AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Tony braced his hands in the doorway. She couldn’t tell whether he was trying to hold himself up or keep himself back.
She let the bra drop.
A muscle jumped in his jaw.
She hooked her thumbs into her panties over each hip bone and looked for something in his eyes. Permission. An invitation.
“Go on.” His voice had melted—or maybe it was that it was melting her. That low, deep, rich sound puddling between her legs. “Get yourself warm.”
Amber bent over and pushed her panties off, aware of the way her belly folded when she leaned down, the way her breasts hung. These shapes were all her own shapes, but his now, too. To a man as hard and rough as Tony, she must look so soft and rounded. Rare and beautiful.
He didn’t move.
She didn’t want him to.
She stepped into the shower but left a gap in the curtain big enough to talk through. Or glimpse through.
As she tipped her head back and let the hot spray pound against her scalp, she gave voice to the sentence that had been tripping around the back of her head for more than an hour. “The first guy I had sex with cried afterward.”
She kept her eyes on the pebbly plastic texture of the shower ceiling as she lathered up her hair.
“His name was Brian. He went to the Naz, too, and we dated junior year. I was … I was really unhappy back then.”
After losing her faith in God, she hadn’t known how to get it back. Hadn’t even wanted it back, but she’d felt an aching need to fill the hole it had left behind.
“Do you want to hear this?” she asked. Because the sound of the water was soothing, but it wasn’t nearly as good as the darkness for burying her apprehension.
“Yes.”
Curt and gruff, even for Tony.
Still, it was what she needed to hear to continue.
“So I kind of latched on to Brian.”
Brian had been so easy, so good. She’d loved that about him—how simple he seemed to find everything. As if his neural pathways were all four-lane highways, compared to the tangled, byzantine mess inside her head.
“We had about four million movie dates, and he came to my parents’ for dinner and hung out with Caleb and Katie. He practically felt like a member of the family. And then one of my friends heard him talking to one of his friends about breaking up with me.”
She had suds all over her hands, a great pile of shampoo lather that overflowed between her fingers. Quickly, she tipped her head back and rinsed it all out.
Then the conditioner, a cool puddle cupped in her palm.
“He’d never done more than kiss me. When I realized he was going to dump me as soon as he worked up the guts, I think … I think I was actually angry with him, but it didn’t come out like anger. I thought I loved him.”
Even then she’d realized that she didn’t love him enough. She never would have married him, and he must have recognized that. It must have factored into his decision to end things.
She’d just wanted to have a boyfriend. To have sex and be normal. The problem was that Brian didn’t really think sex was a normal part of a relationship. To him, it was something that should only happen between a married couple.
“I kind of … seduced him. Not that he made it hard, or anything, but he always kept his hands above the waist, and I moved them down. Gave him permission.”
She rinsed out the conditioner and glanced through the gap in the shower curtain. Tony was leaning against the door frame, watching. Listening.
“It was bad?” he asked.
“It was terrible.” It hurt, and she bled, and then she spent the whole time wishing it would be over. “He cried afterward. Like, really cried. I felt awful.” Not because she thought they’d sinned, but because she’d made him do it, and she knew he would beat himself up over it forever. “And then he dumped me.”
“Was the other guy better or worse?”
