Ian slipped back into the bed beside me, reached out an arm, slipped it under my head. And I, in a motion as natural as breathing, as automatic as the way you find your favorite position for sleeping when you first get into bed, I rolled into the cradling nook of his arms.
And tensed.
Stopped breathing.
Holy emotional overload, Batman.
This felt so good. So right. Like I’d always been here. Like I belonged in the shelter of his burly arms.
I couldn’t feel this way. Couldn’t. Didn’t. I was imagining it. I’d just met him. We had sex once. I did NOT belong in his arms.
Stop thinking, Nina, I told myself.
“Stop thinking, Nina,” Ian told me.
I laughed, a sarcastic guffaw. “Are you psychic or something?”
He chuckled. “Not that I’m aware, why?”
“Because I literally just told myself to stop thinking, and then you said the exact same thing.”
His hand skated up my arm, trailed through my hair, traced the shell of my ear. “No, it’s you, Nina. You telegraph your emotions, especially when your thoughts start going into hyper speed.”
Silence.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m thinking about so hard?”
He rolled his head back and forth. “Nope.”
I craned my head to look at him. His chest was firm and soft and warm under my cheek, his arm a heavy, comforting weight on my waist, across my back. “You’re not?”
“Don’t need to.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m assuming it’s more of what you’ve been freaking out over since the moment we stepped off the plane at Heathrow. You’re fighting with yourself over what this is between us. Totally understandable, by the way. It’s new for me, too.”
“It is?” I knew sounded skeptical. “I was under the impression you did this kind of thing fairly frequently.”
“Have wildly intense and strangely emotionally-connected sex with a stunningly beautiful woman I just met?” He shook his head. “Nope. Not even close. I’m either in a long-term relationship, or it’s a quick one-off. This with you? It’s…both, somehow. And neither. I don’t know.”
“You seem pretty calm about it,” I pointed out.
He shrugged. “No. But I’m a guy. I don’t emote very easily.”
“Well, I’m emoting. A lot. And I don’t know what to about it.”
“You don’t have to do anything about it, Nina.” He finally opened his eyes and looked down at me, an intense azure scrutiny. “Just feel it. Let it be. It is what it is. It doesn’t have to be one thing or the other.”
“That’s unsatisfying. I like things to be in neat little boxes. I felt oppressed and pressured to be someone I wasn’t, back in Michigan. That’s a fairly neat little box. So I took this opportunity to study here. A one-off, something quick, that’s a box I can understand, even if I’ve never experienced it. Or so I thought. But now…”
“Who said it’s a one-off, Nina?” He scooted up to a sitting position, and I did as well. “Why couldn’t it be a five- or six- or seven-off? Why couldn’t it be a hundred- or a thousand- or a million-off? Why do we have to put a box around it, put a number or limit on it?”
I could only shake my head and clutch the sheet to my chest. “I don’t know.”
“What do you want it to be?”
“I don’t know.”
Ian frowned. “What do you know?”
“I don’t know!” I wanted to look away from him, but I couldn’t. He was so compelling and far too sexy to stop looking at. His hair was messy, his skin flushed from our recent exertions, and his eyes so piercing and intense.
“Tell me something you know for certain. Anything.”
I shrugged. “You and me, the way you make me feel…it’s intense. That’s a certainty I can admit to. I’m doing things I didn’t know I’d ever do. Liking things I never thought I’d ever try, much less…do and enjoy.”
“That’s a pretty neat little box, isn’t it? Sexual discovery? Trying and liking new things? You came to England to study, right? You came here to learn new things, to get out of the box you’d been living in your whole life.” He pushed a wayward lock of my long, thick, ink-black hair away from my eye, tucked it behind my ear. “Well, you’re definitely out of that box, now, Nina. You’re trying new things, and you’re liking them. So am I, for that matter. You do something to me too, you know. Talking this openly about what’s going on between us, this is new. Usually—well hell, there is no ‘usually’ for this. It’s either long-term, or it’s clearly but unspokenly short-term, one-night only. I slept in your bed, Nina. That’s not something you do with a one-off girl. I don’t know what’s going on, what will happen, or what to do with what you make me feel. So that’s honesty for you, right?”
“Yeah. Maybe you’re just more honest with yourself than I am.”
He shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, maybe. But I spent a long period of my life lying to myself, so now I’m sort of into brutal self-honesty.”
I fought with myself, and lost out to curiosity. “Lying to yourself how?”
He sighed. “That’s history, Nina. I don’t mind talking about it, but it’s up to you if you really want to know.”
I settled back against the headboard, sheet tucked under my arms. “I don’t need the sordid details, but I’m curious now.”
“I wouldn’t tell you the sordid details anyway, Nina. Just like if in some hypothetical future someone was to ask me about you and I, I wouldn’t discuss the specifics. That’s no one’s business but mine and yours.”
There went that squishy feeling in my heart again, along with a healthy dose of respect. “A man with a code of honor,” I said. “I like that.”
“A woman who respects a man with a code of honor; I like that.” He grinned, then made an expression that I equated to a facial shrug, a lift of the eyebrows, brief turn-down of the mouth. “I told you all the important details on the flight over already: consulting on an IT startup in Detroit, helping them get their network established and their website—god that site was a mess…” He waved a hand. “Whatever. Not the point. I’d finished the work I was contracted to do and had a good month or so to kill, so I was just sort of wandering around Michigan, right? I like to get off the beaten path, see the boring, far-off spots where there are only locals. I was at this bar in the middle of nowhere. Hours from Detroit, nothing but farmland for miles. Just this little dive bar a few miles off the expressway. And there was this girl sitting by herself, really beautiful and looking rather upset, as out of place in that grubby old bar as I was. It started off as just conversation, but led to…other things. Yeah? Sort of like you and me, actually. Not what either of us were looking for or expecting. Thought it was just going to be a once or twice sort of thing, more because we were both far from our homes. I was only in the States temporarily, and she was running from something. Someone, actually, but I didn’t know that then. She said she’d had a bad breakup or something and was trying to move on, get away from it. Said something about Shakespearean forbidden love, I remember. Should’ve been a red flag, looking back. You don’t just get over something like that. But she said she had, and I went with it.”
“Where does the lying to yourself come in?” I asked.
“Right about now. I spent the month I had left in the States with Jamie, and we were…compatible. It just worked. Then my mum ended up getting transferred from Perth to Chicago, and I had a job offer in Chicago which, conveniently, was only a handful of hours away from where Jamie lived. I thought things were really good between us, and I wanted to see where it went with her. I can work from pretty much anywhere, so…I moved to Chicago. Helped Mum get settled and figure out life in the States and all, plus it let me be close enough to Jamie to have a relationship with her.” He paused, rubbed at the stubble underneath his cheekbone with the pad of his thumb. “Some truth for you: I really had it in for Jamie. She was different, had this brutal hon
esty to her that I really appreciated. She was funny and knew exactly who she was, like it or not, take it or leave it. But the whole time we were together, I had this niggling feeling way in the back of my heart. Like her heart wasn’t totally in it. We lasted for almost a year, but it became increasingly clear that she just wasn’t over the other guy. Felt like she couldn’t have him for reasons I never asked about, and was pretty much just using me to try and convince herself she didn’t love him, didn’t need him. This is what I’ve figured out via hindsight, I should point out.
“Thing was, I was lying to myself about how she felt, and she lied to herself just about as much as I did. If we’d both just been clear about things from the beginning, we’d both have avoided getting hurt. I mean, you don’t spend a year with someone and not get invested, right? I was invested. She was too. She wasn’t just using me; I didn’t mean it that way. But she was holding back, holding part of herself away from me, because that part just…belonged to the other guy. I knew it, deep down, and so did she. And Nina, I’m a selfish man. I won’t settle for some or part if I’m going to invest my time in someone. Long and short of it, it ended with Jamie, and rather messily for us both. Male pride is a dangerous thing.” He added the last part almost as an afterthought.
“I’m sorry you went through that,” I told him.
He shook his head. “I’m not. You can’t go through life avoiding pain. You get hurt; it’s what makes life worth living. Not the pain, but what you learn from it, how it forces you to appreciate the good things you’ve got. I wanted things to work out with Jamie, but she was in love with someone else. We had good times together, a lot of them. Things I wouldn’t give up just to avoid having gotten my heart broken. What I took away was don’t lie to yourself. You feel something going on inside you, you feel a realization, or an epiphany, or some truth, you have to just grip it and face it, figure out what to do with it, even if it hurts.”
“But it’s human nature to avoid getting hurt, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know if I think that’s true. Not necessarily, that is. I think, yeah, we do tend to shy away from something that looks dangerous. But if you shy away from every risk in life, you’ll never have any excitement. You’ll be safe, yeah, but at what cost? You gain nothing if you risk nothing.” Ian gave a little laugh. “I’m full of clichés, suddenly.”
“Coming here was a risk. Leaving my parents and my sisters and everything I know. It’s scary being here alone. You’re literally the only person I know. I’ve only been here less than forty-eight hours, but it’s been equal parts exhilarating and terrifying. My decisions are on me. No one is here to keep me from doing something totally stupid.”
“That’s adulthood, Nina. It’s all on you. Not that you weren’t an adult before, but when you make that choice to step away from everything familiar, so there’s only yourself to rely on, that’s when you find out what you’re really made of.”
“What if I don’t like what I find out I’m made of?”
Ian shot me a smile fraught with compassion and tenderness. “You’re just getting started, Nina. Leaving your comfort zone is never easy, and neither is learning life lessons.” He glanced at my alarm clock. “I’d best go check on my dad.”
I didn’t want him to leave, but then again, part of me did: I needed time to figure out whether I wanted to really examine what was going on inside myself, or if I just wanted to ignore things and hope it all went away. But I also wanted to just bury my head in the sand of sex with Ian.
I was afraid if he left, I wouldn’t see him again, and I really wanted more of Ian.
Additionally, I was horny again. Or still. And he was naked in my bed, looking all sorts of sexy-as-fuck.
Furthermore, I was hungry, and I hoped he would take me somewhere for dinner.
And last but not least, I was too scared to vocalize any of this.
Ian slid out of bed, and I watched as he gathered his clothes, with my tongue slightly lolling as I watched the way his dick bounced and swayed, the way his ass shifted and tensed, the way the vertebrae on his spine showed now and then as he bent over to shove a leg into his underwear. I watched with rapture as his abs flexed, revealing grooves and divots and furrows. I gazed longingly at the sandy hair that was swept across his forehead.
“Keep looking at me like that and I’ll be having you for dinner rather than lahori.”
“Lahori?”
“Indian. Several decent places near the hospital. I had takeaway from Needoo last night.”
“Oh. Don’t know if I’ve had Indian before.” I was trying not to angle for an invite. He was visiting his father in the hospital, for god’s sake.
Ian tugged his shirt on, and when his head popped through the neck hole, he flashed me a grin. “You’re ridiculous, you know that? What are you waiting for? Get dressed already. We wait too much longer, the queues for takeaway will be awful.”
I struggled in vain to suppress a grin as I scrambled out of bed. “I’m not ridiculous.”
“You are. You totally are. Sitting there like I’d let you out of my sight this soon.” He sat on the edge of the bed and tugged on his socks, then paused to watch me dress. “I have plans for you, Nina.”
“Plans?” I shrugged my bra straps onto my shoulders and glanced at him, knees a bit weak from the heat in his voice. “What—um, what kind of plans?”
He quirked an eyebrow and shot me that sexy smirk. “The naked kind. The bent over a counter and screaming kind.” He stood up as I was tugging on underwear, capturing my hands and trapping them between our bodies. “The fuck-you-until-you-can’t-move kind of plans.”
“Oh.” I blinked up at him and tried to remember why I was putting clothes on. “Those plans.”
“Does that suit?”
“As long as you feed me first.”
Ian spun me in place and smacked my ass. “That’s the plan. So get some trousers over that ass of yours before I give in to temptation.”
I squeaked as my ass cheek began to sting, and wondered if I was ever going to be able to have sex without wanting to be spanked, or if I was just ruined from having sex with anyone else from here on out.
CHAPTER 6
New addiction: lahori cuisine. Further addictions: watching Ian eat, holding his hand while we walk, having someone order food for me.
Scary: meeting Ian’s father when I’ve only known Ian for two days. Scarier: how weird it wasn’t, sitting in that hospital room, talking to Ian’s dad, trying to interpret his thick cockney accent, laughing at his bawdy jokes.
After visiting with his dad and finding out that the doctors expected him to be able to go home in another day or two, and that given a healthier diet and more exercise he should be just fine, Ian took me to a pub near his dad’s flat, where we met half a dozen of Ian’s friends and drank entirely too many pints of Kronenbourg 1664. This time, no one cornered me and interrogated me or even made a single comment about my presence with Ian. We sat next to each other on the bench-side of a booth, facing the pub, facing his friends. Ian held my hand and drank his beer with the other, his thumb tracing circles on my knuckles, traveling from pinky knuckle to ring finger to middle finger to index finger, back to the pinky and starting over.
He was holding my hand openly in front of his best friends. People he hadn’t seen in more than a year. People he’d gone to uni with, girls he may or may not have dated at some point, guys he’d probably gone chick-trawling with. Bill, for one. He was on the other side of the table from me, two seats over, and his gaze kept flicking over to me, assessing me wonderingly and then glancing away quickly when I caught his gaze.
Dear god. I was analyzing everything that happened. Every word he spoke to me, the way he looked at me, whether he included me in a particular line of conversation, or the way he occasionally nudged me with his knee, as if to remind either himself or me that he was still there, that he was thinking about me. Or maybe neither. Or both. Or maybe it was that he was just bobbing his knee and it was acc
identally bumping into my thigh, and didn’t mean anything.
See? Analyzing.
But by the time I was finishing my third—or was it fifth?—pint of beer, I wasn’t analyzing anything. I was cracking jokes and telling stories about the trouble people got into at U of M, the wild frat parties I’d been to—secretly, of course, because my family wouldn’t have approved of me going to frat parties, but I didn’t mention this to the group.
And then Ian was signing a credit card slip and we were saying goodbye, and I was hugging Inez, who’d been at the last get-together and was a sweet, funny, pretty, and slightly eccentric girl a few inches taller than me and very similarly built, e.g., curvy as hell, but with longer legs than me and more torso to spread the curves over.
She was Spanish, I’d discovered, and had only moved to London from Salamanca five years before. She worked at the Royal London Hospital as a nurse, and was a painter, specializing in heavily textured pieces, thick brush-strokes, big glops of paint that stood out on the canvas. She waxed poetic when I asked about her art, much to the amusement of the rest of the group, who seemed to know better than to get her started. I liked Inez. We could be friends very easily. I could see myself drinking wine with her and watching her paint, touring the forgotten side-streets of London with her in search of out-of-the-way art supply stores and galleries, sitting on the steps of Saint Paul’s while she sketched.
Ian pulled me away from Inez, and then we were walking away from the pub, hand in hand still. He’d only let go of my hand a couple times, and only for a few minutes before holding it again as soon as possible. What was I supposed to make of that? I told myself to stop over-analyzing before it got out of hand. The only reason I’d managed to stop the process in the first place was because I’d gotten tipsy enough to lose myself in conversation, especially once I found a kindred spirit in Inez.
Big Love Abroad (Big Girls Do It Book 11) Page 9
