Evan Halifax did want me. Badly. Here was undeniable proof. Our bodies subtly stroked one another until tears of frustration and wonder welled in my eyes.
“Why?” I whispered. I felt so close to him in that moment, I somehow knew he’d understand I asked him why he was holding back, when he felt so much.
He pressed his lips against my temple. He kissed my neck, pausing to inhale my scent. I shivered uncontrollably in his arms.
“Because I didn’t plan for this, Anna,” he said quietly near my ear. “I didn’t plan for you. Did you ever consider that I’m just as confused as you are? Because I am. I’m scared of how much I want you.”
His confession of uncertainty stunned me. It cast a whole new light on the shadowed, possibly dangerous landscape of Evan Halifax.
When the song had finished, he led me off the dance floor. At our booth, he picked up my evening bag and handed it to me. I could feel the Cartier box beneath the mesh material. As I looked up into his eyes I knew something with a sudden, swift adult certainty that I’d craved for so long.
I’d never return those earrings.
“Let’s forget dinner here. Maybe we can go and check out that Vietnamese street vendor you like and take it up to your room?”
“You’re sure that you want to? There? At my place?” I asked softly.
He nodded. “I’m sure. Except about the street vendor thing. Let’s skip dinner.”
“Yes,” I agreed breathlessly.
I realize that so much of the beginning of Evan’s and my story sounds cliché: a young, relatively inexperienced girl swept off her feet by a handsome, worldly, older man.
Well, here’s another cliché for you. It turns out the steady handhold I needed, that certainty at the eye of the storm, was sex. The p
hysicality of it. The heat. The liberation of emotion. The feeling of being needed, and needed hard.
It was that solidity I craved, the tangible reality of flesh. Desire binds us, sometimes flimsily and shortly, but the bond is there in the exchange. What Evan and I shared that night was something bigger, though. Passion isn’t necessarily the end result of love. But it sure as hell is a great start. A start to what, I couldn’t have envisioned at the time.
It wasn’t until later that I began to understand that our connection was more than that of intense desire. Ours was the bond of fellow prisoners, a tie that time or choice couldn’t dissolve.
Thankfully, we didn’t run into any of my nutjob roommates on the way to my rented room. Somehow, it didn’t match up in my mind, the idea of introducing Evan to vegan, pot-smoking performance artist Tarquin or aura-seeing jewelry maker Iris. It’d be like presenting beings from different worlds to each other. I conveniently forgot that I was one of the denizens of that fringe existence as I snuck him up the familiar squeaky wooden staircase. I listened to Evan’s solid tread behind me, and thought how impossible it all seemed. It was like sneaking Prince Charming into some kind of alternate, hippie universe.
But Prince Charming wasn’t the right descriptor for Evan. Not unless Prince Charming burned.
He caught my hips when we reached the landing. He gently pushed my front against the wall and pressed his body behind me. I gasped in surprise and abrupt lust at the sensation of my cheek and nipples against the cold plaster and his unrelenting male body behind me. He was hard… hot. For a brief second, I had a moment of misgiving. This thing, whatever it was, between us: it was the kind of thing that could destroy me.
He brushed back my hair from my neck, and then both of his opened hands charted the shape of my waist and hips for the first time.
“I’m going to drown in you, Anna,” he breathed out, his rough, quiet voice and his lips moving on my neck, coaxing goose bumps from my skin. “I’ve waited, but it’s been so hard.” He bit gently at the shell of my ear. I shook. I couldn’t believe this was happening. At the same time, the truth glowed like an ember between our pressing bodies, growing hotter. One of his hands crept between me and the wall and swept across my belly. It lowered, leaving a trail of awakened flesh in its wake. He turned my chin—not roughly, but boldly, a hint of desperation in his touch. His mouth closed on my mine at the same moment he cupped my sex.
I moaned and pushed back against the wall with my hands, increasing the pressure between our bodies. This need was intimidating, but unstoppable. He stroked me with slow, firm, rhythmic caresses until I struggled in his hold. Not because I wanted to get away, but because I was wild to absorb more of him. He ran both his hands up my arms and pinned my wrists against the wall. He broke our kiss and sank his dark head, his lips and teeth scraping the skin between my neck and shoulder.
Had I guessed this storm raged inside him? Is that why I’d been so confused—so frustrated—by his reserve?
“Evan,” I whispered. The raw evidence of his desire left me rattled. Exposed.
“Which room is yours?” he grated out.
I only had the wherewithal to nod at the door at the end of the hall. He grabbed my hand and led me down the hallway, his mouth set in a grim, unyielding line.
When the storm finally exploded, it was epic. But I imagined that his need, which grew anguished and even forceful at times, was a tribute to me… to us. I loved it. I craved more.
All through that night, he made love to me under the cover of darkness.
When dawn peeked around the blinds, he pressed his mouth to my temple and rose from my very messed up bed.
“You must be hungry,” he said as he found his strewn clothing on the floor. I loved the sound of his low, rough voice washing over me in the muted morning light.