Page 30 of Mating of Convenience
Yeah, that wasn’t likely to happen, was it?
“Thanks!” Raph’s whole face lit up and that was almost reward enough for me. Or it might have been if my friend hadn’t had another favor to ask. “Actually, there’s one more thing,” he said in a sheepish tone of voice.
“What’s that?”
“I tried to show my Grandma a picture as proof that we’d been dating for a while before we got married, but she kinda noticed that the picture had been taken a long time ago. So I told her I could send her something more recent.”
“Oh.” Was he saying what I thought he was saying? “You want to kiss me and snap a picture?”
“Yeah, I thought something like that might work.” He licked his lips as if he’d suddenly lost a little bit of that spark that always seemed to keep him going. What was up with that? Did he secretly dread the idea of kissing me that much? I couldn’t help but recall the way he’d looked the other day after I’d kissed him--when we were getting married. He’d looked almost stunned for some reason.
As much as I loved kissing him, I wasn’t going to do it while he didn’t want me to. Even just the idea kind of made me feel sick. “Can’t we do something other than kiss?” I asked.
“You don’t want to kiss me?”
“It’s not that. I just... get the idea that you don’t want me to.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Oh, just that you broke up with me? And also the way you looked at me after the last time I kissed you.”
Raph squinted. “You know I didn’t break up with you because I hated kissing you.”
“No, you broke up with me because you didn’t want to be tied to me and Oceanport.”
Raph opened his mouth but said nothing, at least not for a few seconds. “That’s really what you think?” he asked then. “That I left you because I was tired of you and this town? Did you even listen when I told you why I was breaking up with you?”
“I was kinda preoccupied at the time.” Mostly with trying not to sob like a little girl, but I wasn’t going to point that out. Fact was that Raph had skipped town pretty quickly after leaving me. What was that supposed to make me think? Other than that I’d been holding him back somehow.
“The reason I broke up with you is because I know you want enough babies to have your own football team and I don’t want any at all.”
“Isn’t that just another way of saying the same damn thing?” I snapped at him, because yeah, this conversation was long overdue. Sure, Raph had told me all of this before, but I hadn’t been in the right state of mind to respond. I was now. And I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I’d thought about it often enough over the course of the year we’d been apart. “I would have stayed with you, you know? Even if we’d never had kids. I could have compromised.” And I refused to believe that Raph’s unwillingness to have babies was the sole reason for our break-up. I knew him, and Iknewthere was something else. He just wasn’t telling.
“It’s not a compromise if only one partner gets what they want,” he insisted.
“I don’t care. What I wanted was you.” How couldn’t he see that?
Raph’s shoulders sagged. “I didn’t want to be the reason for your unhappiness.”
“And you think your leaving me didn’t make me unhappy?”
“I know it did, and I’m sorry for that. But it was only a temporary unhappiness, wasn’t it? You got over me after all.” He gave me a smile that had something indefinitely sad about it. Maybe it was in the way he looked at me. Like he wasn’t at all happy about the way things had played out either.
I didn’t know how to respond to that. All I knew was that I wanted to wipe that sad look off his face. It was this instinct, above all else, that drove me to take a step toward Raph and before I knew what I was doing, I was kissing him. It wasn’t like that time I’d kissed him because the officiator asked us to. That had been forced and kind of awkward. This was... it felt natural. As if Raph and I were still together and I was just doing my best to take care of him.
At least it felt like that until my brain kicked back on and I realized that I was kissing the very omega who’d shattered my heart into so many pieces I’d never been able to recover all of them--and how could I? He was obviously still holding a few of them in his hands. Because when I tried to break away from him, he slung his arms around my neck and pulled me right back in. I didn’t resist. Raph’s scent overpowered my senses and somewhere inside my head, my brain turned right back off again, as if giving up. When Raph’s tongue touched mine, heat rose up in my body and made me feel like I was twelve again, with the same poor impulse control.
I wanted to keep kissing this omega forever.
It was only when Raph separated from me that I regained a modicum of my thinking abilities. For a second or two, we only stared at each other. Neither of us seemed to know what to say. I felt weird about kissing Raph. He probably felt weird about prolonging the experience.
In the end, it was Raph who shook off his stupor and spoke up first. “Wow, that was some kiss. And I didn’t even take a picture.”
“Picture? Oh. For your Grandma.” Could I pretend that was why I’d kissed him? No, we both knew that wasn’t true.
“You forgot all about that, didn’t you?” Raph’s gaze on me felt intense. I couldn’t help but wonder what he was seeing as he looked at me right then. “It’s fine,” he said after a moment. “It’s not weird that there’d still be chemistry between us. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s just hormones and stuff. They’re not in control of us.”
“Right,” I made myself respond. Just hormones and stuff. “So you want to pose for a picture now?”
