I have to tell her, he thought. Have to tell her how I really feel—how I’ve felt from the very beginning.
“Cassandra,” he began.
But at the exact same time, she said,
“Stone, we need to talk.”
Stone nodded, his heart thumping in his chest. What was she going to say? That she liked the way he touched her? Or that she never wanted him to touch her again?
“Why do we not have a seat?” he asked, motioning to the sitting area across from the floating bed. It had a long, low couch which was also covered in gold fabric and the same multicolored moss that had carpeted the hallway was on the floor.
“Okay.” Cassandra went to sit on one end of the couch and Stone sat on the other, careful to give her some space.
“Please, go ahead,” he told her, once they were settled. “I’m listening—what do you want to talk about?”
“About…about what happened during our, uh, job interview.” Cassandra bit her lush lower lip, as though uncertain how to go on. “I…I had to touch you, uh, intimately and then you had to do the same thing to me during the ‘massage.’”
“We knew intimate touching might be a possibility when we agreed to play these roles,” Stone pointed out.
“Yes, I know…” She nibbled her lower lip some more, clearly unsure how to go on.
Stone wondered what it would be like to taste her lips, to feel her mouth opening for him in a kiss… Maybe now was the time to admit that he wanted to do much more than just touch her—maybe he should let her know that he wanted to make love to her and bond her to him forever.
But Cassandra still had the uncertain look on her face.
“Is it a problem for you—what happened between us?” he asked, frowning. “I’m assuming you would rather have me touch you than allow Gozeriam to violate you as he was his guards.”
Cassandra made a face.
“Oh, God! Of course I’d rather have you!” she exclaimed. “It’s just…I’m really worried this will ruin our partnership…our friendship.”
“Our friendship?” The word sounded flat and dull to Stone—he wanted so much more than just friendship with her! Finally being allowed to touch her beautiful body had taught him that.
And yet, he reminded himself, Cassandra only saw him as a friend. And she had told her ex-mate that she could never see him as anything else. He’d been hoping that their experience tonight might have awakened her to other possibilities but maybe not.
“Yes, our friendship,” she repeated earnestly. Leaning towards him, she put a hand on his arm. “Stone, you’re my best friend—the best friend I’ve ever had and that’s important to me. I don’t want to ruin that by…doing the things we’ve been doing on this mission.”
Stone shook his head.
“How could being together on this mission ruin our friendship?”
“Because when you bring sex into a friendship, it almost always kills the friendship!” she exclaimed. “I mean, I’ve tried the ‘friends with benefits’ thing before and it just doesn’t work.”
Stone frowned. “Friends with benefits? I don’t understand.”
“It’s…a human term for when you bring sex into a friendship. I tried it in college once. I had a great friend, Gil. We’d been friends since high school and we even decided to go to the same college. We shared an apartment and everything and got along so well and then…” She shook her head. “Well, then we decided we could have it all. We agreed to add sex into the mix. And almost immediately things got awkward.”
“Awkward, how?” Stone asked. This incident in her life was something Cassandra had never told him before, so he genuinely wanted to know what had happened.
“Well, we promised each other we wouldn’t get jealous if one of us decided to date other people. Because we weren’t really dating, you know—we were just best friends who ‘scratched the itch’ together when we felt the need. And we honestly thought we could keep it that way. But then Gil started bringing over this cute girl from his Sociology class to study at our apartment and I couldn’t help myself—I got jealous.”
“He brought another female over while the two of you were in an intimate relationship?” Stone demanded. “That was wrong!”
He had never been able to understand a human male’s willingness to be with more than one female at a time or to “cheat” on one with another. The Kindred norm was devoting yourself to one special female for life, once you found her. The idea of having more than one female at a time just seemed…unnatural.
But Cassandra was shaking her head.
“No, it wasn’t wrong,” she corrected him. “He had every right to have a girl over—we had promised each other we wouldn’t get jealous. I was the one who broke the promise—I got jealous.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t help myself.”