Page 27 of A Totally Platonic Thing
When Lucas had done exactly what I would want someone to do, only…only it was Lucas, not a man who wantedme. Sure, he’d had an erection. It would’ve been hard to miss something that size. Although it couldn’t possibly be as big as I’d thought it looked, right? That wouldn’t be fair. But of course he’d been hard. He’d been all ready to watch porn with me, and he hadn’t gotten any in a while, and then getting all worked up and doing something sort of sexual would make anyone’s body react.
That had to be it, because hoping for anything more than that would drive me insane.
The thing was, I’d reacted to Lucas’s accusations the way I had partly because there was a teeny, tiny, miniscule little germ of truth in them, only not quite the way he thought.
Because I didn’t want Aidan. I wanted what Sebastian had, which didn’t mean Aidan at all—it meant someone who loved me the way Aidan loved Sebastian. Someone who always put me first. Someone who wouldn’t bring me food and give me his jacket like the hero of a rom-com executing a perfect meet-cute and then make it clear he was straight. Someone who wouldn’t end up falling in love with a girl and choosing her instead of me, and moving out, and leaving me alone with my laptop and my battered paperbacks and my closeted hookups.
And the way Lucas had taken me in hand…well, it didn’t mean what I wished it could mean. From someone else, almost certainly.
I had to keep reminding myself that all it had meantto himto take me apart that way was “teaching me a lesson” about acting like a bratty, mean, thoughtless idiot.
Which I had been. And I couldn’t believe I’d suggested he and Aidan…I mean, that would never happen in a million years for about a million different reasons, and maybe I hated it that Lucas and Aidan were close when Lucas and I hadn’t been so close lately, except that Lucas putting me over his knee was pretty damn close.
Oh, God.
I couldn’t get a handle on my own thoughts.
And I definitely couldn’t stall anymore.
I flipped off the bathroom light and stepped out, blinking a few times to adjust my eyes to the very faint glow of the neighbor’s security light through the windows.
Lucas was standing by his bed, huge and intimidating in the near-darkness, even though the silhouette of his body was as familiar to me as my own hand.
“Get in bed,” he said, low and smooth, like sex in a voice. I nearly melted into the floor, my heart galloping, all of me going boneless except for that one part that couldn’t get the fucking memo that it wasn’t getting any satisfaction.
Lucas brushed past me into the bathroom for his turn getting ready for bed. The heat of his body as he walked by seared my tingling, oversensitized skin.
I turned to his bed. He’d folded the blanket back on what had become, over the past couple of years, my side of the bed. A clear invitation.
Or a command.
I climbed in and lay down on my back, not knowing how to arrange my limbs. Would he get angry if I accidentally touched him when he got in? He’d been so damn mad at me.
And shit, I still needed to apologize. I had to do that now, as soon as he came back, even though my breath was coming all fast and ragged and my heart wouldn’t stop racing. He’d apologized for being an asshole to me, even though what I’d said and done had been so much worse.
Finally he turned off the water and came out, setting his glasses on the nightstand and then going around the bed and getting in on his side without a word. He was on his back too, not touching me.
“Lucas,” I whispered.
He stirred in the darkness, sheets rustling. “Yeah?”
His voice sent a shiver down my spine. Had his voice always had that effect on me? It’d always made me feel…something. Always. Safe, or happy, or just like I wanted to be close to him. Occasionally shivery, though I tried to ignore that.
Right now, it probably had something to do with the way he’d stalked me across the room, dark eyes blazing, his lean, powerful muscles all tensed up, and then…
“Lucas, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said—” My heartbeat ratcheted up until I couldn’t breathe, and I stopped with a little high-pitched wheeze. “I’m sorry!”
Oh, God, I’d started to hyperventilate. I still had an erection, so I couldn’t turn onto my stomach. I couldn’t lie on my back all night with my ass feeling like this. I couldn’t, I couldn’t…
Lucas rolled over and was suddenly right there, pulling me into his arms and onto my side, one big hand on my back and the other buried in my hair, pressing my face into his chest. I inhaled greedily, getting my first deep breath in ages.
This. This was what I needed, what all the different halves of me were clamoring for. The part of me that had been stunned into silence by the way Lucas took me in hand felt warm, cozy, wanted to burrow into his arms and never move again. And the jittery part…well, those horrible trembly feelings fled from the touch of his hands and the press of his warm body, zooming off into the ether and disappearing.
The part of me that wanted to come still wanted to come. Maybe even a little more than before.
But I could deal with that now. It didn’t matter. Lucas wouldn’t let me. And that was okay. More than okay, because…
Except that it was the opposite of okay, because my arousal showed no sign of going away. It was just…going somewhere different, into the core of me, a warm, steady pulse that wanted a man to care enough to take charge of me when I faltered on my own. That trusted Lucas more than I trusted myself and knew if I waited, it’d be so much better.
