Page 47 of Beautifully Used
“I…” I swallowed the bit of saliva accumulating on my tongue. “That’s not why I…” I couldn’t get the words out. It seemed I was incapable of processing my thoughts into coherent sentences. I didn’t want him to think I didn’t want him to touch me. I wanted that more than anything else at that moment, but my arms went there by themselves. I wanted to tell him that.
“You’re beautiful.” The two words flowed from his lips like honey—smooth, sweet, making me see myself in a different light. I didn’t know what to say to that, but he didn’t really give me a chance since his tongue was back mingling with mine.
He moved his mouth from mine and skimmed his tongue down my chin to the front of my neck. I thought he would stop there, but he kept going. The blouse I wore left most of my upper chest bare, the material stopping right at the top of my cleavage and that’s exactly where his tongue licked and tickled. He pressed little kisses there, and I shivered at the sensation.
Without much warning, Brodie moved off of me and sprawled out next to me on the bed. His head propped up on his elbow, he stared at me. “What’s wrong?”
It took me a minute to comprehend what he’d asked because I didn’t think anything could possibly be wrong. I must have frowned, because he traced his finger down my forehead where I knew those lines showed up whenever I did. I managed a slight shake of my head.
“Something’s wrong,” he said.
When I didn’t say anything, he added, “I want to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
He continued to trace parts of my body. He’d finished with my face, tracing down my cheeks, now he was on my neck. The touch so faint I hardly knew he was doing it. “I like you.”
I smiled and started to say I liked him too, but he shushed me with his finger on my lips when I opened my mouth.
“I like you a lot, Gabrielle. A whole lot. You know … I’m usually hopping into someone’s bed most every night. Someone new almost every time. Before you came here, I did that, but I haven’t been with anyone since you arrived. Not for lack of prospects, there were plenty, but mostly because I didn’t want to. None of those women could ever begin to interest me the way you do. None of them gave me that sense of worth that you make me feel.
“I’ve gone without sex, which everyone is astounded by, even me, but I’ve done that because I want to be with you. I can’t get you out of my head. Other women are meaningless and transparent compared to you. But I want you to know I’ll go even longer if I have to. I mean, Jesus, Gabrielle, I don’t even know how you feel about me. I do know that when I kiss you, my entire world stops. My head buzzes and my body goes into overdrive, making me dizzy. Just like with a car, my body goes into high gear to maintain the speed my heart is pumping because of the way I feel about you.”
That statement made me grin. Leave it to a guy to explain the way his heart worked using the mechanics of a car.
“What I’m getting at, is, I know you must’ve had something horrible happen to you in the past.”
I started to protest. I did not want to go there.
“Shhhh, shhhh, I know something happened. And I know it’s affected you, the way you react to me sometimes. You know you can trust me, Gabrielle. There is nothing in this world that you could have done, or have done to you that would ever make me lose respect for you or change the way I feel about you. I want you to feel comfortable enough with me to tell me.”
I shook my head. “No. You’re wrong.”
He sighed and closed his eyes briefly. When he reopened them, he said, “I have another thing I want to tell you.” I watched the Adam’s apple in his throat move as he swallowed. “Beth didn’t just kill our baby. She also killed herself. She killed herself because she couldn’t forgive herself for what she’d done.”
I sat up. “Oh, Brodie, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He gently pushed me back down. “It’s done and in the past. It took me a couple of years to realize that it wasn’t my fault. I hated her for killing our baby. I’d even told her that. I’d always thought she killed herself because of what I’d said, but after talking with her sister, I realized she was troubled about a lot of things. Things I could never have known about. Things she never told me. She’d witnessed her little brother’s kidnapping and couldn’t do anything about it. A man had come out of nowhere while she and he were on a hike through the woods. The guy snatched her brother up right off the trail. She ran after him, but the man ran too fast for her to catch up. They’d found her brother’s body two weeks later, two miles down the trail from where he’d been abducted. She’d been the one to coax him into going for the hike, and she felt responsible. She’d been eight years old. Her brother just six. Her sister thought I should know that it wasn’t just the baby. She told me that Beth didn’t want to bring a baby into a world where such horrible things could happen, but then, after she had gotten rid of it, she couldn’t accept the fact that she had. There was more to her troubles, but this isn’t the time or place to go into them.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. The lump in my throat prevented me from speaking. The story about Beth was so tragic, my heart broke for him.
“Anyway, after she died, I decided that relationships were not for me and that I might as well enjoy women for the only thing I thought they were capable of giving me. Sex. Uncommitted, unadulterated sex. I’d shut myself off from all emotions regarding women.
“You can’t blame yourself for what happened to Beth.”
“I know that. I don’t blame myself anymore. I stopped blaming myself a long time ago, but I still continued to use women, and they used me. I thought it was a beautiful way of life, and it worked out just fine. Until you came along.”
He kissed me then, softly, tenderly.
“I don’t want to have sex with you, Gabrielle.”
I frowned, I think, and I felt like my whole world had just come crashing down on me. I wanted to ask why, but he shook his head like he wasn’t finished.
He kissed the spot below my earlobe. Then spoke in a very hushed, soft tone very close to my ear. His breath was warm and sweet, giving me an intoxicating sensation. “I don’t want to have sex with you. I want to make love to you.”
My breath caught in my throat as my lips formed a small “Oh.” I was unable to utter a sound as the brief feeling of rejection melted away, and my stomach fluttered at the sensual way he spoke to me.
I couldn’t move as he trailed little kisses down the front of my chest. He lifted my shirt and kissed my stomach, starting from the top of my shorts and going all the way up to the bottom of my bra.
