She saw his expression shift, and caught it just before he answered.
“Because you saidyes. You saidyes, and then youcame inside,” he gasped, as if she’d just told him the most shocking secret from the center of the universe. That it wasn’t just practice to her, it wasn’t just pretend. Shewantedto do this. She had agreed thinking it was going to happen.
And apparently he hadn’t known at all.
He barely seemed able to comprehend it now.
He looked at her like she was a completely different person to him—and not one he knew what to do with. He seemed tormented, torn. She couldn’t tell if he was delighted or horrified. And to the point where her face reddened, and she went to apologize. To explain:I’m not sex mad, you just drive me so wild.
But before she could get there, something inside him simply seemed to reach a crescendo. It built and built in his devouring, overwhelmed gaze and the shake of his head, and then finally he went still, like something had settled in his mind. Like he saw the truth in her eyes, and knew.
Then he just made this agonized sound, like someone helplessly lost.
And broke. He broke. He pushed toward her, so sudden she didn’t realize what was happening until he was there. One handin her hair, the other pulling her against him. Followed by that smoke-kissed mouth suddenly on hers. Passionately on hers, in a way she recognized immediately.
It made her think of black-and-white movies.
Women being swept into heated kisses.
Everything close-lipped, of course, and technically chaste. And yet somehow at the same time so searing hot she could barely stand it. Her whole body was suddenly burning. She could feel every nerve ending in it, all firing at the same time. It was honestly all she could do not to squirm, or press against him, or do a million other things that would usually be normal under this kind of heated pressure.
But couldn’t be, when the heat shouldn’t have existed.
He was still barely doing anything, really.
It justfeltlike being fucked.
And even better: she was starting to suspect he agreed. Because even though he stuck to just that press of his lips against hers, even though his hands went no farther than her hair and her shoulder, she could feel the heat in him rising. It rolled off him in delicious waves; it seemed to sear against her skin.
She thought that struck-match scent had gotten stronger.
And when she gave in just a little and put a hand on his back—just his back, nothing else, nothing more—the muscles there felt tight. Very tight.Strangelytight. They seemed to ripple under the stroke of her palm. All along the length of his spine in a way that didn’t seem quite right.
It felt like bone.
Like the ridges of a dinosaur’s back, suddenly bursting free.
Her eyes snapped open to feel it. But just as she stroked more firmly to see if she was imagining things, he suddenly ripped away from her. As fast as he had done this—faster even than that. Likeher touching him had spelled out the mistake he was making, and he just couldn’t, he couldn’t.
He even looked at her as if she’d been too much.
Horrified, it seemed like to her, as he stumbled back.
He rushed to the bathroom. Then he slammed the door.
And he did not come back out for a long, long time.
CHAPTER TWELVE
She thought about sending him an apology note somehow. But after the weird stuff she’d let herself write in his bedroom, it felt a little like pressing her luck. It had gone well then. It had felt good then. But what if she tried again, and it went the bad way? Maybe she attempted a scribbledsorry I assumed you wanted to have sex with me, and it made the wheels on his truck magically turn into bananas.
After all, if the things she’d told herself were nonsense were actually real, if everything she’d pushed down and suppressed had kind of happened in some way, then what would happen if she let it all rise up again? All her cloudy memories of it didn’t seem like a series of easily controllable things. She wasn’t even sure if control of something like that was possible. Or even reasonable to consider in that way.
Though she had to admit, it was starting to feel a little bit more reasonable than it had. Partly because of what he’d said, and how oddly right it had felt. But it was also just this strange sense she kept having of something at the periphery of her senses. A tingling in her limbs that hadn’t been there before. A new, weird feeling of security, and safety, as if she had done an honest-to-god spell that protected her.
And it didn’t seem to just extend to her.
It extended to Popcorn, too, in a way she hadn’t really grasped before. But she did now, when she realized he wasn’t doing a bunch of things he usually did. He didn’t growl at the door after she shut it behind her. There was no pacing until she shut the drapes. And most shocking of all: he didn’t stay sitting on the back of the chair, by the window, when she climbed into bed.
