I blink, surprised, but realize my shoulders are bunched up. “It’s fine.”
Gabriel pauses a moment, then leans forward, stretching across the space between us. My heart jumps in my throat before he hits a button on the side of the chair and it starts vibrating.
The buzz warms through me, shoulder to thigh, and I let a soft, surprised grunt.
Fuck. I didn’t even know this chair did that. I’ll have to try out the one in my room.
“Might help,” Gabriel says with a smile.
I try to frown, but fuck does the massage feel good. Squirming into it, I meet his eye.
“We’ll make it work,” Gabriel says, picking up from earlier. “And don’t worry about me getting in a scandal outside of our holy matrimony. If I got in trouble, it would firebomb my career, but you’d be free to go. They’d probably make you a saint.”
I let out a chuckle. When I realize the buzzing is making me a little too happy in the pants, I hit the button on the side of the chair and kill it.
There’s a touch of sympathy in Gabriel’s expression. “You really never have sex?” he asks me.
“It’s not like I’m a virgin,” I say, nervous again. “I’ve experimented to confirm.”
“But now it’s different,” he says. “After our arrangement is over, or maybe before if you find someone you can trust, you can have a relationship now.”
“Not that it’s your business,” I point out. “I don’t have room for a relationship or dating in my life. And in fact, since I’ve been forced out of the closet, I seem to have even less room than usual.”
“If you’re not going to have sex again for a long time, I hope we enjoyed ourselves,” he says.
“If we even did anything.”
“I seem to remember hickeys on someone’s collar.”
My hand goes to my chest before I can stop the reflex. The bruises are fading, but every time I’m undressing or in the shower, they remind me he was there.
“That doesn’t mean we had sex,” I argue. “Hell. You’re the one who inspected the condom.”
He chuckles as he remembers. “You looked so grossed out.”
“It was a used condom!” I shake my head quickly. “Or maybe it wasn’t. Who knows? Some things we just never get to know.” When he continues to give me that weirdly sympathetic look, I set my beer down.
“Yes,” I say, admitting it just to stop the annoying look in his eyes. “If I was going to have sex again, just one time, I certainly wish I’d remember it. But I wasn’t looking for sex before I married you, and I’m certainly not about to go and seek it out now.”
Gabriel sets his beer down, too, and purses his lips just slightly. “Maybe you should have sex just once with me again.”
I tilt my head to the side. I couldn’t have heard that right. “Excuse me?”
“We’re already in this mess together. We already did it and got married, for fuck’s sake. So if you want to remember what sex is like, let’s fuck.” His casual smile grows into a cocky grin. “Start our marriage off right.”
I swallow. His proposition makes blood rush through me, my face tingly and warm. I’m so caught off-guard it takes a second to respond, and “Gabriel…” is all I manage.
“One time only, just for kicks,” he says. “Maybe it will break some of this tension between us, too.”
My bottom lip is somehow between my teeth. Gabriel sees it and arches his eyebrows appreciatively.
“I imagine getting good and fucked would help your tennis game.”
“Who said I’m the one getting fucked?” I challenge him.
The words surprise me. I’m not shutting this down. Does that mean I’m really considering having sex with Gabriel right now?
“Hopefully, we’d both fuck each other,” he says casually. “At least that’s how I prefer it.”
