But instead, she nodded, her eyes big. “Erika says I’ve never been fucked properly.”
Very seriously, God help him.
And Dylan would never know how it was that he stayed where he was. Lounging back in a chair on his deck on a lovely Saturday morning, while joggers ran heedlessly by on the coastal walk, seabirds careened about in the air and Jenny Markham had flown all the way down to Sydney to talk to him aboutfucking.
He would never know how he remained calm.
“Well?” he asked, casually. As if this entire conversation didn’t feel, suddenly, as if he’d sustained a series of knockout blows and was reeling about blind. And wanting things he couldn’t have. “Have you?”
CHAPTER THREE
THEREWASSOMETHINGabout that intent look on Dylan’s face, the patience in his green eyes. The way he asked her a question and then waited. Like he could wait forever, if that was what it took.
It made Jenny feel safe. But then, he always did. She could tell Dylan anything.
Even things she was afraid to tell herself.
“I think maybe I’m bad at it,” she confessed.
Something flashed over his face then, some dark gleam, that reminded her of that moment out in front of his house. When she’d stared at his familiar face and hadn’t recognized him at all.
Deep inside her, something clicked. Then flared into life, but she ignored it. Because she was here, in his house. With him. And wherever Dylan was, she could depend on him to keep them inside his bubble. Where everything was always okay.
And if it wasn’t, he would fight it off.
“Not possible,” he told her, a strange note in his voice.
“You don’t know that it’s not possible,” Jenny argued. “Because here’s the thing. I’ve never staggered off after having sex with someone giddy and filled with joy the way that girl did today. And I certainly don’t leave anyone in that state.”
She expected him to leap in, to contradict her, but he didn’t. Because Dylan let her tell her own story. How had she forgotten how freeing that was? How he allowed to her relax and really, truly say what she felt?
Then again, she was here. Maybe she hadn’t forgotten.
“Everyone talks about sex like it’s a compulsion. Passion and desire. Need. Thishungerthat takes them over.” She shook her head, and frowned at him. His legs were thrust out before him, highlighting the powerful muscles in his thighs. How had she never noticed histhighsbefore? Because she doubted they’d cropped up overnight. “Is that what it’s like for you?”
“I wouldn’t bother otherwise, would I?”
“It’s never that way for me.” Jenny took a breath, flipped over that ugly little stone she’d never wanted to look beneath and reminded herself that this was Dylan. That she could say anything to him. “I think maybe I really am frigid. Or broken, somehow.”
He didn’t sit with that in a solemn, concerned silence, as she’d expected he would. He rolled his eyes and didn’t look the least bit shaken by her declaration. “For fuck’s sake. Because that wanker told you so? A hundred years ago now? Real men don’t berate women for their own piss-poor performance in bed.”
Jenny had dated Christopher for two months that had seemed like a lifetime during term time their third year. A relationship—such as it was—that had ended after they’d slept together, he’d informed her that she was crap at sex, and he’d moved on to manipulate a wide-eyed first-year into his bed instead. A real charmer, that Christopher.
But.
“Christopher was renowned for being good in bed, Dylan,” Jenny argued. “You like to pretend you can’t remember, but girls used to go around swooning left and right every time he smiled.”
“When he smiled, sure. After he embarrassed himself in their beds? Not near as much swooning, as I recall.” Dylan crossed his arms, which should have made him look angry. But when Jenny studied his face, his expression was bland. Maybe too bland. “It was his job to make you come, Jenny. Everything else was a load of shite mixed with mind games to disguise the fact he was a selfish prick.”
Dylan had growled the same response at her during their final year at uni, but she couldn’t remember all this...prickly heat.
“No one is good or bad at sex unless they try,” Dylan continued, sounding even more growly. “It’s sex, not surgery. Sometimes people have mad chemistry, which takes it all to a different level. But you don’t need astonishing chemistry to have good sex, Jenny. You can have good sex if you want it. It’s that simple.”
“I can tell you that it is not, in fact, that simple.”
“It isn’t a spot of calisthenics,” Dylan said, and again, there was something about how relentlessly bland he looked that made the back of her neck prickle. Even more than before. “Supposed skill or experience matters far less than what I’d call...” And he smiled then, in that friendly way he had that made her want to smile, too. “Observant enthusiasm.”
She wanted to smile, but she didn’t. “I have no idea what that means.”