CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Gavin’s constant gaze keeps prickling my skin. It’s all I can do to concentrate on the work rather than on the way his smoldering gaze is sliding all over my body like hands.
I feel myself responding as if he’s touching me: My breath has gone shallow and sped up; my skin feels hot and has stippled into gooseflesh. My nipples are hard beneath my shirt and sensitive enough to almost hurt. I hope the guys can’t see them because it feels like an advertisement. If they do, maybe they’ll assume I’m cold rather than turned on, but still I feel like I’m broadcasting need — or at least my feminine body. I’ve never thought my body was anything special, but if Gavin sees my nipples the way he looks right now, part of me feels sure he’ll reach out to touch them like a hungry animal. And worst of all, I can feel my chest heaving with an involuntary response, arching a bit to press my girls against my shirt like a betrayal, showing him what could be his if he wanted it.
Which I don’t want him to know because it’s not true. Brandon Grant only confirmed something that’s been clear from the start: Justified or not, Gavin Adams is a broken heart waiting to happen. I’ve been stupid enough to fantasize (behind Lisa’s back, telling her the opposite) that he’d be different with me than he is with everyone else. It doesn’t matter that he beds a new girl every night, that the floozies swarm when he plays. It doesn’t matter that they all want him, that they won’t stop wanting him, that he won’t stop wanting them. It doesn’t matter that he only seems to deal in single-serving relationships. I’ve been rationalizing a lie: that for me, things would be different.
Why should it matter that he only has one-night stands? He won’t with me.
Why should it matter that he’s as addicted to pretty girls as any man with a drug? That will all stop if he ends up with me.
Why should it matter that he looks at women like meat? He must want me for more than that.
But as I try to keep my mind on the music we’re making together — trying to keep the songs’ potential front and center because there is a future here if I can keep our minds out of the gutter and use Freddy as an unwitting chaperone — it’s hard. The more I try to give Gavin my coldest, most professional shoulder, the more he seems to want me. It’s classic reverse psychology, except that I’m not trying to manipulate Gavin at all.
He’s looking at me like he looks at all the girls: like a steak. Like something delicious to have once then be done with.
That should repulse me. It should, in fact, make me want to reach out and slap him, tell him that I’m not that kind of girl.
Instead, I’m sitting here unable to focus with my nipples hard and my panties wet.
And oh, God, I’m so wet.
As Freddy takes over the conversation, I try paradoxically to focus on my arousal. Because if I’m reduced to such base symptoms as hard nipples and creamy girl parts, then this clearly isn’t what I’d want anyway. If I’m sensing animal lust from Gavin and am responding in kind, then this proves Lisa’s point, as rammed home by Brandon: Gavin Adams is not a relationship man. Unless sex is all I want, I need to stay away.
For me, the potential of sex feels like a beginning. Gavin’s wanting eyes on my flesh could, in my mind, be our first next step. We’ve waited, after all. He didn’t sleep with me the first night, or the second, or the third. We’ve only had one real date, but at least we had one, which isn’t something any of his other conquests seem able to say. There have been a few informal dates, too. So in my head, we’ve had relationship foreplay. It might be time, if Gavin weren’t such damaged goods. With another man — a proper man, who’d stay with me and love me as I unfortunately seem to love him — sleeping together would feel like the next logical step.
But for Gavin, I’d be another notch on his bedpost.
I know this, but the truth is hard to keep front and center. It’s hard to turn from his glances, from the desire written all over his face. Because it’s the right time for us, and my body wants his — not as a conclusion, but as a start. I want to wake up beside him and have more of the Gavin I already love. But because of the way he does things, according to several accounts and my own eyes and common sense, that’s not what would happen. To him, sex is a goal. The surest way to lose our affection would be closing the loop.
It’s an awful conclusion, but if I want to work with him — and I do — I can’t forget it: the only way to stay friends is to remain right here at the bleeding edge — always wanting, but never satisfying.
Just thinking it makes my legs want to buckle — or squeeze together to quench the need. It’s so unfair. I want him and he wants me, but we can’t take that step. We haven’t taken it before now, and that says something. So we’ll keep not taking it, and that will say something, too.
Still, I want to believe it could be different. I even tried to argue what I’m thinking now to Lisa before I headed out, and she said that was my pussy thinking. That’s Lisa for you. “Men aren’t the only people who can think with their genitals,” she warned. And it’s true. Because right now, the intelligent place between my legs has all sorts of reasons that my logical conclusions are wrong.
He really is different with you.
He doesn’t just want your body. You’ve seen it: he wants you, for you.
He respects you. He laughs with you. He likes you.
But maybe that’s the way it is with other girls? It almost has to be. And, in fact, my cranial brain insists, he does laugh with the hot college girls in the club. And as far as liking and respecting? As far as being your friend? Those are tricks men like him pull to get girls into bed.
So don’t be stupid, my head says.
I’m not being stupid. I’m thinking clearly, my body replies.
He doesn’t love you. He can’t, and never will.
But I might love him enough for both of us.
Inadvertently, my carnal brain scores a point for the other team with that last one. I might love him enough for both of us? That’s the kind of thing only stupid girls think, and I’m not stupid. That’s the kind of thinking that gets teenagers pregnant and keeps women with bad men who hit them. You can’t love for someone else, and thinking so is asking for trouble.
If Gavin loved me — if he even had a chance of ever loving me — he wouldn’t shut down every time I got close.
If Gavin loved me, I’d know about the accident, Charlie and Grace, and what she meant to him from Gavin himself. But I only know because Chloe told me, and even now Gavin doesn’t really know that I know. He won’t open up. He won’t let me try to help. I’ve told him about the thorns inside me, but he’s told me nothing.
If Gavin loved me, he’d want my help. He’d want me to help make it better.
If he loved me, he wouldn’t run from the thing that most deeply connected us. He wouldn’t have buried his sheet music, or refused to let me try, in his presence, to remember the lyrics. That day, for the spell of three or four minutes, Gavin opened his heart to me. I could feel his ache in the music. I spoke to that pain, and he let me. I told his story — eerily well, according to Chloe. It’s hard not to believe there was something there, and I’ve wanted to try and recapture it since.
But not Gavin. To him, that moment was too real. Maybe too painful.
And if that’s how it is then fine. I understand. It’s clear he loved Grace, but if he can’t even face it with me, it proves he could never love me the same way. Not really. And probably not ever.
And if what I see in his eyes now is merely a physical need, I’m not interested. My body is, but not my heart. So I’ll resist. I’m strong enough to do that. The more time passes with him looking at me this way, it’s like prolonged foreplay, and it’s as if I can feel his lips trailing down my body, kissing my nipples, running his tongue between my legs. But I can fight it. Even if I have to come right here on this chair without so much as a finger touching me, I can do it.
Because I deserve better than just sex.
I deserve all of Gavin if I’m to have any of him.
And if I can’t have all of him, I’ll just keep waiting — and suffering — until we both find someone else.