was slice people open.
But I was more than my past. More than my wounds.
Just like Maisey was more than the scars her childhood had left on her.
I wanted to tell her every single screwed-up thought in my head about us and all the possibilities I suddenly saw before me. I wanted to offer her my dead heart and see if she could bring it to life and keep it that way, simply by remaining at my side.
She grabbed her ponytail and tugged and then finally let out a shaky breath she’d been holding. “I’m so confused right now, Beckett, and I don’t think it has anything to do with the tequila I drank.”
She was right. I was bungling everything because I was confused too.
I didn’t know how to make a relationship work, not a friends-with-benefits arrangement, or the more complicated scenario that was jogging around in my brain.
What I did know was I needed to sort through my baggage if we were going to have a chance at something else.
It wasn’t fair to ask Maisey to bring my heart back to life.
I had to do it on my own first. I had to figure out how to break free so I could hand her a healthy, pink heart that could beat with love rather than cold wood destined to ruin everything.
Those thoughts had me stepping away from Maisey, even though I really wanted to wrap her in my arms and soothe us both. Instead of folding her in an embrace, I tried to reassure her with the simple truth.
“I’m confused too, Maise. I suddenly want things I’ve never wanted before. So maybe you were right to stop us from going further tonight. But I don’t want to close the door on the possibility of something else.”
She rubbed her hands over her eyes, smudging the makeup ever so slightly. I loved her this way. Not perfect. Not carefully made up. I relished knowing I was one of very few people she allowed to see her like this.
“I don’t know if I’m drunk and dreaming or if you’ve left and walked back in the door as some other version of Beckett. You want time and space? Fine, take it. I need some too.”
“Fair enough.”
She turned and started down the hall.
And I let her go. I didn’t push because I was struggling with the enormity of my thoughts and emotions, trying to make sense of how my world had flipped in minutes, hours, days.
As Maisey disappeared into her room, Vader’s nails scrabbled on the wood in his attempt to follow her.
“Where do you think you’re going?” He looked back at me, gave me that curled-lip look that always seemed like a grin, and then continued trotting after my girl. “Traitor. Traitor Vader is your new name,” I called after him.
But he didn’t come back, because he wasn’t stupid. He knew lying next to Maisey, sharing her bed, and waking up at her side would be a little piece of heaven. A heaven I’d denied myself for far too long.
I scrubbed my hand down my face. What had happened to me? I’d gotten fake-engaged and moved her into my home, and the proximity had done me in. I chuckled to myself. I was a goddamn romance novel.
When I dragged my hands away, the mess in the kitchen came into focus. Served me right to be stuck cleaning it after scaring her away. After causing her to duck and run with a simple touch.
But the truth was, it hadn’t been my touch that had sent her scurrying away. It was the way I’d reversed course on her after twenty years of telling her I’d never want anything more than sex.
The entire time I cleaned up, my brain whirled with new possibilities, and my heart continued to crack through the shell I’d placed around it.
The fire was out. I’d left it smoldering for far too long. But the haze was finally clearing, letting fresh new air into my lungs. I was amazed the wreckage left behind wasn’t as bad as it could have been. That there was still soft, tender skin left.
But could that freshly exposed heart give me an entirely new outlook on life? On relationships?
Could I start something with Maisey that wouldn’t end with her or me slashed to pieces?
For the first time in my life, I was desperate to find out.