I had to understand why Aidan was so determined to have me.
I considered it, listing the reasons in my head as we stood in his apartment staring at one another. After his declaration, I’d shot out of his bed, grabbing the shirt he’d been wearing, throwing it on, and hauling ass into the front of the apartment, hoping I’d be safer from my lust there.
Aidan, of course, followed.
Annoyed.
And now here I was. Thinking of the reasons he wanted me to be with him. The relationship we’d shared during our time with Sylvie was molded by circumstance. We were brought together by a shared feeling of being haunted by the ghosts of our pasts. We got each other. We made each other feel less alone. And the three of us were like a little family unit for a while. That created a feeling of extreme closeness between Aidan and me.
Then there was the fact that we’d never had much of a physical relationship during that time. Lots of heat and sexual chemistry—a ton of pent-up sexual frustration—so that tension had kept us drawn together like the proverbial moth to a flame.
Which led me to the sex in the dressing room at the theater, and then the sex we’d just had.
The sex in the dressing room … I felt hot all over thinking about it again. That was a sexual fantasy come to life. It was passionate and rough and epic. All that anger and bitterness and desire collided in an orgasmic explosion that I was never going to forget.
And the sex just now had been born of that same frustration and longing.
However, that did not mean that sex would be like that between us all the time! Those moments were a huge, almost two-year build-up. Of course sex was going to be off the charts AMAZING between us at first.
Which meant it was part of a fantasy.
It wasn’t real.
Just like who we were back then with Sylvie was no longer real. Those people were gone. I knew I’d changed.
Yet these were all the reasons Aidan wanted us to try again. He was clinging to something that no longer existed.
Then show him. Show him what it would really be like.
I scoffed at the thought.
That was my desire talking. I wasn’t going to continue this with Aidan so I could have sex with him and prove to us both that it was all going to be average in the end.
No. But we could have sex. Friends with benefits. Until he grows bored and realizes we are not meant to be.
That was the most fucked-up thing I’d ever thought.
My eyes locked with his as he waited for me to answer his question when he chased after me. “What is going on in your head?”
Maybe there was something in the whole friends-with-benefits option.
Maybe we would tire of each other.
“I can’t be in a relationship with you, Aidan. But if you want, we could have this,” I gestured between us, “for however long we both want it. But only sex.”
Funny, but I didn’t know what I was more scared of, that he’d agree or disagree.
He glared at me incredulously. “Are you suggesting I be your fuck buddy?”
I flushed. “Well, I wouldn’t put it so bluntly, but yes.”
“Are you insane?”
“There’s nothing insane about it. It’s my offer. Take it or leave it. But it is all I’m willing to give you.”
“Sex?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Just sex.”
“I thought that would be easy for you considering you have a Nicolette on every continent.”
His eyes flashed with smugness. “Jealous? Because last I checked, jealousy usually means you care for more than just sex.”
“Don’t taunt me.”
“Aye, I had Nicolette and a few others that meant nothing to me. I can’t take that back. But I can say I used to hope to hear from nearly every woman I’ve ever been with that all they wanted was just sex. But it was always me saying those words and them agreeing, hoping somehow, I’d change my mind and give them more. How ironic that the first woman to propose it to me is the only woman I’ve ever wanted to try permanency with.”
Feeling guilty, I couldn’t hold his gaze. “I don’t know what to say,” I whispered.
“Aye, I can see you don’t.” The bitterness in his words hurt my chest. Aidan sighed. Heavily. “Fine. If it’s the only way I can have you, then I agree. I don’t understand it. But I agree.”
I looked him in the eye now, hope blooming. “Really?”
He nodded.
And I allowed myself to smile. “This is a better idea than what you had in mind.”
Aidan didn’t respond. Instead, he marched across the room and bent, lifting me up onto his shoulder, causing the breath to escape my body. “Aidan!” I wheezed, in shock as I found myself being carried to the back of the apartment.
“If this is all I get, then hear this,” he said, dumping me on the bed and pulling me toward him by my ankles. His green eyes gleamed with intent. “Tonight, you’re mine and I intend to make the most of it.”
“You’re a total and utter bastard,” I muttered, swatting at the air above me as he pressed a kiss to my bare shoulder.
The sun streamed in through the blinds on his bedroom window, a natural alarm clock that raised the lazy curtains on my eyes.
I felt him shake with laughter against me, heard the delicious rumble in my ear. “You say such sweet things to me.”
I smiled sleepily, my vision adjusting from blur to focus, and took in the clock on Aidan’s bedside table. Ten thirty blinked up at me. Ten thirty. Ten thirty! I shot up straight, hearing him make a disgruntled sound at my back. “Is that the right time?”
“Aye, what of it?”
I whipped around to glare at him, wishing I could shield my eyes against the gorgeous sight of him sprawled on the bed, one arm above his head on the pillow, the other on his stomach. The bed sheets stopped below his navel, and I could see the man was already half ready to go another round. As earth-shattering as last night had been, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to walk if he touched me again. Plus, I was late.
“I have classes. You know, commitments. Don’t you? Have commitments, I mean?”
“I can work later.”
“I can’t do my classes later.”
Aidan sat up, sliding an arm around my waist and pulling me against him, bare skin against bare skin. His eyes moved over my face with such intensity, I wanted to dive back under the sheets. “Surely, you can miss a class or two.”
I could miss a class or two without the world coming to an end, but that wasn’t the point. “I don’t like to.”
“So, what you’re telling me is that you would rather have gotten up early for class today than have the multiple orgasms you had last night?”
I huffed. “No.”
His hand delved beneath the sheets.
“Uh-uh.” I reached for it, dragging it back into the light. At his raised eyebrow, I flushed a little. “I’m sore.”
The boyish grin that spread across his face was almost irresistible.
“Cocky bastard.”
“That’s the second time you’ve called me a bastard.” He tickled my ribs, and I squealed, trying to get away. He was persistent, though. Giggling and begging for release, I found myself flat on my back on the bed with a brawny, amused Scotsman braced over me.
Not exactly a bad way to greet a new day.
“Okay, okay!” I laughed. “I’m sorry! Stop!”
His tickling ceased. His kissing commenced. I wasn’t surprised when my skin grew hot, and my thighs automatically gripped his hips. Despite my complaints of feeling tender, I was lost to the addiction of his touch. Last night we’d kissed and touched each other everywhere, passionate sex mixed with tender lovemaking. Afterward, I’d drifted to sleep only to be awoken sometime later by Aidan’s searching mouth and hands on my body. To my complete befuddlement, rather than growing tired of one another as I’d hoped, each touch increased our addiction.
And I couldn’t stop myself from tasting him again.
Aidan paused briefly to put on a condom and the whole time I lay there panting for him, not even thinking about putting a halt to it. Then he was inside me, and I was sore and tender, crying out in discomfort.
“Pixie,” he murmured, kissing me to soothe me, as he stilled to allow me to adjust to him again. “I can stop.”
“Don’t,” I whispered.
So he didn’t. He moved and I clutched his sexy, sculpted ass in my hands as he glided in and out of me.
“Aidan!”
At first I thought maybe I’d called out his name.
But then …
“Aidan!”
He stopped moving, looking down at me, puzzled. “Was that—”
“Aidan, are you home?” The voice was closer now, heading toward us.
Aidan pulled out of me, yanking the bed sheets to cover us both as the door burst open.
To my complete horror and confusion, Laine stood in the threshold.
“Oh my God,” she said, looking more horrified than I felt. “Oh my God.”
“Laine, get the fuck out!” Aidan snapped, trying to shield as much of me as possible.
“Oh my God.” She spun around, almost walking into the door before she hurried out of sight.
We waited a moment.
But the sound of the apartment door opening and shutting didn’t come.
I immediately glared up at Aidan. “She’s still comfortable enough to walk into your bedroom. That really must’ve been some falling out between you two.”
He glowered back at me. “I haven’t spoken to her since.”
“Well, I guess you better get out there, then.” My tone was ugly. I knew it. However, the cold, hard bite of jealousy had returned as if the last almost twenty months had never happened.
“I will. And you’re coming with me.” He got off the bed, striding across the room in his glorious nakedness to the adjoining dressing room. When he returned, he was wearing sweat pants.
I sat up. “Uh … where’s your T-shirt?”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Really.”
He grinned at me. “Feeling possessive again there, Pixie.”
I jutted my chin in the air. “It would be inappropriate, that’s all.”
“Aye, sure.” He disappeared back into the dressing room and returned wearing a T-shirt, holding another in his hand. He tossed it to me. “Put that on.”
“You don’t seriously want me to go out there with you?”
“I seriously do. Now.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to go out there and make perfectly clear what I already thought I’d made perfectly clear, and that is that I don’t forgive Laine for what she did. I don’t want her in my life.”
I studied him thoughtfully. I too would never forgive Laine. However, I also hadn’t known Laine that long. She and Aidan had been friends since they were schoolchildren. My worry was that his decision to withhold forgiveness was based on what he thought I wanted.
“Don’t throw her out of your life for me, Aidan. Especially when I can’t offer anything …” I said. He knew what I was trying to say.
Taking a step closer to me, I saw the slash of pain across his features and heard it in his words. “Laine took away the one thing holding my world together when Cal took Sylvie. She did it selfishly and without thought, excusing her actions under the guise of caring for me too much.” He shook his head, and I saw the anger alongside the pain. “The only person Laine cared about in that moment of deception was herself. And now I finally have you, and I don’t actually have you, do I, Nora? As far as you’re concerned, you’re already a ghost in my bed. I’m so fucked in the head over you, I’m willing to be haunted.”
He gestured behind him to the door. “But I can’t even be haunted in peace without her interrupting us. She has a fucking key to my apartment. I want it back.”
“You need to change your locks.” I winced as soon as I said it. Aidan bared his soul, and I couldn’t even take the time to explain myself better to him?
His lips pinched together for a moment. “Are you coming out there with me or not?”
“Why do you really want me out there? To humiliate her? Because I think walking in on the man she loves having sex with another woman might have already done that.”
Aidan appeared to process that and his face softened. “How many women in your position would give a damn? Fuck, you drive me crazy, and I don’t understand you half the time, but I’ve never met anyone who cares like you care. Where did you come from, Pixie?”
“Up there. In the sky,” I whispered sadly, pointing upward. “Second star to the right and straight on till morning.”
Recognizing the quote, he braced a hand on the bed and reached out to cup my face. His thumb whispered over my lips. “You’re still that lass who dressed up as a storybook character to make sick children’s days brighter. Stronger, more together, but still her.”
“No, I’m not.” I was afraid of her.
“No one changes that much.” He brushed a kiss across my lips. “And why would you want to? That woman was just as bloody magnificent as the woman you’ve become.”
“Magnificent?” I gave him a teary-eyed smile, remembering.
He remembered too. “Magnificent.”
But I wasn’t her—I forced myself to remember that too. I jerked back from his touch and shook my head. “I’m not her, Aidan. You’ll see that soon enough.”
He blew out a breath of frustration but got up off the bed. “I’ll speak to Laine. You can stay here if you want.”
I did.
Kind of.
I got out of bed and put on Aidan’s T-shirt and tried not to shiver at how good it felt to wear it, to feel like I really was his in it. Standing in the doorway of his bedroom, I eavesdropped.
Not cool.
I know that.
But I wanted to be able to go to Aidan if he needed me.
“I didn’t mean to barge in like that,” I heard Laine say. “I stopped by the studio and Guy told me you weren’t coming in this morning so I thought I’d …”
“Use a key you’re not welcome to have anymore.”
“Aidan, you won’t return my calls. I had to see you.”
“Which part of I don’t want to see you don’t you get?”
“But I need you to forgive me. For us to be friends again. Please, Aidan, I miss you.”
He was silent a moment. And then he replied, his tone gentle but his words not so much, “All I heard in your words was ‘me’ and ‘I,’ just as that was all I heard in your explanation for lying to Nora and for letting me think she’d abandoned me. Doesn’t it compute, Laine, that you chased off the person I needed the most after my niece was taken from me? Don’t you understand how fucking awful and selfish you had to have been to have done that to me? And even now, all you care about is what you want and what you need. You don’t care about me.”
“I do, Aidan, I love you,” she sobbed.
I closed my eyes, hearing so much pain in the confession. It wasn’t easy to hear that kind of pain, no matter her misdeeds.
“Then you love selfishly.”
She cried harder.
“Maybe over time, I’ll learn to forgive you but I’ll never forget. And I’ll never trust you. But even if I could forgive you, that time is not now. I want you to leave. I need you to stay out of my life.”
“Aidan—”
“And I’ll be changing the locks to the flat and to the building.”
Another sob. “Aidan, I’m so sorry.”
“Aye, I know. I can see that. But I still believe you’re only sorry you got caught. You’re not sorry you did what you did, Laine, and until you are, our friendship ceases to exist.”
There was silence, followed by the soft sounds of footsteps, then the door to the flat opened and closed.
Feeling sick for Aidan that he’d had to have such a confrontation, I hurried out to find him sitting on the couch, staring out the window. I took the couch opposite him. “Are you okay? Can I get you anything?”
He looked at me, his handsome face bathed in the glow of the morning sun, his green eyes so bright with the sunlight dancing in them. My breath caught. Not at how attracted to him I was because I knew I might never get used to that.
No, I gasped at his expression. It was open, bare, like he wore his soul upon his face for me to see. And all I saw was love and anguish.
“Tell me. Explain to me exactly why we can’t have a proper relationship. Explain it again. Make me understand.”
My chest felt heavy, like something was pressing down on it, and I could hear my shallow breaths. I knew that something was happening here. Something that was going to decide our fate together in that very moment. Moreover, after hearing Laine and Aidan’s brief encounter, I knew this man was owed honesty.
“I don’t know how to explain without seeming as selfish as Laine.”
“I want the truth, no matter how it sounds.”
“It’s like I told you before. The truth is that I like my life now, Aidan. I’m in school, and I have the play, and it’s everything I dreamed of having. You and I are messy and complicated, and we hurt. It’s all too much with us, and I don’t want to go back to the girl who was afraid of losing you. She wasn’t strong. She was in pain. And that was mostly because I didn’t like her very much. But I like myself now. I’m not the girl who used to think she wasn’t good enough for you. I don’t need you to bolster my self-esteem. I like myself,” I repeated.
He frowned. “I’m glad, Pixie. I really am. But did you ever think that maybe I’m the one who doesn’t like themselves very much?”
No. I hadn’t. “Why wouldn’t you like yourself?”
“Because I resented my sister for dying. And just when I thought maybe I wasn’t such a bad guy, the kid I loved was ripped out of my arms and I couldn’t do a fucking thing to stop it.” His voice broke. “She doesn’t look at me the same way, Pixie. Ever since … I’m not her hero anymore.”
Tears filled my eyes, remembering the way Sylvie loved him. I hadn’t asked him about her enough. I hadn’t wanted to cause him pain, but maybe he needed to talk about it. “I don’t believe that for a second.”
He looked away, but not before I saw the wet in his eyes. “Aye, well, you weren’t there to see Sylvie when she saw me for the first time after their move over there.”
I knew if he felt that way that there wasn’t anything I could say or do to make it better. Only time would handle those feelings. However, I needed him to understand something too. “Us being in a real relationship won’t bring her back, if that’s where this conversation is going.”
He jerked like I’d hit him. “I don’t fucking think that.”
“Well, do you think being with me will miraculously make you like yourself better, because I can tell you from experience, Aidan, it won’t. Only time can give you that.”
“Aye, no doubt you’re right,” he said, eyes blazing. “But in the meantime, I don’t want to lose the one thing in my life that makes every other thing in it worthwhile. You’re everything to me, Nora. Every bloody thing. I never knew happiness like it until I met you. And maybe that scares the shit out of you, but news fucking flash: it scares the shit out of me too. I don’t know if it’s fear holding you back or if what you really need right now is to be alone. All I know is that I won’t love you selfishly. I was going to keep you in this fucked-up arrangement you suggested, hoping that somehow loving you, even if only through sex, would bring you back to me.”
He stood abruptly, looking down at me with that love and anguish that made me shiver in my seat. “But I can’t do it, Nora. I can’t take what you don’t really want to give me. If you’re to be mine, I need all of you to be mine, because all of me is yours.”
Tears spilled down my cheeks, and I couldn’t speak for the lump thick in my throat.
Crushing disappointment strained his expression and he looked at the floor. His voice was hard as he said, “I’ve been offered a job producing a studio album in New York. I’m going to take it. I’ll most likely get a flight out on Monday. Concerning you and me? Once I’m gone, I’m gone for good. I won’t stay on this roller coaster.”
Leaving me?
Aidan gone?
I couldn’t process that properly.
NO!
I’d already lost him and now I was going to lose him again.
This time … my fault.
“I’m going for a walk, and when I come back, I’m sure you’ll be gone.” He strode toward the door, bending down to put on shoes that didn’t match his sweat pants. He didn’t even seem to see them. As he stood, the scream inside of me threatened to burst out, and I felt the sound coming as he opened the door.
But before it could, before he left, he turned back to me. “If you figure out that everyone changes, bit by bit, day by day, Nora, while somehow staying the same, then come find me. If you figure out that we’ve got nothing to fear from the people we were yesterday, and that you certainly don’t, that I know who you are and I love you, then come find me. Just because it takes more than falling in love to find yourself doesn’t mean that losing yourself in another person can’t be fucking beautiful. I promise you, Pixie, being lost in each other for the rest of our lives will be the best thing to have ever happened to either of us.
“And if you figure that out in time, come find me before I leave.”