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But damn it, if she keeps looking at me with those sweet bedroom eyes, I’m not sure I can hold off much longer. I don’t want to scare her, or make her feel like she needs to have sex before she’s ready. I don’t. But she’s given me more and more reasons to want her as she peels back all the walls, one by one, on this trip.
She’s a feast of love.
And I’m a starving man.
“Is there anything on the menu you didn’t order?” she jokes as I reveal all the dishes, one by one.
“They had fried alligator, but I thought that was a bit too much.”
She smiles at me. A yawn catches her unaware, her face stretching, neck creamy and long, marred by small, healing scratches and a bruise that bisects. It’s where John’s arm nearly crushed her windpipe. Three or four images from that horrible day power up my internal adrenaline, making my skin crawl.
If I can have moments like this, where my body reacts to my own memory, what is Lindsay’s hour-by-hour existence like?
I watch her dip lobster in melted butter. She stuffs a piece carefully in her mouth, avoiding the healing split in her lower lip, then groans with pleasure.
Damn it.
This is having a physical effect on me.
And then I realize it’s okay.
It’s fine.
It should.
She’s my wife. The love of my life. We’re done running. We’re done fighting off the demons of the past. We literally killed them, one by one.
Together.
Now it’s time to live.
I grab my own lobster tail and dig in.
The only taste better than this is Lindsay.
Lindsay
I eat all the things. I do. I just keep eating and tasting. I’m stalling.
Not like stalling when I was kidnapped. Back then, I stalled to give Drew time to find me.
Now I’m stalling to avoid giving Drew time to touch me.
This is so stupid. I feel encased in cotton, my stomach exploding from cheesecake topped with blueberry compote.
Drew yawns, stretching like a man whose blood has been pooled for too long, needing to move and race, heat his body and give him relief. We’re more relaxed with each other than we’ve been since I came home from the Island.
We’re also tense as hell, because we know what should happen next.
We hold two realities at the same time. When I do that with other people, it feels surreal. When I do it with Drew, it feels true. You can have conflicting emotions about something and not have to pick one or the other. Both are part of who you are.
So I can want Drew at the same time that I’m afraid of my own reactions, afraid to be bombarded by too many memories – physical reactions – from what happened with Stellan, John and Blaine.
I’m starting to think that the only way out is through.
Through Drew.
“Bath?”
