“I’m sorry, Ian—”
“Sorry doesn’t fix shit all, does it, though?” He gestured at the shadows into which Lucas had vanished. “And then, when I do manage to sort my new job enough to get away and come find you, I discover you’ve already managed to fuck over some other poor arsehole’s heart. It’s been what, a month, barely? And you’ve already moved on from me to someone else and that’s over with too? Even for a true-blue heartbreaker, you move fast.”
“I’m not a heartbreaker!”
“Oh yes you fucking are!”
The sound of a window opening interrupted us. “Have your row indoors, would you?” an old grumpy male voice shouted, and then the window squealed and slammed closed.
Ian spun away, dragging a palm down his face from forehead to chin, blowing out a harsh breath. Then, before I could react, his fingers were pinioned around my wrist and he was dragging me toward my door, closing it behind us, propelling me backward, hands now on my shoulders and walking me backward toward the couch. I could only move as he dictated, breath frozen in my lungs, my gaze locked up on his icy, angry blue eyes. His chest was heaving, his fingers digging cruelly into my shoulders.
“Ian, you’re squeezing too hard,” I said, shrugging in his grip.
He immediately let go, eyes narrowing, nostrils flaring, a vein throbbing in his forehead. But then his hands were ascending, sliding, cupping my cheeks with feather-light fragility. He shuffled forward two steps, and now his body was a mountain of hardness and muscle against mine. His thumbs brushed over my cheekbones, and then he curled his index finger under my chin and tipped my head back, and now all I could see was Ian.
One hand beneath my chin, the other cupping the side of my face, he closed in, lips descending…
It was a kiss meant to claim. To remind. His lips slanted across mine, his tongue parted my lips, my teeth, slashed over my tongue, his lips moved and scoured. And then he pulled away.
“Did he hurt you?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“Sure you want to ask that, Ian?”
He turned away abruptly, and sat down on the couch. “Yes. Tell me.”
I circled the couch, sat a foot away from him on the edge of the cushion. “When I left, I came directly here, to Oxford. It was early in the morning, and I had no room assigned yet, no clue where anything was. I hadn’t planned ahead, so I was…mixed up. I was upset. I should have taken a cab, but I wasn’t sure how far it was and I didn’t want to spend the money. I don’t know. It was stupid. I should have just taken a cab. They were right there, but I didn’t. I had all this luggage, and I was trying to drag it through the town, but I had no clue where the university was. And then it started raining.”
“And cue the professor.”
“Pretty much. He gave me a ride to the university, showed me the office where I could get my room assigned to me. And…that was it, really. Nothing happened right away. It’s not like…it’s not like I went right from you to him. I’m not like that. I didn’t see him again for two weeks. Almost three. But then I ran into him at the library, and we had lunch.”
“Something tells me you’re skipping a few bits.”
“Nothing important. I thought I’d left you behind, left you in London.”
“You had.”
“It wasn’t that simple for me, though. I knew how I’d left was…wrong, but a part of me still felt, and still feels, that I couldn’t have managed it any other way. It was all happening so fast—so much, so fast. It doesn’t make it okay, that I just left like I did, and I know that. My point is, I was still messed up about it, about everything, about leaving how I did, about having left at all, because so much of me wanted to be back there with you. And Lucas…Lucas felt safe.”
“Which makes me dangerous?”
“Yes! You’re a threat to my sanity, Ian. You’re a threat to my plans for the future. To everything I know about myself, about what I want. About who I really am, deep inside. I thought I knew, and in a few days you challenged all that.”
“What was I doing to threaten you?”
“Just being you! I wanted to stay. I wanted to just be with you, never leave London, just stay and fuck you all day every day and let you do whatever you wanted to me and never leave. And emotionally, too, being near you was just…all-consuming. Nothing else mattered. And I guess part of me felt like if I didn’t leave, I never would.” I rubbed at my face. “And Lucas, like I said, it felt like he was safe. He didn’t consume my every thought. I could just be around him and be me, be myself. We could talk about books and everything was just…calm. Easy. He got me, it felt like.”
“But?”
I groaned. “But then I agreed to go on a date with him. I thought it was just dinner, I thought I’d have time to figure out what I wanted with him, but things happened fast, I guess. I don’t even know. But then he took me back to his place, and things—things went a lot faster than I’d imagined. And not as…as safely as I’d thought it would be.”
“Nina. Did…he…hurt you?” Ian’s voice was low and razor sharp.
I met his eyes, let him see the truth, see that there was no prevarication in me. “No, not in any way. Everything that happened was entirely consensual.”
“You’ve got me worried, Nina? What happened?”
I blinked and breathed and rolled my shoulders to ease the tension in them. “Are you really sure you want to hear it?”
“I didn’t come all the way here for nothing, Nina. My feelings for you aren’t so…flimsy…that whatever you have to say now will undo them easily.”
“We had sex.”
“Obviously.”
“He…I let him…tie me. And…blindfold me.”
“And you’d only just met him? I mean, you said there’d been two weeks, but you still barely knew him.”
“I know.”
“And you said you thought he felt safe?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “I know. I did. It wasn’t…he used neckties, and he was gentle. But then he…it was a while before we actually had sex, but he was doing other things to me.”
I glanced at Ian, whose expression was stone-cold and emotionless. “And?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t know what…why I get mixed up about it. He made me feel good, but he drew it out, if you know what I mean? Kept me on the edge for a long time, and then kept me over the edge for even longer. It got to the point where it was almost painful. Then he—we—you know, and…I was still bound and blindfolded, and it made it so intense, and after everything else, how intensely I’d been—” I halted, feeling awkward about saying all this to Ian, feeling an internal conflict about being explicit.
“Coming. He edged you, and then he made you come until it hurt, and then he fucked you until you couldn’t take it anymore. That’s what you’re trying to say, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“But you didn’t ask him to stop, didn’t ask him to untie you.”
“No.”
“So you let him do whatever he wanted, but then afterward…”
“Afterward, I felt…drained. Exhausted. Emotionally…fried. Confused. Overwhelmed, above all. And…even a little guilty.”
“Guilty? Guilty about what?” He sounded genuinely puzzled.
“You. You were…I wasn’t thinking about you during it, exactly, but…deep down it still felt like…like I was betraying you.” I shrugged, a small, pained gesture. “I knew I’d ruined things, but that didn’t stop part of me from feeling like…” I shrugged again, having a hard time saying it out loud.
“Feeling like what, Nina?” He was right there, twisted sideways on the couch to face me. Eyes soft and warm, yet mouth tensed and tight.
I could only whisper, slight, soft words, uttered into his expectant silence. “Like it should have been you.”
“It could have been. It should have been.” His voice was like granite being crushed into gravel, as if emotions were being ground up i
nto dust at the base of his throat.
I swallowed hard. Blinked. Sucked in a long, deep breath, held it. Held it until my lungs burned, as if trapping oxygen could keep the hot acidic tears behind my eyes. I managed to hold it all back, push it all down. Keep the breath locked in until my lungs screamed, keep the tears dammed in my tear ducts, keep the swelling knot of guilt and regret trapped in the hot, swollen vise of my throat.
“Nina.” His voice, fuck, that voice. How could something so rough be so tender?
And why, after what I’d done to him?
I shook my head. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” His thumb on my eyelashes, smearing away the burning dampness.
“Act like it’s okay.”
“I’m not.” He swallowed, cleared his throat. “It’s not okay. I’m angry. I’m hurt.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“Because I’m hurt and angry.”
“That makes no sense.”
He tilted his head to the side. “Doesn’t it, though? For someone who reads a lot of romances you sure don’t understand love very well, do you? If it didn’t matter, I’d have stayed in London. If it was fine, I’d not have come to Oxford looking for you, and I certainly wouldn’t have been stood here waiting while you had it out with the professor.”
“Ian—”
“I’m here because I’m hurt. Because I’m angry. Because, for some damned reason, in the short period of time we’ve known each other, you’ve come to matter enough to me that I can be hurt by you, that I can be made angry by you.”
“You’ve a thing for interrupting me, you know that?”
“Are you trying to sound English?”
I shook my head and blew out a breath. “No, it just happens sometimes. Shut up, it’s fine.”
He frowned. “You can’t joke your way out of this, Nina.”
“I’m not trying to,” I said, tracing lines on the denim pulled taut around my thigh. Anything to avoid looking at him. “I just…I don’t know what to say.”
“The truth? What you’re thinking? What you’re feeling? What you want? What you don’t want? Any of those will work, as long as it’s real.”
I’d almost managed to bluff my way past the emotional danger zone, but then he had to go and do that stupid alpha male thing where he tilted my chin up and forced me to look at him and brushed his thumb over my cheek, and saw into my heart.
That last part, that was what did me in. He saw me.
“Why’d you sleep with him, Nina?”
“I don’t know.” The words were choked out.
“Yes, you do. And the sooner you admit it to yourself, the sooner we can move past this.”
“Why do you care?”
“Because there’s this obnoxious four-letter word banging around inside me, and it’s all focused on you, that’s why.”
“Ian, don’t. Just don’t.”
“Why not, Nina?”
“Because you can’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because—” I had nothing, except my own confusion. “Because of Lucas.” That sounded pathetic, even to me.
“So why’d you sleep with him, then?”
I shook my head, not in denial or refusal, but because the truth he was digging for had been trapped deep, deep inside me for weeks. Trapped, thumping frantically, buried alive, demanding to be let out.
“You really want to know why I slept with Lucas?” I asked, finally purging all the truths secreted deep in my gut.
“I asked, didn’t I?” Ian said, eyes narrowing and chest expanding as he drew a fortifying breath.
I dragged deep, trawled the farthest corners of my soul. “Because I wanted to be over you.”
“Best way to get over someone is get under someone else, is that it?”
“Sort of, I guess? It wasn’t that, consciously, though. It was…he made me feel safe. No, that’s not right either. Fuck.” I rubbed my face with both hands. “It’s—it’s that he was safe. Or so I thought, at least. He was good-looking, intelligent, understood my obsession with Regency literature, and not only understood it but shared it. I was attracted to him, I enjoyed being around him, because he was…calm.”
“I’m not calm?”
I shrugged and shook my head. “That’s not what I meant. It’s hard to put all this into words. He was calming. He made me feel calm. We could sit and each do our own thing for long periods of time without talking. He didn’t make me feel like…like everything I wanted, everything I knew, everything I thought I wanted or knew was…up for debate. Changeable. I could just be.”
“And when you’re with me?” Ian had stepped away to stand with his back to the TV, arms crossed over his broad chest.
“I feel like nothing is certain. I feel like…like I could just somehow end up being this totally other person. You make me feel like, all my life, the person I’ve been was just…not a mask, but…god, I don’t know—like everything I knew about myself was just the skin, just the surface. And being with you somehow opens all that up, cuts through the skin and you’ve started to let out all the different parts of me that have been trapped under that skin my whole life. It’s fucking scary, Ian. I don’t recognize myself around you. Lucas made me feel like the old me.”
“How does this go back to you fucking Lucas?”
I flinched at the cold, casual way he said that. “I’d walked away from you. I had to, though, because I wanted to stay, so badly.”
“You’ll have to explain that one a bit,” Ian said.
“I mean, I could have stayed in London with you, like, forever. Just never left. I could see myself with your friends, in London, just…living life and having fun. And yeah, I know, that sounds great. But what about this—?” I waved at the outside, meaning Oxford in general. “What about my dreams, my goals? It’s so easy to forget all that when I’m with you. That’s why I left. And I didn’t want to, but I had to, because otherwise I never would have. I’d have just stayed in London with you and we’d fuck and drink and everything would be awesome, and then one day I’d wake up and realize I never got my degree, never followed those dreams I’d left my family to come here to pursue. So I packed my shit and came to Oxford. And I knew…I knew I’d messed everything up with you by doing so, and that hurt. I knew you wouldn’t come after me. I mean, why should you? So when I got here, I knew no one, had no clue where I was going, had no room assigned to me, didn’t even know where the university was in relation to the train station. I should have taken a cab, but I’m an idiot and decided not to, and then it started raining—”
“And, as I said, cue the good professor, to the rescue.”
“Yeah. And I felt like…like me, and like he fit with that me. I don’t know if this is making any sense or not, but it’s the best way I can explain it. And I didn’t set out thinking he and I would do anything. It wasn’t like I met him and was like, ‘ooh, let’s use him to get over Ian.’ It wasn’t like that. It just sort of happened. We met, but it was like two or three weeks before we even went out or anything, and even then I wasn’t sure what to expect. And then instead of going to a restaurant, he took me to his place and cooked a meal and we had this expensive wine…” I ducked my head, hating how it sounded, even to myself. “I sound like such a slut. One thing led to another, and then bam—you know? It wasn’t like that, though. But then, it was, I guess. I let it happen, I went into it eyes open. I made the choice and I can’t pretend otherwise. Even after it started to get…weird, or intense, or whatever, I could have stopped it. But I didn’t. And I realized, afterwards, I guess, that even though Lucas wasn’t quite as—safe or vanilla as I’d initially expected, that he still wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t…right. Not like it was wrong. Part of me—” I halted, shaking my head, worried about admitting what had just gone through my head.
“What, Nina? Part of you, what?” He took a seat on the couch beside me, took my hand in his. “I may be upset about—well shit, bloody well everything really, but
I’m not judging you. I’m not, and I won’t.”
“If it had been you, I think the experience would have been different for me.”
“Be clear, Nina.”
I let out a breath. “Lucas tying me up, edging me, all that. It was like—god, how do I explain it? It was like taking a sip of clear liquid, expecting water, and getting vodka. Unexpected. Even if you like both water and vodka, you drink one expecting something and get something totally else, it’s a shock.”
“So you’re saying you did like it, but you weren’t expecting it?”
“Sort of? I don’t know. It felt like something was missing. Something was off. Not right. Again, not—not right in the sense of wrong, morally or whatever, just—off. I don’t know how else to say it or explain it, even to myself. Best I can come up with is that I knew, deep down, that it should have been you, but it wasn’t, and at that point I figured it never would be. But I wasn’t even letting myself think about you at all then, and I guess I’m just now really understanding what I was thinking.”
“It should have been me, Nina.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Because you’re scared.”
“I already said I was.”
“And you thought Lucas was safe, a safe bet, an easy way out. The simplest way to sabotage everything for yourself, only it turned out to be not as easy as you expected. Because he did things to you that only I should be able to do. If it had been plain old just-sex, you wouldn’t have been so upset about it.”
“I guess so, yeah.”
“And then I showed up, and now it’s all a mess, because now you have to face the consequences of a whole bunch of questionable choices, including, but not limited to, everything that happened with Lucas, everything that happened with me, and even coming here to England in the first place. And you—as you’ve said a thousand times now—just don’t know, right?”
Big Love Abroad (Big Girls Do It Book 11) Page 18
