Hypnotized by love, p.17
Hypnotized by Love, page 17
His mouth moved up to my jawline. “Do you hate this?”
I tried to nod, but my head was not cooperating. “I do hate it. And you.”
Then he moved his lips over to my earlobe and sucked it gently into his mouth. My eyes rolled into the back of my head, and I arched against him.
“What about that?”
“I hate that the most,” I gasped. How could I loathe someone this much and still crave his touch like this?
Then I felt his free hand at the top of my sundress, undoing the first button as he kissed his way down my neck and flicked his tongue across my clavicle. I realized where he was headed, and it was a testament to how desperate we were for each other that he had apparently completely forgotten about all the other people currently in the house.
“Stop,” I said, and every cell in my body cried out in protest at my stupidity.
At that, he immediately released me, causing my arms to drop. He stepped back and held both of his hands aloft, like I was trying to arrest him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, breathing hard.
My own chest was heaving just as hard as his, and it took me a second to get enough oxygen into my lungs so that I could speak. He had nothing to apologize for. I was the one who had kissed him first.
Even though he had provoked me by being so annoying and irresistible.
“I can’t think when you do that,” I said, not able to explain why I’d told him to stop any other way.
He lowered his hands. “When I do what? Kiss you?”
I nodded, gulping hard.
The sexy and knowing smile that spread across his face was almost my undoing. “That’s a good thing.”
It was a very good thing, but that was beside the point. “People saw you. Us. Together. The morning of the false fire alarm. They know that you were my client. And I could get in trouble.”
“Why would you get in trouble?”
It was an indication of how much my family and Bridget loved me that this piece of gossip hadn’t made the rounds.
But I couldn’t give a journalist any ammunition, especially when he planned on doing a story about me. I had to keep it vague.
“I just would. We can’t.” My body was making a very strong argument about why it was a bad idea to tell him to stop, and I was definitely listening.
He looked from side to side and then said, “Are any of those people here in this room?”
My skin flushed in response, in anticipation. “No. But we shouldn’t be doing this.” My protest sounded weak even to my own ears.
“I want to kiss you. I’ve wanted it ever since the moment I laid eyes on you again, glaring at me like you were ready to murder me.” He said it like it was endearing.
“I am ready to murder you.”
“Then why did you kiss me?”
That was the question of the day. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do,” he said with such certainty that it made my spine feel like Jell-O. He came closer and closer to me, and I held my breath, waiting. It was like torture.
Until the moment when his chest made contact with mine and I let out a whimper of relief because this was exactly what I wanted. He rested his right forearm against the bookshelf, above my head. He trailed his left fingers along my jawline until he reached my sensitized lips, and when he rubbed his thumb against them, I had to bite back a moan.
“Say yes, Sinclair. It will feel so good to say yes. Try new things and see how good it makes you feel.” He was so seductive and alluring that it took me a second to figure out where I’d heard that before.
It was what I had said to him in our hypnosis session. He was trying to use my own words against me. “That’s not going to work. You can’t hypnotize me.”
“Yes, I can.”
He was right. He could. I’d felt mesmerized by him since he’d come back to Playa Placida, as much as I’d wanted to deny it.
He moved his fingers away and held his lips just above mine. “What is it you want?”
That was a loaded question I wasn’t ready to answer.
“It’s too fast,” I told him. “Slow down.” I wasn’t sure exactly what I was referencing, but I knew for sure that I couldn’t hook up with him in my father’s study while my nana was out there telling yarn stories.
“Are you sure?” I felt him smile as he asked. “I could take my shirt off.”
I wanted that so much I felt almost panicked by it. “You can’t.”
“Fine. I’ll take your shirt off.”
That did make me smile. “It’s a dress.”
“Those come off, too.”
“Clothes on.”
“Whatever you say.” And although it seemed to defy the laws of physics, his mouth got even closer to mine without making actual contact. “Whatever you say, I’ll do it.”
That sent a shudder through me, causing shivers to break out along my nerves. This was so, so bad.
I really was under his spell, and I would have done just about anything to get him to kiss me again. Even humiliate myself.
He moved his head slightly so that there was this frustrating phantom feel of his lips, so close but not close enough. “Tell me what you want,” he said.
Swallowing down every bit of pride and anger I had left, I admitted, “I want you to kiss me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Another self-satisfied smile from him before he bent his head slightly to capture my lips, and I immediately put my arms around his neck to prevent him from going anywhere. His response was to deepen the kiss, sending me into a thick spiral of heat and desire.
“Mason,” I breathed against his lips, not able to help myself.
“I want to spend the rest of my life listening to you panting my name like that,” he growled in a possessive way that made little pinpricks of sweat break out on my temples. “Do you know how many years I’ve waited to kiss you?”
It was an admission that I couldn’t deny or dismiss. I’d told myself that he hated me, didn’t want me, but he had just told me that he did.
I chose to ignore it. “You are so good at this.” I had been a bit too passive in this exchange, overwhelmed by him, and that wasn’t usually our dynamic. I wanted to win. I wanted him on his knees, dying for me.
“Very good?” he asked and then let out a choked sound when I pressed my lips against his throat. His skin was warm and smelled like him. I dragged my lips along his neck, and he said, “In that session, when you said I was doing very good, it took all of the willpower I possessed not to grab you and pull you on top of me and kiss you senseless.”
Now it was my turn to smile. I liked the feeling that I had power over him.
I was kissing my way up to his mouth, letting his stubble rub against my lips, my jaw, and I felt a tremble pass through him. Since he’d brought up the shirtless option, I had been intrigued. I kissed him softly and tugged at the back of his shirt, pulling it loose so that I could run my fingers along the strong muscles of his back.
“If you keep doing that, I’m not going to be able to keep my promises to behave,” he said, nuzzling his nose against mine.
“What is it you want?” I asked.
He pulled his head back and looked into my eyes.
Only I didn’t see desire there. I saw something softer, inexplicable. He reached up and brushed my hair back, tucking it behind my ear. He let his fingers trail down the side of my face.
“You’re the one I want, Sinclair.”
Something important was happening, but it was like he’d scrambled my brain so much with his kisses that I couldn’t figure it out.
“Savannah?”
I heard Sierra calling me. I pushed on his shoulders, suddenly frantic. She was going to find me, and he was so obviously disheveled, and I figured I must look the same. Messy hair—had I been wearing lipstick? I couldn’t remember. If I had, it was probably smeared all over my face. I searched the ground for my scrunchie and found it, doing my best to pull my hair back.
Mason just watched me with an amused look as I ran over to the window to see if I could make out my own reflection. No lipstick, but I did notice that my lips looked swollen, my cheeks bright pink. I hoped my sister wouldn’t notice.
“Savannah?”
“In here!” I said, running over to the couch and picking up my book.
My sister opened the door and stuck her head into the room. “We’re going for ice cream. Do you two want to come?”
“Yes, I do! I’ve been told it feels good to say yes,” Mason announced, and I tried really hard not to flush at his words. “I’d love to get ice cream.”
“None for me, thanks.” I kept my eyes pointed at the page and hoped they would just leave so that my sister wouldn’t figure out what we’d been up to.
“Let’s go,” she said, and I could feel Mason’s gaze on me, but he left without saying another word. Sierra started to follow him, and then she said my name.
I looked up at her.
She pointed at her chest. “Your top button’s open, and you’re holding your book upside down,” she said with a wink, and I collapsed against the couch when she closed the door behind her.
I was never going to hear the end of this from her.
Especially since it shouldn’t have happened. I never should have given in to those impulses.
This had to be a onetime thing.
I couldn’t ever let it happen again.
My solution to this potential problem was to hide out as much as I possibly could. I stopped meeting my sister and Bridget out in public and spent most of my free time at home.
The one issue I currently faced was that the PTA’s silent auction / fundraising party was tonight. Technically my part of it was done—I had gotten all the donors, printed out a sheet for each item, and called everyone before the event to make sure they were ready to go.
Except Mason. I hadn’t called Mason to see if he was still planning on offering up a writing critique. I did print out a paper for it, though.
Everything was set up and ready to go. They didn’t need me tonight.
I worked myself up into a frenzy because I was so worried about seeing him at the fundraiser, to the point that I felt like I might throw up. I curled up in my bed, tucking my blanket around me and wishing it could be my shield so that I could hide out forever.
That roller-coaster feeling was back with a vengeance. I couldn’t separate out all these conflicting feelings I was carrying around, and I had gone and made it a thousand times worse by making out with him.
Because now I knew for a fact what I was missing out on—a physical connection like I’d never experienced before.
Not to mention the emotional connection we used to share.
I groaned and turned over. I could not go and face him tonight. Vivian was active in the PTA, so she would be there, and I couldn’t risk something happening with Mason out in public, because I’d already shown that I was more than willing to throw caution to the wind when he smoldered at me.
When my mom came in to check on me, I legitimately felt terrible and told her I couldn’t go, which she accepted.
My sister, however, did not.
“Are you faking?” she asked, sitting next to me on the bed.
“I’m not. I feel so sick to my stomach.”
Her hand reached under my blanket so that she could feel my forehead. “You don’t have a fever.”
That wasn’t true. I did have a fever, and its name was Mason, and he had permanently infected me, and I apparently had zero antibodies to him, and I was never going to get over feeling this way about him.
Sierra pulled her hand away and sat quietly, waiting. I lowered my blanket so that I could look at her. “What?”
“At the risk of my sounding like my therapist, what is wrong with you?”
“Are you trying to have a talk of shame with me right now?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “You are the one who was about to hook up with Mason with our grandma in the next room.”
When I didn’t answer, she added, “I don’t mean to pry . . .”
“Don’t you, though?”
“Aren’t you dying to tell someone the details?”
It was killing me not to share this with her, but it felt private. Like it wasn’t for her ears. “We yelled, then we kissed, and we stopped. There’s not really much more to it.”
“Oh, I think there’s a lot more to it. Math was never my strongest subject, but even I know that one plus one always equals two.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It means, dear sister, that despite how much you try to deny it, you have feelings for Mason.”
“About him, not for him!” I protested a bit too vehemently. “Why would you even think that?”
“Because of how much you actively hate him.”
Did she not see how twisted her logic was? “Hatred is the opposite of loving someone.”
“No, the opposite of love is indifference. Hating means there’s emotion involved. Passion.”
Sierra did not know the half of it.
“You haven’t talked or thought about Timothy since that censure thing happened,” she went on. “He’s someone you should hate, but you can’t be bothered to spend any of your emotion or time on him. You spend loads of both on Mason.”
While that made a certain kind of sense, she didn’t get it. “I don’t like him.”
“I believe you,” she said, patting my hand. “Do you believe you?”
No.
Which was the problem.
“There’s nothing there,” I insisted.
“You are my sister and I love you, but you look at him like he’s a human-size bag of M&M’s.”
“I do not!”
“To quote Socrates, yuh-huh.”
While I wanted to snap back with a nuh-uh, it would have kept us going in circles. Instead I just sighed loudly to show my displeasure with this entire conversation.
She didn’t get the hint. Or else she just ignored it.
“Look,” she said, “when I told you that him asking me out would be the next best thing to asking you out, you misinterpreted that as meaning that I wanted to date him. I was trying to imply that he’s so into you that someone who looks exactly like you would be a good runner-up. Because this situation is not one sided. He’s head over heels for you.”
My heart clenched at that statement. “That’s not true.” It couldn’t be.
“Why do you think he kissed you? For funsies?”
Sierra did not understand this situation at all. “Being physically attracted to someone is not the same thing as having feelings. Obviously you can hate someone and still kiss them.”
“You can’t,” she said. “I mean, I understand why you keep him at arm’s length, but he’s always been it for you. No one else has even come close.”
“I’ve dated!”
“Not all that much.”
Again, she was discounting history to make her point. “Matt was a serious boyfriend.”
“You dated Matt for three months and then dumped him because he didn’t like that TV show you were obsessed with. The one you used to watch with Mason, I’d like to point out.”
I had no good rebuttal to that, so I settled on, “So?”
“Let’s be honest. The only serious long-term relationship you’ve ever had is with sugar.”
I made a sound of disgust. “Dating in your twenties is mostly stupid anyways. You never know if you’re going to marry someone or if they’re going to turn out to be the reason you spend so much money on therapy.”
Mason was a therapy bill waiting to happen.
“I feel a little like a broken record here, but you should talk to him.”
Deep down, very deep down, I knew my sister was right. That I was being petty and ridiculous. Mason might have a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why things had happened the way they did.
But if he could explain things away . . . what did that mean for me? I’d kissed him once, a mistake I absolutely could not make again. It would take so little for him to make me entirely vulnerable to him, completely defenseless, which would make it easy for him to destroy my heart again.
I wasn’t going to let that happen, but Sierra didn’t need to know about my inner turmoil. “He doesn’t get a pass for bad behavior or to not have to feel shame about what he did. Talking to him doesn’t change anything.”
She seemed to consider my words and then said, “We all make mistakes, and part of being human is forgiving and moving past them if we can. If he continued to be toxic and hurt you, that would be one thing, but if he’s changed? It would be nice if we could erase the past, but hanging on to this anger? The person it’s hurting is you. Not him.”
Again, she was right. “It isn’t my job to absolve his guilty conscience.”
My sister nodded. “I get that. But forgiveness, moving on, it’s not for him, it’s for you.”
I squeezed her hand. I knew she had my best interests at heart. Clinically, I could agree with her sentiment. I knew holding on to anger and not forgiving others was not the best thing for mental health. I was living proof of that fact. It didn’t mean that I wanted to risk letting Mason back in.
But I budged a tiny bit, just for her benefit. “Fine. The next time I see him, I’ll listen to his stupid excuses.”
“That’s the spirit!” she said.
“Why are you pushing me so hard toward him?” I asked.
“Well, there’s the fact that I think you two blockheads really do like each other, and because, I don’t know, I guess I have a hard time taking control in my own life, and it’s cathartic to make you do it.”
“You could do the same thing.”
“I know. I’m trying. In large part because I envy what you have.”
“Loathing and a desire for mutual destruction?” I asked.
“No,” she said as she shook her head. “You said you were jealous that I’m so even keeled. I’m jealous of the emotions you have. How you feel the things you feel and they’re so big. Sometimes you tamp them down and pretend you don’t have them, but they’re still there.”
