“Right. The boss.” Just like a lot of the men in the patriarchal society she lived in. Like the men who earned higher wages than women for the same level of education and experience. Like the men who didn’t take no as no. Wait—wages—what if he did porn? Shit. She’d consider that one later.
Right now, it didn’t matter if bossiness was the extent of Noah’s interests—it was enough to be wrong for her.
He met her gaze full on, decidedly bumping up the intimacy of the conversation. “Look, dominance doesn’t have to be scary. We could…” He paused, likely realizing the assumption he’d made. “I mean, I could maybe try to tone it down. If it’s not what my partner is into.”
It was sweet what he was offering—to put his own preferences aside in order for them to be together, but what good would that do? She’d sleep with him and then probably fall for him even harder and she’d get attached and maybe he’d get attached to her, too, all the while the friction of what he’d given up would gnaw and eat at him and eventually his resentment would destroy everything good between them. It was akin to building a relationship on a lie. It didn’t work to even attempt it.
“Jaylene…” The ache in his voice said that he not only recognized her thought process but that he shared in her disappointment.
“It’s fine,” she said. Though her eyes were a little watery now. Thank God for the sunglasses. Stupid, that she should feel like this over someone she hardly knew.
Noah switched the buns bag to his outside hand and laced his now free fingers through hers. She let him. It was a good-bye of sorts. There could never be anything between them. Not anything more than this. Jay was well aware that compromise had to occur within relationships, but putting her feminist beliefs to bed, so to speak, wasn’t a compromise—it was a breach of integrity.
Despite the warm day and the heat that ignited from the touch of his skin against hers—and yes, her hand was clammy—Jay felt the cold front of loneliness sneaking in. Perhaps this was why so many of her friends were single. Or lesbians. Because the men willing to accept them were few and far between.
At the moment, she didn’t care if the man of her dreams was impossible to find. She was too distraught that the man wouldn’t be Noah. So stupid. She didn’t even know what he did for a living. The suspicion of porn flitted through her mind again, but she batted it away. It didn’t matter now.
They came to her steps first, both of them stopping, neither of them letting go of the other’s hand. Jay wished she could stretch the moment on and on, but eventually the silence between them got awkward and something had to be said.
Coming up with nothing meaningful, she settled on her other possible epiphany.
“Noah, do you work in that lingerie store? Is that why you were there?”
“No.” He laughed. “I do not.”
She loved the sound of his laugh. It made her smile despite her melancholy mood. “Then why were you there? You still never told me.”
He paused. Finally he said, “I’d never been in one before. I wanted to see what it was like.”
There was a sense of honesty in his admission, but his pause and the fact that men just didn’t go into women’s underwear shops to see what it was like on a regular basis caused her to doubt. “Were you ogling the mannequins? Or hoping to get one of the salesgirls to model for you? Is that how your dominance thing works?”
“No.” He laughed again. Then suddenly he grew serious. “No. Look, I know that you have these preconceived notions in your head about things like this, and there’s probably nothing I can do to change your mind about them. Or me, for that matter. Which is really too bad. Because I honestly went into that store for the experience.”
He took a step forward, closing the distance between them so that his natural manly scent wrapped around her like a blanket. “And the whole time I was there, the only thing I was thinking was how sexy everything there would look on you. A red see-through chemise would contrast with your dark hair so perfectly. Or maybe a black leather bustier would be nice to prop up your gorgeous breasts. And I definitely want to see you in wisps of white lace riding up your legs as they wrap around me.”
Her breath caught and her pulse ticked up a notch. She should be offended, shouldn’t she? She wasn’t though. Not in the least. All she wanted, in fact, was for Noah to keep on talking.
Fortunately, he did. “Maybe that’s a little too forward for you, and you might even call it sexist, but I call it infatuation. And since after today I’ll probably never see you again in more than a neighborly sense I have to lay all my cards out. I’m into you, Jaylene. Yes, I’m into dominance in the bedroom, but I saw your eyes when you read those words. The way they dilated, the way your breathing hitched—you were turned on.”