“What? Masturbating at work and then bent over a desk for me?”
“Donovan!”
But, of course, he didn’t look ashamed at all. He waved a dismissive hand and took another sip of his wine. “No, no, this is good. This is part of the idea I had. I know I told you we could pretend the past never happened. But maybe instead, our former . . . knowledge of each other can be to our benefit. There’s already a built-in comfort level here.” He bent his knee, turning more toward her. “So you can practice with me.”
She stared at him. “Practice what?”
“Immunizing yourself to sex talk. I’ll try to get you to blush or get flustered, and you work on fighting that reaction.” He grabbed the bottle of wine and poured a little more in each of their cups. “Alcohol will help for this intro session.”
“Donovan. Seriously. We’re so not doing this.”
“Better with me than reacting badly to a client. And we know more about each other than we should already. This could be helpful.”
“This is a bad idea.”
He leaned back, mischief in his gaze.
Uh-oh. She could sense him loading his slingshot.
“I was fifteen minutes late this morning because I had a hot dream and jerked off in the shower.”
“Oh my God.” She closed her eyes. “You can’t say stuff—”
Of course before she could even put her words together, her head filled with the image of him in the shower, naked, stroking himself, making those sounds she remembered. Her face flamed.
“Look at me.” He voice was soft but firm.
“No way.”
“Come on. No need to hide. Be bold.”
She forced her gaze upward, her jaw clenching. “I hate you so much right now.”
His eyes met hers, clear and unaffected. “Give me statistics about masturbation, Rush.”
She blinked, her thoughts falter
ing. “What?”
“I know you know them. I saw them in your sex ed program.”
She ground out a frustrated breath and pushed her hair off her forehead, grasping for the figures she knew were already in her head. “Uh, ninety-five percent of men admit to doing it, more than half do it weekly. For women, the numbers are only a few points less—eighty-nine percent.”
“I love that you can quote statistics even buzzed on wine. It’s kind of awesome. We should do shots and try to quote studies.”
She rolled her eyes. Though, she’d totally play and win that game.
“But my point is that you already know that, statistically speaking, masturbation in normal. It’s healthy. It’s natural. It’d be odd if I didn’t do it. So why should it embarrass you to know that about me? Or anyone. Lane does it. The clients we saw today do it. I’m sure my assistant does, my boss, the guy who sold me coffee this morning.”
“Yeah, but there’s a difference between knowing something in theory and knowing it in reality.”
“Sure there is, but that’s the point. You have to break down the wall between the two, take the taboo factor out of it.” He tilted his head. “Do you masturbate, Marin?”
“We are really, really not having this conversation.”
He lifted a brow in challenge.
“Ugh. You use that brow lift on your clients. I saw you do it today. It’s not going to work, West. I am immune.”