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She did remember. Paige felt herself flush at his unflinchingly direct gaze and slowly nodded, pretty sure she knew where this was going.
“Your words were extremely bittersweet. On one hand, I wanted you to find this man because you deserved him, but on the other hand, I knew that when you did, it wouldn’t be me. And that hurt like hell. It haunted me, to be honest,” he clarified softly. “To the point that I was wishing it could be me, and wishing pretty hard. It was like a seed got planted in my head and grew with each passing day. Every time we exchanged a text, or FaceTimed, or got together, it was like throwing down … fertilizer.”
“Fertilizer?”
Even though he knew her question was rhetorical, since she obviously knew what fertilizer was, he answered anyway, because it was part of his analogy. “Yes. And the make-out session in your hallway after our divorce anniversary ‘date’, was nothing but fertilizer. Pure. Fucking. Fertilizer.”
He took a deep breath. “It changed everything. It changed me from the man who was only wishing to be the man who made you want sex so much you weren’t afraid to fuck his brains out, to deciding I was going to be that man. It also obliterated the boundaries we’d maintained as friendly exes, changing the future landscape of our relationship, so there was no going back to that, even if I wanted to. Which I didn’t. For me, there was only one direction to go and that was forward, for real.”
“Big risk,” she murmured.
“Not if I did it right,” he countered, shrugging off the enormity of the decision he’d made, before turning serious again. “I tossed and turned in bed that night, unable to sleep, thinking about how I was going to be the man you wanted, and also how I was going to make it long-term. I knew you’d probably resist, since you can be stubborn—” David halted as her eyes narrowed, and then with a quirk of his lips, he continued. “Anyway, around 3 a.m., a plan started to finally take shape … and, ironically, I had you to thank for it, because I ended up drawing inspiration from something else you’d said.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep. You’d said you didn’t want to get in a sexual situation, only to have it fall apart like it used to and find out you still weren’t able to enjoy sex.” He lowered his voice. “You also didn’t want to put another man through what I went through and make him feel like I did.”
“So, when you sold our deal as being about my healing, that was—”
“Totally legitimate. Now, I’m not going to lie and say that wasn’t my foot in the door, too, because it was.”
Paige thought back to the ‘bullet points’ of their arrangement. “So … our ‘fake’ dating?”
“There was nothing fake about it. I did think it would make you feel comfortable about what we were doing, which would make success more likely, but I mostly wanted what we were doing to be as close to the real thing as possible.”
“And the ‘sexual baby steps’?”
“What? We needed to start from the beginning,” he said, all innocence. “Plus, I wanted to be able to enjoy every little thing we did. And you, too, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Look, I know you think I was deceitful for doing this, but doing nothing wasn’t an option. I had to try. Even though there was a chance you might not take the bait, so to speak, and nothing would come of it—beyond your ‘healing’, that is—I had to try. And if nothing did come of it, that was something I could live with. What I couldn’t live with, was not taking the chance at all.”
She started to ask him something, then changed direction. “How long was this going to go on for?” she asked. “You know, if Jules hadn’t—”
“Fucked things up? A month, maybe two, but it was going to depend on you.”
“So, until I took the bait, you were going to just keep … fishing?”
He nodded. “I planned on asking for next month’s work schedule on Monday. We’d never set a specific end date, so I would’ve kept asking for your monthly schedules until … whenever.”
“What if I’d told you on Monday I thought another month wasn’t necessary? That I thought my recovery was complete?”
“I would’ve told you I disagreed, that you were being hasty, and there were still several positions we needed to try, before you could even think about calling your recovery ‘complete’.”
She couldn’t help but chuckle softly at his quick response. “And after we’d tried those positions?”
“I would’ve had us work on a few more. There’s over sixty positions in the Kama Sutra, so that could’ve kept us busy for a while.”
“I feel like at some point I’d have questioned your … thoroughness.”
“If you did, I would’ve told you it was the only way to make sure your recovery was absolutely complete.”
“You were really going to keep selling that?”
“If that’s what it took to keep this going until you were on the end of my hook, yes.”
“Even though my recovery was supposed to be for another man?”
