What She Needs - Lacey Alexander [113]
“Fair enough,” he answered. “Besides, it’s not my goal to make you unhappy. Just the opposite. I only hope you agree by now that sometimes I know what’s best for you, too.”
Jenna pulled in her breath, then let it back out. She’d been doing a lot of thinking about that, and in addition to what she’d told him last night—about the events of her past—something more specific had hit her. “You know, you’ve made me revisit some memories I hadn’t for years, and . . . the truth is, maybe there are even more of them than I put in my questionnaires. Nothing huge, but just more little things that might have built up inside me.”
“I kinda knew that,” he said softly. “I could tell.”
“And . . . my experiences this week have forced me to realize something.” She lifted her eyes to his, glad no one else was in earshot. “You remember that incident with my cousin?”
He met her gaze. “Of course.”
She took another deep breath. “Well, I’m just now understanding that what he did made me feel ashamed, as if I’d done something bad—even though it wasn’t my fault. And the reason I’m just now seeing this is because—oddly enough—nothing I’ve done here has made me feel that same bad way. Here, I’ve . . . questioned my actions at times, worried about the morality of them or wondered if they made me a slut—but all that has been more about questions than actual feelings. I’ve just never felt bad inside, here, the way I did then.”
The warmth in his expression made her feel all the more close to him. “That’s because everyone here respects you, and one another, and sex. It’s all in how it’s approached, sunshine. It’s people who sometimes make sex bad—whether they misuse or abuse it to exert power over someone weaker than them, or whether they insert a double standard, or whether they simply send negative messages about it, forcing their own morality or fears on others. But there’s nothing inherently bad about sex on its own. It’s just pleasure.”
She found herself nodding as his words enlightened her. They lived in a culture that portrayed sex in extreme ways. Whether society was hammering into people that it was bad, wrong—or, more recently, overly glorifying it as something everyone should be seeking, all the time—it kept people from looking at sex with their own minds and forming their own opinions on it.
“But . . . I’m still not one hundred percent sure I agree on that last part,” she couldn’t help arguing.
“Why?”
She started to tell him sex couldn’t be “just pleasure” because she still felt a connection with people she fooled around with—yet, that quickly, she realized it wasn’t completely true. She’d felt a temporary connection—with the other pirates, the dungeon dwellers, the harem girls—but, in fact, the only real connection she’d experienced was with him. And she surely didn’t want to say that, even if they both knew it. So finally she replied, “I’m still not keeping the emotion entirely out of it.”
“Well, that’s okay,” Brent surprised her by saying. “I told you in the beginning, that’s how you’re wired—you can’t really change it. Most women are physiologically programmed that way. But you’re doing a great job of pushing that aside and finding what I wanted you to find here—how to free yourself, how to enjoy sex to the fullest.”
Only she wasn’t pushing it aside. With every liaison, she felt more and more tied to him. And, again, she knew he knew that. So was this Brent still trying to distance himself from that connection—one she knew he’d felt, too? She didn’t want to squabble—she wanted to keep basking in the afterglow of last night—so she simply responded, with a smile, “Well, I definitely am enjoying sex more than ever before.”
“That makes me happy, Jenna. You make me feel like my work here really matters. I mean, I’ve always felt that way, but given your hesitation at first, it’s been more gratifying than usual to see the changes in you. Thank you for that.”
Again, she felt him building that distance—wanting to claim their relationship was mostly about work for him and not the raw lust she’d witnessed in the dungeon,