Impulse - The Companion to Pulse (Pulse 4.50)

"He was married."

The words come from the doorway of my office. My head bolts up. She's standing there wearing the same dress she was months ago when she came to break up with me. Now, she's confessing one of her darkest sins to me.

"Did you hear me?" She takes a step into the space before she slams the door behind her. "I said he was married."

"I heard you." I don't get up. I did the math in my head last night after we got home from the park. I read everything I could get my hands on about the Governor. I knew that the son-of-a-bitch seduced my girlfriend, when she was an innocent teenager, into his bed.

She sits in one of the chairs, her entire body shaking. "I told you my mistakes were worse than your mistakes."

I stand now. I can't allow her to beat herself up over something that happened so long ago. "Jessica," I whisper her name as my lips graze over her forehead. I lean back against the edge of my desk as I look down at her. "I'm reasonably sure that at least a few of the women I fucked were married."

She closes her eyes and shakes her head as if she's warding off the mental image of me sliding my cock into someone else's wife. "Don’t say that."

"It's true." I lean forward. "You were too young to know better. It's all on him."

Her fingers dart to her eyes. She pushes on her brows. "You don't know that."

"I know his type." I kneel down in front of her. "You were available and naïve. He took what he could from you."

Her body shifts when she pulls in a heavy breath. "It's not like that."

I know enough about women to know that there isn't one alive who is willing to confess that she was seduced by an older man just for sex. They all want to believe that love was woven into the fabric of the relationship somewhere. Maybe that's a coping mechanism. Maybe they have to tell themselves that so they can get over the fuckers once they're dumped.

"He didn't seduce me, Nathan." I hear the denial in her tone. She needs to believe that. It's very hard to picture a teenager Jessica not being on the receiving end of a lot of male attention.

I don't want to press this, but it's pushing a wedge between us. We haven't fucked since we got back from the wedding. She's been avoiding me and it's killing me inside. "He did."

She taps her hand on the arm of the chair. "You're wrong. You don't know."

I hear the tempered anger in her tone. She's trying to control herself. "I know his type," I hiss the words out. If she's going to fight me on this, I'm going to fight back. We're clearing the subject of Thomas the Governor off our collective intimate plate right now. I'm not going to let that bastard interfere in my relationship with Jessica another minute.

"I seduced him." She tips her chin out. "I made him want me and then I'm the one who fucked him."

I stand and lean back on my desk. My fingers curl over the edge of it, as much for steady balance as to curb my desire to clear everything off of my desk in one fell swoop. There's no hiding my anger at this moment. I just listened to the woman I love confess to seducing a married man. Sweet and innocent Jessica Roth just left the building. No wait. She just fell off the fucking planet.

"You don't know what I was like when I was eighteen."

I don't. She's right. I only know what she's like the past year and a half. I know that the woman I met at the club was anxious and nervous about having a one night stand with me. I know that she used her body in ways that surprised me given the limited experience she claimed to have. I know that she can suck cock better than anyone who has wrapped their lips around me. Maybe I don't know her as well as I think. "Did you know he was married?"

She pushes herself back into the office chair as if that's going to help her gain some distance from the question. "That's not important."

There's my answer. It just slapped me across the side of my face. "You knew."

She shakes her head slightly. "I knew he was involved with someone. It was right around the time they got married."

It's enough to placate me. I don't fucking care if he was married. That's on him. He should have kept his dick inside his pants if he was planning a walk down the aisle. "When did it end?" Again, it's a question that has no bearing in the here and now. Why the fuck does it matter when it ended? Why can't I just accept that the woman I'm hell bent on marrying has more of a sordid past than I realized?

"Months after it started." She shuffles her heels against the carpeted floor.

"Who ended it?"

"Why does that matter?" Her head tilts to the side. "It's over now. It's been over for years."

I know she's right. It doesn't matter. It shouldn't but I need to know. "Who ended it, Jessica?" I repeat the question as if I've heard nothing she's said in response to the first time I asked it.

She skims her hands over the skirt of her dress. "It was mutual. We both ended it."

That's not what I wanted to hear. The jealous part of my heart wanted her to say that she dumped him because she realized he was all wrong for her. I want her to tel