Silas really hadn’t meant to bring Rae down, or upset her, but he could tell that that state of Kori was weighing on her. “Could be you just need to keep trying,” he suggested. “Seems like she’s coming out of whatever shell she created for herself,” he shrugged, at a loss. The kind of loss that Kori was dealing with, that Rae had felt, it wasn’t the kind of loss he was familiar with.
“I think it’s a risk I’d be taking for me, actually,” he reasoned with a wag of his eyebrows. All joking aside, no matter how much she thought he was risking, he felt like she was worth it. First woman in a while –ever, if he was being honest- that had made him feel like any backlash he could get wouldn’t matter in the long run.
It probably wasn’t charitable or nice to laugh at Rae’s admission. But he couldn’t help being amused by the reassurance that he wasn’t the only one suffering. It wasn’t like he’d been some kind of monk, but it’d been a pretty long stretch without much activity for him. His feelings for Rae had a lot to with that. Casual sex hadn’t ever been a big thing for him, but he’d also never been the kind of guy to be in bed with one woman and thinking about another, so considering he’d had little success getting Rae out of his head, he hadn’t bothered. “Oh, I’m watching,” he told her, mentally face-palming at just how ridiculous that sounded.
He bit into his lip to keep from saying the first thing that popped into his head. At the feel of her fingers on bare skin whatever he’d been trying so hard not to say was forgotten. There was nothing covert about that, but he couldn’t really bring himself to care right that minute. “Whatever I want, huh?” That was… distracting. “That’s some pretty serious free reign you’re giving me.” She was making it difficult to be good and adhere to the going slow method of things they’d agreed on. Going slow was the last thing on his mind. Why had they decided that again? The exact reasoning was escaping him.
It turned out that Rae had more balls than he did, pulling him into a kiss like that. He’d have been content just doing that for the rest of the afternoon, even if it pushed his self-control that much harder.
He was breathing just as heavily as she was, a small grin pulling at the corners of his mouth, when she eventually broke the kiss. “I think I can manage, yeah,” he assured her. “And if I can’t, then maybe falling on the cold ice will do me some good.” Nothing like a cold shower though, which was something he thought he could use right about now too.
Getting a feel for the ice and the skates, he took a couple slow strides, and realized that his balance did need to compensate a little for the cast on his arm. He was going to burn the thing when the medics approved its removal.
“Do you think you can stay balanced?” he asked her with a raised eyebrow, his eyes traveling to her chest and back up again. It would have been smarter to keep his gaze above her neckline, for his own sanity. “Said yourself things have changed.”