Page 96 of Cruel Summer


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Not that he’d said that explicitly. He was just attracted to her.

Though she came back to the kiss in the alleyway. What they had was an exceptional sort of chemistry. It had erased everything else from her mind. Everything but him. She’d been so caught up in the moment that she hadn’t wanted to stop and think about anything. That was damned powerful. Because turning her mind off was not her strong point.

Denial, sure. But denial was accomplished by layering other things over the top of the truth. The trick was to never have an empty mind. The trick was to have lots of thoughts, so that you were constantly intentionally guiding them.

Certainly when it came to sex, her experience was that her thoughts just kept moving. She was loath to admit that occasionally she could be running through her entire week’s meal plan and kinda forget that she was supposed to be trying to have an orgasm. So yeah. The experience with Logan had been something else. Maybe that was it. Maybe he felt it too. Chemistry that went further than it usually did. That was the thing. She’d heard.

“I’m… All right, I can’t tell you what’s going to happen,” she said. “But I can tell you that all I wanted to do was keep kissing you. I can tell you that I thought about it more times than I can even count in the weeks since it happened. I can tell you that I…that I want more. That I think about you and…”

A muscle in his jaw twitched, and he kept his eyes on the road. “Are you telling me that you think about me and touch yourself, Samantha?”

Calling her Samantha instead of Sam was so deliberate. So effective.

She was trying so hard not to be embarrassed. She was not a kid. She was a grown woman. She had needs. She accepted that. But telling a man that when she got a restless feeling between her legs, he was the one she thought of, well, that was really outside of her scope of experience.

“Yes,” she said quickly. “Once or twice.”

“Once or twice.” He laughed, but it was flat and bitter-sounding. “You’ve got better self-control than I do.”

She squeezed her thighs together, now decidedly physically uncomfortable.

“Well. What’s the problem?” she asked, because was there even a problem? They wanted each other. Why was he being like this?

“I’m not having sex with another man’s wife. As long as youfeellike you’re his wife, I’m not having sex with you.”

Shame rushed through her. Along with that, anger.

“What a convenient set of morals. You were fine with everything that happened three years ago. You wanted me to acknowledge it. But now, now you have morality about it.”

“I’m older. Less interested in bullshit.”

“Right. Great.” It wasn’t bullshit, not to her. It was her life. She hadn’t asked for any of this.

She didn’t know how to tell him she definitively felt like Will wasn’t her husband. Hewasher husband. She couldn’t just erase of all those years. Maybe it was dead on the vine, but her issues with Will needed to be worked out with Will. She couldn’t do that right now because they were not talking to each other. She just wanted to make this not about him. She wanted to separate it. She was frustrated Logan wouldn’t let her do that.

This was more sitting in bad decisions and mistakes. And the fact that there wasn’t going to be an easy resolution with him. This was a problem, because she liked him. Because it meant she was in a place with someone that she quite liked, where she couldn’t make him happy with her. She couldn’t seem to get what she wanted.

She was stuck with him in a car for the next three weeks.

What a trip.

You have a crush on him.

Oh good God. She did. She had a crush on him. She was with him in this car, and he didn’t like her back.

She was really trying to stay away from the high school parallels, but they kept on finding her.

She hadn’t experienced this in high school, of course, because she had liked Will, and Will had liked her back. Then they had dated. And that was that.

She hadn’t experienced a hell of an unrequited crush. It sucked. She didn’t like it.

She realized that the unrequited crush, at this point, should really feel like it was on her husband, whose activities she was just profoundly disinterested in. Maybe she could just tell Logan she was done with Will.

But what if she was wrong? What if she was motivated entirely by her desire to make Logan happy? To smooth this over? To not sit in this weird middle ground?

She owed it to herself to sit in the discomfort.

To not just try to tell him what he wanted to hear. What would get her what she wanted.