“Fuck! Okay! Maybe I’m not cut out for sweeping you off your feet right now.” He was smiling at me.
“I don’t know . . . I feel pretty swept,” I said, moving closer to him and placing both my hands on his shoulders. God, he really was tall and having to stand on my tiptoes to look up at him made him so much sexier.
“You do?” He raised a brow. “Swept?”
“Very.”
We smiled at each other. It was a giddy smile. The kind you make when you feel like you’re falling. Mark pushed the door open with his foot and took a step back. He held out his hand and I slipped my fingers through it and then let him lead me to his bedroom. The mood changed again when we walked in. The presence of the bed took impromptu spontaneous kissing under the stars to something else entirely. It added a layer of seriousness to it all. It added a layer of intention. The presence of the bed was the promise of sex. Mark must have seen me looking at it, because suddenly he took a step back.
“Uh, sorry, was that presumptuous of me?” His face fell and he looked at me with concern.
“It wasn’t presumptuous.” I stepped closer and kissed him this time. I tried to put everything I was feeling into that kiss. To convey to him that every second of that date, all I’d been thinking about, was him. And it had nothing to do with who he had once been. The boy on the poster on the wall. It was all about him. As he was. Now. The man I’d gotten to know over the last week. This kiss was about that.
The bedroom smelled like him. Full of amazing scents from fragrances that he’d acquired all over the world. I’m sure there was sandalwood and something you would imagine smelling in a souq in Morocco. This exotic smell had my head spinning and my body screaming. His shirt was the first thing to come off. During the kiss I’d found my hands gripping the bottom of it, pulling it up and then over his head. I’d had to put a stop to the kiss for a second, as I’d pulled it over his face. The absence of his lips felt catastrophic in some way. Like they were not meant to be away from mine. He clearly felt the same way, because the second his shirt was tossed to the floor, he kissed me.
Face between hands. Pushing me down onto the bed now and crawling over me. I put my hands on his chest and was struck by how perfectly smooth it was. As if running my hands over warm marble. He groaned a little as my fingers grazed his nipples, clearly he was sensitive there and I took great delight in grazing them one more time, just to see him squirm again.
But soon his squirm took on an urgency that I’d never experienced in my life before. No one,no one, had ever been this hungry and desperate for me. This pulling-at-clothes, fast-deep-kissing, hands-grabbing-and-squeezing desperate for me before. His breath came out in jagged little bursts, as did mine, as he fumbled with my T-shirt and started pulling it off and—
“Wait!” I pulled away from him suddenly, pulling my T-shirt back down. I’d been so swept up and away that I hadn’t really remembered.How had I not remembered?
“What?” He crawled off me and sat back on his haunches, looking down at me. “Too fast?” he asked.
I nodded before I knew what was happening. Shit, I must be confusing him. I was clearly sending out a very mixed signal here. One minute I was telling him I wanted it, and then next I was telling him to stop. But I guess that’s what happens when you let your brain take over.
“Are you okay?” he asked, looking very concerned.
“It’s just . . . just . . .” I sat up and crossed my legs.
“What?” he whispered.
I shook my head. How did I get these words out of my mouth? How did I say this to him?
He leaned away from me. “You don’t have to tell me. You don’t have to give me a reason. We can just stop.”
“I . . . I don’t want to stop,” I said, my voice shaking. “I do. But I don’t.”
There was a silence between us for a while and then I felt him stand up off the bed. I wanted to reach out and pull him back down, but didn’t. I didn’t look up at him either. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see he was pulling his shirt back on and then, I could see, he was adjusting something in his pants; he tried to hide this from me by turning around, but I saw. I straightened myself up and climbed off the bed too. Feeling a whole bunch of feelings, one of them being embarrassed.
“Do you want a cup of tea?” he asked.
I smiled. “You make tea a lot.”
He shrugged. “My mum was British. Whenever we were upset or stressed, she would bring out tea. Said there was nothing a cuppa couldn’t fix.”
I nodded and we walked into the kitchen together. I sat at the table and watched him as he busied himself making the tea. He placed my cup down and then sat opposite me. I looked at the space in front of him.
“Where’s yours?” I asked.
“I’m okay.” He said that meaningfully, as if to imply I wasn’t.
I lowered my mouth to the cup and sipped it slowly. It was warm and sweet and yes, it made me feel just a tiny bit better. But not much. I ran my fingers around the rim of the cup several times and then took a big, huge breath. A massive one. As if I was about to dive into a pool and swim an entire length underwater. I let all the breath out my body as I decided to tell him what was wrong. A knot tightened in my stomach, because I didn’t really know how to get the words out, but I knew I wanted to.
CHAPTER 61
“So, you know how I told you I used to be . . . uh, big when I was younger?” I started slowly, forcing the words out of my mouth.
He nodded, rested his elbows on the table and leaned in. His body language told me he was engaged and listening to every word I was saying.
