I’m pushed to my orgasm too, and experience it in full. I spill into her and feel the pleasure race up through me like a bolt of lightning.
I collapse into the desk when it’s all over. Piper and I recover in silence, and it eventually becomes awkward when we both return fully from the high.
“That was…”
“A mistake,” she says, peeling herself off the desk to redress. She pulls the shirt back down over her torso, hiding most of her ass, and locates the sweatpants. I haven’t a slightest clue where I threw them—the same goes for my belt and jeans.
I take a step forward and bring her back to me, afraid she’ll veer too far away again.
“We’re still not done talking,” I murmur in her ear. She tenses all over again, although this time for a different reason.
I can’t keep the truth to myself much longer. It’s breaking me more than it’s surely breaking her. “You have no idea how hard it was to stay away from you.”
“Really?” She shoots me a glare over her shoulder. “The first time wasn’t…”
I clutch her tighter, and remain behind her. “I had to leave. Remember I told you about Ellie’s mother dying in a car crash?”
She freezes, probably predicting the rest.
“I had nothing to do with Ellie before I had to leave Maple Crossing. Holly, her mother, took off straight after Ellie’s birth. She was impossible to contact, and so were the rest of her family.”
“What about a lawyer?”
“That was a possibility, but there was no guarantee. Her family worked in legislation, so going through a lawyer would’ve been a real pain in the backside, and a lost cause, probably.” I sigh. “I wanted to get out of New York. I needed to clear my head?—”
“And that’s why you visited town.” Piper snaps around and crosses her arms. “I don’t understand—why not just tell me the truth?”
“Because I never told you about my daughter in the first place. I thought I had lost her forever. Telling you the truth would mean telling you that I’d been lying to you?—”
“You were lying anyway.”
“Not with you. What I had with you was real.” I stop to think for a moment. “It was easier and less painless for both of us if I told you I needed to head back for work.”
Her eyes are on high alert, scanning every corner of my face, as if to make sure that I’m telling the truth.
“She would have been an orphan, Piper, if I didn’t go?—”
“I get it,” she cuts me off at a good time before I decide to tell her all about my past. None of that matters now, anyway. “I would’ve done the same if the shoe was on the other foot.”
I study her electric blue eyes and ask her, “Where do we go from here?”
“Well.” She grimaces. “I think it’s safe to say we’ve passed from simple to complicated.”
I fear we passed that line long ago.
Much longer than both of us realized.
“For now there’s not much we can do but wait until James Taylor is done with his assessment.”
I nod. “Even though you did start the fire,he won’t be able to prove it. You can trust me on this one.”
Piper keeps quiet, silently disagreeing. I suppose once trust breaks once, it breaks forever.
“We can’t keep ignoring each other like this,” she says. “Like we’re not even friends. Soon it’ll rub off on the kids, and I don’t think either of us want that.”
“No,” I say, still caught up on the friend thing.
We were never friends, and it definitely feels weird to call ourselves that when we were never friends to begin with. Friends don’t do what we just did.
