The Intimacy Experiment (The Roommate #2)(70)

Sex was easy. People made it complicated with their expectations and their insecurities. Naomi had never given sex that power. She’d mastered the movements like any other dance, and as for the accompanying chemical reactions?

Well, she’d never put that much stock in those feelings.

Even the best sex with Jocelyn and Josh had never been that complex. It was just fun and nice. An expression of how much she cared about them. Hell, sometimes it was just a way to blow off steam.

Naomi had devoted most of her waking hours and many of her sleeping hours to dirty dreams of Ethan. She had employed every ounce of filthy, sexual energy she had to the idea of working him over like he was some juicy Regency wallflower and she was a highwayman with the middle name corruption.

So now that he was laid out before her, she wasn’t . . . scared. Because that would be ridiculous. It was just . . . she wanted . . .

It felt like holding on to the side of a cliff, hanging by her fingertips, and if she let go, she’d fall hard. Hard enough that she might lose herself and fly apart into a million pieces.

It was a good thing she was sitting down.

Ethan dropped to the bed beside her, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

“You’re not ready,” he said, gentle again, soft again, into the darkness.

Denial formed on her tongue, urgent and a little bit mean.

She was always ready. He wasn’t special. He was just a man.

Except.

She wanted to kiss every sharp point on him, every curve. But something inside her had locked up, and okay, maybe it would be braver to examine it instead of trying to suffocate it with her bare hands.

“I’m maybe, inexplicably, not ready,” she said, still a little mad, but also kind of in awe.

“You wanna talk about it?”

She shook her head. Emotion sat in her throat. A weird place for it, in her opinion.

Ethan leaned back, just a little, to look at her. Why was his face so . . . good? Why did his nose make her want to weep? Why did she want to find a color that matched his lips and use it to paint?

She closed her eyes against the onslaught. Breathed in and out and in again. Finally, asked her body what it wanted from her. The answer, like so much else this evening, caught her off guard.

“Can I just . . .” She moved so that she was above him, her knees hugging either side of his thighs, hovering, waiting for confirmation, because if she was confused, Ethan had to be completely thrown by this entire display.

“Of course.” He pulled her down so she could sit in his lap, wrapped his arms low around her back until she was flush against him, his scent draping over her like a blanket. His warmth bleeding into her body.

After a few minutes, her heartbeat evened out and her breathing calmed. Part of her still wanted to fight. Didn’t want to want this. But that part faded along with the tension from her limbs. Okay, so their pace was different than her usual speed. No one really talked about how so much of letting other people in involved listening to yourself.

Naomi didn’t know how long they sat like that, not speaking, her face tucked against his neck. He smelled like summer, like more daylight and going outside to lie in the grass.

Ethan brought his hand up and combed through her hair after a while, the gentle tugging the most soothing sensation she could imagine.

Okay. So this . . . holding . . . wasn’t better than sex, but it was maybe more than sex, for her at least, tonight.

She hardly ever let herself be still with anyone, too afraid that if she did, they might see the hungry gaping wound of her heart. How it wanted and wanted and wanted so much that she never fed it anymore for fear of it growing too powerful and consuming her.

Naomi knew it was okay to want closeness and comfort without sex, but asking for that still felt a little like surrender.

As it turned out, maybe this was modern intimacy.

The way Ethan breathed, even and easy, his body moving hers like gentle swells on the ocean. The way his shoulders held steady under her hands. The way he ran his fingertips like a whisper down her back. The way she could fall asleep like this, if she wanted. Safe and cared for.

Apparently, sometimes even teachers had a lot to learn.





Chapter Twenty-Five


A FEW DAYS after what she’d started thinking of as “the cuddling incident,” Naomi wrapped her hands around her third cup of coffee and, with an aggressive shake of her head, brought her attention back to the Shameless status meeting. Between the extra hours she’d put in studying for her class and waking up early this morning to adjust her lecture series notes, her head weighed about fifty pounds at the moment.

“Filming last week went even better than we’d hoped,” Cass said, filling the founders in on last week’s shoot. “Josh and I reviewed the raw footage last night, and we think we can extend the series from three videos to five, easy.”

“Oh, that’s great.” Clara moved to adjust the magnetic note cards they used to map their content calendar across a wall in the conference room. “Let’s do that and plan to keep one video exclusive for platinum subscribers. Naomi, you’ve been working on a new tiered programming structure, right? Can we review that now?”

Naomi blinked. “Sorry, what?”

Next to her, Josh furrowed his dark brows. “Last week you said you’d review the subscriber analytics and make recommendations on which types of content we should put behind the higher paywall, remember?”