6
Well,it was settled. Grace was either crazy or going through a midlife crisis or both.
She was leaning toward both.
As she climbed into the front seat, she was trying to reconcile her actions over the past ten minutes or so. One second, she’d been sharing, let’s face it over-sharing, her entire life story, something that she never talked about. The next she started crying, something that she hadn’t done in decades. And then she topped off the erratic emotional hat trick by introducing an Indecent Proposal, and she wasn’t playing the part of Demi Moore. The three events seemed to be all over the place, but she had a feeling that one had actually led to the other.
For some reason, the man who she’d literally let take the driver’s seat had snuck around the walls she’d carefully constructed to protect herself. She wasn’t sure how he’d done it. It had been an impenetrable fortress up until this point in her life, yet he’d been able to sneak in.
How had that happened?
Grace always dealt in cold hard facts, not feelings. Not whims. She didn’t know if like Lady Gaga she was born that way or if she’d developed that particular trait as a coping mechanism for being raised by a woman who was purely emotionally motivated. The age-old nature vs. nurture.
Whatever the genesis of her behavior was, in her professional and personal life she gathered information and drew her conclusions based on that information. For better or worse, that was how her brain worked. This situation was no different. She just needed to break down the chain of events and analyze why she’d behaved the way she had.
One hypothesis: it was circumstance based. Had she done all those things because she was stranded overnight with a sexy stranger? The entire situation did have an innate intimate cocoon element to it. In this moment, it did feel like they were the only two people in the world.
Or was it the shared near-death experience? Grace had heard of people bonding when they experienced traumatic events. Although was a tree almost falling on them that traumatic?
It could be purely biological. Maybe her confession, cry, and cringy sleeping arrangement proposal were all side effects from the adrenaline that had been released into her system.
All of those were solid possibilities, but none of them were ringing true to her.
The reality of the situation was, she’d never met a man who was ruggedly handsome, disarmingly charming, who had an air of authority and command that was both calming and arousing. And apparently that’s what it took for her to spill her guts, cry, and then ask him to get naked with her.
Behind her, she could hear shuffling and rearranging going on and it served as an audio reminder of the impending strip down sleepover that she’d put into motion. She needed to get herself together so she could nip her embarrassing behavior in the bud. She took a deep breath and wiped beneath her eyes, still in shock that tears had actually come out of them.
The last time she’d cried was when she got the phone call from the hospital at two o’clock in the morning, that her mom had passed away. She’d sat in her bed and cried for hours until her sisters woke up. When she heard their alarms going off, she wiped her tears and from that second on, she’d been in survival mode. No more tears. She hadn’t even cried at the funeral.
Tonight, when she felt her eyes watering, it had been so shocking to her that she’d grasped at straws, any straws, to erase the fact that they had happened. The straw she’d chosen was getting naked with a man who she’d known for an hour. It was strange the way the psyche worked and what it would do to protect a person.
Even now as she thought about the sequence of events, the thought of being in her underwear and bra with this sexy stranger felt less intimate than her crying in front of him and sharing her entire life story…so there was that.
“Okay, I think that should work.”
Grace looked over her shoulder and saw that the back seats were down, and her belongings neatly stacked against the sides of the vehicle, with an empty space in the middle for them to lay down. One of the blankets that she’d packed was spread out and the other one was pushed to one side, she assumed that one would be used to cover them. It would be snug, but that was sort of the point.
“Great. Sooo, I guess now we strip.”
I guess now we strip?Had those words actually just come out of her mouth. When had she become a frat boy?
It appeared her moment of self-reflection had done nothing to derail the embarrassing behavior train, it was headed full steam ahead to Humiliation Station, she just hoped there weren’t any more stops along the way.
As she unzipped her jacket she shook her head in hopes that her brain was an Etch-A-Sketch and she could just erase the memory of her saying those words.
She’d just slid her arms out when she heard...
“You’re really sure about this?”
His deep voice pinged through her like an erotic pinball machine. She turned her head again and when their eyes met, she inhaled a shaky breath. If she’d been on the fence before whether or not this was a good idea, what she saw in his eyes definitely pushed her right over to this was an amazing idea. The stare was a knee-weakening combination of tenderness and protectiveness. She could see that he was battling with whether this would be a good idea for her, not him, and that only made her want to do it more. She’d never felt more respected and taken care of.
As their eyes continued to lock, the energy that passed between them did what her feeble attempt at erasing her memory had not, it made everything that had happened up until then disappear. In that moment, she trusted the man in the back of her vehicle with her life, her heart, her…everything.
“Yes,” she responded simply as she turned back around in hopes that he didn’t see the effect the moment they’d shared between them had had on her.
After removing her shirt and pants, she folded them neatly and set them on top of her bag that was conveniently directly behind her seat. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that Easton had taken his shirt off, but she avoided looking in his direction, which was quite a task considering the close quarters that they were in, as she climbed into the back of the vehicle.
She didn’t avert her eyes because she was trying to respect his privacy, or anything like that. She did it because she feared it would be like looking directly into the sun. Once she did that his image would be seared into her pupils, and she might never see things the same way again.