Page 140 of The Moment You Know

“I did read that, but I thought it was really lame. There’s better romance out there. My all-time favorite reads are rockstar romances, but I’m also a huge fan of the motorcycle club romance, too. I’m a little obsessed with both of them, actually. But, I like the age-gap romances, too.”

“Hold up. How many ‘favorites’ do you have?”

“It depends on my mood. Sometimes I want to read something old-timey and sometimes I want straight-up, unapologetic smut.”

“Okay, that makes sense, I guess. So, do you read all this—” he cleared his throat, “—literature on a Kindle? Or do you carry around books with ripped, bare-chested men on the covers?”

“How do you know about books with ripped, bare-chested men on the covers?”

David grimaced. “My mom has some. It’s not uncomfortable, or anything, thinking about her reading them, either.”

She laughed a little at his discomfort. “Well, I do have a few of those books, but most of what I read is on my Kindle. I love my Kindle. You can be reading the dirtiest sex scene and no one around you knows. It’s fantastic. I take it everywhere I go.”

“Everywhere except the doctor’s office, though, right?”

She blinked at him. “What?”

“Isn’t that where you read scientific magazines?”

It took Paige a split second to recall the ridiculous conversation they’d recently had about scientific magazines and when she did, she struggled to maintain a serious expression. “Yes. You’re absolutely right. I take it everywhere but the doctor’s office.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“So, anyway,” she said, quickly moving on, “along with all my reading, I started watching porn for the first time in my life. Now, you may be wondering why—”

“Not really, no.”

“—but I really like watching good love scenes in movies so I figured it just made sense to check out some porn.”

“Sure.”

“I found that I liked ‘romantic’ porn, which sounds ludicrous because it’s porn, but I needed to see some connection between the two people having sex, otherwise it felt detached and indifferent. And I didn’t like watching that, because it made me think of … me.”

Her words, along with the flash of sadness in her eyes, had David reaching over and pulling her in for a hug. “Jesus, don’t say that. You were never detached and indifferent.”

“Yes, I was.” Her voice was muffled against his chest. “But that’s what abuse does. It corrupts the natural and makes intimacy inaccessible. I know you probably don’t like to hear it—”

“I don’t. Fuck, I really don’t.”

“—but it’s the truth.”

Paige pulled back a little so she could look at him. “There was obviously something wrong with me sexually. We both knew it, even if we didn’t know what it was at the time, but now that we do, we have to let it be real. Because my sexual dysfunction was real. I spent a significant amount of time in therapy working to overcome it and that didn’t happen without complete honesty.”

Her expression turned pensive. “Do you remember the things you said to me the night you left?” she asked quietly.

He did and the memory made him want to puke.

“That was honesty. You gave it to me then and I need it from you now. It won’t hurt my feelings or make you sound like an asshole, if that’s what you’re afraid of. I don’t want you to lie about how you felt, or how you saw things, because not only does that minimize my trauma, it also minimizes yours, too. And before you say you weren’t traumatized, yes, you were. My sexual dysfunction hurt you in many ways and even though it wasn’t intentional, it did happen. Every time you pretend it didn’t, you invalidate your pain, as well as your reasons for leaving me.”

“Okay,” David agreed reluctantly. “Complete honesty.”

He must not have been convincing enough because Paige gave him a skeptical look. To prove his sincerity, he crossed his fingers and held them up for her to see. “Complete honesty and I are like this. I swear.”

“We’ll see,” she said, then picked up the thread of their conversation. “So, this was a really strange time for me. Between all the books I was reading and all the porn I was watching, I started to feel like a horny teenager.”

“I saw that coming a mile away,” David told her with a roll of his eyes, then leaned forward, as if he was going to share a secret. “Oh, and just so you know, if you’re going to tell me you were shoving your hand down your pants every day, that won’t be a surprise to me, either.”

“First of all, it wasn’t every day,” she countered with a straight face. “And second of all, sometimes I was wearing a skirt.”

---