Page 117 of Always: A Legacy Novel

“You didn’t have a party at all?” she asked.

“They wanted to; I didn’t. I got what I wanted. Call it a present.”

“You ruined their fun, probably.”

“Oh, no. They had lots of fun letting my sister turn me into a human ice cube. Where did you get these blankets?”

“Found them in a closet down the hall.”

Cross shook his head. “I didn’t tell you to snoop, Catty.”

“I wasn’t!”

“Mmhmm.”

“I didn’t, really, I just thought it would be nice to look out the windows and the couch doesn’t face that way. The floor is hard.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Okay, so I snooped a little,” she mumbled. “Shut up.”

Cross rested one hand under the skirt of Catherine’s dress on her outer thigh, while his other drifted through the waves of her hair. “Snooping brings trouble.”

“Well, sometimes. I found something, though.”

“Yeah, blankets.”

“No,” she drawled quietly, “something else.”

Catherine held her hand high giving him access to see the small foil packet she held between two fingers. Cross’s gaze darted to the condom, and then back out the windows to the water.

“So here’s the thing,” Catherine said with a small sigh, “I don’t want a bunch of questions about stuff, okay. You don’t push or pressure or ask. You let me do whatever on my own time, however I want. You’re good like that, which makes me good, Cross. I’m good. I’ve been good. I just … needed the right person, I guess. So don’t overthink, or whatever. Don’t get strange or weird about it, that’s all.”

“You know you could have just asked me if I had a condom, right?”

“Well …”

“Because I do,” he said when she didn’t keep speaking. “Not because I expect shit, but because it’s good to have one, just in case.”

“I know you’re not—”

“A virgin? Not since a week after I turned fourteen. I don’t think anybody’s first time fucking should be drunk and in the backseat of a friend’s car, though, but that’s how it happened. I was the one drunk, by the way. I wasn’t so nervous, then.”

Catherine turned her head just enough for Cross to see her frown. “That … doesn’t sound good at all.”

“Not really, no. The only bright side was that being drunk meant she didn’t expect me to be any good at what I was doing. But I got it over with, which was what I wanted. I got better at it all, too.”

“You had sex to get it over with?”

“I didn’t say it was smart, Catherine. I said I did it.”

“I don’t know her, do I?” she asked.

Cross hid his laugh in her hair. “No. Neither did I, still really don’t.”

“Ouch.”

“I’m not going to make it weird, like you said,” he told her, squeezing her thigh gently. “It’s like anything else with us, babe. It’s what you want, when you want it, and how you say you want it. It’s on your terms, not mine.”