At Your Most Beautiful by Harper Bliss (best free ereader .TXT) 📗

couldn’t answer any of these questions. Not now, not since the image of Quinn’s lower belly tattoo had settled itself at the forefront of her mind again.

Quinn seemed a touch less forward than last week, and yet, Maya could hardly bear to look away from her. The fast-forward button had been pressed on her life since she’d run into Quinn again. She had taken her sweet time getting her bearings in New York, but now, it seemed, it was high time for some sort of action.

“Do you have any other new tattoos?” Maya heard herself ask Quinn. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to know the answer to that question—she did. But part of her still felt she shouldn’t be asking questions like that.

Quinn nodded slowly. “I sure do.”

“Not in any visible places?” Quinn was wearing a long-sleeved blouse of which the cuffs covered the tattoos on her wrists.

“Correct.”

“Pity I no longer have a swimming pool.” Had Maya’s manhattan been spiked? What on earth was she saying? Quinn had only been flirting a little bit earlier, almost innocently, but referring to the pool Maya used to have was hardly innocent.

Quinn gave a low chuckle. “That’s a damn shame, indeed.” Her gaze drifted sideways and an instant later their new cocktails arrived.

After they’d clinked rims, Quinn asked, “After I left your house that morning, do you remember what was going through your head?”

Maya had to take a sip before she could reply. “My mind was all over the place. So much so I changed the date of my trip to Puerto Rico so I could leave earlier. I didn’t know what to do with myself because a large part of me was disgusted by what I had allowed to happen, while the other part of me…” She huffed out some air. “The other part of me wanted to do it all over again.”

“Disgusted?” Quinn sounded appalled. “Why would you be disgusted by it? What we did, what we so briefly had between us, was fucking beautiful, Maya.”

“Maybe from your point of view. You were the carefree twenty-four-year-old who was home for the summer and managed to seduce her neighbor. I was the older woman who had ended up in bed with someone much too young for me and of the same gender.”

“If you put it that way.”

“How would you put it?” Maya had suffered through enough guilt to last her a lifetime. She was more than ready for a different perspective.

“I had the night of my life.” Quinn sunk her front teeth into her bottom lip for an instant. “While I understood your reasons, I was pretty crushed when all of a sudden you were gone. Honestly, that night… even after all this time, it’s still the stuff a lot of my dreams are made of.”

That had been the thing about Quinn back then and it was still very much the thing about her now. She always knew exactly what to say. At least she did where Maya was concerned. There was something about Quinn that Maya couldn’t help but react to, especially when she spoke to her like that—as though Maya really was the woman of her dreams.

“Surely you’ve had much more spectacular nights since.”

“I can’t say that I have,” Quinn said. “Because that night was something special. The circumstances made it so. You made it so. God, Maya, you… just blew my mind. I don’t just mean when we were in bed, but how you were with me in general. The way we talked and flirted and how you responded to the things I said and did. There was something about it, something special that I will always cherish.”

Maya took her time sipping her drink. Despite all the guilt and shame it had caused her, she had also known that night had been exceptional, but Maya had always believed that to be because her circumstances had been so different than Quinn’s, who still had so much of her life ahead of her, who still had so many women to meet. She wanted very badly to believe what Quinn had just said but took it with a pinch of salt nonetheless. Because, over time, memories get distorted and can turn into emotional events of which the accuracy fades and the associated feelings become amplified. Still, Maya was flattered by what Quinn had just confided in her.

“There was something special about it,” Maya confirmed. “Something I forced myself to forget about.”

“God, Maya. If I had one wish it’s that you hadn’t felt so badly about it afterward. Life’s for living, not for the energy-consuming, useless activity of feeling guilty. Fuck guilt. Really.” Quinn narrowed her eyes and something close to a grin appeared on her face. “I might have something along those lines tattooed in a…” She paused, injecting the air with suspense. “…rather intimate spot.”

If it was Quinn’s objective to have Maya longing to see that particular tattoo right there and then she was succeeding.

Maya drank again. What else was she going to do? This was why, she now knew, when saying goodbye to Quinn last week, she had made herself believe that they wouldn’t see each other again. Paradoxically, it was the same reason Maya was sitting here with Quinn tonight, their conversation quickly descending into a deep flirt. Maya hadn’t been able to resist her years ago and something told her that she wouldn’t be able to resist now either.

Quinn slanted her body into Maya’s direction. “But I want it on record that I’m not going to seduce you again, Maya. I’ll happily take credit for doing so ten years ago, when I only cared about myself and my twenty-something urges, which were greatly satisfied.” She inserted a smile that disappeared as quickly as it had come. “It’s not that I don’t want to, but it’s just not something that I’m going to do again.”

Quinn might as well have given Maya the sexiest of lingering kisses. She might as well have disrobed and shown Maya her latest tattoo.