He’d certainly been scorched in the intervening years. Some people were tempered by that process. Strengthened.
Hardened.
Not him. It’d turned him nervous and cautious.
Fragile and brittle.
Why take a risk you could reasonably assume you’d get smacked hard by life for taking?
Linda had more than taught him that lesson. He’d married for what he’d thought was love and what’d it get him in return?
A banker’s box full of trust issues and attorney fees.
Single, employed, reasonably secure.
Why take a risk again?
But this was Skye, someone who even though she’d dropped from the front of his mind years ago always lingered in the peripheries, ever-present in his memories or when talking about the past and gaming, or comic books, or anything they’d all done together as friends. He couldn’t think about Rusty or Darryl or Grant or Milo or any of his friends he’d known back then without the others automatically popping into his memories and waving, too.
It wasn’t just her.
But she had been the glue back then. For him, at least.
And all the BDSM stuff. Before Skye, he didn’t know much about that—him occasionally cruising hentai sites aside.
Not really.
How washesupposed to compete withthat?
That wasn’t the kind of guy he was, either.
If he changed the kind of coffee he drank in the morning, that was radical, in his neatly ordered world.
Yet the touch of Skye’s hand on his thigh, the warmth through his jeans, and his mind stilled and let him think about what might have been.
What maybe could be.
God help him, he wanted it.
Badly.
Wantedher.
But why would she wantme?
It hadn’t helped that at one point Tuesday night at D&D, when he was in the kitchen getting a drink of water, Eliza had walked in and draped an arm around his shoulders.
“You okay?” she whispered.
He nodded.
“How are you doing?”
“We talked on the phone Monday night. She told me about the scene. Sounded…brutal. But she seemed happy with what happened.”
“Did she mention who she played with?”
“Guy named Landry.”
