A thought occurred to stop him while he was speaking, a thought which coincided with Darcy closing the distance between them and curling two fingers into the gap between the lowest buttons on his shirt. A wonderful, compelling, implausible thought about what Darcy was really asking. She tilted her head to the side and looked up at him through her dark eyelashes, a small smile playing around the corners of her full, red mouth.
“It’s not a sex couch?” she pressed.
Teagan was abruptly unsure about that. Perhaps he’d spoken too soon.
“It’s hard to say,” he temporized. He watched the pink tip of her tongue curl delicately between her lips before she spoke again. The heel of her palm was pressed against his stomach just above his waistband. His heartbeat was probably audible, echoing off the terrazzo.
“Well, could it be?” Darcy asked.
God, he was really dumb sometimes.
He opened his mouth to reply that of course it could be, the conversation pit or any other architectural feature of his house was more than suitable for sex, no worry about that, in fact, the floor or walls would do in a pinch—
But the rational side of his mind abruptly chimed in toinform him that he shouldn’t make any promises he wouldn’t be able to keep, and he just stared at her wordlessly.
Darcy closed her eyes and pressed her mouth to his loose lower lip, no doubt interpreting his hesitation as amazement that he could be getting lucky tonight. He kissed her back, trying to compose an explanation that wouldn’t make him sound like a completely worthless excuse for a man, but a graceful description of the circumstances eluded him. Her hands got busy on the buttons of his shirt.
Teagan chased Darcy’s mouth as she focused on divesting him of his clothes. He tried to convince himself that if he just didn’tthinkabout anything, maybe his body would cooperate and do what it always had before. He wanted her. He wanted to touch every inch of her, taste every texture and color on her body. But where that wanting would have filled up the hollows in his body before, it was fighting for space with a damping fog that made him feel distant even from this moment.
He couldn’t feel that wanting outside of his head.
Darcy backed away, casually ripping off her top and tossing it to the ground. She wore the same electric blue bra he’d so briefly glimpsed—was it really only yesterday?—but he registered it only for a moment before she bent her arms behind her to unhook it, then tossed it away as well.
Teagan made an incoherent noise at the unfairness of it all. Darcy registered that as appropriate respect for the glory of her bare breasts, hanging round and full, tipped with dark brown nipples, and she grinned at him. He hadn’t yet moved.
“Come on, Teagan,” she said, in the same impatient tone of voice she’d used to urge him faster up Slough Creek trail, and she pulled him by the hand toward the couch.
Moving mostly via muscle memory rather than consciousintent, he ended up braced over her, one hand supporting himself, the other cupped around the soft swell of her breast. The places she was soft were delightful to him. He’d seen a lot of her hard edges already. The sharp jut of her chin when she was angry. The muscular line of her calves as she climbed a trail in front of him. But her round hips, the curve of her stomach, the satiny skin under his fingers—these were equally precious.
He worked to lose himself in the sensation. Maybe more time would do it. Circling her nipple with his thumb was an endeavor he was willing to devote the next ten minutes to, at least, and if that didn’t get him there, he’d try worrying it between his lips.
This tentative plan seemed to conflict with Darcy’s orders, however, because she was working hard to render them both naked in short order.
“Wait, wait,” he gasped into her mouth when her hand dipped to the waistband of his pants.
“I have condoms,” she said reassuringly as her fingers closed around the top button of his fly.
Of course she did. Darcy never went hiking without bear spray, and of course she had not offered to try out the sex couch without protection. But that wasn’t the issue. She pulled down his zipper.
“No, I mean—” He disentangled himself from her, pulled back to a kneeling position. She followed, hands dipping perilously close to his groin. He grabbed her wrists just as she cupped him, panic spiking.
“Wait,” he said again, but too late.
Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. At what she wasn’t feeling, presumably.
“I’m on, um, medication,” he said as she slowly pulled her hands away.
Her expression was uncomprehending.
“Antidepressants,” he said, feeling his cheeks burn.
She still didn’t get it.
“They have, I think, side effects,” he said, willing a meteor to target Irvington, New York, and put him out of this conversation.
Darcy’s face was still a muddle.
“So... do you not want to...?” she said slowly, as though saying something that didn’t make any sense. And it didn’t make any sense. Of course he wanted to sleep with her. She was a dream. He literally dreamed about her. But if he’d thought about wanting to sleep with her—and it wasn’t like the ideahadn’toccurred to him—it was in the same abstract way that he’d thought about wanting to take her to that little Ethiopian restaurant in East Williamsburg or to bury his face in her loose hair, because desire was one of those emotions that he could only halfway feel now. He wanted to do everything with her. He hadn’t planned to do anything at all.
