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Oh.
And then the rest of it all started coming back to me, too. The rest of the memories that we had made last night. It took me a moment to slot them all into place, but as soon as I did, I squirmed against my sheets and smiled at the ceiling. That had beengood.Seriously good.
I glanced over beside me, and sure enough, there he was fast asleep next to me. He looked a little younger than he had last night now that he was asleep, all the muscles in his face relaxed. I reached over and traced my fingers over his cheek; his skin was so soft. I would need to get him to drop a skincare routine. I stifled a giggle at the thought, and he rolled over, and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me tight against him. I closed my eyes and let him, snuggling back against him happily. I was about to let myself drift back off to sleep...when all the insecurity that I had tried to shut out last night came flooding back into my head once more.
I couldn’t believe I had allowed him to stay the night here. I couldn’t believe that I had let him...well, that we had hooked up so soon after we had first met in person. And if I was being honest with myself, I had been the one behind all of that. He had given me all the power, asked me what I wanted, and I had told him to keep going. Fuck, I don’t think that I could have asked him to stop even if I’d wanted to; when he touched me, when he laid hands on me like that, I felt like I was utterly helpless before him. I wondered if I made it obvious. He just drove me crazy, he had done from the moment I had laid eyes on him in that damn bar...
I wriggled out from under his grasp and slipped over to the edge of the bed. I needed to clean myself up. When he woke up, I didn’t want him to see the smeared make-up from last night on my face. Did I just go with a bare face, or did I try to reapply and hope that he wouldn’t notice that I had a full face of make-up on first thing in the morning? I was a little nervous about the thought of being blatant and honest with him, especially when he had only seen me in full date mode the night before.
I tried to calm myself down. I was freaking out over nothing. Nothing! I knew I didn’t have anything to worry about, not really, and yet I was bending over backwards to convince myself that he would have been justdisgustedif he’d gotten a look at me first thing in the morning. I had had the same panic the night before, when he had been undressing me, but I supposed the sheer animal need that I had for him had been enough to get me over the worst of that. Now, though, now it was the clear light of morning, and I had to accept the fact that I was more than ten years older than this man and that it was going to be harder to hide that now that the sun was out once more...
This was exactly why I had promised myself that I wasn’t going to bring him home. Say that all he was after was casual sex? Well, he’d gotten it now, and there would be no reason for him to come back for more. Was he one of those guys who just ticked girls off his list and that was that? Maybe he didn’t even work offshore. Maybe that was just something he told the hapless women he hooked up with to keep them off his back and make sure that he didn’t have to bother getting too committed.
I showered and made myself a coffee, and glanced in on him as I went; still asleep. So at least he wasn’t going to be able to make a break for it while I was looking away. Was that still a thing that people did? Left in the middle of the night to avoid waking up the person they had been sharing a bed with? I had been out of the game for so long that I could honestly say that I had no real idea.
I needed to call Mallory. She would know what to do. Even if that was just telling me that I was freaking out about nothing and that I needed to calm the hell down and stop panicking about what was going on. In fact, I could just about synthesize the advice that she would give me inside my own head.You’re a grown woman. You can have sex with who you want. Who cares if you liked each other that much right away? You’ve been talking for weeks now anyway...
And that was about enough to make it sting a little less. I didn’t need to worry about this. Did I? I mean, yes, in a perfect world, maybe I wouldn’t have gone home with him so soon. But I liked him. I really liked him. And I was seriously attracted to him. Besides, it wouldn’t be long until he had to ship off again, and there was no part of me that was willing to wait so long for him to come back. I would have blown a fuse if I’d had to wait that much longer.
At the very worst, even if he never called me again, I could put this little escapade down to me juicing up my mojo a little, reminding myself that I was still a sexy woman with sexy-woman-needs. If I could get a guy like that into bed, I couldn’t imagine that I would doubt myself when it came to anyone else.
I sipped on my coffee, and when I was finished, I scrubbed my teeth to make sure that I didn’t have nasty breath when he came to. I didn’t want to scare him off for anything. Last night had been so damn good, I hated the thought of missing out on another round of it.
Deciding to slip back through to join him in the bedroom, I perched on the edge of the bed and watched him rest a little longer; he didn’t snore, just breathed deeply, like he was trying to inhale everything in the room around him. I was about to snuggle down in bed next to him again – and hopefully wake him up for another round of fun when he felt up to it – something caught my attention from the corner of my eye.
I looked over, and saw his phone on the bedside table. It had lit up, letting him know that he had a message. But that wasn’t what made my heart drop with panic.
The picture on his phone was of him, with a couple of women – well, one woman, and a girl, really. I reached out for his phone with trembling fingers, and slowly picked it up. There was no way that I could be seeing what I thought I was. There was just noway...
I knew the girl in the picture, the one that he had his arm slung around in a way that spoke to his familial familiarity with her. She had dark hair, the same eyes as him, and her name was Mary Mackenzie.
And she went to my school.
That alone would have been strange enough to raise some serious questions, but it was all the pieces I put together afterwards that really made my stomach turn. If it had just been her, then that would have been one thing; it would have been odd, and I would have asked him about it, and I was sure that he would have come up with a decent excuse to palm me off and convince me that he had done nothing wrong.
But I had finally figured out where I knew him from. He had gone to the school I taught at, too. I had never been one of his teachers, thank goodness, but he had only left about six years ago, which meant that he couldn’t be older than twenty-four.
I had a sudden flashback to our encounter the night before, when he had called memissin bed, and I felt a panicked shiver run down my spine. Oh, no. Oh,no.That meant that he had to know, right? That he had deliberately decided not to tell me?
Oh my God. I tossed the phone back on the bedside table, where he had left it. I had sat opposite his mother at parent-teacher nights, for goodness sake. She was on the PTA. And I had just fucked her son. I had just hooked up with him. And it had been some of the best damn sex of my life.
The sound of the phone clattering down on the bedside table was enough to stir him from his sleep, and he raised his head, his brow furrowed and looked over at me.
"Hey," he murmured, and he reached over to put his hand on the small of my back. I leapt to my feet at once, as though he had pressed a hot iron there instead. Really, it was because his touch still made my heart rush a little faster in my chest, and after what I had found out, I knew I couldn’t allow that to happen any longer.
"I think you should go," I told him firmly, and he pushed himself up on his elbow and looked at me, his brow furrowed.
"What’s wrong?" He asked, his voice still a little blurry and gravelly from sleep. The covers slipped down his chest, to reveal that perfectly-hewn body. How could I have believed that it belonged to anything other than a young man? I cursed myself for being too quick to jump into bed with him. Maybe he would have come clean to me at some point if I had given him more time, but I hadn’t, and now I was caught up in the middle of this huge mess and I had no clue how to get out of it.
Did I just come out and tell him what I knew? I would feel like a snoop for coming clean about it, but he could already tell that there was something wrong with me. Maybe I should just be honest. Maybe I should tell him that I knew that I didn’t want him in my house a moment longer because I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to keep my hands off him if he didn’t get the heck out of here...
"I think you should go," I told him quickly. I didn’t want to have that conversation with him, not now, not yet. Probably not ever. I was just way too mortified to even think about the reality of what I had just done. He stared at me for a moment, and the corners of his mouth quirked up, as though he was sure I was joking.
"What?"
"I think you should probably get out of here," I repeated myself. It was the third time I had told him this, and if he didn’t start paying attention soon, then I was going to kick up a fuss. I had to pull my eyes away from him, my body urging me to move back towards him, to kiss him the way that I really wanted to. It was absurd to think that just a few moments before, I had been considering sliding back into bed with him and going for another round. I had never taught him, but I had seen his face around school, and the whole thing was just making me feel seriously nasty.
"If that’s what you want," He replied calmly, and he went to grab his clothes from next to the bed and got dressed. I held the robe that I had put on tight around me and prayed that he would get out soon and without too much protest.
