Tara Taylor Quinn - Sophie's Secret

“And you think your forty-six-year-old body is as sexy as, say, the thirty-year-old dancer I watched onstage for the past two weeks?”

Maybe she was being cruel. Maybe even deliberately, a little bit. He’d hurt her.

She wasn’t a whore who jumped from bed to bed. Who jumped for the male body, period.

Maybe she had been. Once. But Duane hadn’t known that woman. He’d only known this one.

“Is this your way of telling me you’ve spent the past two weeks lusting over some other guy’s body? That when you had sex with me tonight you were thinking about him?”

He thought that poorly of her? That she’d do that? Pain seared through her, taking her to the darkness that had consumed her in her youth.

He’s showing you his insecurities, her rational mind asserted.

She wanted Duane to accept her with all of her issues. Didn’t that gift come with the obligation to do the same for him? To accept all of him, if she was going to commit to any of him?

Sophie took a deep breath. “No, Duane, I’m not telling you that at all. I didn’t feel the slightest twinge for the guy. Couldn’t even, after two weeks of setting lights on him, tell you his name. What I’m telling you is that it isn’t your body that attracts me to you. The fact that it’s gorgeous is a benefit, but I don’t get turned on because you have a nice ass.”

His eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

“I get turned on by you. By the way your hands hold the wrench when you tighten the connection under the kitchen sink. By the way you respond with a sigh and collective commiseration for everyone involved when you’re stuck in traffic. Or when someone knocks into you in the grocery store and you tell them they’re all right. I get turned on by your laugh, how it bursts out when something really amuses you. And I like that what makes you laugh most is tongue-incheek humor. I get turned on by your thoughts and theories, and not only by how quickly you think, but also by how your mind wanders off on its own tracks. You don’t automatically buy into what the world is saying, or accept the answers the world accepts. I get turned on by how you look at me…”

Sophie’s words drifted off. She was making it harder for him to walk away. And if he couldn’t stay without convincing, she didn’t want him here.

But then, in spite of admonitions to herself, she added, “All of those things will still be there when you’re eighty.”

“You’re telling me you’re in love with me.”

Was she? She loved him. But was she in love with him? Was she ready for something so consuming? “I’m telling you that I’m not going to turn to some other man when you’re fifty-seven and I’m thirty-nine.”

Still studying her, he nodded. “Okay.”

Okay.

She’d parried. Offered a way out of a conversation that had gotten more personal than either one of them could handle.

And he’d accepted.

Then she remembered the bulimia. She couldn’t keep doing this. Couldn’t keep running. If she didn’t face whatever was scaring her back into a physical disease she’d thought gone forever, she could end up dead.

But she wanted to lie back down. To pull Duane down with her. To cuddle up to his chest and know that she’d be safe there forever. Or at least until daylight took the sting of darkness away.

She sucked in as deep a breath as she could manage. “Now, let’s hear worry number two.”

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