I reached out with my hand, but all I did was gently grab him by the chin. Then I was leaning forward and pressing my lips to the side of his mouth. I heard him suck in a breath when my tongue flicked over the little bit of sauce. His lips were on mine a moment later. The kiss grew heated quickly, but when Cain pulled away from me, I let him go.
“I don’t understand this,” he whispered.
“It’s okay,” I said even as the disappointment flowed through me. “It’s the stress, the close quarters. I know you’re not really attracted to me-”
His lips on mine shut me up, as did the feel of his cock beneath my fingers when he grabbed my hand and placed it on his groin. “You want to tell me again that I’m not attracted to you?” he growled.
I shook my head. When he released my hand, I slowly pulled it away from his lap, though it practically killed me to do it.
“What is it that you don’t understand?” I asked as my eyes met his.
“This…this need I have for you,” he murmured as he reached up to trail his thumb over my bottom lip. “Sex has always been this thing I occasionally wanted, but never needed,” he said softly.
“Have you ever been with a man before? Or been attracted to one?”
He shook his head. “But I honestly can’t say I’ve been particularly attracted to women, either,” he admitted.
“But surely the women you’ve been with-”
“They were escorts,” he interjected. I was momentarily rendered speechless.
“Why?” I finally said dumbly. “You’re so gorgeous, you could have anyone you wanted.”
He dropped his eyes and I instantly felt bad. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to judge.”
“You weren’t,” he said. “It’s a valid question.” He lifted his eyes and said, “I knew any woman I dated would want to touch me, kiss me. I couldn’t let anyone close enough to do that. And I didn’t want to explain why not. Escorts didn’t care…not what position I fucked them in, which was always from behind, and not that they weren’t allowed to touch me. I tried to be with a girl the normal way after…after what happened, but when she put her arms around me, I panicked and pushed her away. She fell to the floor…”
Cain shook his head. “I apologized, but I’d scared her. She never spoke to me again.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
“Sixteen. I couldn’t explain myself or tell her about the attack.”
“Will you tell me about it?” I asked as I reached up to brush my fingers against his temple. He leaned into the touch. Instead of answering me, he reached down and grabbed the pizza boxes andput them on the floor next to the bed. Afterwards, he leaned back against the headboard.
“Can I hold you while I tell you?” he asked.
I was tempted to tell him he never had to ask my permission to hold me, but I held my tongue and instead said, “Where do you want me?”
Chapter 13
CAIN
I was worriedthe nerves would come back when Ethan settled his head on my chest and wrapped his arm around my waist, but thankfully my stomach didn’t rebel at the contact. When I’d asked him to touch me earlier after I’d kissed him for the second time, I hadn’t been sure I’d be able to go through with it. But watching his hands as they’d skimmed over my body with infinite gentleness had been mesmerizing. Yes, there’d been a twinge of fear there, but the need to feel his touch had been greater.
I let my hand settle on Ethan’s back while I closed the other over the one he had resting over my heart. I loved the feel of his weight on me. I would have thought the sensation of being held down, even by someone as slight as Ethan, would have been too much, but it was oddly comforting.
And kissing Ethan…well, there was just no equal to that. I hadn’t lied when I’d told him that my need for him confused me. I’d already accepted that his gender wasn’t the issue…it was that one person could hold such power over me. Maybe I should have been more freaked out about being attracted to a man, but I suspected my past had a lot to do with that. When everything had gone to hell for me, I’d just started exploring my sexuality. It was true that I hadn’t been attracted to any boys in my class, but there really hadn’t been that many girls either. My fucked-up childhood even before the attack had given me a perception on love and relationships that wasn’t really all that healthy and that I hadn’t wanted to emulate. The attack had just sealed the deal.
“I grew up in a small town about a hundred miles from Lexington in Kentucky. My mom was a bank manager and my dad was a CPA. They met in college and got married after graduation. I came along a few years later. I don’t really remember things getting bad until my sister, Hailey, was born. I was six. I only remember bits and pieces…fighting, my mom with bruises, my dad bringing her flowers. By the time Daniel came along, things were clearer.”
“He was nine years younger than you, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, not surprised that Ethan remembered my siblings’ ages. “My dad was really possessive of my mom and her time. As she started working her way up the corporate ladder at work, he seemed to grow more and more resentful. I never saw him actually hit her until I was ten. I tried to stop it, but my father told me to stay out of it. My mother told me to take my brother and sister to my room. It never made sense to me,” I said softly.
“What didn’t?” Ethan prodded when I got too lost in the past.
“How they could yell and scream at each other like that and then the next day they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Even with my mother covered in bruises, she’d justmeltinto him. Like she was the happiest woman in the world. And things would be fine again until it all started over again.”
