Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 93140 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 466(@200wpm)___ 373(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93140 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 466(@200wpm)___ 373(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Grant squinted. “Are you asking me if I like to role play or have any fetishes?”
“I guess. I just found certain things worked for me, while others didn’t.”
He took the wine glass from my hand and drank the other half. “I’m not particular. But now I’m desperate to know what you’re into.”
I let out a nervous laugh and took the empty glass from his hand. “I need more wine for this conversation.”
After I refilled, I led Grant over to the couch. “Can you just pretend you didn’t open Beauty and the Beast?”
Grant shook his head with a wicked grin as he lifted my feet onto his lap. He began rubbing. “Not a chance, sweetheart. Spill it. What’s your kink?”
“It’s not really a kink.”
“So let’s hear it. Or do I need to unveil your full Disney collection and figure it out for myself right now?”
I drank a little more liquid courage. “I found that I sort of like videos where the woman is pleasuring the man.”
Grant stopped rubbing. “You like to watch a woman give head?”
It was the new millennium. I shouldn’t be embarrassed by anything that empowered me sexually, yet I bit my lip and nodded.
“Jesus Christ,” Grant grumbled. “You’re fucking perfect. How the hell did you ever have a dry spell?”
I laughed. “My dry spell was self imposed. I have a pattern. I pick an asshole to date. Then I blame it on the entire sex and take a long hiatus.”
“You’re sitting here with me. Does that mean I’m an asshole?”
I sipped my drink. “I don’t know, are you?”
His playful smile wilted. “I can be. But I don’t want to be to you.”
“It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to figure out where my issues come from. I have some serious trust issues, Grant. My dad used to accuse my mom of cheating all the time. I’ll never know if there was any truth to his accusations. I like to believe there wasn’t, and he was just irrational and unstable. But that’s what they always fought about, and were fighting about the night he ended her life. When he panicked and took off, he left me handcuffed to a radiator where no one found me for two days. And yet I still have a tendency to be attracted to dominating, asshole men.”
“And you see me as one of those?”
I shrugged. “I don’t now. Though I never see it at first. I like confident men—ones who are assertive and exude a certain kind of energy. You definitely fit that bill. But in my experience, the men with the take-charge personality I find so attractive don’t necessarily make the best partners. The last guy I dated was really controlling. He didn’t like me hanging out with my friends, and when I did, he’d check up on me. When I told him to back off, he had a way of making me feel guilty for wanting my own space.”
Grant took my hand. “I’m sorry. We all have past relationships that carry into how we deal with things in the future.”
“You know how I finally decided it was time to get rid of Scott, my ex?”
“How?”
“Without even realizing it, I’d started to click my pen.”
“And that means…”
“Scott had a pet peeve. He hated when anyone clicked their pens.”
Grant squinted. “You said Bickman hated foot tapping and heavy perfume and you used to do those things to secretly annoy him.”
I smiled. “Bingo. I was unconsciously doing things to annoy him. That’s not a sign that screams stable relationship. So I broke things off.”
“I’ll have to remember that. When you type at me in all caps, I’ll know what it means.”
I laughed. “Is that your pet peeve? Not sure you should have shared that with me.”
Grant smiled. “You have a wicked side, Saint James.”
I felt like I’d shared a lot of my past, yet I didn’t know too much about his. At least not the important stuff. I knew he was adopted from foster care, but I got the feeling his baggage didn’t come from that.
“Can I ask what happened between you and your ex-wife?”
Grant’s jaw flexed. He looked away for a minute and then stared down when he finally started to speak. “Lily had a similar background to me—an unstable mother with no father in the picture. Except her mother was mentally ill, not an addict like mine. When we first met, I was attracted to her because of how different she was than everyone else. I didn’t know back then that mental illness was hereditary. I thought she was spontaneous and wild. And for a long time she was. But slowly, over time, the highs she ran on started to spiral into lows. There was no middle ground with her.”
I’d learned a lot about mental disorders over the years. A part of me always wanted to believe there was something wrong with my father. I wanted to blame what he’d done on anything but him, because it would be easier to accept that he’d killed my mother if it wasn’t his fault. So I knew bipolar disorder and other depression-related illnesses often started in a person’s twenties.