Page 36 of The Spice Play

I kept us both upright with one hand on the mattress, but the other wrapped itself around her waist instinctually, returning the gesture in the best way I knew how that wouldn’t cross a line.

“Thank you,” she said, the sound muffled as she spokeit directly against my skin. Warmth from her breath heated me, the pleasant scent of flowers surrounding me, and God I was lucky my shirt was long enough to pool around my hips because there wasn’t a single chance my boxers would hide the base reaction my body was having. “It’s really hard for me to assume that any guy I meet is even halfway decent because of him, but you being this nice to me is kind of breaking that down.”

How bad must he have been formeto be the kind of person that broke that mold? I liked to think that I wasn’t a bad guy when you boiled things down, but she’d literally watched me shove my skate into someone's chest earlier.

She pulled back a bit, and I wanted to tighten my grip, wanted to let her hug me just a little longer, but I thought better of it. I didn’t know what kind of trauma I was working with here, and I didn’t want to push her in the slightest.

“What happened?” I asked when she slipped away from me entirely, her lower lashes damp and clumped together. She settled down right in front of me, her knee touching my thigh, her hands falling into her lap as her mouth scrunched up to one side. “If you don’t mind me asking, I mean. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

Her lips unscrunched and quirked upward on one side, the saddest little smile I’d ever seen on an adult woman taking shape on her face. “Morris, uh, didn’t… he didn’t believe me when I told him that I wasn’t capable of having kids,” she said, swallowing audibly as her gaze averted from me, finding a home in her lap instead.Shit.“I had told him when things first started getting serious, and we’d talked about it a few times over the years before he proposed. I think he just didn’t want to hear it and didn’t want to consider what that would mean, you know? But hecame with me to my yearly pap smear a few months after we got engaged, and I was chatting with the doctor about wedding planning and all that — he wasn’t even paying attention, just staring at some game on his phone, but the moment she asked me if we planned to do IVF after the wedding, all hell broke loose.”

I didn’t know a lot about struggling with conception, but I didn’t knownothing, either. There was a period, before everything went downhill, when Taryn was concerned that she wouldn’t be able to conceive naturally, and I remembered the sleepless nights we’d had and the overwhelming feeling she’d struggled with that something about her was incorrect while she waited for the results of her fertility tests. I couldn’t imagine brushing that off or pretending like it wasn’t happening. For all her faults, I’d still been right there, holding her hand at four in the morning while she cried her eyes out.

I didn’t know what to say to Nelly, not when I didn’t know her well enough to ask specific questions, but I found myself reaching out to her regardless, dragging my fingers across her thigh until I reached her hand. I at least knew how to hold that.

“He checked out after that, I think,” she said softly, her eyes locked on our joined hands. I dragged my thumb over the back of her hand, over and over, over and over. “That was when he started sleeping with Ruby.”

“Oh, fuck,” I sighed, adjusting my ice pack with one hand and squeezing her fingers with the other. “Don’t tell me Ruby is?—”

“Yeah,” she said, letting out a small, bitter laugh. “She’s who he’s marrying. He was a music producer, she was a wedding singer… can I make it any more obvious?”

I blinked at her, the joke settling in, and the moment itclicked, I snorted. “Did you just make a “Skater Boy” reference in the middle of this?”

Her lips quirked up again as she lifted her gaze a little, looking at me through heavy lashes. “Maybe.”

“Unbelievable. Here I was thinking we were having a serious discussion about your piece of shit ex,” I laughed. I squeezed her hand again, and she chuckled, pushing the little stray strands of brown and blonde out of her face. I tried not to let it worry me how natural and easy this felt, how much it reminded me of the night I’d gone back to her apartment with her — it had startled me, then, how easy I found her to speak to, to touch, tokiss.

“Weare,” she chuckled. “Anyway, my point is, I didn’t know about it for months. And when he finally told me about it, he claimed he was just struggling with the idea of us not being able to conceive naturally, which isinsanebecause he knew for years. And I just… stayed. I stayed, and stayed, and stayed, and we put the wedding on hold, we canceled our venue. I was naive enough to believe that he just needed time to work through it between my best friend's thighs and that he’d come back better. And when he didn’t, or rather when he realized I was just waiting and not getting a hint, he packed up and left while I sat and stared at him. I just froze.”

“God damn,” I cursed, shifting my weight forward and leaning just a little closer. “Not trying to be entirely inappropriate here, but why thefuckwould he choose to sleep with anyone else? I mean, there’s a reason I spoke to you and not someone else at Smokey’s. How on earth were not enough for him?”

She laughed hollowly again, her eyes shifting from me and dropping back to her lap. “Honestly?” she said, her cheeks deepening in color. “It was because I’m terrible inbed.”

I reeled back a little, my nose scrunching, my brows folding in.What?I couldn’t see a world where that was true — sure, I hadn’t let her touch me that night, but she’dwantedto. The only scenario I could think of where someone could truly be a bad lay was one where the person didn’t even try to contribute, and that couldn’t be the case with her. “Bullshit,” I said.

She took a deep breath in. “I am.”

“Didhetell you that?”

She nodded, and fuck, it was like my heart was breaking for her all over again. Had he created some sort of complex?

“Have you slept with anyone else?”

“Yeah, one guy in high school who didn’t complain, but I think he was just over the moon to be having sex at all that he didn’t think to question it. And the handful of guys I’ve slept with since Morris and I split…” Her low lip caught between her teeth, slowly dragging along until it popped back into place. “Well, none of them ever called again, so.”

Including you.

The words were unspoken, but they hung in the air, mildly accusatory and wholly understandable. I’d contributed to that feeling for her. It made sense, now — all of it. Why she’d been so upset by it, why she’d kept her distance the last week after I’d advanced on her, why her face had fallen when I’d left in a hurry that night. She claimed I was breaking a mold for her, but I was just as guilty for reinforcing it.

“I’m sorry. That was shitty of me,” I offered. I swallowed, the words I wanted to say getting stuck. I wasn’t sure if it was the hour, the lightly dizzying pain meds I’d downed, but the words came out anyway without a second thought. “If it’s any consolation, if I had even the slightest worry that youwere bad in bed, I wouldn’t have wanted you the moment I saw you again. And I did.”

She looked at me through heavy lashes again, that deep red tinge to her cheeks doing things to me that it absolutely shouldn’t have. I slipped my hand from hers, using it to lift her chin instead, leaning just a little further forward despite the ungodly pain from my knee.

Maybe I shouldn’t have said it. Maybe I was taking advantage of someone who was clearly emotionally unstable right now, but I couldn’t help myself, not when it came to her — the words came out whether I wanted them to or not. “I still do,” I said, hooking my fingers around the side of her neck and pulling her just a little closer.

Her eyes blew wide, but she didn’t pull back, didn’t run from me. She stayed perfectly still.

“If you’re so bad, Nelly,” I rasped, pushing up onto my good knee and bringing myself closer, closer,closer, “all you really need is the right teacher.”

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