Page 111 of Reckless
Kelly
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to recover from the sea cave and instead got steadily more obsessed with the exact point where things had gone wrong.Or right.
I came back up to the house shaky soaked in my own need, and more aware of Xerses than I had been before he’d had his hand between my thighs.He’d stopped because he knew that I wasn’t telling him something.
He had read my body, my reactions and paused.
The look on his face when he’d realized there was a truth that I hadn’t given him.He’d gone from hot and wrecked and half-wild against my mouth to careful and caring in less than a breath.
I mattered to him.
And I knew why it had lodged in me all these years with that much shame.
I wasn’t afraid of sex.
All anyone need to do was listen to my stories about every awful date.Every man who’d bored me, annoyed me, weirded me out, or made me feel like I was supposed to hand over some huge intimate thing just because he’d paid for a drink and said words in the right order.So I always said no but time passed.
And the older I got, the more the choice started feeling a little like standards might be too high,
But the truth Xerses had felt in my body was yes, when I couldn’t say it.
He’d knew there was something.
I went to my room but I wanted to scream, cry, throw things, and go right back down to the cave and let him put his hands on me again until my brain stopped functioning.
I shut the door behind me and leaned against it, eyes closed.
My mouth was swollen.My skin was pink through my throat and chest.
I grabbed the sink with both hands and stared at my reflection.
“You are almost thirty years old,” I told the mirror.“You have a real estate license.You pay your own rent.You have friends.”
The mirror did not look impressed.
“You do not get to fall apart because one gorgeous man stopped touching you out of respect,” I said.“That is the opposite of a problem.”
The word landed in my own head like a brick.
Virgin.
I hated it.Hated how it sounded.Hated how it was such a stereotype that let people have thoughts that it meant more than it was.
I was not naive.
And I wanted him enough to ache.
I stripped out of the bikini and showered, mostly because I needed the physical reset and partly because I did not trust myself not to live in the feeling of his hands if I left any trace of the cave on me.The water helped.Then it didn’t.Because now the places he hadn’t touched as sharply as the places he had.
By the time I got dressed for dinner, the house had shifted again into evening mode.Softer light.More candle than sun.More music.More expectation.Graduation dinner tomorrow.Tonight a family dinner that was “simple” by Norouzi standards, which still meant enough food for a minor kingdom and at least twenty people moving through the house as if they all lived there permanently.
I made it downstairs late on purpose.
And for the first time in days, I wanted a little distance between the moment I appeared and the moment he could look at me and know too much.
That lasted about four seconds.
I stepped into the dining room and found him halfway down the table in a black shirt that should have counted as cruelty.
