AllFreeNovel
Share Us
By the time that I had finished the meal he’d made for me, my belly was full and I could feel myself getting sleepy. But I didn’t want him to go. I knew that I should have gotten rid of him by now, should have told him to leave, but with every minute that passed, it seemed like he was better-suited to being here. Like he was what this place had been lacking all along.
"I probably should head to bed," I remarked, and I eyed him, giving him space to excuse himself and leave before anything happened. I was relying on him to draw the line there, because I knew that I didn’t have it in me to do that. Not when I knew that he was so damn good in bed.
"Can I come with you?" He asked simply. I opened my mouth to correct him, but he was quick to fill in the blanks himself.
"No sex, I know," he assured me. "I just want to be close to you, Abi."
I couldn’t help but smile when he told me that. I knew that this was probably just asking for trouble, but I had already done that when I had called him up in the first place. I might as well have just allowed myself to go the extra mile and actually sleep next to someone that I wanted to wake up beside.
"Just sleeping," I warned him again, and he nodded and smiled.
"Of course," he promised me, and I knew that he meant it. I knew that I could have put any rules in place at all here and he would have abided by them in an instant. That was just who he was when he was around me; he listened to me, took me seriously. He knew that he had already pushed his luck practically as far as it would go with what he had done in keeping the truth from me, and that meant that I got to call every shot now that we were actually...well, together was the wrong word. But close. In the same room once more.
I went for a shower, and he offered to clear up after dinner; Jesus, as though this man couldn’t get any more perfect. I let the hot water run over me and swore to myself that I wasn’t going to let anything else happen tonight. Not until I’d had some more time to think on it, figure out if it was right or not – there was some part of me, some not-small part of me, that found the thought of sharing a bed with him and not laying hands on him utterly impossible. But I could do it. I wanted to do it. I had the self-control to make this happen.
I changed into the most comfortable and non-sexy flannel pajamas that I had in my collection, and I headed through to the bedroom; he was already under the covers in my bed. His clothes were on the floor, all but his boxers; I supposed that I couldn’t expect him to sleep fully-dressed, but the thought of his nakedness under those covers waiting for me was almost more than I could handle.
I slipped into the bed beside him, not touching him, making a point not to get too close. It would have just been dangerous; I felt like I could feel this heat rolling off him in waves, drawing me to him, a warning and a temptation all at the same time. His skin seemed to pulse with energy and I wished I could lean in and feel it, feel it against mine again. I wondered if he was thinking the same thing.
"Thanks for letting me stay tonight," he murmured, his soft voice breaking the silence.
"Thanks for saving me when it came to the car," I replied, and I smiled. The tension seemed to leave between us; we could do this. We had to prove it to each other, that this was more than just the raw physical attraction. I needed to be able to trust that there was something else to this. That this wasn’t just the rawness that I had seen it as when we had first climbed into bed together.
I reached for his hand beneath the covers. My heart was pounding. I wrapped my fingers around his, and he held on to them tight, as though he never wanted to let me go.See?I could do this. Being close to him was easy. It was fun. It could just be the two of us and I wouldn’t give in to all those base instincts that were screaming at me to do something, do something, do something.
And that’s how I fell asleep that night. Just touching him.
Nothing else happened, as I had promised myself that it wouldn’t; nothing else happened, because it didn’t have to. Just the two of us being so close to each other was all that we needed to feel alive, to feel the passion.
Much as I would have liked to be able to dismiss all of this as a fling, as nothing more than an attraction, I could feel now that it was so much more than that. Because, as I slept, I dreamed of nothing. Nothing that my mind could come up with was better than this.
And so, I just rested, next to the man I knew now that I was falling for. And there was nothing I could do to stop this in its tracks.
Chapter ten
Time to say goodbye
"Well,youknowwhatyou need to do, right?”
When Mallory said that to me, once I had filled her in on everything that was going on with Joseph, I couldn’t help but furrow my brow. I had no clue how to handle any of it, and here she was, coming at me like it should have been obvious.
"Do I?" I replied, and she nodded.
"You need to sleep with him again."
"What!”
I exclaimed the word so loudly that half the coffee shop we were in turned to see what all the fuss was about. I lowered my gaze, fixed my eyes on her once more.
"You can’t be serious," I muttered, and she shrugged.
"That’s the only way to get it out of your head," she replied. "Only way to stop wondering if you could have made something work between you. One more time, and then it’s over and done with for good."
I leaned back in my seat and took a moment to ponder on what she had just said. It was a lot to take in, that was for sure, but maybe she actually had a point?
Ever since the night that Joseph had come around to my place and the two of us had shared the bed together and he had held me all night long, I had known that shaking him wasn’t going to be easy. I was falling for him, hard, and I knew that he would have done anything to be with me. Knowing that someone wanted me so deeply and intently was a little dizzying, if I was being honest with myself, and it was addictive knowing that he valued me so highly.
And I had eventually come to Mallory and spilled the truth to her about what had been going on – that I couldn’t shake him from my head, that I felt like I was going crazy without him, but that I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to commit to him, not really. Not when I thought about everything that he had kept from me. Not when I thought about how people would react if they found out the truth of our relationship with one another. This town was the small, judgemental kind, and I knew better than to throw anything to those dogs that could have affected the way that they all saw me at work.
