She thought about that for a while then hesitated. I wondered if she felt it wasn’t the right time to tell me. “Now I can’t really remember, but we muddled along, I suppose. I thought he was stable.” She bit the inside of her cheek. “I just really wanted to find someone and have a family, and we’d all live happily ever after in a pink cottage with a rosebush in the front and a dog running around on the front lawn. And now, I have to start all over. That must sound very stupid and boring to you.”
That rankled. “Why? You think I don’t want kids? You think I don’t want to settle down?”
Her mouth went hard like she was gearing up for a different kind of fight, and then she withdrew. “Oh, I have no idea.” She fiddled with her gold purse, seeming to want to get away from the subject. “I made so, so many compromises being with him.”
The way she sucked in her lips signaled her embarrassment. “Like what else?”
“Like…” She rubbed her forehead. “Okay. This is what a fool I was. What I put up with. He didn’t ever, you know…”
“Er, no, I don’t know. He didn’t ever…what?”
She slapped my arm. “You know.”
“Don’t whack the driver. And I genuinely do not know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.”
I gulped. What the heck was she talking about?
“Even drunk, I can’t say it,” she said. “That’s why he dumped me.Such a prude.”
“Fuck him.” I felt my face tense at Perry’s criticism. “We’re both thirty-two years old. Just use your words, Tabitha.”
She smacked a hand over her face.
“It’s sex, kind of,” she mumbled through her fingers.
“We were brought up in a market town surrounded by farms. Animals mating at every turn. In your case, maybe even in your kitchen.”
“I can’t. If it were just mating, I could talk about it. Maybe.”
“What did your regency romances call it? Not bedsport but…?”
“Bedsport.” She cackled with glee. She used to read those romances out loud to me when we were kids. I’d never told her it was hard for me to read, but I guessed she’d never seen me with a book in hand. “Good memory. Whatdidthey call it? I can’t remember. Oh… He pleasured her honeyed recesses with his mouth.”
Damn. Now she’d put that image in my mind, but it was Tabitha and me. Her hand fisting the sheet as she moaned and squirmed while I made my way down her body, kissing and licking her skin…
Stop.
That Perrywas a bloody pillock. How could he have resisted Tabitha? “Why wouldn’t he go down on you?”
“He said it wasn’t for him. I said I understood. But he expected, you know…” She rolled her eyes.
“Oh fuck. What a tosser. I thought I hated that guy enough already.” What kind of selfish fuckwit wouldn’t pleasure his woman but expected her to take care of him?
“So, you do it, right? And you don’t complain?” She took a good, hard look at me, albeit with one eye shut.
I looked over at her, and I wanted to say, “Yes, and if it were you, I’d make sure you’d remember it forever.” Why wouldI even think that? Just me being my usual competitive self, likely.
We were on a bumpy lane, nearly at her house now.
She was blushing up a storm, but I wasn’t shy talking about sex and being upfront. I shrugged. “Yeah, when there’s chemistry. Of course. I want to. It’s part of the whole thing.”
She sighed, and her mouth went tight as though she was still mad at herself. Then out of the corner of her eye, she slid her gaze down my torso, as though she was seeing me in another light.
I shifted on the seat.
Feeling more flushed than was appropriate, I pulled into her parents’ gravel driveway, which was a roller coaster of an off-road experience, and turned off the engine.
