But at least it has a bed. I was frankly starting to wonder if he owned anything. “Why haven’t you decorated your house?”
Sid bends down to open the cedar chest. “What?”
“They’ve got so much stuff at the exchange! Pictures, rugs, couches. I saw a big red couch I liked today.” Had a good breakdown on it too, but let’s skip that part. “You could do anything with this place.”
He looks up at the naked walls. “Yeah… I guess.”
“So why haven’t you?”
“I’m not sure I know how. I bought a table once, butI got rid of it a few days later. It feels make-believe most of the time. Like… moving toys around in a dollhouse.” His response startles me. After twelve years, I would have thought he was settled here. As if sensing my thoughts, he adds, “At least I’m not still living out of a knapsack.”
“Hiking pack,” I say.
“Is there a difference?” He draws up so that he’s standing in front of me. The air between us is charged with heat, but we don’t reach out. Not yet.
“Hiking packs are bigger. Fancier. Like the king-sized bed of backpacks.” Everything I’m saying is so stupid, but I can’t stop smiling. Even as Sid’s face takes on its usual, serious bent, I can’t stop beaming at him like a firefly.
“Kayla.” He places a hand on my arm, and I let my hands travel up his chest. His pulse races against my palms. “I made you a promise when you came here.”
“You seriously didn’t bring me all the way up here tonottake me to bed, did you?”
“No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying…” As he struggles for words, I realize this is one of those rare moments when his guards are down. If I ever want to see him clearly, I have to listen.
I try to be tender instead of hungry as I reach up and touch his face. “Saying what?”
“I don’t want you to regret me. If you wake up tomorrow and come to your senses, and it turns out that I’ve hurt you by doing this…”
It’s too awful to let him go on. “Sid.” I take him into my arms, pressing him close. “I know I don’t deserve it, butplease. Please have faith in me. I want to be with you. Please don’t punish me for making mistakes.”
“Punishyou?” he says disbelievingly.
“I… I know you don’t want someone as messed up as me, but—”
His face contorts with confusion. “When did I ever say—”
“Same night you promised not to sleep with me. You said I came from a weird sex cult and you didn’t want anything to do with that.”
A dark shadow passes over his face. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No, I deserved it. And it’s true. But if you give me a chance—”
“Kayla, I know this is a shitty excuse, but I said that because I was trying to convince myself it didn’t matter that you didn’t want me. I was asking you to marry me without telling you I was ex-TNS. I knew I would never deserve to touch you. I was trying to talk myself into thinking it was okay that you wanted nothing to do with me, even though I was falling for you.”
His words stun me for half a second. Then I burst forth like a breaking damn. “But I treated you like shit!”
“I never said I had good taste.”
I slam an angry fist into his chest, but that only makes the grin wider on his face. He wraps a hand around each of mine.
“You shot me with that rock and I was done. I’d never met someone so fearless.” He weaves his fingers into my curls. As his thumbs press against the nape of my neck, I slide my hands up his chest to rest on his shoulders. “And it would kill me if I became the one thing you were afraid of.”
“I’m afraid of a lot of things, Sid.” That much must be obvious after today. “But not you. Never you.”
His mouth meets mine and I let the taste of him take over me. For the first time, we go slowly. Desperate as I am to be with him, I also don’t want to miss a single sensation. I take my time rolling up the hem of his shirt, revealing his stomach, the thin trail of pale hair leadingdownward from his navel to his jeans. His chest shudders as I reach it, and I’m stunned for a moment by the breadth of his ribs heaving under my hands. Our lips break apart and I teeter backward until he catches the small of my back, my fists still clutching his shirt.
“If we do this…” His eyes don’t look like themselves, blue swallowed up by the dark of his pupils. “If we do this, there’s no going back. No… whatever our deal used to be. If we do this—”
“It becomes real. I know.” And it’s a bad idea. At this point, I’ve known him for a little over two months. It’s not enough to build a marriage on. But that’s what we’ll be if we go through with this—legally bound, physically consummated. Husband and wife. Married, in every conventional sense of the word. I should not be sleeping with him. But I can’t take the longing or the loneliness anymore.
