Page 112 of You, As You Are

Both of Iain’s hands came to cradle her head, his thumbs brushing over her cheeks. Maisie finally opened her eyes and saw how serious he was; his eyes played no games.

“You said you can’t rush,” Iain recalled, “so how about this: we build something else. Campfires might take longer to light, but they burn far longer than a firework.”

Maisie’s heart ached, because he’d understood what she’d said to him last night. With little explanation, Iain had understood. He’d sacrificed for someone else what he’d wanted once before, and here she was asking him to do it again. He was everything – she couldn’t be this fortunate to be listened to entirely before they’d even begun.

“Why would you do that?” Iain hadn’t been with a woman in over a year, Maisie wouldn’t blame him if he had urges.

“Because if you haven’t noticed,” he said, “I can’t stay away from you, Daffy. My world was fucking black and grey until you came and painted all of your colours across it. You only look at me sometimes and I feel like I want to burst.”

The confession went straight to Maisie’s pounding heart.

He’d said he could only be her friend and yet here they were. She hadn’t wanted to catch feelings for anyone right now, and yet she had.

Their bodies shifted. Feet shuffled and brought them together from the inch that they’d drifted apart. Maisie slid her hand from the back of his head to feel the bristles of his beard under her palm, stroking a line across his uneven skin with her thumb. The texture meant that he was alive – he was someonereal.

“I’m not pretending anymore, Iain,” she uttered with all her heart.

The fake dating plan?Poof.Gone.

He shook his head once more. “I don’t know when I stopped.”

They both moved at the same time. Maisie tugged his face back to hers. Crashed her mouth to his lips. All of her kiss in appreciation and awe of this man in front of her.

She’d worried last night that her feelings for him weren’t reciprocated, but none of that was true.

Her hands roamed his arms, over dips and ridges of his strong biceps to peel his hands from either side of her neck.When she pulled back from their kiss, Iain’s gaze held a question she shortly gave an answer to when she lowered on her good leg to sit on the bed.

Excitement that she’d never thought she’d see on his face flashed in Iain’s eyes as she tugged on his hands to join her. He sat by her side, sweeping hair from her shoulder closest to him.

“Campfire?” she said. He hummed, pressing his lips to the crook of her neck to make Maisie’s head tip back in pleasure. “This makes no sense. It’s always been too much to ask for someone to respect what I want.”

“You’ve had my respect, Maisie, since the day you looked at that cliff in Borth and decided not to back down from it.”

A chuckle puffed through her lips. “You pretty much had to drag me up it.”

Iain turned her hand that he still held and brought it into his lap, overlaying their palms. “I only had to encourage you,” he said, “that was all.”

Her gaze dipped to their hands on his thigh, initially, then drifted to the tented evidence that he was just as turned on as she was. Maisie couldn’t quite believe it. There were people who would say that they didn’t fit aesthetically. That someone like him couldn’t be turned on by someone like her.

Well fuck those people.

She drew her lower lip between her teeth, inhaling. “I wasn’t just talking about general courtesy.” Iain tipped his chin for her to continue as they slipped into a very necessary conversation. “I told you that I can’t be spontaneous. I want this,us. I want to do this.” She really,reallydid. “But I need … preparation.”

The cocky idiot smirked. “It’d be my pleasure.”

Another wave of heat spread through Maisie at the thought of his hands on her, or his mouth, rolling her eyes away as a smile broke through her seriousness. “No, I need …”

He tucked her hair behind her ear. “You can tell me anything, Maise.”

And she wanted to.

“I have endometriosis.” Maisie realised she hadn’t outright told him that. “Sex is sometimes … painful.”

Mostly it was due to her condition; she had scarring in various places around her uterus making things not move around as they should to let her feel pleasure; but more often than not it was the cycle of worry her head put her into. Sex had alwaysbeenpainful so sex would alwaysbepainful – that’s how it was in her mind at least, which is why she couldn’t rush into bed.

She needed longer than other women maybe did to be ready. Plus, it didn’t entirely help when hindsight said the men she’d been with before had been too impatient to give her that. She was tooneedyif she complained, toodistantif she kept her mouth shut. So, there her mind was; stuck going round and round with worry and that old familiar phrase that she was too much ‘work’.

What a way to kill the mood.

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