Naked

by Megan Hart

  I believe it’s possible to look back and pinpoint the moment when something good turns to shit in front of you. I know for a fact it’s also possible to know it’s going to happen even before it does. I didn’t want this to end. I didn’t want to lose Alex—and I didn’t want to give him up.

  But I knew I was going to.

  He brought me coffee, and I almost said nothing. He kissed the top of my head and nuzzled my neck, and I almost said nothing. I closed my eyes and felt his touch, heard the soft whisper of his breath. I pulled away.

  His sigh turned harsh. Resigned. “You’re pissed off.”

  I clicked carefully with my mouse to close my project. A dialogue box popped up. Changes have been detected in your document. Do you want to save? Yes or No.

  I’d spent a few hours working on this piece, and it was still crap—worse off than it had been before, as a matter of fact. Time wasted, but a lesson learned.

  I clicked No.

  I swiveled slowly around in my chair to face him. “We need to talk.”

  Alex’s eyes narrowed the tiniest amount, followed by the smallest tightening of his mouth. He nodded, though, and pulled up the straight-backed chair to sit in front of me. He hadn’t yet dressed or even showered, and his rumpled hair and low-hanging pajama bottoms invited my caress.

  Everything about him still seduced me, and I had to look away.

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I know my father is an asshole. I’m sorry.”

  My breath actually hitched at his words, my throat closing so tightly I thought for a moment I wouldn’t be able to breathe. My head whipped up so fast my hair slapped my cheeks. I thought he was fucking with me, but one look at Alex’s face told me he really had no clue.

  “I don’t give a flying fuck about your dad, Alex.”

  “So…then what are you pissed off about?”

  I stood to get away from him. To move. To give my body reason and focus, so I didn’t give in totally to anger. I faced him, but from a safe distance. He couldn’t reach me—I couldn’t touch him.

  “How could you take me to that house, to meet those people, without telling me the truth?” Each word bit out, jagged and sharp. “How could you stand there and introduce me to her without telling me in advance who she was?”

  I’d seen him be many things, but never stupid. Even so, no matter what else he was, Alex was still a man. And any woman who’s ever had one knows how smart men are doesn’t have much to do with their IQs.

  “Who?”

  “Anne,” I said tightly.

  His face went a little blank—not as much as I’d seen it in the past, but enough to show me I’d poked him someplace tender.

  “Anne is Jamie’s wife.” He put the emphasis on “wife.”

  “And Jamie,” I said. “Christ, Alex. Did you think I wouldn’t see? Did you really think I wouldn’t figure it out?”

  “Jamie’s my friend.” He didn’t look away from me, though the intensity of his gaze made me wish he had. “My best friend.”

  “And what about her? Anne? What is she?” Without waiting for him to finish, I stepped forward. He retreated. “You took me to their house and you pushed me in front of her without telling me you’d slept with her, and then you dropped me to run off with your BFF. Do you know what an idiot I felt like? Do you even understand why it might have been important for you to tell me that hey, by the way, I fucked my best friend’s wife?”

  His mouth opened. Then shut. Alex straightened, his shoulders going impossibly broad as he put his hands on his hips. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t like…that.”

  I pulled in a breath that hurt my throat. “What was it like, then?”

  For the first time during our conversation, he dropped his gaze.

  I stepped back, my stomach sick. My heart sore. “You…love her.”

  “No,” he said at once. “Not anymore. And not like you.”

  I swallowed bitter bile. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Yes!”

  I could’ve stretched out my hand and he his, and we might’ve touched. But we didn’t. Vastness stretched between us, and there was more to come.

  “That you loved another woman you’ve never mentioned, not once. You gave me a laundry list of just about every other person you ever fucked, but you never once mentioned her. The one you loved.”

  “I just…” He shrugged, looking helpless. He scrubbed at his hair, making it wild. “Does it matter who I loved first, so long as you’re who I love last?”

  This went deeper than an ex-girlfriend. “Does your bestie know you fucked his wife?”

  “Yes. He knows.”

  I swallowed again, hard. Alex had told me many times he would tell me the truth, if I asked, and I’d spent too much time not asking. “Look at me.”

  He did. Many times I’d seen my Alex with blank eyes and smile, putting on a face for the world. He didn’t do that now. He gave me everything I hadn’t asked for, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t see it.

  I thought of two men, standing too close for friendship. I thought of Anne, whose gaze had followed them, knowing and accepting…and loving despite what she knew.

  I could not be that woman.

  And I could no longer not ask.

  “The three of you?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “A few months. Years ago. It’s over, Olivia. I swear to you, it’s over.”

  I knew that without him telling me. I’d seen it in Anne’s face when she’d looked at him, and heard it in her voice when she’d told me to love him anyway.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He ran a hand through his hair. “Because I didn’t think you’d understand.”

  “Is she the reason you didn’t go home for so long?”

  He opened his mouth and I waited for the lie, but then he nodded. “Yeah. The shit with my family isn’t ever going to go away. But what happened with Jamie…”

  “And Anne,” I said, my tone challenging him to say her name in front of me.

  “Yes. With Anne. I didn’t think I should go back. But then I met you, and everything seemed different. Olivia,” Alex said, “I love you. I want to make a life with you. And I don’t want to never see Jamie again…but…I won’t, if you don’t want me to.”

  I couldn’t ask him to do that. I swallowed again, my throat sore from holding back screams and tears. “You should’ve told me anyway. I’d have been upset, but it would’ve been better than finding out the way I did. I felt stupid, Alex.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  I believed him, but that didn’t matter. I looked at the ring sparkling on my finger and twisted it back and forth from underneath with the pad of my thumb. I wouldn’t have minded crying, but though I felt the tears in my throat, behind my eyes, nothing would come. I looked at him with clear eyes—nothing blurred, nothing out of focus. I saw Alex for real, with nothing but truth between us.

  “Do you love him?”

  He hesitated again. “Yes. But I never fucked him, Olivia. I swear to you.”

  “Do you want to?”

  He moved closer then. “No. Not anymore.”

  “Does he want to fuck you?”

  “Jamie,” Alex said, “knows when to stop. Look, Olivia, Jamie and me…we’re a pair of douche bags when we get together. I know we can be fucktards.”

  I’d seen them together and knew there was something more than friendship between them. There’d always been; it seemed there would always be. And unlike Anne, I wasn’t sure I could ever just watch it happen.

  “Is Cam yours?”

  Alex said nothing, though his jaw dropped. He shook his head and ran a hand through his hair to cup it at the back of his neck. He paced. “No. How…Fuck, no. That boy’s Jamie’s, through and through.”

  “He looks like you.”

  Alex whirled to face me. “He’s not mine.”

  “Are you sure?”

&nb
sp; “I’d have to count the months,” he said, his voice on the verge of sarcasm, “but yeah, I’m pretty sure. And even if he were mine, Olivia…that kid isn’t my son.”

  My breath caught on a small squeak. “How can you say that?”

  “You of all people,” he said, “ought to know.”

  Then the tears came, sliding down my face in thick, wet streaks. Alarm twisted his features. This time he was the one who moved, I was the one retreating.

  “Olivia—”

  “I can’t do this, Alex. I thought I could. I thought it wouldn’t matter to me, but it does.”

  His breath hissed out. “I don’t understand.”

  I took the ring off and held it in my palm. He stared. I watched his throat work as he swallowed, hard, and his mouth slipped open, wordless. He made no move to take the ring, and it glittered and shone on my palm the way it had on my finger.

  “I thought it would be different with you. I wanted it to be.”

  “It is different with me,” Alex said in a low voice. “You know it is.”

  “Not different enough.” I put the ring on the desk. I crossed my arms tight over my stomach, gripping my elbows. It was the way Anne had stood in her kitchen, and I understood why.

  “You’re breaking up with me?”

  Everything about him went hard. His shoulders, his jaw. His eyes went to ice. His fingers curled into fists at his sides. “Because of what someone else did to you? Because of the lies someone else told you? I should fucking pay for someone else’s sins?”

  It was my turn to say I was sorry, though the words slashed my throat and left the taste of blood on my tongue.

  “I never lied to you,” Alex said in a stiff, cold voice. “You knew everything about me. And I thought…I thought you would understand. You, especially, would understand.”

  “Because I loved Patrick,” I said flatly. “You thought I could love another gay man? That it would just be that easy?”

  “I thought,” he said, “that you could love me.”

  “I would always wonder,” I told him, “if I was…enough.”

  I wasn’t proud to see my words had broken him. Alex took a step backward, toward the door. The hem of his jeans dragged on the floor. I couldn’t stand to look at his naked feet.

  Everything about us was suddenly, terribly naked.

  He paused with his hand on the door. “Fucking men doesn’t make me gay any more than fucking women makes me straight. You can either trust me or you can’t. There’s nothing I can do but love you, Olivia.”

  “I envy you,” I said. It wasn’t what I thought I was going to say.

  “Why?”

  “Because you know exactly who you are. And I have no idea who I am.”

  “But how could you ever think you aren’t enough?”

  “Because I’ve never been enough,” I said. “Never enough of one thing or another. I don’t know how to be enough, Alex. I don’t know who I am, or who I should be.”

  Alex crossed to the desk, where he picked up the ring. He put it in my hand and closed my fingers over it. “Then let me help you find out.”

  Shadow and light. Truth and lies. I didn’t want this to end, and neither did he.

  “You don’t have to choose, you know.” He said this into my ear before kissing my throat, my collarbone, the slopes of my breasts. He tugged a nipple between his lips, and I sighed. “You don’t have to be any one thing, Olivia.”

  “I’m not sure I could be if I tried.” I ran my hands through his hair, always just a little too long. “But what about you?”

  He smiled and pushed himself up on one elbow. He ran a hand over my naked belly. “I choose you. I’ve been an asshole for most of my life, Olivia, but I swear to you I will be a faithful asshole.”

  I laughed and cried at the same time. My ring flashed as I ran my hand again through his hair. “I do trust you.”

  “Good.”

  “But the rest of it…about getting married in a church, or…”

  “We’ll get married wherever you want to get married. Whatever you decide. I’m easy that way.”

  I gave a playful peek at the cock tent made in the sheets. “You’re just plain easy.”

  “Yes.” He kissed me softly, then a little harder, hands roaming.

  I stopped him long enough to cup his face, to look into his eyes. “Remember when you said you thought this would be easier?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry it’s not.”

  Alex traced a pattern on my belly with a fingertip, then laid his hand flat upon it. “I’m not.”

  “No?”

  He shook his head and looked at me. “Nope. Nothing worth having is easy and all that shit.”

  “You’re such a philosopher.”

  He kissed my belly in the place he’d just traced. “Let’s just say I spent a lot of time fucking up. I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to make this work with you.”

  “I want to make it work with you, too.”

  He kissed me again, lightly, just over my belly button. “It’s a deal.”

  “I like that,” I whispered. “Do it again, a little lower.”

  He obliged. Then lower still, until he nuzzled at my thigh. He nipped. He laughed. He licked my clit and made me squirm, then held me still while he kissed and stroked and sucked. But he didn’t let me come.

  That he saved for when he was inside me, propped on his hands to keep from crushing me. I tasted sweat when I kissed him. It tasted good.

  Later, when we had finished but weren’t done—I thought maybe we’d never be done, Alex and me, and that was just fine—I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling, where once he’d pointed out the shape of an angel.

  “I love you, Alex.”

  He sounded sleepy when he answered. “I love you, too. It’s going to be all right, Olivia. No matter what happens. Okay?”

  He was sleeping when I crept from the bed and grabbed my camera from its loyal place on my dresser. He didn’t move when I took the first photo, or the second. He shifted, though, when I crawled back on the bed and held the camera at the end of my arm, pointing down, clicking to capture whatever moment this was.

  There were shadows, so we were half in dark and half in light. And there was a blur to the corner that might have been a woman’s shape, if you looked closely enough. There were layers in this picture and many things to see.

  He opened his eyes and kissed me, and I put the camera down to let him.

  I didn’t have to decide if I was one thing or another. If I was both and neither. Everything and nothing. It’s okay to struggle to find our place in this world and the person who will take us for who and what we are. Sometimes we dress ourselves in layers that only get peeled away in the end, to leave us as we should be.

  Naked.

  NAKED

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-6413-1

  Copyright © 2010 by Megan Hart.

  All rights reserved. The reproduction, transmission or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission. For permission please contact Spice Books, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Spice and Colophon are trademarks used under license and registered in Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

  For questions and comments about the quality of this book please contact us at Customer_eCare@Harlequin.ca.

  www.Spice-Books.com

  ter>