Page 111 of Forget Me Not

He waits for me to reply, so I do, even as the numbness takes over and I’m not sure what I feel anymore.

“I love you, too.”

I suppose the warning signs that your marriage is coming to an end start off as small things in a lot of cases. Less time. Less sex. Less words spoken between each other.

Before Jack and I got married, we had sex all the time. By the time our wedding rolled around, we’d fallen into a comfortable rhythm that gradually dwindled as time wore on. He’d stop watching me change with that ornery sense of wonder I’d grown so used to having. That same look that made me feel desired. Attractive.

My friends told me it was normal.

My gut told me otherwise.

When Jack and I wrecked, we’d been fighting so much that our sex life had suddenly reached all new heights in the form of makeup sex. The kind that feels desperate. Like trying to hold onto something melting through your fingers.

With Jack, it was a rollercoaster of emotions rising and falling with our relationship since the very beginning. With Reid, it’s a steady climb to the top that has me questioning just how high we can go before this thing between us turns volatile.

I’m not comparing the two men. Just myself with either of them and my experience with the all of two men that I’ve slept with. Both were good. Both are bad. Just in their own ways.

I’ve never had a line drawn in the sand so clearly for me as I do with Reid. In the outside world, we’re just two people. No one’s in charge. No one’s got the control.

In the bedroom . . . that’s a different story.

I like Reid in charge. I like the idea that he is driving the sex between us. I like that I can put my trust in him to make me feel things I’ve never felt before and give myself over to the idea of my own sexuality without having to worry about what position my body should be in or how I should be moaning.

With what he does to me, I literally don’t have to think.

And it’s fucking freeing.

Reid and I fall into an easy routine over the next week. He goes out, rents a boat with Al or stays at the inn, fixing little things that need repaired and otherwise playing our surrogate maintenance man. I teach my art class or go about my daily duties at the inn. Sometimes he corners me and drags me into an empty closet or the third floor.

No one would suspect that every night ends with me moaning his name.

It’s only a few stolen hours every night, but each one is like a little diamond, sparkling brilliantly in the sun. We eat dinner, we talk about life and all its problems. I end up on his lap, kissing him feverishly until I feel like I won’t be able to breathe if he doesn’t touch me. He’s warm, powerful, groaning my name in a way that makes my body tight with need.

Unfortunately . . . that’s where it ends.

Each night ends, before the grinding and heavy petting can get too far, with him gritting his teeth and pulling away with a husky, “Get some sleep, little bird. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He doesn’t stay the night—not that I want him to. That would go against this . . . arrangement between us. Doesn’t mean that sleeping beside him the first time wasn’t magical.

Waking up next to a naked Reid is something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

I spend most of the first night after he leaves embarrassingly optimistic under the guise that oh, he’s probably just tired.

The next night I spent confused and a little hurt at his abrupt departure, wondering if there’s something wrong with me.

The third night, I laid in bed, hot and bothered until I drifted off into a fitful night’s sleep filled with dirty sex dreams that cast Reid as the main character and left me angry the next day.

By the fifth night, I refuse to unlock the door when he arrives.

“Nope. You’re being weird.”

Reid chuckles darkly, a sound that goes straight to my core and sets up the scene for the raunchiest of dirty fantasies. He leans forward, his forearm on the doorframe of the screen door, and looms over me. Even with the screen to divide us, it gives me a front row seat to the gun show of his biceps bulging in the black t-shirt he’s wearing and does nothing to curb my need for him.

“Let me in, little bird,” he murmurs, like a vampire trying to glamor his way into my bed.

If only that were the case. Maybe it would explain the warmth between my thighs at that growly voice.

And also why I open the door and let him enter.

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