He grunted and pushed away from the wall. “Then what was all this talk about Walker?”
“Well, it was part of the carefully constructed series of barriers that I was putting up to keep myself from kissing you. I figured that Walker or Jackson would be… An easier entry point.”
“Explain.”
“I knew you were going to be a whole thing. I figured somebody like Walker, who is a poster childfor casual sex, was maybe a better choice for someone looking to lose their virginity without getting into a relationship, and without getting into… deep water. I had the sense that you were…”
“Fucked up beyond all reason?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to put it that way but…yes,” she said.
“And you were right.”
“I was. But my big mistake was thinking that I could keep myself from getting too deep. Because I already was.” She looked away from him because she didn’t know how he was going to react to that news.
“I don’t think that was a good idea.”
“I don’t need it to be a good idea. It’s already happening. It already is. There’s no discussion to be had. Here we are. If we could’ve stayed away from each other, we would have. You are all tortured about our age gap, and I’m just trying to keep myself from… I don’t know what I’m trying to keep myself from doing. That was amazing, and I don’t regret it, and now I’m sitting here with a grilled cheese, and we’re having a conversation, and it’s actually pretty nice.” She shoved the rest of the sandwich into her mouth. “I’m completely good. You know what? I got the sex that I wanted. No training wheels required.”
He grunted. “Happy for you.”
“Well, what about you? Are you going to be weird about it?”
“Nobody can know,” he said. “And I’m serious. Because Cody will kick my ass. I told him that he could trust me with you.”
“Well, that’s stupid. Because it’s not up to him who I sleep with, is it? It’s not up to him who you sleep with. We are consenting adults, and we consented to that enthusiastically.”
“Cody is my family. He’s all I have. He was concerned about us, and I told him that he could trust me.”
“Again. You haven’t broken his trust. You didn’t hurt mein any way. You didn’t do anything that I didn’t want. There’s nothing wrong with what happened.”
“Promise me,” he said, moving closer to her. He put his knee on the edge of the bed and crawled over the top of her, bracing his hands on the headboard, staring her down. “Cara, promise me.”
“Fine. I won’t tell anyone that it happened.”
Then he leaned in and kissed her, deep and slow. “Don’t tell anyone that it’s happening.”
Present tense. Not past tense. That’s interesting.
“Is it happening?”
“We couldn’t keep our hands off each other the first time, no matter how bad an idea it was. What makes you think we’re going to be able to successfully do it going forward?”
He had a point. Because in theory, it should’ve been very easy for them to avoid each other. But they hadn’t done it. Instead, they had thrown themselves into each other’s paths at every opportunity, even though he had been playing at being reluctant.
“Good point.”
She wanted to ask him for reassurance. For how long it would go on, for how she would know when it was over. For how she could protect herself. But she didn’t want to talk about that. She didn’t want to talk about it ending. Maybe it was just sufficient enough that she knew it couldn’t go on. Maybe it was good enough that they both knew it wasn’t forever.
They could continue to be whatever they were, this sort of strange friendship where they had shared some pretty deep intimacies emotionally, and sleep together. Nobody had to know. He was her secret.
Her dirty, wonderful, adventurous secret. It sucked because normally she would tell Marlowe, but Marlowe would tell Cody. And that was the one person that Zane didn’t wanttold, and there was absolutely no way that Cara could put Marlowe in that position, and she wouldn’t put Zane in a position he had explicitly asked to not be in.
So that meant it really was a secret. But maybe that would be better. Because whenever it ran its course, she wouldn’t have to deal with people wondering how she was, she wouldn’t have to look at other people and know that they were pitying her because her Situationship had come to an end.
No. It was a good idea. Keeping it a secret.
“I have to go home,” she said. “I have to get up early and open the bakery, and I need to get out of these hiking clothes. I mean, obviously I’m out of them right now, but you know what I mean.”
