Her lips parted and her eyes went even wider. I laughed. She really thought I hadn’t noticed.
“And what would you like to talk about?” she asked. “In the shower, of all places.”
“I’d like to start with this.” I pried her arm away from her breasts. “No more hiding from me, Em.”
“I’m chilly,” she said primly. “You let in the cold air.”
“It’s a tropical fucking rainforest in here. You’re all pink.” I cupped her jaw, swept my thumb over her rosy cheek. “Let me walk you through what’s going to happen next.”
“This seems like a kitchen table conversation.”
She shifted away from me and reached for a round plastic thing with little nubs on it. I didn’t know what it was until she squirted some body wash on it and went to work scrubbing an arm.
It took me a second to snap out of the trance that was a soaped-up Emme but when I did, I grabbed the round thing and took over the job. “That’s tough shit because we’re having the conversation here. Now, I’m going to say a few things that you’re not going to like but do me a favor and try to listen.”
“Really setting yourself up for the win,” she said.
“I meant everything I said last night.”
“About field day? Great, because your version sounded a lot better than anything I’ve come up with and my ass is going to be toast if I have to pull everything together in two weeks by myself.”
“About field day,” I said, “and everything else too.”
Emme dropped her gaze to the tiled floor. She was quiet for a minute while I washed her arms very, very thoroughly. “You said a lot of things.”
“I meant all of them.” I turned her to face the wall as I started on her back. “That’s what I want. Now you have to tell me what you want.”
I went into most games expecting to win but that wasn’t going to work here. Instead, I devoted all of my attention to washing her back. I wasn’t going to let myself think about what would happen if she turned around and said it felt like she’d waited years for this and life finally made sense. Just as I wasn’t going to let myself think about what would happen if she decided she wanted to enforce those boundaries and rules again.
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I don’t know what it means for us to…to complicate things like this. For our friendship and this fake-marriage thing.”
I had to choke back an irritable growl atthis fake-marriage thing. I’d sooner survive her reaching in and ripping my beating heart from my chest than I would hearing those words ever again.
“I’m worried it will make all of this a lot harder,” she continued.
I stepped closer, letting my shaft slide into the plump curve of her backside. “It’s going to be hard either way.”
She slapped a hand to the wall, laughing. “I just—I don’t want to lose you. I feel like it’s already so much more complicated than we thought it would be and sex is jumping up to a whole new level of difficulty.”
“I mean, if you do it right.”
She laughed but it was an indulgent laugh, like she wanted me to know it was a good joke but I was pushing my luck right to the edge. “I don’t want to lose you,” she repeated. “That’s my bottom line. When I think about the end of the summer, when your deals are closed and Grace is married, I get scared because I know this will end and I can’t lose you in the process.”
I stroked the scrubber down her sides as I weighed the risks in front of me. I could all but guarantee she shut me down or go on holding myself back until the end of my days. I was fucked either way so I asked, “What if it doesn’t end after the summer?”
She whirled around, her expression panicked. “Sooner? Not before the wedding, right?”
“No, silly girl. I’m not missing that wedding for the world. I need to meet this jam farmer.” I turned her back to the wall. “We talked about the end of the summer because we had to get through so much during that time.”
She wagged a finger at me over her shoulder. “No, you wanted to get back to your life by the end of the summer and be done with this.”
I swatted the finger away. “I never said any part of that.”
“But—yes, you did! You said it that day in my apartment. When we were looking at our schedules and you screwed up my window.”
I ran the scrubber down the line of her back and around the flare of her hips while I tried to figure out how the hell I gave her the impression I wanted to hustle my way through this marriage. “The window was already broken,” I said, though it didn’t matter and it wasn’t going to fix this new issue of ours. “It continued to disintegrate when I looked at it a little too long.”
After a pause, Emme said, “I thought you wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible. That you were just counting down the days and…and when your deal is done, we’ll be done. And it hurts whenever I think about it because Iloveyou, Ryan, and I miss you when you’re not with me but I know I’ll break if we spend the next month in bed together and then it’s just over. I don’t want to break and I don’t want to lose you. Ican’t.”
