“You can tell me anything,” he said.
She cleared her throat. “I guess I can, but there are things we only tiptoe around, not jump right into.”
It hit him then. They’d been talking sex.
Sex with Asher. Her sex life. Sex.
In spite of himself, he wanted to know.
“Come on,” he said.
“It’s just... I’m realizing we didn’t have a great sex life, okay?”
So on top of making her feel bad about herself, on top of giving her a complex, he’d been shitty in bed? Well, that sucked. He didn’t like that at all.
He also felt... he felt protective and weirdly like he wanted to fix it. His brain got stuck on that. He couldn’t figure out what to do with that, couldn’t figure out how to move on from that.
Because he would do better for her.
Oh. No. Never. No.
“I should have hit him twice.” That seemed like a fair, true and neutral thing to say.
“I appreciate that,” she said. “Though I’m forced to take some of the blame for it.”
He frowned. “Why?”
‘Let’s just... go to the polar plunge.”
“No, hey. Tell me why you think it’s your fault.”
“I just... I don’t know. It’s me. I didn’t realize anything was missing. I didn’t realize my sex life was bad until Bix, Arizona and Fia looked at me like I’d grown a second head when I said I wasn’t that into sex. I didn’t realize we were missing something until Asher told me he had chemistry with a woman he didn’t even love that was better than what we had and now I’m forced to conclude that something was off. If I didn’t know it was off it must be me.”
“That is dumber than wanting to jump into ice cold water.”
“How is it dumb? It makes perfect sense to me.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that. That’s not fair.”
“Well, I can take half the blame, right? He wasn’tin bed by himself. Something is... there’s something broken in me, maybe. When it comes to sex. I don’t know. Maybe it’s my grandma being so concerned with modesty. Maybe it was my parents being so... I feel like whatever was happening with him, there’s something with me too.”
“Do you want to fix it?” he asked.
“I don’t know! And I really don’t want to talk about it. I want to do my polar plunge.”
It was best to let this go. It just fucking was.
He hadn’t realized it until right then but his stomach was so tight he could barely breathe.
“Right, your crazy-ass polar plunge. What does this have to do with anything?”
“Because it’s a thing people do to like test their mettle and stuff, and I want to test mine.”
“I just don’t get why this specifically.”
“Because. Because it’s about doing something that I know will make me uncomfortable, and just committing to it anyway. Because I’ve been safe for such a very long time, and now I want to...”
“Get hypothermia and die?”
