Free Shut Up and Kiss Me by Madeline Sheehan, Claire C Riley Page A

about calling him? He left you his number, right?”
    “ He doesn’t want me to call him.”
    “ I’m just saying—”
    “ I’m not calling him. Him leaving made it very clear that it was a one-night thing. I’d rather not embarrass myself.” I softened my voice, realizing I was being harsh. Nikki meant well, but that was part of the problem: she had meant well when she had told me to go for it and to be free for one night. Yet after sleeping with Will—after spending a night feeling relaxed and at ease with him, and after going through a variety of foreign emotions since then—I now felt more trapped than ever. I felt ridiculous, like a teenager with a crush. And feeling like this couldn’t possibly be healthy for me.
    Inching her stool closer to mine, Nikki slung her arm around my shoulders. “I’m sorry men suck so much.”
    I shrugged. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”
    “ Well, someone has to apologize for their existence.”
    I grinned. “Maybe their mothers should?”
    “ Good luck with that one. But in all seriousness, Mila—you’ve been through so much, you deserve a little happiness. I say go for it.”
    My grin slipped away and I glanced off. “I don’t know,” I mumbled.
    She was right, I had been through a lot—more than most women my age—and I did deserve some form of happiness. But then, as I turned back to Nikki and thought of our small, chintzy apartment, with its mismatched furniture and cramped bookshelves, I couldn’t hold back my smile. I really was happy, and being happy now despite everything made me appreciate what I had all the more. And while my past was still out there, my future was unhindered and ready for me to take hold of it and make it what I wanted. I just had to be a little braver, like I had been with Will. After all, it had been a year and a half. Maybe it was time to start…living again.
    “ Stop worrying about me,” I whispered.
    “ Never,” she whispered back.
    Later that night, as I slipped into bed and turned off my lamp, I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling, allowing myself to really think about my past for once. To push back against the feelings of fear and foreboding that always came with the memories and simply think about the contrast of my life now compared to then.
    Perhaps it wasn’t even Will that I felt so strongly about, but the confident person I had been when I was with him—at least once I’d allowed myself to break the mold I’d built around me. That woman was a stranger to me, and yet there was something about her that felt familiar. Perhaps she was the person I could have become if everything hadn’t happened the way it had.
    My hand fell between my legs as I thought about Will’s hands, touching me, making me cry out in pleasure. Nikki was right: I did have needs—needs that I had forgotten about until meeting Will. Needs that, perhaps, I had never really explored before—not really—but now that they’d been ignited, they were flourishing inside of me.
    Closing my eyes, I slipped my hand into my underwear, unashamedly thinking of Will as I touched myself. Each stroke of my finger was his, each tremor of pleasure pulled from me was one he was pulling from me. I inhaled the scent of him, still clinging to my pillow, wishing he was there, wishing his lips were on mine, that his body was pressed against me, that my nails were dragging down his muscled back… And as my orgasm gripped me, I imagined he was here, and instead of the darkness, I was staring up into his beautiful blue eyes.

     

* * *
     

     
    “ Townsend,” Will told the
maître d’. “Elise,” he added, scanning the interior of the restaurant.
    Favors was a small café adjacent to one of the leading hotels in the city, as well as a place his mother liked to frequent. It had been exactly a week since he’d seen her last, and he wasn’t about to risk running into the rest of his family at their estate and ruining another perfectly good Sunday.