Unbound: (InterMix) by Cara McKenna Page A

But I always kinda figured you were supposed to be over that by your thirties.”
    “Nah. Plenty of people make arses of themselves over sex well into middle age. And
     beyond. Just look at every politician ever.”
    She took a deep breath and finally found the balls to ask, “Do you miss it? Sex?”
    His eyes widened, meeting hers, fleeing, meeting them again, escaping to stare at
     the thumbs tracing the lip of his mug. “I suppose. The way I miss a hot bath or ice
     cream. As a luxury, perhaps.”
    She shot him a sad smile. “That’s all?” Maybe he was just downplaying it so she wouldn’t
     feel threatened, trapped here with him.
    “It’s not as though I came out here expecting to keep it in my life,” he said. “I
     lost it in the trade. And willingly, yeah.”
    “Wow.” She studied him for a long time, well after his gaze had returned to the fire.
     “That’s very sad.”
    “I’m sure it is. I do my best not to think too much about it all.” He looked to his
     mug or the floor and laughed softly. The sound made Merry’s neck flush. “You’re very
     nosy, you know.”
    “I know. It’s just that you’re probably the most interesting person I’ve ever met.
     Plus you can’t kick me out, so I may as well interrogate you for as long as I’ve got
     you captive.”
    Something shifted in his expression, a hint of alarm passing over his features.
    “Just kidding,” she added quickly.
    “It’s fine. Pry all you want, just don’t expect to get too far. I came here so I could
     forget all the things that drove me out of my old life. I’m not eager to rehash them
     now.”
    “Sorry. I’ll drop it.”
    “Though it’s sort of nice to be asked,” he added, catching her gaze.
    “Yeah?”
    “Sure.” His brow furrowed, chin dipping. “I can’t remember the last time anyone seemed
     eager to know me.”
    A pang of heartache passed through her, chased by something softer. Affection, perhaps.
     Longing. “Maybe because you never answer when they knock.”
    He looked up again.
    Kiss me,
she wanted to say. Was this how men felt, she wondered, constantly angling for a
     sexual segue and struggling to manifest one? Rob wasn’t taking any of her bait. If
     she was going to get anywhere, she’d have to be blunt.
    “May I hold your hand?”
    He blinked at her, a hundred perfectly valid questions tensing his face, starting
     with
Why?
But when he spoke, all that came out was, “Okay.”
    He unlinked his fingers and offered his hand. Merry took it in her own, on the edge
     of the cushion. She let her body’s awareness swim in the warm, strong weight of him,
     the softness of his palm, the roughness of his knuckles, the heat where his fingertips
     had touched his mug.
    They watched the flames behind the grate and she gave his hand a faint squeeze. When
     she felt him squeeze in return, the sensation lit a fire in her toes that crackled
     through her legs and belly, spreading a fever all the way to her cheeks and ears.
    “This is nice,” she told the flames.
    “It is.”
    “No one’s held my hand in ages.” Not even her erstwhile fuck buddy. Probably no one
     since her dad, standing beside her as they watched her mom’s ashes dissolving into
     the Pacific tide. Yet this contact felt nothing like consolation.
    “They ought to,” Rob mumbled. “It’s so soft.”
    Merry had lost much of her old softness in the past year, though not in her hands,
     not in her heart, not her mouth or her sex. She rubbed Rob’s knuckles with her thumb,
     noting how the space between their palms had grown damp. Like chemistry, the way their
     two bodies could come together in even this most negligible way and alter that tiny
     climate.
    Soft,
she thought. Like Rob’s bed and sheets. As his spent body might feel against hers,
     after she reminded him of certain luxuries he’d sacrificed in exchange for solitude.
    She turned to him, freeing her fingers, edging them along his wrist. Struck still
     as a statue, he let