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“What are you talking about?”
“Sorry. Let me try that again. You said you had a crush on me.”
He gave a noncommittal growl.
“I just think that the woman you have a crush on doesn’t necessarily exist.”
“Huh?”
God, she was going about this all wrong. But it had been on her mind ever since he’d dropped that “crush” bombshell on her. All on its own, it wouldn’t have set off any alarms. But the fact that he’d completely changed his appearance to impress her mother, that did worry her. Her grandmother’s “prank” aside, why would he do such a thing unless he was putting her on a bit of a pedestal?
She needed to make sure he didn’t do that. She wanted to keep seeing him, wanted to spend time with him in bed and out. The more time she spent with him, the more she liked him.
Which was why she wanted to be real with him. “Tonight, when I came over here, I was all in a rage because of my mother.”
“I noticed.”
“Well, it’s kind of a pattern for me to do that. Or it used to be. I thought I was past it.”
His hand, which had been stroking her back, stilled. “What do you mean, a pattern?”
She forced herself to continue, even though she didn’t know if it would change things between them.
“It started when I was a teenager, maybe fifteen. My mother always micromanaged everything I did, who I spent time with, my grades, my friends, everything.” She passed her tongue over her lips. “I rebelled, I guess you would say. And I used sex to do it. When I’d had an especially bad fight with my mother, I used to sneak out that night and meet up with Maura. We’d go to whatever party was going on. I’d pick someone I thought was cute, and I’d…we’d have sex. It was my way of feeling like I had choices. It wasn’t cool. I’m…ashamed of it, not the sex part, but the fact that I was doing it for fucked-up reasons. It wasn’t fair to those boys, not that they seemed to mind.”
She paused, trying to measure his reaction from his silence and his stillness. But there was nothing to read. So she kept going.
“But I knew it wasn’t the healthiest pattern, so I saw a therapist after I went to college. That’s how I came to see that it was my way of claiming agency over my own body. I didn’t need to do it anymore, and I didn’t. But tonight…tonight I felt that same ‘fuck-it-all’ ‘burn-it-down’ thing from my teenage years.”
More silence followed.
When he finally spoke, it wasn’t a question but a statement. “So that’s the reason you came here tonight. To burn it all down.”
“Oh my God, no! I wanted you back at the Loading Dock. Why do you think I was waiting for you, naked? You’re the one who came in and dropped your Thermos and made us leave.”
“My hands stopped working,” he said simply, as if that explained everything,
She smiled into her pillow. Maybe this was going to be okay. “I came here tonight because I…I needed to see you. I don’t want you to think I’m some perfect being up on a pedestal. I admit that my mother made me spiral. That’s what drove me out of the house. But when I got here it changed. Because of you. Kind of like…” She searched for a metaphor that would make him understand. Something nature-based. “As if I was a lightning bolt and you were the earth. You grounded me.”
Wrapped in his warm arms, she still felt that way. But she felt there was something else, too. Worry. Fear. Would her confession change how he felt about her?
Normally, she wouldn’t share details from her past so quickly. She’d gone through a sexually overactive phase but, lucky her, she’d never gotten any kind of STD. One interesting aspect of taking charge of her sex life was that she’d always insisted on a condom. If a guy didn’t want to wear one, she walked away. It hadn’t been about emotions for her, at least not romantic ones.
Two things had brought that phase of her life to an end. The first was graduating from high school and getting some space from her mother. The second was a pregnancy scare. Her period had been three weeks late and counting. When it finally started, she’d actually gotten down on her knees in the toilet stall and thanked the heavens. After that, she’d decided to take a break from sex for a while.
She realized that Galen was stroking the hair away from her face in a tender manner. She turned her head to gaze into his dark whisky eyes. It took some courage to do that, since one thing she might see there was judgement. Galen didn’t seem like a judgmental person. But men could surprise you when it came to discussions of sex.
“Are we okay?” she asked him.
“I’m okay. Are you okay?”
He hadn’t answered the question. “But are we okay?”
Another prolonged pause, during which her mind raced with possible things he could be thinking. What a slut. … Did I really have a crush on her? … Good thing we didn’t have sex yet.
“I don’t know what you’re expecting.” He sounded genuinely confused. Her heart sank, because she’d been expecting…acceptance? Understanding? But she’d always been expecting scorn and disgust. Which was very screwed up and something she’d been working on with her therapist before she left Arizona. “It’s your body and your life. You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
She blinked at him. That was…so true. Straightforward and true. “You don’t see me differently now?”
