“You should,” he advises. “We do have a pool, you know.”
“Chlorine does unpleasant things to my hair,” I inform him. Then, dragging a finger saucily down his chest, I add, “Besides, if we went swimming alone, I’m sure we would both be naked.”
Carter smiles, curling his arm to drag me closer so he can give me a kiss. “Good point. You don’t need a bikini. The fewer clothes on you, the better.”
I sigh with pleasure as he bends his head and starts kissing my neck again.
“Want to hear something funny?” he asks.
“Sure,” I answer.
“My mom asked me this morning if you were pregnant. Heard it around town.”
I sigh heavily. “Hilarious. Did she tell your dad? Should I be on the lookout for a hitman now?”
“Nah. They don’t handle unwanted teen moms with hitmen, a checkbook is their weapon of choice. You wouldn’t be unwanted anyway though. If we had a baby, it would be different. We’re more or less old enough for that now.”
“Okay. I’m gonna reiterate one more time that I am not pregnant.”
“I know, I just thought it was funny hearing my own rumor echoed back to me.”
“I’m just tickled, let me tell you.”
Shrugging unrepentantly, he says, “Shouldn’t have told me you were fucking someone else.”
“I didn’t. I told you I went out with someone else, and I’m not you. A date doesn’t necessarily lead to sex with me.”
“No kidding,” he says, as if I made him wait an eternity. “Sex doesn’t always lead to dates, either. You’re a weird girl.”
Since he has given me an opening to ask a question I’ve been tempted to ask, I set aside my wariness of the answer and take the plunge. “Anyway, you’re the one who actually went out with someone else,” I begin, lightly enough, considering how hard my heart pounds as those words tumble out of my mouth.
“‘Went out with’ might be an overstatement. We didn’t go anywhere, I just used her to fuck with you.”
He’s so fucking mean sometimes, I swear. Not even to me in this instance, but to stupid Jenna. “You didn’t like her at all?” I question, heart in my throat. Despite being grounded in reason much of the time, my heart thuds like its continuing function depends upon his answer. Stupid, stupid heart.
His dark gaze locks with mine and he shakes his head in such a way that I feel foolish for asking. Even though it’s completely possible he could have liked that girl, the look on his face tells me otherwise. “I like you,” Carter answers, simply.
“Have you slept with her or anyone else since me?”
“Not yet.”
My heart soars and then stalls at his answer. Such a bittersweet reminder that he could, if he wanted to, but he doesn’t—yet.
In a sense, for me at least, it feels like that is when it will really be over between us. That is when whatever ties us together will dissolve, when I will actually be free to move on with my life and veer in a direction that leads entirely away from him.
It’s hard to imagine grasping that any other way. It will happen when he sleeps with another girl, because I sure as hell won’t be the one jumping into bed with anyone else right on the heels of whatever this is.
He will, though. He did already, when I didn’t put out expediently enough to satisfy his baser needs.
“You know me. If I had wanted to get off, I would’ve made you do it, not called in a sub.”
His words that night come back to mind. I’m mulling them over, trying to put together an impossible puzzle. How do I have Carter and also some semblance of safety? How do I ask him not to sleep with anyone else, without promising to meet his needs myself? For that matter, how do I ask him not to see anyone else—period—if I’m not ready to jump back into being his girlfriend? I can’t. It wouldn’t be fair.
My head and my heart couldn’t be further apart on this issue, though, and before I can stop it, my heart recklessly throws a hand on the wheel and hurls us around a scary corner. “I don’t want you to.”
His eyebrows rise in surprise at my frankness, while my formerly ballsy heart drops right down into my stomach. “Then you want to get back together.”
No. That’s too scary. I shake my head, dropping my gaze to his chest so I don’t have to look him in the eye.
“You’re gonna have to help me out here, babe. I don’t know what you want,” he tells me.
I want a time machine that can travel back to the night he told me nothing happened between him and Erika, and I want him to tell me the truth instead. Or a trip ahead in time, so I can see if giving him another chance would lead to a much deeper heartache down the road.