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I looked down at my feet.  “You know what?  Let’s not talk about this anymore.  I get the picture.  But just to be clear, if you ever try to spank me, I’ll probably knee you in the balls.”
He laughed.  “I don’t spank.  You know what I do.  You like what I do.”
“God, the things that can happen in six years and still it feels like no time’s passed.”
“I don’t know how I even did it,” said Tristan softly.  “Looking back from here, I have no idea where I found the strength to let you stay out of my life for so long.”
I looked down at my fidgeting hands.  “You’re a strong guy.  It looks, from where I’m standing, like you handled it just fine.”
“You were always the strong one.”
My brows drew together.  “Bullshit.”
“Let me finish.  You were.  Just because you’re a girl, and you don’t get into fistfights, doesn’t mean you aren’t tougher than me.  You faced your pain head-on.  You always have.  I can’t tell you how much I admire that.  I wish I were like you.  I have from the beginning.  There is no one I admire more.  You don’t run away from anything.”
I was sitting on his bed, we’d just had sex on his couch, and we were pretending this was friends, and so this made me crane my neck to look at him, my smile wry.  “What do you call all of this?  Being together like this, pretending it’s only friendship?  Don’t you think denial is a form of running away?”
He came and sat beside me on the bed.  Without a word, or seemingly any effort, he plucked me into his lap.  He pulled me hard against him, wrapping his arms tight around me so I was facing forward.  I couldn’t see his face in this position.
“You aren’t in denial, so this isn’t running away for you.  For me, perhaps, but not for you.”
I barked out a short laugh.  “So what would you call it, in my case?”
“Pity.”  His voice was a quiet, reverent utterance.  “You’ve taken pity on me.  And I’m in denial, telling myself that it’s more for you, like it is for me.”
I couldn’t breathe in his arms.  He wasn’t playing fair.  He knew it and I knew it and still, I didn’t walk away.  “We can’t keep doing this, Tristan.  You can’t keep saying these things to me if we’re going to have any hope of staying friends.”  There was more desperation than conviction in my words.
“I can’t stop, Danika.  Please don’t ask me to.  Even if this is the set up for the fall of a lifetime, I still can’t walk away, and I can’t back off.  Don’t you see?  I feel alive now, and I can’t go from feeling this and back to nothing, back to getting by a day at a time, surviving, instead of gripping onto every second that passes, wishing that each day would never end.  Knowing every day that you’re in the same building as me, that you’ll talk to me when I come to see you, that you’ll laugh for me, and make me laugh, and even, if you’re feeling very charitable, you’ll let me hold you sometimes, let me touch you, and even be inside of you.  Don’t you see that I’m living on hope right now, and that hope is sustaining me like nothing else could?  So I’m sorry, but I have to keep doing this.  I’m not strong enough to stop.  I never was.  Like I said, you were always the strong one.”
My eyes were shut by the end, my lips trembling.  “Oh Tristan, what are we going to do?”
“Whatever you want, sweetheart.  Whatever you allow.”
I knew I needed to leave, to get out of that house before it went too far, but I didn’t have the strength to try to break free of his arms just then.  They weakened me, not with their strength but with their tenderness.
I let him hold me for a very long time, but sometime in the night, I did find the strength to get up and leave.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DANIKA
Tristan was either suddenly very interested in one of the Vegas gallery’s featured photographers, or he’d found a new approach to getting me to spend more time with him, because he set up a private showing after hours in the gallery the following Thursday.
I’d been putting him off, so I tended to think it was the latter.  The alarming thing about that was my reaction to it.  I felt giddy with anticipation even after all of the things he’d said that should have had me running in the opposite direction.
It was the evening of my day off, and since I was the only one that handled showings like this, I found myself getting dressed up and coming in to work at nine p.m.
I dressed seductively and not subtly so.  This was not an outfit I could have gotten away with on a normal day at work.
From ribs to knees, the dress was a fitted black sheath.  The only immodest thing from the chest down was the slit that run high up one thigh.
The top, though, was completely out of hand.  It was made up of cream silk, with a neckline that plunged so deep, I never could have worn even a strapless bra with it.  The sleeves were gathered, and hooked onto my shoulders lightly, nothing but a prayer holding them there.  And the material was very fine, so the slightest breeze would have my ni**les popping to attention.
And there was something much bigger than a slight breeze heading my way that very second.
I came into the gallery and began to set things up, knowing Tristan was just minutes behind me.