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I bit my lip. “How are we going to do it?”
“Not like this.”
He took my empty plate, stacked it on his, and set them both on the wooden planks at his feet.
When he draped an arm lightly over my shoulder, I couldn’t stop myself from leaning closer. Not just because of the relief from pain, but because he was strong.
Steady.
Calm, too.
The sunrise was much prettier when I was with him like that.
A few minutes passed before either of us spoke again.
“What’s our best chance?” I asked him.
August didn’t answer right away.
He took a moment to really consider it, which I appreciated.
Finally, he said, “If you keep trying to deal with it on your own, you’re going to end up curled in a ball of agony. I’ll keep fighting my instincts, but knowing you’re in pain makes it much harder. We’ll make it a week or two, but I’ll eventually break, and you’ll be so desperate for relief that you’ll beg me to take you.”
Despite his words, his voice was neutral. He didn’t seem to want me begging, and he didn’t want to lose control.
“What’s the alternative?”
“We become a team.”
“What?”
He explained, “If we rely on each other, we can retain control for as long as possible, and we’ll be more likely to make it through.”
“How do we do that?”
“We satisfy the magic.”
I blinked.
The magic wanted us to have sex and seal the bond. Weren’t we fighting it to avoid that outcome?
“Not by making it permanent,” he said, as if reading my mind. “We satisfy it like this.” He pulled me a little closer, and I remembered that his arm was around my shoulder. It felt so right, I had stopped noticing it somehow.
“By touching?”
“For now, yes. The magic wants us touching, so we touch. We can do so as friends. Sitting together while you work. Sleeping in the same bed, with pillows between us if that’s what will make you comfortable. When the magic pushes for more, we give it more.”
“How much more?” I countered.
“From what I understand, the next thing it will do is push us to touch more intimately. I can give you that without sealing the bond, and take care of my needs myself. At that point, we just have to retain a shred of control to stop ourselves from taking it all the way.”
My face warmed, but not because of the heat.
We were practically strangers, and we were talking about sex casually. While we sat on the porch swing and watched the sunset. It was bizarre, but not wrong. If anything, it was exactly right, because it was what the bond wanted from us.
“So you’re proposing friends with benefits?” I asked.
“Sounds about right.”
