Free What He Really Feels (He Feels Trilogy) by Lisa Suzanne

and Jules were actually dating.”
    Funny that I seemed more content to both my sister and to Bill when the pain on the inside of letting go of the woman from the night before stabbed at me in a consistent dull ache.
    “I didn’t even get her name.”
    “God, you are the mother of all douche bags.”
    “It wasn’t like that.”
    “You had sex with a girl whose name you didn’t know? Sounds like it was ‘like that’ to me.”
    “A, I don’t want to be discussing my sex life with my sister. And B, you weren’t there.”
    “Thank God for that.”
    “It was…” I didn’t know how to define what had happened between us. “It was good. It helped me see beyond Jules.”
    “That’s a start.”
    “Yeah, it is. And I wanted to see her again, but I’m leaving for San Diego tomorrow. What good would it do?”
    “Maybe a lot of good, Trav.”
    “Yeah. Maybe.” The best I could hope for was that she’d be at Mahogany that night.
    We finished the dishes and my family left after a tearful goodbye. I had to promise my mother (again) that I’d text her every day if I couldn’t call. I hugged my nephews tightly, nearly tearing up a bit at saying goodbye to them. Wes and I hugged man-style, pounding each other on the back, and my sister kissed my cheek. And then my dad came in for a hug, and I almost lost it. Despite the fact that he was my boss, he was also a great friend to me, and I knew I was going to miss our random lunches at Denny’s and our man-to-man talks.
    I still had a few hours to kill before my last big night out on the town, and I needed to burn some energy.
    I jumped back into the water and swam laps. I sliced my arms powerfully through the water, kicking along until my lungs burned and my arms felt like jelly. It was the best workout I’d had in awhile besides all of the sex the night before, and I idly wondered as I drove home what had given me that burst of energy. Usually after marathon nights of sex, I was wiped the next day or two, but something about my night with the mystery woman had renewed and energized many aspects of my life.
    When I got home, I took a long, hot shower, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman I’d showered with in that very spot that very morning. I thought about her hands on my body, the way her eyes looked up at me as she was down on her knees before me, the way she kissed me.
    I was devastated by the loss.
    I clung to the hope that she’d be at Mahogany that night, but deep down I knew she wouldn’t be. She didn’t want something with strings, yet I felt them tied inextricably around my heart. No matter how hard she’d fight me, if we were to see each other again, there was no way we’d be able to deny that there was more to it than sex. And so, because of our conversation and the way she had left my place earlier that day, I had a feeling she wouldn’t put herself in a place where she had the potential of running into me.
    But I still had hope.
    We arrived at Mahogany a little after 10:00, having finished the beer in my fridge before we left so I didn’t have to take it to California. I quickly scanned the room when we entered, but I didn’t see her. While I would never forget any tiny detail about her beautiful face, I had no recollection of what her friends looked like, so trying to track her down through them was a dead end. Mike and Bill remembered what they looked like, and Bill had filled Mike in on the details of my night, but they didn’t see her friends there, either.
    We settled into a table in a corner and the waitress kept the beers coming. I was subdued for my last night in town. I thought I’d be in the mood to party it up, go out with a bang, but I felt like I’d rather be anywhere else than the bar where I had met the woman I’d never see again. The same bar where Jules had first kissed Nick and the same bar where I’d kissed Brooke at midnight only a little over a month earlier. So much had changed in that time, and more changes