“Well, that means I’m a failure, because my intent was to fuck your brains out.”
She couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “I mean, my brains aren’t intact. Trust me. Though…” A pulse started to beat at the apex of her thighs again, and she marveled at the fact that she could be so confused and get aroused at the same time. He had that effect. “I can go again.”
“Give me a minute,” he said.
“But see, if I have a minute, I’m going to start thinking. I can’t help it.”
“Just don’t.”
“How?”
“It’s a trick I learned,” he said. “When Becca was sick. I knew what the future held. I knew she was going to die. But I didn’t think about that. I counted the breaths that she was taking right now. I would make myself conscious of the air, the position of the sun in the sky, the feeling of my clothes on my body. Anything and everything to ground myself in the moment. There is nothing more than the moment. Everything else is a what-if. Nothing else is real. The past is gone. The future doesn’t exist yet. This,” he said, his blue eyes so intense she had to fight not to look away. “This is the only thing that’s real. Right now. We are all that’s real. Everything outside that door is only a possibility.” At this, he dragged his fingertips along her lower lip again. “This is the only real thing in the world.”
He lowered his head and kissed her again, and she let herself get caught up in that. In that seductive promise. In everything.
The only real thing.
TWENTY-THREE
She woke up pressed against an unfamiliar masculine body. It all came back to her. Quickly and in stunningly vivid Technicolor. Logan. She didn’t know quite what to do. She needed to go back to her room. She didn’t know what time it was. She hadn’t texted anybody who was expecting a text from her, and they would probably think that she was dead on the highway somewhere. She needed to get back to her things. To her space so that she could…breathe. So that she could text her kids and her friends.
She slipped away from the warmth of his hold and out of bed, collecting her clothes.
She didn’t want to call Elysia and Whitney.
It was a weird thing to think, except when she’d first had sex, she’d been ashamed and horrified at herself…and desperate to talk to her friends.
She wasn’t horrified or ashamed, not this time.
But she didn’t want to share it either.
Which was inconvenient in some ways because she was also confused. She didn’t know what to do next. She didn’t know anything. It would have been helpful to talk to her friends, to share the moment. But the moment felt like hers and Logan’s. Like it didn’t belong to anyone else. It was wound around too many other personal things.
Becca, her death, his tattoo. His feelings for her in high school.
Her fears about her own wickedness. Her shortcomings as a wife. Her cowardice. Her audacity.
She didn’t know how she managed to find herself a wicked coward who also had audacity, but she did.
In the middle of all that, though, was satisfaction. And the knowledge she wouldn’t take last night back even if she could.
There was a lesson in all this, she supposed. The same lesson that had been there from the beginning. This lesson about uncertainty and discomfort. About being okay with being messy and wrong and not having any idea what she was doing. But while she was accepting that it was her lesson, she still wasn’t entirely comfortable with it.
That was its own lesson.
She stepped outside, and realized that the sun hadn’t come up yet. She hadn’t even bothered to check the time. She took her phone out of her purse and saw that it was four in the morning.
She clutched her chest as she walked down the sidewalk toward her room. She was doing a very short little walk of shame. This was a new experience.
She wasn’t ashamed though. Not really. At least, that wasn’t the dominant feeling. It was, as ever, more complex than that. She growled quietly as she let herself into her room. She was a little bit tired of complexity, honestly. She took a shower, and as the warm water washed over her skin, she tried not to imagine what it had been like when he touched her.
Her head was full of him. She felt like she was failing her assignment, only recently given to her. To see about this new life on her terms.
That was on your terms. You wanted him.
It was true. She had. She was taking points from herself for involving another person, but the truth was, she and Logan were involved. They had been.
They were just being honest now.
