“Share with me,” he said.
“No.”
“Hey, that’s why we got two different kinds.”
“I don’t date, and I don’t share food.”
“We just shared appetizers.”
“It’s different.”
“Come on,” he said, taking a swirl of the spaghetti marinara on his plate and holding the fork up in front of her. “Taste it.”
She leaned in and took a bite off his fork, too late realizing whatan intimate move it was. Realizing too late that it was going to affect her.
Being here, being on a date, was just so normal. But for her, it was entirely abnormal. What if she became mayor? Would it change that?
Would it make things like this feel normal?
Would she feel she could just come into a restaurant like this? Would she go on dates?
It wouldn’t be with Flynn. Because after her candidacy, it would be over. And what would that be like? To not be with Flynn anymore. To not see him all the time.
That didn’t feel right, and yet …
Maybe this was the problem. Flynn had always been something. He made her feel things, in spite of herself. She wanted to be hostile to him, but could never quite pull it off.
Maybe this was part of her journey. Maybe Flynn really was a mountain that she had to climb.
That made her throat dry, made her body feel warm.
Flynn.
He had always been there. This man who inspired feelings inside her that no other man ever had. And after this, maybe she would be mayor. Maybe she would go to upscale restaurants, and maybe she wouldn’t spend all her time at The Watering Hole. Maybe she would want a real relationship, because maybe she would be closer to being the real person she had wanted to be so badly when she was younger.
But she would still be a virgin. She would still have to have a first. She would still have to admit that she was afraid, and that intimacy had always frightened her.
She realized then with stunning clarity that she could never admit that, not to anybody but Flynn.
He was the man who was meant to be the first. She knew it with as much clarity as she’d ever had in her entire life.
She only knew one way to go about things like this. She took a bite of her pasta. “I’ll share with you.”
“Thanks,” he said, reaching over and starting to take a bite from her plate.
“And after dinner, maybe we should fuck.”
His fork scratched against the plate, and he looked up at her as if she had grown an extra head. He didn’t say anything. He just stared at her. Her heart began to pound hard. She had said it. Oh, she had really said it.
“Just, you know, I think it’s actually starting to get a little bit undignified, the way we’re avoiding it.”
She said that like she wasn’t about to come apart at the seams. Like it didn’t terrify her. It did. God damn, it did.
But this was the only way. The only way forward. Not just to deal with the ridiculous hold Flynn Wilder had had on her for all these years, but with living on the outskirts. Living behind a mask.
“I can’t talk to you about this here,” he said, his voice low and rough.
“Well, damn. Now I suspect I’m not going to get dessert.”
