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"Yes," I tell him, because in my fantasy, I'm honest.
My fingers pick up a rhythm, slow circles right where I need them, hips rising to meet my own hand, and my free hand comes up and buries itself in my hair and pulls, right where he pulled, and the spark of it goes all the way down my spine and straight between my legs.
The fan drones on. My heels dig into the quilt. In my head he's peeling the lace down my legs and telling me to hold on to the rail, and his voice doesn't stop. That's the detail my imagination is absolutely sure of, that a man that silent all day would talk the whole way through this, filthy and unhurried, telling me how long he's wanted it, what the dress did to him, what he's about to do about it. And every imagined word makes my fingers move faster, my pussy growing slicker, not even the sound of the fan able to drown out how wet I am as I rub my clit desperately.
In my head the stair edge bites into my back and I don't care. In my head he's heavy between my thighs, jeans open, one forearm planted beside my ear the way he planted it on the doorframe, and he drags the head of his cock through the mess he's made of me, teasing, watching my face in the dark.
"Tell me you're sure," fantasy-Aiden says, pressing in just barely, just the start of the stretch.
And my actual body, my traitorous, oversensitive, two-weeks-starved body, doesn't wait for the good part.
My orgasm breaks over me with no warning at all, no long climb, no crest to ride. One moment I'm reaching for the image of him pushing inside and the next I'm arching clean off the quilt, dress rucked to my ribs, thighs clamping around my hand, everything pulsing in hard greedy waves while a strangled keening sound comes out of me.
His name never makes it to my voice. I mouth it at the ceiling instead, once, twice, riding my fingers through every last pulse until I'm wrung out and shaking and flat on my back in the dark.
Still completely dressed. The only thing I managed to take off were my shoes.
That fast. Two weeks of holding it together in front of that man, and alone in my own bed I lasted about as long as the walk home. I'm furious. Genuinely, sincerely furious, lying here with my hand still trapped under the ruined lace, because it wasn't supposed to go like that. I was supposed to at least get to the part where he's inside me, and instead my body took one look at the memory of his mouth and simply left without me.
The fan chugs. My skin cools in patches. And the ache the orgasm was supposed to fix settles right back in where it lives, because the thing I actually want isn't something my fingers can reach. His weight. His voice in my ear. The version of him that says yes.
Ask me sober.
I'm going to. That's the part that has my pulse going unsteady all over again, staring at the ceiling of this crooked little apartment. He thinks he gave me an out tonight.
He gave me a deadline.
Chapter 9
Aiden
Isit on the end of the bed in the dark with the towel still around my neck, forearms on my knees, thinking it through the way I planned out the rebuild. What it costs. What it saves. What has to come out before the rot spreads.
The shower was supposed to buy me some peace. It bought me about four minutes.
Then the want came back in, patient as the tide, and this time it brought her voice with it. Then I'll ask you sober. Five words, and they've been sitting on me like an engine block since her door shut.
She's going to do it, too. That woman has kept every promise she's made since she got here, down to showing up at a party I forbade her from attending, and some day very soon she's going to plant herself in front of me with clear eyes and steady hands and ask me again.
And I already know what I'll say. I burned my one no on her doorstep tonight, spent every last scrap of decency I own getting my mouth off hers, and the account's empty now. If she asks me again, she gets a yes. She gets a yes so fast and so complete it'll frighten the both of us.
So I need to get rid of her before she can ask.
Her trial's up next week. All I have to do is shake her hand, thank her for the work, tell her it isn't a fit for the long term. Monday morning I'll call Dana at Coastal Staffing and have something lined up for her in Portland before the month's out. A salary that matches what she's worth, an office with air-conditioning that works, a boss who doesn't sit in the dark corner of a bar watching her laugh. I’ll pay her for the trial period and write her a glowing reference. I won’t even need to lie.
It has to be this way.
Summer people leave. Women like her get their fill of haddock and gravel and men with dirty hands, and they head back to the city lights.
I lost everything and had to start over from scratch once. I don’t think I can do it again.
Chapter 10
Vanessa
Something is wrong with Aiden this morning, and I'm the only one he's aiming it at.
He beat me to the yard, which hasn't happened since my first week. By the time I come down the guest dock with two coffees, the big lift is already straddling the water at the end of it, straps hanging, and Whitmore's boat is idling out in the channel waiting its turn like a debutante. Biggest haul of the month. Aiden's running it on hand signals and about nine words, every one of them for Marcus or Tommy.
