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I got back to work and tried to ignore the nagging feeling that my best friend wasn’t far off the mark. I did feel more than I wanted to admit, more than I wanted to deal with for sure. But the fact was, if Nicole wanted to act like nothing happened between us, then that was what we’d do.
Maybe I could confess to myself in the dark of my own bedroom that I felt something like longing for her. That my mind went again and again to that night, to the moment when I knelt before her and tasted her for the first time. It was not only that, though. It was more—how Nicole had said that finding out I was working without a profit changed the way she saw me. It made me feel like that was real, like she saw me in real life, outside of work, outside her bed. She had touched my face, said that she liked my stubble, liked that I was reckless. Something about her stuck with me. Not only the fact that I hadn’t washed that shirt. Because, goddammit, that shirt smelled like her. She’d been wrapped around me, up against me, and that shirt smelled like her skin, and faintly of strawberries. Her soap perhaps, or shampoo. Something sweet and surprising like she was. I didn’t keep it under my pillow or anything stupid. It was on my chair. And if I picked it up and breathed in hard and deep like a junkie, that was my own business.
She had been so trusting, so beautiful in that bed. She’d buried her face in my neck, and I’d felt her body loosen, all her tension slip away. She’d given herself over to me completely and had let me bring her to new heights. I felt like such a badass because I made her come like that, made her stammer over how no one had ever made her feel like that before. I’d never felt better or more powerful or happier than I did when she fell asleep in my arms, the dark sweep of her lashes curling against her cheeks, her lips softly parted, completely at ease and completely safe.
She held herself apart a great deal. I’d noticed that in spite of myself in the years she’d lived in Rockford Falls. She seemed completely self-contained, like nothing could touch her. But it was all a façade. No one could have been more open, more vulnerable and generous and enthusiastic than she was that night in my arms. Her true self, the part she kept hidden, that she protected with her hard exterior, was beautiful and gentle and feisty and magnificent. I couldn’t get her out of my mind at all. Having seen her that way, known her so completely and taken possession of her fully, it was impossible to pretend things could ever be the same.
Sleeping with Nicole had changed everything. There was no denying that.
I’d had one-night stands. Not recently—I sort of lost interest in one-time hookups months ago, but the point was, this hit different. Nicole was everything a one-night stand didn’t feel like. Deep and powerful and unforgettable, and like all that mattered to me was how I made her feel. I wanted to map her whole body, learn every erotic spot by heart.
I craved more of her, but not only her body. I wanted to talk to her about the community center, about my ideas for it and why I was so determined to see it built for so long. Not a business conversation. A personal one. Because that’s what had happened with us, at least for me. Things got very personal. I felt a level of intimacy with Nicole that I couldn’t explain. Sure, we’d flirted and bantered and talked for weeks, but this was a sense of being understood, of wanting to know more about her and understand her deeply. Frankly, it scared the hell out of me.
14
Nicole
“I really need this,” I said to Michelle, taking a long drink of my strawberry margarita.
“You’ve already drank half of it, so you must. Hard day at work?” she asked.
“No more than usual,” I admitted.
“I wish Trix could’ve come,” she mused. “She always makes you laugh and cheers you up.”
“That’s because she’s amazing and a terrific smart ass. But she needed to do the mom thing tonight with Damian working. I get it,” I said a little wistfully.
“Don’t tell me you’re wishing you had kids.”
“I did keep Liam and Sadie a few weeks ago. Sadie, I mean, what can I say? She’s so smart and fun and I love just doing crafts with her, she’s into bead bracelets right now. We made a ton of those after Liam was asleep.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s enough to give anybody baby fever. So cuddly and he has a great laugh, you know that giggly baby laugh,” I sighed a little dreamily.
