Not Another Bad Date

since she’d felt the hot rush from a man’s touch flow through her and the delicious pull of lust tugging at all the right places. “I might not have thought about it in a while,” he continued, “but I haven’t forgotten that night we drove to the La Quinta off I-35. Not the best place, but not exactly a dump. I didn’t have much money back then.”

She hadn’t minded.

“We had sex at least five times.”

Seven if a person counted the next morning. She took short uneven breaths in the top of her lungs as he kissed the side of her throat. The scent of his skin filled her head, and it would have been so easy just to sink back into him. To close her eyes and just feel his big chest and arms around her. “I don’t remember,” she lied, because telling the truth would make things so much harder.

He slid his palm up the front of her hooded jacket, and her uneven breath got caught in her throat. His hand lightly skimmed across the top of her chest to her shoulder. Slowly he turned her and looked into her eyes. He smiled as his hands slipped to the side of her head, and he plowed his fingers into her hair. He tilted her face up, and her lips parted. “Liar,” he said just above a whisper, then he lowered his face and kissed her. A light teasing brush of his firm lips. A wet smear across her mouth, and she stood perfectly still.

“This is much more fun if you participate,” he whispered.

She stood still while every nerve ending in her body screamed at her to grab him by the ears and participate the hell out of him. To let him make her feel good, to mold herself against him and use him to satisfy her hunger and need like a succubus, but she knew better. Nothing good would ever come out of kissing Zach. Sometimes the price of satisfaction was too high.

She wrapped her hands around his wrists and took a step back. “I can’t do this,” she said. “This can’t happen again.”

His hands dropped to his sides, and he took a deep breath. He looked down at her through narrowed lids. “It’s going to happen, Adele. If not now, another time.”

He looked so sure, her mouth got suddenly dry and she shook her head. “No, Zach. Not with you. Not ever.” She couldn’t breathe around him and walked out of the office like demons were nipping at her heels.

The next few minutes were a blur of restless nerves and raw emotion. Adele pleaded a splitting headache, which wasn’t a huge stretch from the truth, and Cindy Ann volunteered to drop Kendra off at home after the party. As she drove from the gated community, she called Sherilyn and told her sister that she and Kendra would be in later that evening.

Once she was home, shut safely inside Sherilyn’s condo, she took a deep breath and slowly let it out. Zach was wrong. Nothing was going to happen between them. Ever.

She moved through the entry to the kitchen and set her purse on the granite counter. Before Sherilyn had gotten ill, she’d been in the process of painting the mostly beige kitchen a cheery yellow. As a result, the kitchen walls were painted halfway down.

Adele took the extra house key out of a bowl in the cupboard and tied it to the string of her sweatpants. Like everything else about the sisters, Adele’s tastes were the total opposite. She preferred white walls and colorful furnishings while Sherilyn preferred color on the walls and subdued furnishings.

She grabbed a scrunchie off the counter and pulled her thick hair into a ponytail as she walked back out of the house and locked the door behind her. She’d jogged earlier, but she didn’t know what else to do with the restless energy humming through her veins. Her head really was starting to ache, and she didn’t want to think about Zach.

She stepped from the porch and took off at a familiar, even pace. The steady beat of her heart and the routine rhythm of her feet were usually a comfort, but today it was as if her past was riding her heels. She couldn’t outrun it, and it caught up to her at the corner of Crockett and Third. Her feet slowed at the bus stop near the corner and she took a seat on the hard bench advertising Tina’s Taco-rama. An old truck with a red bone hound in the back drove past, stirring up the leaves on the road and rattling the cool air with its busted tailpipe.

Would you drive me insane like you used to? he’d said as he’d lowered his face to the side of her neck. And honey, you drove me out of my mind.

She’d driven them both insane. Him because she hadn’t jumped in bed with him, like every other girl on the UT campus, the first time he kissed her. Her because she’d wanted to wait until she’d been sure she loved him, and he loved her, too. She’d waited a whole month. A short time that had felt like forever. Looking back, she couldn’t say that he’d pressured her to have sex. Not unless she counted the way he’d kissed her. So hot and intense he’d left her breathless. And not unless she counted the way he’d touched her. Slow and unhurried, a light teasing stroke to her stomach and breasts, he’d driven her crazy until all she could think about was feeling his hands on her. She’d wanted to feel her hands on him, too.

She’d had boyfriends in the past. Some with whom she’d thought she might be falling in love. Things had gotten fairly hot with some of them, but she’d never been sure they were it for her. The one. Her soul mate.

Looking back, the thought of saving herself for a soul mate seemed like an immature romantic fantasy. An embarrassing ideal that she blamed on too many fairy tales as a child, but back then she’d thought Zach was all those things and more. The man meant for her, and she recalled perfectly the moment she’d slammed headfirst in love with him. Up until that moment, she’d tried to take it slow. Tried to put the brakes on her runaway feelings, but the day he’d shown up at her dorm room with an illustrated book of flower fairies in his big hands, there was no slowing the beat of her heart or stopping her headlong fall.

The book hadn’t been expensive, but it had been perfect. Six months before she’d met Zach, she’d had the fairy queen, Titania, sitting on a rose petal, tattooed low on her abdomen, her wild blond hair strategically covering parts of her nude body.

Adele hadn’t believed in fairies for a long time, but she’d still loved the art and Scottish folklore of the Seelie Court. She had wonderful memories of her grandfather sending her out to the garden with a net to hunt the fairies he’d assured her lived amongst the roses and buttercups.

“I saw this, and it reminded me of the story you told me about your grandfather,” he’d said as he handed her the book.

She’d only mentioned it in passing, and he’d laughed at her and told her he thought she was cute. Looking at the gift in her hands had shocked her so much she’d blurted, “You went into a bookstore?” Silence fell between them, and she glanced up.

Some of the pleasure drained from his face, and he crossed his arms over his chest. “Yeah. Go figure. I can read and play ball.”

“I didn’t mean it like that!” But she sort of had meant it. As long as she could tell herself that Zach was a stereotypical jock, the more she felt they were on equal ground. She was the brains to his brawn, but Zach wasn’t dumb. Far from it. “What I really meant was, did you make a trip to a bookstore just to buy this for me?”

He looked down at her for several moments, judging whether to believe her or not before his hands fell to his sides, and he shrugged. “I thought you’d like a book more than anything else.”

“But you didn’t have to get me anything.” She felt her heart swell a little in her chest. He’d bought her a book on fairies, not because he liked them but because she did.

“Look at this one,” he said, and pulled the book from her hands. He turned to a picture of a fairy sitting on a crescent moon, her blond curly hair blowing about her head and nude body. “This one reminded me of you.”

Adele glanced down at the page, then back up into Zach’s brown eyes. Her swelling heart ached, and she felt as if she were being slammed up against something bigger than she. Bigger than her ability to stop it. She wrapped her arms around his neck and fell into that something bigger. “I love it. Thank you.” She closed her eyes and breathed in the smell of his skin. I love you.

He tossed the book on the small desk in her dorm and turned his face into her hair. “You’re welcome.” He ran his hands up and down her spine and she lifted her mouth to his. She poured everything she felt into the hot, hungry kiss. Her heart. Her soul. The love pounding through her veins.

He groaned against her lips as he slid his hands down her back to her behind and pressed his erection into her. “You make me so hard,” he said, just above her mouth. “I want you.”