Hours and almost one bottle of wine later, she had filled her notepad with suggestions from the ten magazines she had spent the evening scouring. The overall advice was the same in all of them except for the one encouraging her to be a daredevil. Shit, it was either that or start dressing like a slut and making sexual advances toward Mac. One even suggested in a roundabout way that she invite her man to her house for dinner, wear a dress, and sit in front of him. Then after a few moments of small talk, she was to open her legs and start touching herself. According to the author of the article, it would have him eating out of the palm of her hand . . . or eating something for sure. She could feel herself blush furiously just thinking about doing that. Mac would probably have her committed. “Poor Ava’s finally snapped.”
She wanted Mac in every way, but damn it, she was essentially a twenty-eight-year-old virgin. She had never had a real sexual relationship with a man. Like most single women her age, she had needs and desires. Her vibrator took the place of a real man in her bed and she had learned to live with that. It was the safe way out. When she needed to take the edge off, she used it. Sometimes . . . most of the time it was Mac’s name that she called as she reached orgasm.
She didn’t know how to function outside of that, though. She could probably talk to her sister-in-law, Ella. She had confided that she had been a virgin when she met Declan. That was where their similarities stopped, though. Ella might have lived a sheltered life before she met Ava’s brother, but she hadn’t spent her life running from past trauma. She wasn’t scared of intimacy or afraid she’d freak out during sex and humiliate herself.
Part of her knew that Mac would take care of her and help her overcome her fears, but the other part didn’t want him to know how messed up she was. His opinion of her mattered. She wanted him to see her as strong and confident, not scared and insecure. God, what would he think if he found out that she had picked men up in bars for years, paying them to come home with her for a few hours, just to keep up the pretense that she was normal? She knew it sounded bad when she thought about it, but it seemed to make people look at her with less pity when they believed that she was dating. Normal, unattached women her age had sex, right? She wasn’t normal, and she wasn’t having sex, but it was all about perception. Throw people a few tidbits here and there and they drew their own conclusions. In this case, the assumptions were wrong.
Ava had spent years believing that one day she would cross some invisible line and she would be worthy of Mac. It was kind of like holding on to an outfit in a smaller size thinking you’ll lose weight and fit into it in the future. Well, fast-forward ten years and the damn outfit still didn’t fit and she was no closer to making it happen. That was where she was: still dreaming of the day that it all came together and she woke up normal, in love, and with Mac.
Looking down at the magazines spread over her couch and coffee table, she felt a wave of despair. This was it? All that was standing between her and losing Mac to another woman was a bunch of magazine articles? Self-help and advice for the romantically hopeless. Shit, short of the boob job, she planned to try some of the other suggestions. What did she have to lose? Mac was probably with Gwen tonight, maybe having sex. While she was sitting home alone, just like always. When had she given up? At what point had she stopped trying to get better and instead accepted that she was broken beyond repair? Had her friendship with Mac unwittingly become a replacement for a real relationship with him? While he was in the military, there hadn’t been any real pressure. Actually, it had made it easier for her to communicate with him knowing he was too far away to drop by unexpectedly. She saw him when he was home on leave, they wrote and talked on the phone, but she didn’t see him every day. When he finally came home for good, they just fell into the routine of spending most of their spare time together. They went for drinks, had dinner, hung out at each other’s apartments, and attended family events together. They were more of a couple then than many married people she knew. Things had been going so well that they were almost back to where they were before her attack, only now they were both very much adults.