Shaw shook his head and swallowed hard. “Jesus, Ari. This is—”
“Something beautiful when shared between people who respect and trust each other,” I told him. “The way we respect and trust each other. There’s no one else I trust as much as you with this.”
“But can I trust you, Ari? My whole perception of you seems like a lie. Your mother warned me about this for years, and I didn’t listen. How could you expose yourself like that to me?”
“You liked it,” I said simply.
His cheeks returned to a delightful pink. “That was wrong of me. I should have put a stop to it.”
“Why? We’re both adults.”
“I was married to your mother.”
“Was,” I argued.
“You’re so young.”
“But not underage.”
“People will think I was sleeping with you while I was married.”
“Don’t they already think that?”
He frowned, and the intense look smoldered my insides. “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
I smiled, feeling more confident than on my way here. “Not for everything, but for this, I do. We belong together.”
He was lost in thought for a few seconds. Then he was back to shaking his head. He was doing a lot of that tonight, as if rejecting the ideas he was thinking about.
If only I could get him to see that this was okay. That we were okay. That someone who loved him as much as I did deserved to be with him. I would do anything for him. I did do unspeakable things for him. Things that if he knew, perhaps he would look at me differently, so he could never know.
