Page 45 of Hate To Love You

“I…I’m on the pill,” she mumbles.

Her shirt goes flying. It leaves her body just as quickly as my soul leaves mine. That’s what her kiss does to me. In a good way. I think it doubly leaves me when I look down and study the bra she has on. It’s not a regular color. It’s freaking tie-dye. Wait, no, it’s not. That’s not what it is. It’s ombre. Yes! Score one for me.

She takes my hands and guides them to her fabulous bra. My fingers splay over the pink that turns to purple that turns to blue. Jesus, I’m dead. I’m so dead. Her breasts are so perfect. Fabulous. Fantastic. Goodorama fabtastic.

“I just thought it made sense. I never wanted to be in a situation where I got carried away, and things happened. You know, unplanned things. I didn’t want to bring a child into the world if I wasn’t fully prepared to love them with a hundred percent of my devotion. I didn’t want to be like my mom. Like…like what I thought she was, I mean. I didn’t want to abandon my own child because I just couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t know she didn’t choose that.”

My hands are still on her boobs. It feels awkward while talking about sad things, so I shift them to her waist. She leans into me. “We’ll find her,” I promise. I have absolute certainty in that. If money is good for one thing, it’s for hiring people who are ridiculously good at their job, and the PI I hired is excellent. Not like five-star online rating kind of excellent, but word-of-mouth, do-your-research, and get-into-some-pretty-dark-areas-of-the-internet excellent.

“Thank you.” She kisses me again.

Wild again.

I feel wild too. I am wild. She unleashes something in me when she bites my bottom lip. Something that reminds me I’m here right now, and so is she, and whatever came before this moment is just the past. I’m obviously not the little kid who had a crush on his best friend, or the teenager who pined for her, or the man who dreamed about her and thought about her endlessly. I’m not even the same person I was when we started all this, and neither is she. She detested me, but that’s changed. At least, I hope so. Erm, maybe I should double-check on that because hate sex has never been on my to-do list.

“You’re sure about this?”

“Heck, yes, I’m sure.” She sinks her teeth into my bottom lip in a bite that hurts but also revs my blood up like I’m cranking cold amps made of motor oil and electrodes.

That bite does something to me and makes me pick her up and carry her to the blow-up chair. It’s something that tells me setting her down on it and stripping every bit of clothing off her and licking her for eternity is a great idea.

As I said, my brain is in that awkward stage of working but not really working, and then I make one wrong miscalculation.

Pop!

She ends up on the floor in a deflated mess of plastic. I’ve got my hands on her leggings, and I’m ready to rip them off. They’re still there, but I’ve frozen. Obviously. We just burst the blow-up chair, and that thing was real legit nineties vintage. Probably why it didn’t last. Thirty-year-old plastic isn’t a great idea, apparently.

My eyes travel up, afraid she’s going to be mad because the blow-up chair just burst under her ass, and it couldn’t have felt great. But I’m relieved to see her eyes are laughing, and then the rest of her follows suit. She giggles. Then giggles harder. In a minute, she’s laughing so hard that she’s snorting real snorts. Loud ones. Air dragged through her nose kind of snorts. She laughs so hard that she has to do the double-over thing to survive it. It makes me laugh too. Infectious and contagious, pretty soon I’m bending in half with tears in the corners of my eyes.

“That…poor…chair,” Patience gasps. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry.”

“You didn’t do anything. It was just old. Probably not a great idea to keep it in a tree fort that’s not perfectly temperature controlled. And probably not a great idea to set you down on it so hard either.”

She takes my hand and pulls me to her. I’m athletic enough that when she falls back, she doesn’t succeed in pulling me on top of her or even off balance. I do shiver, though, because she keeps pulling me until she’s lying flat on the ground.

“I want you to do things to me.” It’s a different kind of breathing she’s doing now. A different kind of panting. It’s a wonderful breathlessness.

“What kind of things?” I ask.

She’s the one who basically rips off her pants right in front of me, then nearly kicks me in the chest while trying to get them all the way off. To help her, I grasp them by the ankles and start pulling.

She’s not wearing any panties. No thong, no seamless variety, no lady boxer things. Nothing. So that’s why she didn’t have any panty lines in those leggings.

“These kind of things,” she croaks.

I’ve never heard her sound so desperate. And the way she tore at those leggings…if I wasn’t hard before, I’m screaming hard now. I guess they call it that because you’re so hard that it hurts. It makes you want to scream because you can barely contain all your wants and needs.

I have to hesitate. I have to stop this before it starts because she has to know the truth—the entirety of it. I tried to tell her already but then mucked it all up. I have to be clear now because she matters too much to me to give her anything less. “If we do this, I don’t want to just be…that one-night person. I’d rather not do this than do it and have you never want to do it again.”

“Ahh. You want to be the person who wrecks me for anyone else ever again because it’s so good with you that I’ll never not want it with you.” She narrows her eyes at me. “That’s a mighty high opinion of your skillset.”

“No. I want to be the one who does this with you now and in the future because you choose to do it again and again. I want to be the one to please you. I want this to mean something. I don’t just want to be that one summer night’s fuck in a treehouse because the treehouse is amazing, and you’re feeling sentimental or just horny. I don’t want to do this for the sake of just doing this. I want it to mean something.”

“Um, said no guy ever,” she says with a laugh.

“I think lots of guys think this way. We’re just afraid to say so.”

Her eyes soften, and the rest of her follows. “I’m choosing to do this with you because it means something more to me already. I don’t want anyone else. I was just kidding about your skills. You have nothing to prove to me. I already know that, with you, it would be good. Probably nearly perfect. I know that after you, that will probably be it for me. I know what I’m signing up for. I can’t promise it will last forever, though, because who can?”

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