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“He wasn’t when we married,” she says. “He was sweet and kind, but he forgot that a stripper who moonlights as an escort would be touched by men while she’s working, and he couldn’t handle it.”
“I’m not sure I could either,” I admit.
“I was still dancing but starting up the app, so I focused on that. There were no other men, but he couldn’t handle me being on display. I can’t blame him, but it’s sad. We were… I think I loved him as much as I could love anyone.”
“You don’t think you can love anyone?”
“I’m thirty-two and I’ve never felt that heart-stopping love that rips you apart.”
“It shouldn’t rip you apart,” I argue. “It should put you together.”
“Is that what this is?” Cady asks, her voice suddenly crisp. “You trying to put yourself back together after you got your heart broken?”
There’s a sharp edge to the question and I keep telling myself it’s because she’s scared of big feelings.
I have big feelings. Big feelings for her.
I may not be able to label them, but they’re big enough to swallow me whole, especially when she looks at me like she did this morning. Last night.
When I asked her to dance.
“This is me, who can’t stay away from you even though you’re doing everything you can to shove me away,” I tell her honestly.
Cady drops her gaze. “I’m not trying to shove,” she says in a quiet voice.
“You’re trying to gently extract yourself,” I correct. “And I’m telling you that’s not what I want.”
“You don’t know what you want,” she chides.
“I want you.”
Cady’s mask is firmly in place when she looks up at me, so I can’t tell what she’s thinking. But I know—I know exactly what she’s feeling when she rises on her tiptoes and kisses me.
She kisses me.
Cady doesn’t kiss lightly, and so I know that means more than her words.
I kiss her back, trying my best to show her how I feel.
41
Cady
Ikiss Max.
I kiss him in the middle of the wedding reception of his best friend as Ed Sheeran croons “Perfect” to the guests.
I didn’t mean to. It just happened, but now I can’t stop.
Kissing seems like such a simple thing: the lips of two people brushing against each other. But such a simple act is so complicated. A kiss can be one of friendship, or of love. A platonic love of family or friends, or full of the deep hunger of lovers.
A kiss can promise or comfort; demand or apologize. It can be sweet, like a summer rain, or like being caught in a blustery winter storm, when the only thing to do is hang on.
Kissing Max is all of those things, all at once.
I don’t want to stop kissing him.
Because kissing Maximus Steele makes me feel alive. He makes me feel whole and fixed. He’s fixed me just with the touch of his lips against mine.
