Why am I alone?
Argh. Not again.
This is unacceptable. Asher can’t be here. Not when I’m doingthis. But every time I’ve attempted an orgasm since our heart-to-heart on the phone last week, Asher’s face has snuck into my mind.
I think his vulnerability flipped a switch in my genetics or something. His loneliness and uncertainties, his openness and sincerity... It all unlocked a secret empathy level in my heart, like an Easter egg in a video game.
He thinks no one takes him seriously.
He thinks his patients don’t trust him.
He thinks women find him expendable.
I am flabbergasted, and something possessive has taken flight inside me. How can he not see how wonderful he is? Perhaps the stodgy old surgeons at the hospital don’t give him a second glance, but who cares about them?
And if women don’t want him, then they are fucking blind as that elderly nurse with the inch-thick glasses in the ER who refuses to retire. This is the one part I simply cannot fathom.
Just... how?
He is so easy to love! I’m a self-inflicted emotionless shell of a person, and he still found a way to creep inside and become my best friend. How is that not tangible proof of his lovability?
I haveseenthe way women want him with my own 20/20 eyes. Asher has surely confirmation-biased his way into a complex that doesn’t exist. And now I’m fatally damaged because learning all this has messed with my mind. I don’t know why I can’t get him out of my head, why these strange fantasies are cropping up like weeds.
I’ve wondered before, yes. Idle meanderings that don’t mean anything. What his lips feel like. How his hands would touch me. The places he’d linger as he undressed me. Asher is kind. Caring. I’m certain he takes care of his partners in bed.
Not likethisguy.
But this is more than wondering. This is fantasizing. This is straight up illicit indulgence.
It’s like I’ve opened my wrists, and I’m bleeding out control and sanity as an offering, all while reaching for Asher’s strong hand.
What is wrong with me?
I don’t know what brought it on or how to make it stop.
But it’s thoughts ofhimthat allow the ecstasy to blossom down below, and what do I do with that? I can’t tell him. I can’t act on it. I can’t force it away.
I’m stuck in the Here And There, weirded out and uncertain, surrounded in so many shades of gray, I’m practically Anastasia Steele.
Without the... like... bondage stuff.
One thing I know for certain: If my friendship with Asher is going to survive, it has to stop.
He smells like a sexy forest.
Can forests be sexy? Because this one is.
Even with the chlorine of the pool water obscuring the scent, it’s still reaching deep inside me, yanking want to the surface like it’s pulling up daisies. I try to relax on my lounger beside the pool, but every muscle is tensed, and sweat that has very little to do with the sun gathers in every crease.
“What are you doing?” Asher asks, settling on the lounger beside mine.
I jerk my attention from his abs to find him studying me, brows scrunched. It isn’t the first time this Pool Party Saturday that I’ve caught myself staring, but it is the first timehe’scaught me staring.
It took him three weeks. Three weeks of a strict diet and focused workouts to redefine the pretty muscles that are always there but have never held me quite so captivated. Reclining on a lounge chair in the summer sun, glistening from the pool water still drying on his skin, he is a god.
It’s a problem. My own personal problem, but still.
I lean closer. “You are obscene.”
