Page 110 of This Could Be Us

“Then let’s go upstairs.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

SOLEDAD

Sometimes when I’m nervous, I say weird things.

“I reviewed a dupe for that comforter last week.”

Judah stands beside his bed with its slate-gray duvet and tilts his head to consider me. “What exactly is a dupe?”

“Oh, um… a duplicate. Like a cheaper version of the real thing.” A breathy laugh slips out. “It wasn’t as good as this one. You made the right choice.”

A smile cracks Judah’s serious expression, and he slides his hands into the pockets of his dark jeans. He’s wearing an MIT sweatshirt.

“MIT,” I prattle on. “Very prestigious.”

“So is Cornell.”

“True.” Excitement and nerves have apparently atrophied my brain. I gulp and lick dry lips.

Dry lips?

Oh, my God.

Where is my lip balm? I’m having sex with someone who is not Edward for the first time in nearly twenty years, and I have chapped lips.

“I think I left my purse downstairs,” I say, my voice emerging high and strained. “I need my lip balm… um… my purse. I’ll be right back.”

He grabs my hand before I reach the door and turns me to face him. He frames my face with big, gentle hands and dips to my height, holding my eyes with his. “We don’t have to do this.”

“What?” I cover his hands with mine, blinking at stupid tears. “But I want to.”

He breathes out a shallow laugh. “Are you sure? Because I haven’t done this in a long time, but I don’t remember conversations about comforters and lip balm as foreplay.”

“Then I guess you weren’t doing it right.” I smile into the warmth of his palm. “I’m sorry. I’m nervous. I haven’t been with anyone except Edward since college, and for the last two years our sex life was almost nonexistent.”

“You know I haven’t been with anyone other than Tremaine since college, and we’ve been divorced almost four years.”

He towers over me, strong and virile, and my curiosity overtakes my nervousness. “How did you do it? Abstain for four years?”

“I told you I’m not into casual sex. I know that’s unusual, but—”

“Do you masturbate a lot?” The words shoot out of my mouth like bullets from a misfiring rifle. “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

I close my eyes, mortified, but let out a sigh of relief when I see him grinning.

“Well, do you?” I ask again, grinning back.

“When I need to. I run more, though lately…” He gives me an assessing look and then awhat the hellshrug of his wide shoulders. “Since I met you, I would say the rate has probably tripled.”

“You mean running?” I tease.

One of his hands slides from my cheek to splay across my throat and tip my chin back until I meet the molten want in his otherwise inscrutable expression. “No, the other one.”

“I think about you when I touch myself,” I confess.

He goes impossibly still, like a statue burning from the ground up with all the heat gathering in his eyes.

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