“Liv. No. Please. I need to know,” she laughed. “How bad is it? How terrible would it be if it came out? I can help you with damage control if I know what to expect.”
I narrowed my gaze at her, knowing damn well that wasn’t why she wanted to know. She was morbidly curious, and if I were honest, I would be too if it wasn’t happening to me. “Almost everything but sex.”
“Oh, my God,” she breathed. “In public.”
“Kind of.”
“What does that mean?”
“He… I don’t know. We were discreet, but we were wildly fucking drunk, so I don’t know how effective that was,” I sighed. To my left, an older woman stepped into the aisle closest to us, nonchalantly browsing book after book. Should’ve known it was a bad idea to hide near the romance section. I lowered my voice. “He, uh… touched me, at a bar. But then he rented a private balcony at another bar, and the curtains over the windows kept shifting, and… more things happened.”
“Oh my God.”
“I sat in his lap somewhere else and I’m about fifty percent sure my ass was on display. That was… that was far too public. But the worst of it was behind closed doors.”
“In the hotel room?” she asked, her cheeks blushing as she tried to contain her smile. It wasn’t working.
“In a bathroom,” I clarified.
“Liv. How bad was that?”
“So bad that we were almost having sex,” I croaked.
“You realize people will put hidden cameras?—”
“Please don’t finish that sentence. Please.”
She nodded as she downed the last of her drink, shaking off whatever heat the topic had given her. “Okay. Right. Yeah, I can see why you’re worried.” She stared at the carpeted floor for a moment, the cogs in her mind visibly turning, and I wasn’t sure what plan she was concocting but I was desperate to hear it. “How big was it?”
Well, that was a disappointment. “Seriously?”
“I’m just curious!”
I shook my head. “I barely remember. I was practically blacking out when I saw it.”
“But from what you remember…?”
Covering my heated face with my hands, I audibly groaned into them, wanting to hide from the world and her and my parents and Damien. “I don’t think my fingers touched when I wrapped them around it.”
“Oh. My. God.”
“Please stop imagining yourself in my shoes and enjoying it,” I huffed.
“I’m not?—”
“You are.”
“Okay. Fine. I am a little bit,” she laughed, letting her grin take over. “I just don’t understand why you want the annulment so quickly. You could, like, enjoy it a little more. You’re married, after all. You could just lose your virginity and be done with it. He’s hot as fuck, Liv.”
I shook my head, nausea churning my gut at the idea. That wasn’t a possibility — not when I barely knew him, not when I’d been saving myself for something special like my parents had drilled into me, even if he was incredibly attractive. “I can’t. I don’t want to. I need to keep my distance from him.”
“But you’re tempted.”
“Shut up.”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” she sighed. “Have you spoken to him at all?”
“Nope. Like I said, keeping my distance.”