He does.
“I know,” he says quietly, looking over at Caroline. “It devastates me that it still hasn’t happened yet.”
I slip my hand over my mouth because I’m scared of what might happen if I don’t. I might gasp, or cry, or vomit.
I’m in my car now.
Driving.
I couldn’t face him after that. Those few sentences confirmed all of my fears. Why would Caroline bring it up? Why would he respond to her with such bluntness, but never tell me the truth about how he feels?
This is the first moment I’ve felt like I’m disappointing his family. What do his sisters say to him? What does his mother say? Do they wish he could have children more than they wish he would stay married to me?
I’ve never thought about this from their perspective. I don’t like how these thoughts are making me feel. Ashamed. Like maybe I’m not only preventing Graham from ever having a child, but I’m preventing his family from being able to love a child that Graham would be perfectly capable of creating if not for me.
I pull into a parking lot to gather myself. I wipe my tears and tell myself to forget I ever heard that. I pull my phone out of my purse to text Graham.
Traffic is terrible. Tell Caroline I won’t be able to stop by until tomorrow.
I hit send and lean back in my seat, trying so hard to get their conversation out of my head, but it plays over and over again.
“You would make such a good father, Graham.”
“I know. It devastates me that it still hasn’t happened yet.”
* * *
I’m standing at the refrigerator two hours later when Graham finally returns home from Caroline’s. I know I’m stressed when I clean out the refrigerator and that’s exactly what I’ve spent the last half hour doing. He lays his things on the kitchen counter. His keys, his briefcase, a bottle of water. He walks over to me and leans in, kissing me on the cheek. I force a smile and when I do, I notice this is the hardest I’ve ever had to force a smile.
“How was the visit?” I ask him.
He reaches around me into the refrigerator. “Good.” He grabs a soda. “The baby is cute.”
He’s acting so casual about it all, like he didn’t admit out loud today that he’s devastated he isn’t a father.
“Did you get to hold him?”
“No,” Graham says. “He was sleeping the whole time I was there.”
I snap my eyes back to his. Why did he just lie to me?
It feels like the inside walls of my chest are being torched as I try to keep my emotions from surfacing but I can’t let go of his admission that he’s devastated he hasn’t become a father yet. Why does he stay?
I close the refrigerator door even though I haven’t cleaned out the side drawers. I need to get out of this room. I feel too much guilt when I look at him. “I’ll be up late tonight. I have a lot of work to catch up on in my office. Dinner’s in the microwave if you’re hungry.” I walk toward my office. Before I close the door all the way, I glance back into the kitchen.
Graham’s hands are pressed against the counter and his head is hanging between his shoulders. He stays like this for almost an entire minute, but then he pushes off the bar with force, as if he’s angry at something. Or someone.
Before I can close the door to my office, he looks in my direction. Our eyes meet. We stare at each other for a few seconds and it’s the first time I’ve ever felt like he was a complete stranger. I have absolutely no clue what he’s thinking right now.
This is the moment when I know I should ask him what he’s thinking. This is the moment when I should tell him what I’m thinking. This is the moment I should be honest with him and admit that maybe we should open that box.
But instead of being brave and finally speaking truth, I choke on my inner coward. I look away from him and close the door.
We resume the dance.
Chapter Thirteen
* * *
Then
Every minute I’ve spent with him today surprises me more than the last.
Every time he opens his mouth or smiles or touches me, all I can think is, “What would possess Sasha to cheat on this man with Ethan?”
Her trash, my treasure.
His childhood home is everything I imagined it would be. Full of laughter and stories and parents who look at him like he was sent straight from heaven. He’s the youngest of four kids and the only boy. I didn’t get to meet any of his sisters today because two of them live out of state and one of them had to cancel dinner.
Graham gets his looks from his father. His father is a solid man with sad eyes and a happy soul. His mother is petite. Shorter than me, but carries herself with a confidence even bigger than Graham’s.
She’s cautious of me. I can tell she wants to like me, but I can also tell she doesn’t want to see her son get his heart broken again. She must have liked Sasha at one point. She tries to pry about our “relationship” but Graham feeds her nothing but fiction.
“How long have you two been seeing each other?”
He puts his arm around my shoulders and says, “A while.”
A day.
“Has Graham met your parents yet, Quinn?”
Graham says, “A few times. They’re great.”
Never. And they’re terrible.
His mother smiles. “That’s nice. Where did you meet?”
“In my office building,” he says.
I don’t even know where he works.
Graham is having fun with this. Every time he makes up a story about us, I squeeze his leg or nudge him as I try to stifle my laughter. At one point, he tells his mother we met at a vending machine. He says, “Her Twizzlers were stuck in the machine, so I put a dollar in and bought Twizzlers so that hers would get unstuck. But you wouldn’t believe what happened.” He looks at me and urges me to finish the lie. “Tell them what happened next, Quinn.”
I squeeze his leg so hard he winces. “His Twizzlers got stuck in the machine, too.”
Graham laughs. “Can you believe it? Neither one of us got Twizzlers. So I took her to lunch in the food court and the rest is history.”
I have to bite my cheek to keep from laughing. Luckily, he was right about his mother’s food, so I spend most of the meal with my mouth full. His mother is an amazing cook.
When she goes to the kitchen to finish the pie, Graham says, “You want a tour of the house?”
I grab his hand as he leads me out of the dining room. As soon as we’re in private, I shove him in the chest. “You lied to your parents like twenty times in under an hour!”
He grabs my hands, pulling me to him. “But it was fun, wasn’t it?”
I can’t deny the smile that’s breaking through. “Yeah. It really was.”
Graham lowers his mouth to mine and kisses me. “You want a typical tour of a typical house or do you want to go to the basement and see my childhood bedroom?”
“That’s not even a question.”
He leads me to the basement and flips on the light. There’s a faded poster of the table of elements hanging on the wall of the stairwell. He flips on another light when we reach the bottom of the stairs, revealing a teenage boy’s bedroom that looks like it hasn’t been touched since he moved out. It’s like a secret portal straight into the mind of Graham Wells. I finally learned his last name over dinner.
“She refuses to redecorate it,” he says, walking backward into the room. “I still have to sleep in here when I visit.” He kicks at a basketball lying on the floor. It’s flat, so it barely rolls away from him. “I hate it. It reminds me of high school.”
“You didn’t like high school?”
He makes a quick gesture around the room. “I liked science and math more than I liked girls. Imagine what high school was like for me.”
His dresser is covered in science trophies and picture frames. Not a single sports award in sight. I pick up one of his family photos and bring it in closer for inspection. It’s a picture of Graham and his
three older sisters. They all favor their mother heavily. And then there’s the lanky preteen with braces in the middle. “Wow.”
He’s standing right behind me now, looking over my shoulder. “I was the poster child for awkward phases.”
I place the picture back on the dresser. “You’d never know it now.”
Graham walks to his bed and takes a seat on the Star Wars comforter. He leans back on his hands and admires me as I continue to look around the room. “Did I already tell you how much I like that dress?”
I look down at my dress. I wasn’t prepared to meet the parents of a man I’m not even dating, so I didn’t have a whole lot of clean laundry. I chose a simple navy blue cotton dress and paired it with a white sweater. When I walked out of my bedroom before we left my apartment, Graham saluted me like I was in the navy. I immediately turned around to go change, but he grabbed me and told me I looked really beautiful.
“You did tell me that,” I say, leaning back on my heels.
His eyes drag up my legs, slowly. “I’m not gonna lie, though. I really wish you would have worn your scuba gear.”
“I’m never telling you my dreams again.”
Graham laughs and says, “You have to. Every day for as long as I know you.”
I smile and then spin around to read some of the awards on his wall. There are so many awards. “Are you smart?” I glance over at him. “Like really smart?”
He shrugs. “Just a little above average. A by-product of being a nerd. I had absolutely no game with the girls so I spent most of my time in here studying.”
I can’t tell if he’s kidding because if I had to guess what he was like in high school based off what I know about him now, I’d say he was the high school quarterback who dated the head cheerleader.
“Were you still a virgin when you graduated high school?”
He crinkles up his nose. “Sophomore in college. I was nineteen. Hell, I was eighteen before I even kissed a girl.” He leans forward, clasping his hands between his knees. “In fact, you’re the first girl I’ve ever brought down here.”
“No way. What about Sasha?”
“She came to dinner a few times, but I never showed her my old bedroom. I don’t know why.”
“Whatever. You probably tell that to all the girls you bring down here. Then you seduce them on your Star Wars comforter.”
“Open that top drawer,” he says. “I guarantee you there’s a condom in there that’s been there since I was sixteen.”
I pull open the drawer and push things out of the way. It looks like a junk drawer. Old receipts, file folders, loose change. A condom in the back. I laugh and pull it out, flipping it over in my fingers. “It expired three years ago.” I look at Graham and he’s staring at the condom in my hand like he’s wondering how accurate expiration dates are. I slip the condom into my bra. “I’m keeping it.”
Graham smiles appreciatively at me. I like the way he looks at me. I’ve felt cute before. Beautiful, even. But I’m not sure I’ve ever known what sexy felt like until him.
Graham leans forward again, scooting to the edge of his bed. He crooks his finger, wanting me to come closer. He has that look in his eyes again. The look he had that night in the restaurant when he touched my knee. That look sends the same heat through me now, just like it did then.
I take a few steps, but stop a couple of feet from him. He sits up straight. “Come closer, Quinn.” The desire in his voice whirls through my chest and stomach.
I take another step. He slides his hand around the back of my knee and pulls me the last step toward him. Chills break out on my legs and arms from his touch.
He’s looking up at me and I’m looking down at him. His bed sits low to the floor, so his mouth is dangerously close to my panty line. I swallow when the hand he has wrapped around my leg begins to slide slowly up the back of my thigh.
I’m not prepared for the sensation his touch sends through me. I close my eyes and sway a little, steadying myself with two firm hands on his shoulders. I look down at him again, just as he presses his lips against the dress covering my stomach.
He holds eye contact with me as he slides his other hand to the back of my other thigh. I’m completely engulfed by my own heartbeat. I feel it everywhere, all at once.
Graham begins to bunch my dress up in his hands, little by little, crawling it up my thighs. He slides his hands and the dress up to my waist, then presses his mouth to the top of my thigh. I move my hands to his hair, gasping quietly as his lips move over my panties.
Holy shit.
I can feel the intense heat from his mouth as he kisses me there. It’s a soft kiss, right against the front of my panties, but it doesn’t matter how soft it is. I feel it all the way to my core and it makes me shudder.
I clench my fingers in his hair, pressing myself closer to his mouth. His hands are on my ass now, pulling me toward him. The soft kisses begin to turn into firm kisses and before he even has the chance to pull down my panties, a tremor starts to rush through me, unexpected, sudden, explosive.
I pull away from him with a whimper, but he pulls me back to his mouth, kissing me there harder until I’m gripping his shoulders, needing his strength to continue standing. My whole body begins to shudder and I struggle to remain quiet and remain upright as the whole bedroom spins around me.
My arms are shaking and my legs are weak as his kisses come to a stop. He slides his mouth against my thigh and looks up at me. It takes everything in me to hold eye contact with him as he pushes my dress up a little more and presses a kiss against the bare skin of my stomach.
Graham grips me at the waist. I’m completely out of breath and a little in shock at what just happened. And how fast it happened. And the fact that I want more of him. I want to lower myself on top of him and put this condom to use.
As if he can read my mind, Graham says, “How accurate do you think that expiration date is?”
I lower myself onto his lap and straddle him, feeling just how serious his question was. I brush my lips across his. “I’m sure the expiration date is just a precaution.”
Graham grabs the back of my head and dips his tongue inside my mouth, kissing me with a groan. He slips his fingers in my bra and pulls out the condom, then stops kissing me long enough to tear it open with his teeth. He turns me, pushing me onto his Star Wars comforter. I hook my thumbs inside my panties and slide them off as he unzips his jeans. I’m lying back on the bed as he kneels onto the mattress and puts the condom on. I don’t even get a good look at him before he lowers himself on top of me.
He kisses me as he begins to slowly push himself into me. My whole body tenses and I moan. Maybe a little too loudly, because he laughs against my mouth. “Shh,” he says against my lips with a smile. “We’re supposed to be touring the house right now. Not each other.”
I laugh, but as soon as he begins to push into me again, I hold my breath.
“Jesus, Quinn.” He breathes against my neck and then thrusts against me. We’re both a little too loud now. He holds still once he’s inside me, both of us doing our best to stay as quiet as we can. He begins to move, causing me to gasp, but he covers my mouth with his, kissing me deeply.
He alternates between kissing me and watching me, doing both things with an intensity I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced. He pauses his lips so that they hover just above mine, occasionally brushing them as we fight to remain silent. He keeps his eyes focused on mine while he moves inside of me.
He’s kissing me again when he starts to come.
His tongue is deep inside my mouth and the only reason I know he’s about to finish is because he holds his breath and stops moving for a few seconds. It’s so subtle as he fights to remain as quiet as possible. The muscles in his back clench beneath my palms and he never once breaks eye contact when he finally does pull away from my lips.
I wait for him to collapse on top of me, out of breath, but he doesn’t. He somehow holds himself up after it’s over, watching me like h
e’s scared he might miss something. He dips his head and kisses me again. And even when he pulls out of me, he still doesn’t collapse on top of me. He puts all his weight on his side as he eases down beside me without breaking the kiss.
I slide my hand through his hair and hold him against my mouth. We kiss for so long, I almost forget where I am.
When he breaks for air, he watches me silently for a moment, his hand still on my cheek, and then he dips his head and kisses me again like he doesn’t know how to stop. I don’t think I know how to stop this, either. I wish more than anything we were somewhere else. My place . . . his place . . . anywhere other than a place where we have to stop and go back upstairs eventually.
I am not inexperienced when it comes to sex. But I think I am inexperienced when it comes to this. The feeling of not wanting it to be over long after it’s over. The feeling of wishing I could bury myself inside his chest so I could be closer to him. Maybe this isn’t new for him, but based on the way he’s looking at me between all the kissing, I would say there’s more confusion in his expression than familiarity.
Several seconds pass as we stare at each other. Neither of us speaks. Maybe he doesn’t have anything to say, but I can’t speak because of the severe intensity building inside my chest. The sex was great. Quick, but incredible.
But this thing that’s happening right now . . . the not being able to let go . . . the not wanting to stop kissing . . . the not being able to look away . . . I can’t tell if this is just a side to sex I’ve never experienced or if this goes deeper than that. Like maybe sex isn’t as deep as it gets. Maybe there’s a whole level of connection I didn’t know could exist.
Graham closes his eyes for a few seconds, then presses his forehead against mine. After releasing a quick sigh, he pushes himself off me, almost as if he had to force his eyes shut in order to separate us. He helps me up and I look for my panties while he disposes of the condom and zips up his jeans.
All Your Perfects Page 10
