Page 33 of Wild, Wild Cowboy

“And you want to discuss that?” I asked.

For the life of me, I could not wrap my brain around this conversation. Normally, I didn’t have this problem with women. Of course, most of my conversations with women had more inuendo than substance. The only thing we reallydiscussedwas her room or mine. A nice babbling brook of a conversation, never too slow or too deep.

With Hannah, that babbling brook had a tendency to plunge straight into a waterfall I never saw coming.

“I think it’s going pretty well. Do you?” she asked.Hopefully. And the crazy thing was, she looked at me like she wasn’t sure how I would answer.

I leaned forward. “I think it’s going so well that if you asked me to join you here in the bathroom, I’d do it.”

Her eyes darted to the bathroom door like she was actually considering it. Then she shook her head. “Chloe’s only pretending to read her psych book. She’s watching us.”

I glanced to where Chloe stood leaned over her book that lay open on the counter. Jo’s didn’t tend to be very busy on weekday afternoons, so there was nothing keeping her from getting some studying done. As I watched, she looked me dead in the eyes and flipped a page, not even trying to hide the fact that she was spying on us. I smirked back at her.

“All right,” I said. “Your place, then?”

She shook her head. “There isn’t time. I have to be back at the library in forty minutes. That would give us only fifteen minutes for…stuff.”

“Plenty of time. You’d be amazed at thestuffI can accomplish in fifteen minutes.”

“Iamamazed. That’s the thing.” She gave me a perplexed smile, then took another bite of her sandwich. “How is this so easy for you? And how do you make it so easy for me?”

“How iswhatso easy?” I asked, honestly baffled.

“Sex.”

“Because itiseasy.”

“Not for me, it isn’t. And usually not for my partners, either.” She paused. “When they’re with me, I mean,” she corrected herself softly. “Sex isn’t easy for people when they’re with me.”

Here came that waterfall.

I wasn’t cut out for this, for heady waters tossing me about so I couldn’t get my footing. I wasn’t the person people came to for deep feelings. I was the person they came to so they wouldn’thaveto feel those deep feelings. But I couldn’t walk away from her just because I was swimming out of my depth. I had to white-knuckle my way through it.

“Hannah,” I said in all seriousness, because if she kept looking all sad like that I was going to have to find her ex-boyfriends and ruin their lives one by one, “I really like fucking you, and I think we should do more of that.”

She stopped looking sad. “Well, good. Because I’ve been thinking aboutwhyit’s so different with you. Do you know what it is?”

“Yes.” I nodded firmly. “It’s my magic dick.”

She snorted. “It’s a very nice dick, but no. If it were actually magic, it would have made me come, and it didn’t.”

I reeled back against the booth, clutching my chest like she had shot me there. “Goddamn, Hannah. You can’t justsaythings like that.”

She pushed up her glasses with a little frown and blinked at me. “Why not? You already knew it was true.”

“Duchess, truth has no place in a civilized world.”

She squinted at me like she was trying to decide whether to take me seriously. “If you really thought that, you wouldn’t have made me touch myself in front of you.”

I grinned. “Touché.”

She gave me that perplexed look again. “I think it’s this, right here. This is why sex is different with you. It’s because we’re friends. That’s why it’s easy.”

That knocked me back a bit. “Friends?” I repeated. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Had I ever been friends with a woman? Essie. And James. But they were both paired up with my brothers, so maybe they didn’t count. Not that I hadanything against being friends with a woman. It just hadn’t happened before.

She nodded. “We’re friends. That’s why we can talk like this, and why talking like this doesn’t end in disaster.” She pulled off a bit of crust and popped it into her mouth. “I was never friends first with anyone I dated. A classmate would ask me out, or a co-worker, or what have you. We’d go out on a couple dates, decide to be exclusive, and then we’d have sex. My therapist told me to be honest, and I tried that, I really did, but talking about sex only ever made things worse. Because it meant I couldn’t fake it anymore.”

I nodded slowly. “I could see how that would happen, if he’s an insecure dillweed.”

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