Private Research: An Erotic Novella (20 page)

“I fucked that woman because you wanted me to. You told me it was your fantasy, Mina.” His eyes flitted back and forth, searching my face, and the anger suddenly seemed to leach out of him. He shook his head. “But I made the mistake I thought I was too smart to make. I didn’t take into account the power of fear. I believed you because I never imagined you were just too much of a coward to face up to the fact that maybe something real is happening between us.”

“Something real? You think this is real? You pay me—”

“I paid you to do research!”

“What do you want from me?” I glared defiantly at him, daring him to say something different, something braver than he claimed I was.

He stared at me. His light blue eyes open. Thinking.

In our silence, the sound of the water hitting our bodies, pounding against the tile, grew thunderous. I turned the silver knob and reached for the towels in the shower’s little antechamber.

“I . . . I want you to stay.”

My hands fell to my side, and my face felt slack. I turned back to stare at him, wide-eyed. I’d dared him, but I’d never imagined he might actually say it. Actually want it.

He reached for me again, but this time not angrily, one hand curving behind my head, where my hair was wet and plastered against my body. I blinked away the sudden hot tears.

“I don’t want it to be all about sex. I want more.” He pulled me in, and I went, stunned and distraught, flat against his chest. But he wasn’t done yet. He just kept torturing me with words. “I want you to do what you need to do, finish your degree, and then find a position here.”

“We barely know each other, Seb, sex aside.” What I said as I shivered in his embrace was true. Maybe two years before we’d had half a dozen deep conversations, and these last months we’d had countless more, pushed each other, been as physically close as two humans could be, but that wasn’t the basis for me to make some permanent transatlantic move. Or for Seb to do so either. At least not for a while.

“What I know is that we were
friends,
Mina, and I fucked that up,” he said. “But I was lucky enough to get a second chance. There’s more here. There’s been more the whole time.” He shifted and cupped my face in his hands, lifting my chin up, everything about this touch painful in its gentleness. I stared into his eyes. Water dripped from his hair onto my forehead, my cheeks, hot like tears. “I want to give us the chance. I want you to stay.”

Stay. Stay. Stay.
The word echoed in my head, emptying me of all other thought, of speech. I was aware instead of sensation, of his fingers stroking the line of my jaw, like he could make me say something.

My brain snapped back to life with a flood of impossibilities. I grabbed two towels, nearly throwing one at him, and then wrapped myself in the other one, taking another for my hair as I left the shower.

So he’d been thinking of me as his girlfriend. And why shouldn’t he have? I’d been the ideal one for him this summer. Willing to cede independence and decisions for the chance to finish my work. Willing to sleep with him, to explore the kinkier side of sex, or at least what was kinky to me. I’d now witnessed sexual acts and fetishes that I had no desire to experience for myself.

And what would a relationship between the two of us in the future be? A continued membership at Harridan House as long as all acts were agreed upon in advance? Would Sebastian really be satisfied without that?

Would I?

I didn’t talk to him as we dressed and returned to his apartment, but everything inside me ached. We got ready for bed in that same silence, and when I finally climbed under the covers, I lay on the edge, turned away from him.

Until he invaded my space and held me close, his body so familiar. My stupid attempt to prove I couldn’t be with him meant nothing. The activities in which we’d engaged at Harridan House—
that
was just sex. But here, in the privacy of his flat, his bed–this was more, no matter who else he’d fucked.

We didn’t agree to it. It has to be mutual, Mina.
Sebastian’s twisted morality was not so twisted. Was fundamentally honest. He’d tried to stop us from going to Harridan House. I was the one who had pushed. He’d humored me.

Of course, he hated anything that smacked of cheating, that broke trust. I knew his family history. A dark fog of disgust enveloped my thoughts, my chest. I’d been trying to protect myself and I’d given no thought to his emotions. I’d been selfish and cruel.

I lay there in the endless dark, thinking, feeling, reexamining everything with the frantic pace of desperation. He was awake, too, his thoughts as silent and raging as my own.

Finally, at some point in the night, he let go of me and fell onto his back with a sigh.

I flipped over to face him. His arm was over his head, forearm resting against forehead, but at my movement, he turned his head to look at me. Questioning. Waiting.

“I thought if you slept with someone else, I’d break everything between us.”

His lips pressed together tightly, but he didn’t speak.

“When he touched me, I was going to move away. And then I thought that that act, too, would make everything more final.”

“Sex without emotional attachment
is
just sex,” Sebastian said. “You and me? We like physical pleasure. If you’d even wanted to fuck him, I would have dealt with my own jealousy. But it’s infidelity that breaks relationships.”

“I know,” I said quickly. “
Now,
I know. But . . . I didn’t know we had a relationship.”

Sebastian looked back up at the ceiling, squeezing his eyes shut.

“You’re right,” I continued. “I’m a coward.”

“Mina.” His voice sounded ragged, like he was struggling to speak, and it hurt me. Hurt me the way his anger at Harridan House had terrified me, had made me realize I didn’t want
him
to be angry with
me.
“We’ve had a relationship since the first day we met.”

“Why did you never ask me out?”

“I don’t know.” He opened his eyes and sat up. In the dark, I could just make out the pale outline of his body, arms resting on his knees, head in his hands. “No, I know why. Because I was immature. I’d only be in the States a few more months and I wanted to fuck around. I knew you were the kind of girl . . . you’d be my girlfriend. Things would be complicated.”

Girlfriend. That’s what I’d wanted. And what had I imagined? A long-distance relationship based on sweet romance? But who knows what would have happened if we’d acted on our attraction back then. Maybe I hadn’t needed a “wild” year of my own to be his sexual match. In fact, the concept went against all my ideals, my feminist ideology. Just as all the shame I’d held all those months should have gone against it as well. It was all too complicated. My actions and motivations, and Seb’s, didn’t fit neatly into some theory. This wasn’t school, or research. I wouldn’t be writing some dissertation that analyzed everything to death.

And analyzing this right now, when all I needed to know was that he wanted to be with me, with only me, was stupid.

So the question remained: What did I want?

“I’m sorry. About tonight. It wasn’t fair to you. None of it.” It wasn’t enough of an apology. Nothing would be.

He didn’t answer, but the uneven sound of his breath filled the space between us.

“I have to go back,” I continued. “I have a TA position for the fall. In the spring . . . maybe I could come for a month or two while finishing up my dissertation, but then I’d have to return to defend it, finish everything up. Then, who knows where I’ll get a job. It would be long-distance . . . which is what you didn’t want.”

“Right.” A single word. Was I convincing him? I wanted him to lie back down and grab me and tell me none of the obstacles mattered. That we had to try. That what we had was bigger than distance.

But was it?

Was it for me?

“But maybe a few months long-distance, and some time together in the spring, and we’ll know.” I hardly felt like myself speaking, voicing the tentative desire to try. “We’ll know it’s . . .” I took a deep breath. “It’s love and worth compromising for. Worth shifting our lives to make it—”

He was on top of me so fast, the movement took my breath away.

“—work,” I gasped, finishing the sentence even as his hands held my wrists by the side of my head and his body pressed mine down.

“So that’s a yes?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Because it
is
for me. And I want to give this . . .”
Love?
Was this love for him? I hardly heard what else he said as the word spun through me, warming me in a way nothing else had ever before in my life. Wondrous. Is that what he meant? He
loved
me?

His mouth lowered to mine, and the kiss tasted like love. Like a promise. Like tenderness. Like something that my stupid attempt at words couldn’t even describe. When he let go of my wrists to cup my face, I wrapped my arms around him.

When he finally slid inside me, I wrapped my legs too. I pressed my body to his as tightly as I could, lifted my hips to keep him as deep as possible. His movements were slow and infinitesimal, but each shift sent tremors through me, unfurling, colorful ribbons of sensation and emotion. And I said with my lips what my heart and mind were too full to say.

Love.

Chapter Eighteen

“
W
OULD
YOU LIKE
another drink?”

I turned my head lazily to squint at Sebastian in the bright afternoon sun.

“Mmmhmm,” I agreed, and watched him walk off, admiring the way he looked in his swim trunks. After a week in Cannes in the south of France, we both were more tan than usual. And after a week of getting-reacquainted-with-each-other’s-body sex, I still wanted to pull closed the curtains of the cabana, strip off my bikini bottoms, and fuck him here.

I was starved for sex after the last four months without him, and I had no way of knowing if this summer would be all we had for another half year. We were celebrating regardless. Celebrating the fact that I’d finished my PhD, that I’d had an article on the overwhelming similarity between James Mead and Anne Gracechurch (using forensic and computer analysis, and framing it as a mystery) accepted for publication. That we could even spend this time together. Things were good.

We’d managed to make long-distance work these past nine months, in part thanks to some creativity with Internet video calls and in part due to the efforts we’d made to see each other. Although I’d had to miss Nigel and Kate’s wedding, Sebastian had joined me in November for my sister’s. I’d spent half of December and all of January in London, working on the final stages of my dissertation before I submitted it for defense. The backup version. I also used that time to follow more clues into the Mead-Gracechurch connection. While I had decided to cut my losses as far as the dissertation, I was still determined to find the missing link.

During those weeks, we’d even visited Harridan House one more time just to walk through the halls as ghosts, to fuck in one of the rooms. We hadn’t closed off the future to any possible fantasies that might creep up, but bringing other bodies between us at this fragile point felt like an invasion of the world we were hoping to build. The love.

The life that would be that much more difficult to maintain if I accepted the fabulous tenure-track position I’d been offered in Ohio. If it had been New York, or Chicago, or San Francisco even, then Sebastian could have been the one to sacrifice, move to a department stateside since he was still years from breaking out on his own. Instead, I had postponed accepting, which I knew meant other candidates were also waiting with bated breath. But there were still two postdoc positions that were due to be announced soon, and there was always the possibility of working as a researcher at that documentary-film company in London for which Kate had mentioned one of her bridesmaids, Clare, made films.

Sebastian returned with two bright pink, fruity drinks, the glass wet where the frozen drinks sweated in the sun. On the beach, his predilection for scotch appeared to be subsumed by a taste for tropical, sugary drinks.

He sat back down next to me on the triple-wide sun bed. Handing me the drink even as he leaned in for a kiss. On my bare breast. I’d taken to the topless sunbathing easily after all those nights at Harridan House. And there were all these little perks, even if “lewd” behavior on the beach was frowned upon.

“We should close the curtains,” he murmured.

“We should,” I agreed. I put my drink down on the table beside me, bestirred myself from the outdoor bed, and undid the ties that kept the canvas back. Tugged the edges closed. Then I climbed back on and crawled over to Sebastian. Straddled him.

The feel of him hard under me had me bite back a moan. Discretion was necessary.

My fingers rested over his nipples, which hardened under my touch. I looked down at his face, a study in pleasure. He reached his hands up to the strings on the side of my bikini bottoms and tugged. The fabric fell away and his fingers replaced it, reaching for me, cool on my hot flesh. I shifted up a bit, pulled his shorts down to free his cock.

Positioned myself over him and eased down, sucking in my breath as always at that first delicious feel of his parting me, stretching me, joining us.

We moved slowly, hips undulating, and I leaned forward to meet his open mouth. In the instant before, I saw his face, saw that look in his eyes. The one I hadn’t understood last year. The one I’d tried to deny.

This wasn’t just sex. I felt that too.

No. It was more.

So much more.

Something worth keeping.

About the Author

SABRINA DARBY has been reading romance since the age of seven and learned her best vocabulary (dulcet, diaphanous, and turgid) from them. The day after her wedding she woke up with an idea for a novel and she’s been writing romance ever since. She is the author of
On These Silken Sheets, The Short and Fascinating Tale of Angelina Whitcombe,
and
Entry-Level Mistress
.

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