Page 33 of Unrealistic Expectations

He kissed her on the forehead—he couldn’t seem to stop doing that—and said, “I’m going to go start dinner, and I’ll bring you some wine in a few minutes.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jessica would most certainly go out of her mind—in a very clinical sense—if Galvin didn’t fuck her tonight.

She knew he was attracted to her. They’d been intimate a number of times. And, even though she’d finished, he hadn’t taken things any further. It was going to give her a complex. She was out of practice in flirting, and she wasn’t sure what else to do.

It was on the verge of stressing her out, even though she was sitting in bathwater that smelled like him in his perfect bathroom in her dream house. When he came back in, he’d changed into a T-shirt and jeans, his feet bare. He held a giant glass of red wine in his hand. Before handing it to her, he placed a bamboo table over the bath. All this to make her comfortable and happy.

The one thing that she wished he’d do but didn’t was look at her. She was not a “naked person.” She felt fine about her body. It met societal standards of thinness, and somehow she’d never got caught up in diet culture because she’d never had the impulse to be noticed for her appearance. But she wanted Galvin to see her. She wanted him to think she was sexy and desirable.

“There you go.” He put the wine down and turned to leave.

“Stay.” She hadn’t meant for that to sound like an order, but it had. “Keep me company.”

He pointed with his thumb to the bathroom door like he was trying to leave a party. “I should really start dinner.”

“I’m not in any danger of turning hangry in the next five minutes.” She wrinkled up her nose at him. “I really need your company right now more than food.”

“Okay.” He didn’t seem to want to stay.

“What is going on with you?” she asked.

He shrugged. “What do you mean?”

Jessica sighed. One thing about being in a relationship for so long was that she’d gotten out of the practice of articulating her thoughts. She and Luke had known each other so well that they didn’t have to sit down and have conversations about little moods. Each little mood had practically been shorthand. And, honestly, she missed that.

Maybe she needed to embrace the weirdness and awkwardness of getting to know someone new.

“You seem really uncomfortable with me here,” he said. “Do you want me to leave?”

When she shook her head, he sat down on the floor next to the tub with his knees pulled toward his chest. He rested his forehead on his folded hands between his knees. He waited so long to speak that she almost got up out of the tub.

“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” he finally said.

Jessica was confused. Despite the fact that she was worried about making him uneasy, she’d never been more comfortable in her life. They’d been dating—even though it was sort of fake and sort of not—for weeks now. She was more comfortable with him than she had been with a few of her therapists in college.

“I’m not uncomfortable. Why would you worry about that?”

He lifted his head and looked at her. She loved his eyes. Even though the whole package of him was lovely, he could seduce someone with his eyes alone without even trying. “I want you, Jessica.”

“I’m more than okay with that, Galvin.” She took a sip of her wine and hoped that he wouldn’t notice that her hands were shaking. Because then he might leave the room without them actually making any progress. “I want you, too.”

“How much I want you scares me,” he said. “I’ve never felt like this before, and I am so afraid that I will screw it up that I feel like I can’t do anything. I don’t want to try any of my usual moves on you, because it feels wrong. Dating and sex were always just for fun before. But the stakes are higher here.”

“I’m not going to make a video disparaging your prowess in the bedroom. You’ve made me come enough times that I could honestly serve as a character witness for your abilities at this point.”

He laughed softly. “You’re so amazing.”

“I’m not. I’m just me.”

“But that’s amazing to me.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Your mother is the worst person I’ve ever met in my life. She would actually try to extort money from her own daughter—”

“And you kicked her out of my house. You did something that I’ve never been able to do.” Jessica reached out a free hand and put it on his knee. It would leave a wet mark on his jeans, but she needed to touch him. “And I know you weren’t doing it to protect yourself. You were just thinking about my feelings. You’re a more caring person than I think you know.”

“I care about you.” He shook his head. “I think all of my past relationships have been about my own ego, feeling good in the moment, or networking.” He said the last word like it was dirty, and she supposed it was. “All of my relationships have been transactional until this point, and I feel so fucked up right now because I can’t control what I feel for you.”

His words heated her to the very core. “That’s not a bad thing.”

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