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To the new, utterly wild sensations that were rioting through her body.
This was desire. And she knew that it must’ve existed inside her for a very long time.
Do you want to fuck him?
That word was like someone had reached down deep inside her and grabbed on. Pulled. Squeezed. Taken everything that she thought she knew about herself and inverted it. Twisted it. And she could scarcely breathe.
No. She didn’t.
She didn’t want to do that with Byron.
But she had figured that it would never factor into her life. Not inthoseterms. That was this kind of rough, crude thing that other people did. That other people needed. She had retreated to the realm of the cerebral. She was rational and reasonable, like her father.
Except he wasn’t always that way. Or you wouldn’t exist.
No. But she had decided that she would live her life the way that she had always seen him behave. She had decided that she would avoid the heartbreak, avoid the loneliness. That she would do whatever she needed to do in order to have more.
She could see a future with Byron. Steady and sweet. A home and a family.
And she had never thought about...the sex. Not in detail.
It was easy to do that when you decided that you were a person who didn’t really need it. When you decided that you were a person who wasn’t in need of such things.
She had kept that blank. She had kept her desire in check. She had minimized it. Made it the smallest part of herself. So small it had nearly disappeared. Yes, she acknowledged that it would be part of marriage. But again, every time her mind went that direction, she just told herself that she knew the mechanics.
But this wasn’t mechanics, the feeling of her hand on his face. The feel of his lips.
It isn’t sex, either. You are standing in a barn with your hand on your best friend’s face, and he might think that you’re crazy.
She dropped her hand quickly and began to pull away, and he held her firm. “Do you want to?”
“Do I want to what?” she asked, the words coming out strangled.
“Do you want to kiss me?”
She wiggled, her face bursting into flame.
“Lachlan...”
“Do you want to?”
Did she want to? If she did, she couldn’t take it back. This was like standing in front of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He was Adam and the serpent all rolled into one. Offering her knowledge. And she knew that when she had this knowledge, she couldn’t go back. Couldn’t break away. Couldn’t not know. She had spent her life outrageously innocent for a reason. It wasn’t because of morals. It was fear. Fear of this very thing. Of something bigger than she was. Of something that superseded logic. Something that belied her claims that what she wanted was a quiet, simple, easy life. She did not wish to belie her own claims. But maybe one fight. Maybe one bite.
Wasn’t that always the way?
She could see herself walking toward her own ruination. She could see it clear as day. Why the hell was she doing it?
Maybe it had been a slow chipping away over the course of years. He’d gotten her saying swearwords multiple times over the past few weeks. Maybe that was the first step down the road to hedonism. She had never really considered it. She had always thought it was somewhat arbitrary, but had always decided to defer to her father when it came to matters of language. Because he didn’t like certain words, and she thought that was fair enough. People were entitled to their opinions on such things. She had never found them important enough to fight for the cause of saying any.
She had never thought it made someone better or worse, and even though she had found Lachlan’s language shocking in the beginning of knowing him, she had never felt like she needed to change him. Or scold him. Not at all.
But now she wondered. Yeah. Now she wondered if it was like a gateway drug.
“I want to kiss you,” he said, those blue eyes leveled to hers. “Doc, I really want to kissyou.”
And it was that; that was her undoing. Like a thread had been pulled and everything inside her had released.
Gloriously.
