“So it is that, then. Someone being good to you. Making you feel like goodness could be a thing. Encouraging you to love what you love and be the way you are with them. Be yourself, no matter what.”
She face-palmed in the dark at that.
Because god, it sounded weird. She was a weird,messed-up loser who let arguments and relationships from ten years ago get in her head, while getting excited over the tiniest sip of the milk of human kindness. “That is not a thing that should turn anyone on,” she groaned, fully expecting him to agree.
And instead she felt him shrug.
“I don’t see why not.”
“Because it’s ridiculous. And not happening.”
“But it is, though. I know it is. I can hear it when you move, Emmie. When you rock your hips. When you press your legs tight together to try to stop the feeling. The one that happens when I talk real gentle like this. That got worse when I saidmoanandcome,” he said, and all she could think about, once he had, was what he’d called her. That new almost nickname.Emmie, he had said, far clearer than it had been at the truck. Far softer, too. And oh, every word around it.
Her face heated overhear it when you move.
Partly because evenwithoutthinking about what it meant, it sounded so utterly rude. But mostly because of what it probably did mean, underneath. A nice, pretty, polite way of saying she was wet. She was wet, and he knew it. And the worst bit about it was: he wasn’t even wrong. She was so slick between her legs she could hear it herself, despite her best efforts not to.
And she knew it wasn’t just him talking like this that had made it happen. It was his hands on her waist, his hand on her shoulder, his hands on her ankle. Maybe even before all this, maybe so far back it would make his head spin.
Though she tried to dial it down anyway.
“Well, they’re dirty words.”
“I don’t think it’s the dirtiness that did it.”
“Then what do you think it was? Your gloriousness?”
“The fact that I’m so ornery, so uptight, and I said it anyway. I encouraged you,” he said, and oh god, she couldn’t even deny it. He was kind of right. Every time he’d said a word of the sort he wouldn’t usually, it had knocked the wind out of her.
But she couldn’t wholly concede.
“You were just saying facts. You weren’t trying to say it’s okay to be that.”
“It is, though. Even though you feel nothing for me, and you think I feel nothing for you, there’s nothing wrong with finding something hot if it’s the kind of thing you’re into. Just on a practical, objective level, it’s normal and good and I would never want you to think otherwise. Never. The opposite, in fact. I’d want you to indulge it to the greatest possible degree you could.”
“You goddamn liar.”
She practically spat the words at his still turned back. Then expected him to turn and spit back. Now it would be enough, it felt like. And instead, he stayed exactly where he was, shrouded in gloom. Then his voice, dark and steady.
“Put your hand between your legs,” he said.
And oh, she wanted to laugh when he did.
But it hit her way too hard for that. Like lightning, and not just in terms of how terrifying it was. Oh no, no, no—it made her heart start beating like a little bird in her chest. Heat rolled through her, thick and unstoppable and so sweet she didn’t even want to deny it.
My love is like a fever, she thought.
And had to fight to get some sense out of herself.
“Stop it. You don’t really mean that.”
“I just told you I did. Now go on and do it.”
“But—” she started to say, and felt rather than saw him shake his head.
“Nobuts. No more debating. You want it, and I’m telling you to take it.”
Telling, she thought.Want, she thought.Take, she thought. Though it wasn’t any of those three things that made the protests die on her lips. It was the gravity in his voice, the surety of it. Like he really believed what he was saying. Like he could just apply his own steadiness and straightforwardness to something as salacious as sex, if he wanted to.
