Tough Luck Hero

"What if you spend a few minutes talking to me. Because I'm trying to figure out exactly where I stand here, and I have to say, I'm not entirely sure."
"Well excuse me for not feeling all that sorry for you," she said, her tone verging on ferocious. "I am...I don't do things like this."

"I guess I don't know how you feel about things like your number. Or, whatever it is that people seem to obsess about when it comes to sex and partners. It was different maybe when we thought we had done it before..."
"Are you concerned that you just made me a slut when you hadn't already?"
He frowned. "That's not what I said. And you know it. But I feel like maybe it was a little bit of sex under false pretenses. And, it wasn't on purpose, but I'm worried."
"Worried that I'll have a spiral because I've now had sex with three men instead of two? However will I go on?"
"You don't have to be sarcastic about it."
"Yes, I kind of do, because it's either that or punch you in the face, or maybe curl up on top of my pamphlets and have a mental breakdown."

His stomach twisted in horror. “This is why I want to talk. Did I...did I do something that you didn’t like?”
She lifted her hands, rubbing the back of her neck and squeezing her eyes shut. “No. I’m just...horrified. And I don’t know what to do with all of the feelings. Because I’ve never had an orgasm with a man before, and I’ve never gone down on... Anyway, I can’t have this conversation with you right now because I’m very delicate.”
“You’re delicate?” He had no idea why that was the part of her little speech he had chosen to comment on, except maybe because it was about the only thing he could focus on in the middle of all that information.
“Birdlike.”
“And you’ve never had an orgasm with a man before?” He was not even going to touch the blow job issue.
“No,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk about that.”
“You can’t introduce the fact that I was the first man ever to give you an orgasm and expect me to not talk about it. At length.”
“If you were a gentleman you would honor my request.”

He had said it the last time they were together, and it had been rough, thrilling. She had relished that look inside of him, beneath the veneer. And because it had meant so much coming from him, she knew it would mean even more coming from her. And what would happen then? The world might fall apart, and she would be revealed. Lydia Carpenter, in all of her shattered, messy glory, wrapped up in a tight little ball and squished down deep inside well-ordered, reinvented Lydia Carpenter, who controlled her life in a way that was a lie, because life couldn’t be controlled. Who looked so smooth and serene, like she could never be broken when deep inside she already was.
If she asked Colton West to do that to her then he would know. He would know that deep down she wanted those things, that she fantasized about those things. That she was no more the perfectly kept and well-ordered person she presented to the world than he was.
Then he would have her. Have his hand wrapped around her every vulnerable piece. He would know just where they were, and just how to destroy them.