“We fit,” Ruby observed quietly. “And look. I got you on the bed with me this time.” She reached up to smooth away the lines that had formed on my forehead. “To be clear, I want to spend time with you, and cuddle while we talk,” she assured me. “We don’t have to get naked before dinner. Or after.”
I smiled, reaching forward and running a palm over her stomach to her opposite hip. “Tell me about your family?”
“Let’s see . . .” Her hand reached up to run along my neck and into my hair. “I have one brother, my twin—”
“You have a twin brother?” I asked. How could I have kissed her, watched her bring herself to orgasm, given her another one with my hand earlier and spent the last five days with her without knowing such basic information?
“Yeah, he’s in med school at UCLA. His name is Crain.”
“Crain? That’s not a name you hear every day.”
“Well, everyone calls him by our last name, Miller, but yeah.” She ran her fingers over my scalp, lost in thought. “He’s good people.”
“And your parents?”
“Are married,” she said, meeting my eyes. “They live in Carlsbad, which is just north of San Diego. I think I mentioned they’re both psychologists.”
I pulled back to study her. “How is it possible both of your parents are psychologists and you seem so . . . normal?”
Laughing, she pretended to shove my chest. “That is such a stupid stereotype. One would think if the parents were both very good shrinks, their children would be better adjusted, not worse.”
“One would think.” I felt my lips press together in an amused smile. She . . . she was unbelievable. “So you grew up in Carlsbad before attending UCSD?”
“Mmmhmm,” she said, focusing on where she drew her finger back and forth across my collarbones. “Happy childhood. Cool parents. Twin brother who only occasionally dated my friends . . .” She seemed distracted, and confirmed it when she stretched up, kissing my throat. “I’m a lucky girl.”
“No demons, then?” I murmured.
Ruby pulled back slowly, her eyes clouding for a heartbeat. “No demons.”
I studied her face, sliding my hand up to her ribs before telling her very quietly, “That wasn’t very convincing.” I had no idea why I’d asked that, but now I needed to know. My chest grew tight with this feeling of diving deeper, of making this into more than flirtation, kissing, groping. This here was what I needed but was also most terrified to seek: intimacy in words before action.
“Fine,” she said, smiling a little. “But you first.”
I blinked, surprised. Despite having asked her this, I hadn’t really expected the question to be turned back on me. “Well, I suppose my childhood was fairly happy as well. Looking back I realize we were rather poor, but children don’t often notice things like money shortages when they have everything they need. My marriage, as I may have mentioned, was rather . . . quiet. Especially compared with a childhood filled with rowdy brothers and sisters. We didn’t argue much, we didn’t laugh much. There wasn’t much left holding us together at the end.”
She brought her hand to my jaw, following the shape of it with her fingertip as she listened.
“I suppose my demons are my reserve, and how I fear I spent the better part of my teens and all of my twenties with a woman I probably won’t know for the rest of my life. It feels like a bit of a waste.”
“Your reserve?” she repeated quietly.
Nodding, I murmured, “I always wonder if I come across the way I mean to with people.”
“How do you mean to come across?”
“Friendly. Interested,” I told her. “Responsible.”
“You come off as responsible.” Her lips tweaked into a smirk. “Maybe a little aloof.”
Laughing, I admitted, “That’s fair. I’ve always been the quiet one, a bit awkward. Max and Rebecca, who are closest to me in age, were the clowns. I’ve been the contained one, but it also meant I got away with things they didn’t.”
“This sounds like a story I need to hear . . .”
Shaking my head, I bent to kiss her jaw, speaking into her skin, “Your turn.”
When I pulled back, she looked at my chin, her finger drawing lazy circles at the hollow of my throat.
“Ruby?”
Blinking up to meet my eyes, I watched as she took a deep breath. “I had a bad boyfriend my freshman year,” she said, simply. The words were just vague enough that I wasn’t sure how she meant it. Was he violent? Fickle?
“What do you mean—”
“Maybe calling him a boyfriend isn’t exactly right,” she said, tilting her head on the pillow as she considered her words. “We went out a few times and he wanted sex before I did. He got his way.”
When I understood what she was telling me, my heart seemed to try to claw its way up my throat, so my words came out strangled. “He hurt you?” As I looked down at her thin frame, her delicate jaw, full lips, and wide, honest eyes, a fire-red tempo took over inside my chest; I was consumed by a rush of anger and vengeance I’d never experienced.
She shrugged. “A little. It wasn’t very dramatic or violent, just unpleasant. It wasn’t my first time, but . . .”
My brow lifted in understanding. “It hurt anyway.”
She nodded, focusing her attention on my chin again. “Yeah. So, you asked about demons. I guess that’s mine.”
I was at a loss. I felt my mouth open, and close again. I wanted to punch a wall, wrap her up in my arms, and cover her body with mine. And then I pulled my hand back from her ribs, instinctively worried.
“Stop,” she said through an uncomfortable laugh. “That’s why I don’t like talking about it. It was a bad night, but one of the many benefits of having good psychologists for parents is that you learn to talk about things, which helped me out with this.”
Ruby seemed so wholly healthy, so composed, weathering my fits and starts easily. That said, it was all well and good to embrace the idea of being adventurous sexually with someone, but it made me regard her a bit more earnestly as someone with good and bad experiences, who not only wanted to handle me carefully, but also required careful handling of her own.
“Just ask me,” she said, correctly reading my expression. “If we’re going to do this”—she gestured between us—“then you need to know these things about me.”
“You’re not . . .” I began, feeling awkward, like I was trying on a child’s glove. I swallowed, and then swallowed again, coughing.
“Niall,” she said, stretching to kiss me, letting her lips linger at the corner of my mouth. “Ask.”
“Sex . . . isn’t an issue for you.” It wasn’t a question, and I wanted to close my eyes and vanish when I felt the hot flush of embarrassment rise over my skin. She was just so open, so comfortable being sexual.
She didn’t seem to notice, and didn’t even seem bothered by my blunt words. “It was at first,” she began. “I mean, maybe it still is sometimes. For the first year or so after I was a little . . . freaked-out. I slept with a bunch of guys, almost like, ‘Hey, universe, I choose to do this. And this, and this.’ But my therapist helped. What Paul did wasn’t really about sex. He was a mess. The times I’ve been with guys after him weren’t anything like that. I don’t feel like he broke me, but he did show me that some people are just . . . bad.”
“Do you think of it often?”
She smiled up at me and touching my lips with her index finger in a gesture that was at once sweet and maddeningly seductive. “I guess. It depends on what’s going on in my life, really.”
I felt myself instinctively pulling back.
“But especially times like now, where I’m worried it’s going to make you careful with me, or hesitant to let go . . .” Her eyes searched mine, pleading. “Promise me you won’t be.”
I wanted to promise her this, but what she’d told me simply reinforced my desire to take this slowly. “I—”
We were interrupted by a knock at the door: our food had arrived. I stood, slipping on and buttoning my shirt to let a man with a rolling food-laden table into the room. He placed it beside the bed as I signed the ticket. The room ticked in the silence; the remnants of our conversation seemed to dissolve out of the air.
Ruby sat on the mattress, curling her legs beneath her as she lifted the silver domes off our plates. The door closed behind the waiter, and I sat beside her at the table.
“Hungry?”
“Starving,” she mumbled, pouring ketchup on her plate. She leaned over, kissing my cheek. She was relentlessly right-minded. “Thanks for dinner, hottie.”
And as she tucked into her meal, it was clear that, for the time being, our conversation had moved on.