But trust is trust and a promise is a promise. She shared herself with me. I can do no less with her. As for the feeling that I’m slicing myself open with a dull spoon…surely it will fade once I get this over with.
Though the story is always there at the front of my mind—it’s not like I’ve been able to ignore it or go around it or forget it, no matter how hard I’ve tried through the years—it still takes me a while to find the words. To make my lips form the unfamiliar shapes. And even when I do find them, even when they start pouring out of my mouth like poison, they taste rusty and unfamiliar. Like the lock I’ve kept on them for so long has somehow melted into them. Somehow turned them metallic and dirty and bitter. So, so bitter.
“First off, what happened in my hotel room yesterday morning…it really did have nothing to do with you. You were perfect, amazing.” I cup her cheek, stroke my thumb over her impossibly high cheekbones. “I’ve never wanted a woman the way I wanted you that night. The way I want you still.”
“You don’t need to say that.”
“I don’t need to say anything,” I counter. “But it’s the truth. If we’re going to try to build this trust thing between us, I owe you that much, don’t you think?”
It’s a rhetorical question and I don’t wait for her to answer before I continue on. If I pause too long, I’m afraid I’ll never get the words out.
“So, I feel like I have to preface this by saying that I’ve never had sex like that before. So raw. So devastating. So hot. And I’ve never let myself even think about doing to another woman what I did to you.
“Even as I was doing it, there was a voice inside of me telling me to stop. Telling me that I was getting too close to the edge, too close to the line I’d set myself years ago. I ignored the voice, the warnings—how could I not when you were so responsive, so beautiful, so goddamn perfect? I ignored it all and I stepped over a line I swore I’d never cross. I hurt you—”
“You didn’t!” She sits up abruptly as she says it, half-passionate, half-distraught. “You gave me more pleasure than I’ve ever felt before.”
“And more bruises.” Once again, I trace a finger over the one on her jaw. “Anyway, I woke up in the morning and saw what I’d done…and it freaked me out. Hell, it sent me into a panic. I’d behaved like an animal, had ravaged and bruised and spanked you. And worse, as I lay there looking at you, there was a part of me that wanted to do it all over again. That’s why I kicked you out. Not because I didn’t want you, but because I did. Too much.”
“There’s no such thing as too much,” she tells me as her long, delicate fingers stroke softly over my back, my chest. And though I’m telling this story, though I’m in the middle of revealing my darkest secret—my biggest shame—my body still responds to her. My breathing quickens, my dick goes hard and my hands ache to touch, to caress.
But I know if I do we’re going to end up right back where we were at this time yesterday and I don’t want to go there. Not right now. Not when there’s still so much for her to understand.
And so I grab on to her hands and press soft kisses to her palms before sandwiching them between my own. “I can’t do this if you touch me,” I admit as I gently squeeze them. “There’s no way I’ll be able to get out everything I need to say to you.”
For a second, she looks like she’s going to argue, but in the end she doesn’t. She just squeezes my hands in return, burrows closer into my chest.
I take a deep breath and continue, though it’s the last thing I want to do. “I didn’t just accidentally become a behavioral analyst for the FBI. I mean, obviously, you have to work hard and have some pretty impressive credentials to get the job, but that’s not what I mean. A lot of the people I worked with had started out wanting to be field agents or psychologists or police detectives. Very few of them ever actually set out to be profilers. I mean, who volunteers to crawl inside the minds of some of society’s most depraved individuals and tries to see the world the way that they see it? It’s not a pretty place and usually, the FBI picks profilers and analysts from agents who have a knack for the job, who see things a little differently than the others. But that’s not how I got the job.”
Her eyes are wide as they search my face, but her voice and her hands are steady when she says, “You went after it. From the beginning.”
Fuck. This is harder than I thought it would be and I never once imagined it would be anything less than excruciating. “I did, yes.”
More silence as I try to form the words, try to force them out. But how do I say this? How do I just thrust it out into the open when I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to hide it?
Veronica takes the choice out of my hands when she cups my face between her palms and looks deep into my eyes. “Tell me,” she says.