Chapter 13
Thirteen
Kelly’s Choice
Kelly
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to recover from the sea cave and instead got steadily more obsessed with the exact point where things had gone wrong. Or right.
I came back up to the house shaky soaked in my own need, and more aware of Xerses than I had been before he’d had his hand between my thighs. He’d stopped because he knew that I wasn’t telling him something.
He had read my body, my reactions and paused.
The look on his face when he’d realized there was a truth that I hadn’t given him. He’d gone from hot and wrecked and half-wild against my mouth to careful and caring in less than a breath.
I mattered to him.
And I knew why it had lodged in me all these years with that much shame.
I wasn’t afraid of sex.
All anyone need to do was listen to my stories about every awful date.
Every man who’d bored me, annoyed me, weirded me out, or made me feel like I was supposed to hand over some huge intimate thing just because he’d paid for a drink and said words in the right order. So I always said no but time passed.
And the older I got, the more the choice started feeling a little like standards might be too high,
But the truth Xerses had felt in my body was yes, when I couldn’t say it.
He’d knew there was something.
I went to my room but I wanted to scream, cry, throw things, and go right back down to the cave and let him put his hands on me again until my brain stopped functioning.
I shut the door behind me and leaned against it, eyes closed.
My mouth was swollen. My skin was pink through my throat and chest.
I grabbed the sink with both hands and stared at my reflection.
“You are almost thirty years old,” I told the mirror. “You have a real estate license. You pay your own rent. You have friends.”
The mirror did not look impressed.
“You do not get to fall apart because one gorgeous man stopped touching you out of respect,” I said. “That is the opposite of a problem.”
The word landed in my own head like a brick.
Virgin.
I hated it. Hated how it sounded. Hated how it was such a stereotype that let people have thoughts that it meant more than it was.
I was not naive.
And I wanted him enough to ache.
I stripped out of the bikini and showered, mostly because I needed the physical reset and partly because I did not trust myself not to live in the feeling of his hands if I left any trace of the cave on me.
The water helped. Then it didn’t. Because now the places he hadn’t touched as sharply as the places he had.
By the time I got dressed for dinner, the house had shifted again into evening mode.
Softer light. More candle than sun. More music.
More expectation. Graduation dinner tomorrow.
Tonight a family dinner that was “simple” by Norouzi standards, which still meant enough food for a minor kingdom and at least twenty people moving through the house as if they all lived there permanently.
I made it downstairs late on purpose.
And for the first time in days, I wanted a little distance between the moment I appeared and the moment he could look at me and know too much.
That lasted about four seconds.
I stepped into the dining room and found him halfway down the table in a black shirt that should have counted as cruelty.
His gaze met mine.
Every conversation at the table kept moving. My friends kept talking. Charlie was already halfway through a story no one had asked for. Roxanne was rearranging plates with the force of a queen moving armies. The room was alive and noisy and bright.
And somehow his stares found me like the rest of it was background.
I felt the cove all over again.
I had made a decision somewhere between the shower and the stairs.
I was not going to let the cave turn me into someone shy. He could know there was a truth I hadn’t told him yet. Fine.
So I crossed the room, sat down beside him because that was where the room expected me and I was too far in now to start acting skittish, and accepted the glass of tea he pushed toward me without asking if I wanted it.
“Thank you,” I said.
His voice came low enough for only me to hear. “You’re welcome.”
Nothing more. Not Are you okay. Not We need to talk.
Dinner moved.
I have no idea what half of it consisted of.
But under all of it, there was Xerses, beside me.
He moved around me like he could feel the shape of what I needed and was disciplined enough not to demand more before I offered it.
He gave me quiet attention. He passed me bread when I reached for it. Refilled my tea glass once and then left the carafe where I could reach it myself. Shifted his chair back half an inch when Charlie leaned too far across the table so I had more space without making the movement obvious.
By dessert I was in more danger than I had been in the sea cave.
After dinner, the family scattered in the usual loose directions.
Charlie and Hope toward music. Avril and Kir into one of the side lounges.
Miley and Jeff into some intensely mutual legal bickering that would probably end in sex.
Roxanne and Parvis into a conversation with Isabel that looked both glamorous and exhausting.
I made it to the front hall before I heard him behind me.
“Kelly.” I turned.
“Hi.” I hated that my voice sounded softer tonight.
“Come upstairs,” he said. That hit hot so fast I nearly resented the speed of my own body.
I stared. “You can’t say things like that to me.”
One corner of his mouth moved. “It’s not what you think.”
“Bedrooms are upstairs.”
He looked very calm for someone who had any business remembering that with as much accuracy as I knew he did.
“So is the library,” he said. “Unless you’d prefer your room.”
That he gave me the choice made me want to scream.
No one should be that good at being considerate when they look like that.
“Library,” I said.
He nodded once and then let me go first.
I stood by the window because sitting felt too vulnerable.
Xerses closed the door quietly behind us and then stayed by it.
“Say it,” I said before I could lose my nerve.
“Say what?”
“Whatever it is you’re thinking while standing there looking like a man who’s already decided something.”
“I haven’t decided anything.”
“You always decide things. That’s your entire personality.”
His expression didn’t change much. “You first.”
I laughed once. “No.”
“Yes.”
I cringed. “Absolutely not. I did not walk into this room to go first.”
“You walked into this room because I asked you to.”
“That is not the same as volunteering for emotional exposure.” I should probably tell him. I knew it
He waited.
I crossed my arms. “You don’t get to stand there all calm and make me do the emotional work first.”
One brow lifted. “You think I’m calm.”
“You’re vertical and not sweating. It counts.”
He shook his head and said, very quietly, “I stopped in the cave because something didn’t add up and you would not tell me why.”
I looked at the bookshelves behind him because looking directly at him while I said this felt impossible.
“Do you know how much I hate that you noticed.”
“Yes.”
I looked back at him.
“Do you think I wanted that to happen in a sea cave,” I asked. “With you looking at me like you already knew something I hadn’t said yet.”
“Please tell me.”
The gentleness in that nearly killed me.
I looked away again and laughed once under my breath because this was absurd. My life was absurd.
“I’m a virgin,” I said flatly.
He found my face with that same sharpened attention and said nothing at all for one long beat that felt like it could have held a year.Then he nodded and said quietly, “Okay.”
I stared.
“Okay?” I repeated. He opened his mouth to say something but then I shook my head. “Do not,” I said, “say one noble thing and expect me not to throw something.”
“I wasn’t trying to be noble.”
That landed.
I dragged a hand through my hair. “You don’t understand how much I hate this.”
“I can guess.”
“No. I mean the saying of it.” My voice sharpened before I could smooth it. “Its’ the assumptions that come with it. I’ve had offers but I never wanted to...”
Speaking was hard.
He watched me carefully. “You think I’m making assumptions.”
“I think men do.”
His mouth flattened, not because he was offended for his sex, thank God.
I kept going because now that I’d started, stopping would be worse.
“I’m not telling you because I need you to handle me delicately.
I’m not telling you because I’m scared of sex or a prude or trapping you or anything like that.
I’m telling you because in the cave, if I hadn’t, you were going to learn it with your hands before I got to say it with my mouth and that, ” I broke off and pressed my lips together.
“And I thought I wanted to and it shouldn’t matter that I’m very choosy. ”
His gaze didn’t leave my face.
Space.
Still, I was too wound up now to take space for peace.
I looked at him for one beat. Then another.
And then, because at that point the night had already become a confessional and maybe I was too deep in it to preserve any dignity worth having, I said the ugliest thing.
“Besides I’m almost thirty.”
The words fell and stayed there.
“I’m thirty,” I repeated, flatter now. “I am not eighteen. I am not preserving myself for anyone. I’m just here. Thirty. I didn’t want to mix my body with a man I couldn’t stand for more than a minute but I like you, more than I want to say. And I didn’t want to stop.”
Heat climbed all the way up my throat. I hated myself for the honesty and also felt slightly better for having finally said it with all the teeth on it.
Xerses held my gaze. “That’s everything?”
I laughed. Sharp. “Did you think there was more?”
He moved then. Not all the way across the room. enough that the distance lessened and my body noticed the difference.
“I was more worried you had someone else in your mind.”
His voice had changed. He had quiet kind of intensity that made it impossible to mistake for politeness.