I tried to ignore the pinch of envy and concentrated on what this might feel like to him—another woman coming in and changing everything up, ruining fond memories, officially ending an era. “Does it bother you a lot? That I changed it?”
He jolted, swinging his head to look at me, his expression telling me I’d surprised him with the question. Shocked him, even, by thinking to ask it.
Quickly he schooled his features, and I expected him to deny or ignore, but he didn’t. He stuck his hands in his suit pockets—he must have flown directly from work again—and stood next to me, gazing out over the room.
“It doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would,” he said thoughtfully. “Perhaps because it’s as stunning as it is.”
His off-hand compliment made my skin as warm as if he’d kissed me.
“Or maybe it’s because I was rarely ever in here anyway. There’s nothing that I should have been attached to. Still...I thought that I might have been.”
It was the most he’d ever shared with me, and the sharing was even better than the compliment. He’d said he would tell me things, that he’d be honest and exposed with me the more that I was with him, but I hadn’t yet seen it, and I’d never quite believed it.
And he might not have let this out purposefully, but he had let something out, and I was startled to find how much I liked it. How I wanted more. How I wanted to collect his bits of honesty and hold them to myself like I’d collected his notes in my drawer.
“Tell me about her?” I asked with quiet hesitation, afraid to spook him.
For a fraction of a second, he seemed he might say something else, something meaningful.
Then he gave me a sharp, “No,” spinning on his dress shoes back toward the door he’d come in. “We’ll meet after dinner for a session. I have things to do in the meantime.”
It was maddening to be so close to him after so long, more maddening that I cared to be close to him at all, and I told myself firmly to let him go, that this was a reminder of what a shithead he was and to stop romanticizing the goddamn asshole who’d kidnapped me and threatened me with death because wanting anything from the monster was the real definition of insanity.
But I did care.
And after weeks of writing about all the ways I cared in the diary that was right this very moment double locked in the writing desk across the room, the intricate details of those feelings were at the surface and ready to launch off my tongue.
“Have there been other women?” I asked, stopping him at the door. If he wouldn’t tell me about his past, fine. But I sure as hell deserved to know about his present. Especially if he expected to take me off to his fuckpad later.
God, I hoped I could call it a fuckpad later.
He didn’t turn around. “Other women since Marion?”
“Since me.” As reasonable as it was for me to need to know, the simple statement felt like I was giving too much away. Revealing too much.
But wasn’t that what he wanted from me? For me to expose and reveal while he gloated in my discomfort of the baring?
He swiveled to face me, a smirk dressing his lips. “I believe you said it wouldn't matter if there were.”
It was a gut punch. Because I hadn’t meant it when I’d said that, and he knew it as well as I did.
But he’d said things too, things that he also hadn’t meant.
“See,” I took a step toward him, “but you said you wouldn't be fucking me. And now you have. And you’ve alluded to doing it again. So, if you're going to be putting a cock that’s recently been exposed to another woman’s pussy anywhere near me, then it does matter.”
Before the words were out of my mouth, I could see his next potential move, could see him taking away sex as an option between us all together, and it would kill me if he did. Literally kill me.
But the jealousy that had taken root inside me was on its way to killing me as well, so the words came out and now I had to face the consequences, whatever they may be.
He assessed me for a beat, his gaze brushing over my features with familiar tendrils. “It's not a concern,” he said finally.
Which wasn’t a fucking answer. He could be saying he hadn’t slept with anyone or that he’d been recently checked for STDs or that he always used a condom or that the sex he’d had didn’t warrant worry or that he just didn’t care about what affect his sex life had on me at all.
“Does that mean—”
He cut me off. “It means it's not a concern. Don't push me further on it right now. I give what and when I’m ready to give. Your job is to give always. Do you understand?”
He expected an answer. He expected respect. “Yes, Edward,” I said.
His smile appeared and vanished so quickly I wasn’t sure if it had existed at all. “I’m having dinner with Joette and Azariah. I’ll set out clothes for our session beforehand. Be ready by the time I return.”
This time I let him leave. I didn’t want to know that I couldn’t stop him again if I tried.
Fourteen
“Whenever you’re ready,” Edward prompted, making himself comfortable on the sofa across from me. He hitched up the leg of his linen pants and crossed his ankle over his knee, draped an arm over the couch back, and took a swallow of his cognac. Except for the more casual attire, he appeared exactly the same as last time.
Everything was the same as last time, actually.
I wore the same white dress, the same boring underwear. He’d walked me down the same path, ushered me into the cabana in the same way. The only difference so far had been that, instead of offering me a drink, he opened a bottle of Petit Verdot and handed me a glass.
It tasted of plums and figs and spice and couldn’t have been a better choice if I’d selected it myself.
He was beginning to know me, really know me. I was already so vulnerable with him, and he wanted to crack me open and bleed me more? I wanted it and I didn’t all at the same time. Parts of me were ready to pour forward, like water through a sieve, but other parts—larger, bulkier pieces of past pain—strained against the netting, dislodged by the movement of the liquid, but unable to follow the same path.
I pinched the skin of my forehead and tried to find my balance. “The same as before, Edward?” I asked, when I felt more solid. “Tell you something that makes me feel exposed?”
“I’m surprised you don’t have several anecdotes at the ready. You’ve had nearly three months to prepare.”
I couldn’t help glaring. “Was that why you stayed away so long? So that I’d have time to decide what to tell you? It would have been nice to know I had homework.”
My irritation slid off him like water. “The length of time wasn’t meant to be anything but time. Distance, I’ve learned, can be very valuable. And homework or not, you can’t tell me you didn’t think about it, that you didn’t peel away layers and find more that you could share.”
I suddenly felt a strange urge to cry.
I rarely cried. For sure I didn’t cry in front of people. Not because I tried not to, but because I just couldn’t. There wasn’t enough emotion inside of me to need to get out.