"Honey," Benny said, giving me a lopsided smile. "I think your ride is the man you are currently sitting on right now. Be nice to my girl," Benny warned before moving away.
And leaving me at Pagan's mercy.
Right where I wanted, but was terrified, to be.EIGHTKennedyNot being a casual sex type of girl, I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to say, or do, from that point on. Truly, it was about as awkward as I had been when I lost my virginity at the ripe old age of eighteen to someone much more experienced than me, making me feel mumbling and bumbling and wholly unsexy.
Slate pulled up a chair and got himself a round as I tried to pull off of Pagan and sit down on the free side of the couch, but the arm around me only tightened.
"Relax, pet," he mumbled when Slate launched into some line of conversation I was too distracted to follow along with.
Was I really going to do it?
Was I going to go home with a man I barely knew who beat people and sold guns for a living?
Was I going to have sex with a man whose last name I didn't even know?
If I were only listening to my body, the answer was a resounding yes.
But could such decisions really just be made by the body? I mean, I guess they could. So long as the brain was present enough to demand protection and you had pocket money to catch a ride home if things felt wonky.
But was I the kind of woman who...
"You got nice hands, Kennedy," Pagan said oddly, making me jerk back, realizing how zoned out I had been when his hand closed over top of mine, making me realize how long I had been staring at my own, "but they're not that fucking interesting."
His hands were though.
They were the kind of hands that told a story. Each and every one of the white, pink, and red scars there was evident of something, some form of trauma, some memory he had.
Feeling weird about romanticizing the man's freaking hands, I looked up to find Slate already gone somehow. When I turned back to Pagan, his lips were twitching.
"He tried to talk to you twice before he gave up."
Ugh.
I was not usually so bad at social graces.
I never stared at my own damn hands when someone tried to engage me in conversation.
"Kennedy," he said, his voice a strange mix of firm and gentle that didn't quite seem to suit him, making my attention snap to his slightly damaged, but no less sexy, face.
"Yeah?"
"If this is a no," he said, gesturing between us, "then it's a no. I'll take you home. Or I'll call you a cab. I'm cool with a lot of fucked up shit, but a woman giving herself an ulcer over whether she wants to slum it with me is not one of those things. First, it bruises my pride a little," he said, giving me a small grin, both of us knowing his pride could withstand a freaking earthquake. "Second, I'm not the kind of man who is going to convince you to sleep with me. You want to, or you don't want to. It's as simple as that."
"There's nothing simple about it," I admitted, surprising myself a little.
"I get you're the relationship kind of girl, pet. But I think it's pretty fucking obvious that I am not the relationship kind of man. I'm not offering you that. But if what has you hung up is because you've never fucked a guy once and never saw him again, I'm open to the idea of fucking you anytime you need a solid dicking."
I snorted at that, completely caught off-guard. "Wow. That was eloquent."
"Regular fucking Hemingway over here," he agreed, reaching out and giving my hair a little tug. "Besides, I don't think I could do to you all the things I want to do to you in one night anyway."
He wanted to be... fuck buddies?
Was that what he was offering me?
Somehow, my mind didn't rebel quite as hard against that as it did the one-night stand thing.
"You want to just... have casual sex with each other whenever the mood strikes?" I asked, wanting to clarify.
"The mood is gonna strike often. So clear your fucking calendar."
There was a weird little thrill inside at that, my body fully on board. And my mind, well, it was holding the grab bar, wanting reassurances from the conductor before it boarded.
Sex talk was, in my experience, almost never comfortable. The safe sex talk or the hard limits talk or the exclusivity talk. All necessary, but awkward.
The latter was the one that had my belly in knots as I swallowed hard and forced the words to come out, knowing they were going to trip all over themselves, but wanting to be clear.