Exposed (Madame X, #2)(43)
His thumb wipes at my eyes. “Don’t cry, Isabel. Please.” His voice is low, quiet, careful. “It’s all so hard to explain.”
“You can put your mouth on me, and let me suck you, and you can put your finger in—in my . . .” It’s hard to say out loud, but I force myself to speak my mind, bluntly and without filter. “You can put your finger in my *. You can come on my breasts. You can lick my *. But you can’t have sex with me?” I feel proud of myself for saying those words, for speaking so daringly.
It’s not my way. Or rather, it wasn’t Madame X’s way, but perhaps it is how Isabel talks.
He closes his eyes, squeezes them tight, breathes out a harsh sigh. “Isabel—”
“I don’t understand, Logan. I’m trying, but I don’t.”
“Everything up until now, it’s been amazing. You are amazing. You’re a dream. You’re so much—so much more, in every way, than anyone I’ve ever known. You overwhelm me.” He touches my cheekbone with his thumb. “I feel like I’m drowning, sometimes, like you’re an ocean and I’m just trying to stay afloat. And . . . the thing is . . . I want to drown in you. I like the way it feels. To lose myself in you. I feel like—god, it’s hard to put in words. Like there’s nothing else, no one else, like the world doesn’t exist. I feel like in this moment I could just be with you and make love to you and touch you and make you feel good, and there would be nothing but us forever. I could sink into you, and we’d disappear into each other. It’d just be us.”
“Me too, Logan. I am drowning. I’ve drowned. I can’t breathe without you. I’ve tried. I don’t know anything else. I just want this. I want you. I want us. Please, Logan.” My voice shakes on the last two words.
His eyes waver, flick from my eyes to my mouth, back to my eyes. “There’s more than just us, Isabel. I can’t ignore that. I want to, but I can’t. There’s so much that’s gone before this moment, and we both know it. There’s just . . . so much.” He breathes, long deep breaths, as if girding himself to speak unpleasant truth. “I want you, Isabel.”
“You have me, Logan.”
“Let me say this, okay? First, you have to understand that I’m not rejecting you. I want you. I want this. I want us. And this is honestly the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Saying no, it’s harder than anything I’ve ever had to do, and I mean that. I see that it hurts you, and I hate it more than anything.”
I draw a breath. “You told me you’d rather have an unpleasant truth than a good-sounding lie. Well, so would I, Logan.” I sit up, bringing the sheet over my chest and facing him. “So give me the truth.”
He sits up, too. Drapes the sheet over his lap. His brows furrow. His hair is tangled, and his mouth flattens in a hard line. “If Caleb showed up right now, what would you say to him?”
I sag, my breath leaving me. I burn, and I want to weep. “I don’t know. He’s not here.”
He lets silence hang for a moment. “You’ve walked away from me for him twice now, Isabel. I don’t hold it against you. I understand your position as well as anyone can, I think. But . . . until I’m sure you won’t walk away from me for him a third time, or a fourth, I just . . . I can’t commit all the way. I want you. But I don’t want to share you.”
“You’re not sharing me, Logan. And—” I break off, summon strength from anger. “But you can do all those other things with me, touch me in a way no one ever has, do things with me that I’ve never done before. But you can’t have sex with me?”
He just looks at me. There is sadness in his blue eyes. “Yes, Isabel. I can make you come with my fingers and my mouth. I can touch you, and kiss you . . . I can do all those things. And if you walk away from me, I’ll survive it. I’ll have those memories, for good or ill; I’ll never forget this time with you, whatever happens next.” He pauses to think. “If you were just some girl I was passing time with, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But you . . . you mean something to me, Isabel. If it were just about sexual attraction, I’d be inside you right now. I want that so bad I can f*cking taste it. I can feel us, Isabel. But I just—I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if we have sex, it won’t just be having sex. When we do that, it will mean . . . everything. For both of us. And when we do that, I know I won’t be able to quit you, and I won’t be able to let you walk away, and I won’t survive it if you walk away from me.”
“I won’t walk away.”
His eyes blaze. “You can’t say that. You and Caleb have unfinished business. You know it, I know it, and he knows it. And you can’t promise me that if you come face-to-face with him again, you’ll choose me instead of him.”
“Logan—” I say, but I stop because I’m choking. “Damn it, Logan.”
“Say I’m wrong, Isabel.” He touches my chin and I have to look at him. His indigo gaze is the most tortured thing I’ve ever seen. I believe him when he says this is the hardest thing he’s ever done. I see the pain in his eyes. “Sex means something, honey. It does. People pretend like it doesn’t. People pretend like they can just f*ck a thousand different people and none of it ever means anything, that it’s just doing what feels good. But if you find that one person who resonates with the music of your soul, when you find that one person whose very presence takes up all the spaces in your heart and makes your soul sing, makes your body feel more alive and beautiful and loved than you’ve ever felt, you realize that sex does mean something. I’m guilty of cheapening it just like everybody else. But I know better. If sex were meaningless, if it were just hormones and fluids and pheromones and a few minutes of pleasure, it wouldn’t hurt when we get cheated on. But it does hurt, because it does mean something. When Leanne cheated on me, it broke something inside me. I tried with Billie, but the longer things went, the more I realized that I was shut off, and that I’d never invested in her, or in any idea of an us between her and me. It was casual sex, just with one person over a long period of time. But it was still empty and meaningless and didn’t fill anything inside me, didn’t resonate. I thought Leanne and I resonated, and she proved me wrong.”