Maddy shook her head, just slightly. ‘No.’
The quiet pressed in around them. Eva wasn’t sure what to do with this. With Maddy.
‘Not sure there are two ways to interpret it,’ she said finally.
Maddy let out a breath that might have been a laugh. ‘Interpret it that I said something vile that I wouldn’t have said if this weren’t my hen party.’
Somewhere down the corridor, Kelly shouted, ‘Ready or not!’
For a moment, they just sat there, Eva and Maddy, under the massage table, a couple of awkward kids playing hide and seek.
Then Maddy shifted, her arm brushing Eva’s as she moved. Eva went still. Maddy did too.
And suddenly, the game, the noise, the others,everything, felt very far away.
‘The game might be over already—’ Maddy started.
‘Yeah,’ Eva said.
Neither of them moved.
Twenty-Seven
Maddy was sitting very still.
She felt aware of how small the enclosed space beneath the massage table was.
And Eva. Eva, who wasright there.
Maddy’s arm was still in contact with Eva’s. Neither of them had pulled away.
‘The game might be over already—’ Maddy said, trying to find a way back to the world outside this table.
‘Yeah,’ Eva said.
But neither of them moved.
And that was the moment something in Maddy shifted.
Because she could keep pretending. She could keep telling herself the same things she had been telling herself since the moment she met Eva, that this was nothing, that this was the stress of getting married, some mad expression of cold feet.
And she could remind herself that she was getting married. That her mother was somewhere in the building, trying to find her. That her future sister-in-law could be listening at the door right now.
She could keep all that in mind. She just didn’t.
It was like someone had quietly removed the scaffolding from her thoughts and left her standing on something much more fragile and dangerous.
She wanted… No. Not wanted.Desired.That was the only true word for this.
Maddy desired Eva.
Not in the vague way she wanted most things in her life. Like wanting a good meal when she was hungry. Or sleep when she was tired. Or time to sit and read a good book.
It went deeper than all of that. This was physical, hormonal, emotional, intellectual and sexual desire. Desire that didn’t care about timing, or logic, or the fact that she was supposed to love someone else. Desire that didn’t behave like her attraction to Adam. This wasn’t the snail’s pace creep of her relationship with him, to a comfortable companionship that fit like old slippers. It was so much more immediate than that. More pressing. More terrifying. Morenow.
Oh god. This was how it happened. Maddy could understand it all now. Every time she’d read a book where someone wrecked their own life for simple passion, Maddy had simply tutted and turned the page. She’d never understood the fuss. Wasn’t it just sex, ultimately? A pleasant, yet fleeting sensation?
But now she knew. It wasn’t just sex. It was more than that.Thiswas the feeling that made you do it.Thiswas thefeeling that you would willingly ruin your life for. Thisneedto touch Eva.
