I wasn’t expecting the way she reached out along the kitchen counter and grabbed my hand. I had no idea that the look in her eyes would be so genuinely concerned as she moved closer.
“Please don’t,” she said. “Please, Anna, don’t do it. It won’t do you any good. Not with your seizures. There’s no way you’ll come out good from this. No way at all.”
The stab in my ribs was hard as I caught the truth in what she was saying.
“Please,” she repeated. “I won’t tell Nicola, but you have to come to your senses. Please don’t do this. He fucked you up last time, and you didn’t even have them then… don’t do this… it won’t be fair on anyone. We’ll all be worried sick.”
Yeah, they would be. Yeah, I was an idiot even considering it.
I was nodding, even though my heart was a racing mess. I knew I would be risking a step back into more seizures if I pushed my own stresses with games and emotions and crazy sex.
I knew full well he could fuck up the progress I’d been striving to make for years, and screw up the months of setback and upped meds on lamotrigine even further.
I knew all of this, but still I couldn’t stop myself craving Lucas Pierce.
“I know it’s crazy,” I told her. “Don’t worry. I’ll come to my senses. I will.”
And I truly intended to. I really did.
I went for a walk past the Neptune fountain in the city centre every lunchtime that week, and threw a coin in the water, like I always had. I urged myself to stay sane and back away from this stupid splurge and put my health and brain and respect for my past ahead of whatever my clit was begging for.
I threw a coin into the water every day that week and wished that I could forget about Lucas and his depraved filth and gorgeous body.
But I couldn’t.
The messages kept coming and I kept firing them back, and the weekend came closer without me daring to talk it through with Vicky again. I pulled out my best underwear from my top drawer and made sure I was shaved to perfection. I dug my toys from under my bed and packed them up in a little black case.
I thought through all the things I wanted him to do to me, and what difference the past ten years might have made to him. To his body. To his tastes. To his smirk.
No matter how many times I wrote out a message to back out of the hook up, I never sent it off.
No matter how many times I wrote out a message to Nicola, forcing myself into the hailstorm of her talking sense into my stupid skull, I never sent that off either.
It was the sex. The passion. The thrill and the need and the craving of my body for his.
Fuck that couple in that club that night and the glimmer of lust they’d reminded me existed.
Somehow, no matter what I did, or thought, or tried to reason with myself, I was a fluttering mess on that Lydney bound train on Saturday morning, with a case packed up with smut and filth and an overnight supply of my epilepsy meds, even though I swore I wouldn’t ever sleep in a bed with him and would be back home that evening.
No matter what I did, my heart was pounding hard as the train pulled out of Cheltenham station and I sent off the final ping that sealed my doom.
On my way, I told him.
I’ll see you soon, he said.
Any time this lifetime would be too soon, but it was too late for that.
The train pulled up at the little town station and I stepped out onto the platform, then climbed over the bridge to the other side. I headed out to the front and scanned the car park for a sign of him, but he wasn’t there.
I cursed my stupidity again as I dropped myself down onto a battered bench with my cases at my feet, cursing the rain on top as it started to spit down from high.
And then he came for me.
A truck pulled into the station and my heart did a stutter, before I even knew for sure it was him. Call it instinct.
He turned around in one of the spaces and drew up in front of me, and down came the passenger window.
And there he was.
The man who’d broken my heart into a thousand pieces and left me clutching at the shards.
I hadn’t seen him in glasses before, but they suited him. He was wearing a suit on a Saturday, and I knew full well it was because he knew I liked them. His smirk was the same smirk that set my clit pulsing. He looked older, but not all that much older.