Push Me (To The Edge series, #1) by Jill Macintosh Read Free Book Online

himself emotionally, he would be giving up control.
    I’m referring to real emotion here. Not the words he spoke. Anyone can come up with romantic or sexy things to say.
    The only real passion and intimacy Ian was capable of was physical.
    I wanted true passion, raw emotion. I wanted something that was so real, so true, so honest, so deeply felt in our souls that no words would be sufficient to describe it.
    I mistook Ian’s physical passion for that in the beginning. I misinterpreted his desire to protect and provide for me as that kind of love.
    Silly. I har dly knew him then.
    But I knew him now. Or at least I knew him well enough to know that behind that mask of wealth and materialism, beneath his beautiful skin, deep down inside his nearly flawless body, there was something dark that he would never face.
    I had tried to talk to him about it, practically begging him to tell me something, anything, just one little piece of his life.
    “Let me in,” I would say, nearly pleading but maintaining just enough dignity that it wouldn’t get to that point.
    Sometimes he wouldn’t say anything at all, but most of the time he’d deny that there was a reason he wouldn’t open up emotionally. He was lying to me, and it pissed me off. But mostly I felt badly for him because he was lying to himself.
    He was intensely private. Almost obsessively so. We almost never went out, and when we did, we always ended up in a private room of a small restaurant. We never went to movies or concerts. Our lives revolved around work and sex, very little else.
    Ian had family in Utah, and the only thing he told me about them was that they were “hyper-religious” and he no longer had anything to do with them. I never pressed him for more information about them, nor did I ask why he didn’t seem to have any friends. His social circle, if you could even call it that, was comprised solely of people who did what he did for a living, and the only thing they seemed to do as a group was dine out once in a while. There were never any guys nights out, no fishing trips, no going to sporting events, nothing you’d expect a typical guy in his thirties to be doing.
    Aside from Rachel, I had very little contact with anyone other than Ian. I had a small, tight-knit group of friends back in New Jersey, but it had gotten to the point where we kept up mainly on Facebook. We’d also see each other sometimes during holidays and on the rare occasion that some of them would be in Manhattan and in the last year I’d had to turn those opportunities down twice because Ian had to do something work-related.
    I had also lost almost all contact with Steven and Ross, two of my best friends from college, but that wasn’t entirely my fault. They had moved to Boston when Massachusetts became the first state to approve same-sex marriage, and even though New York had legalized it since then, they chose to stay in Boston. That was a little over a year ago, so they were gone before I even met Ian. The only time I’d seen them since then was when I went to Boston to attend their wedding. Ian, of course, didn’t go.
    No one at work knew anything about my private life. Which really isn’t a bad thing. Especially when you begin to realize that you wouldn’t want your coworkers to know anything about your life at all, thanks to the person you were living with.
    I had come to realize that Ian struggled with a major case of paranoia. That was my layman’s diagnosis, anyway. It was as though he worried that people would take advantage of him, or steal from him if he let them get too close. It was hard to figure out. He was hard to figure out, and it didn’t take long before I realized he wasn’t going to wake up one day a changed man.
    I’d toyed with the idea of trying to get Ian to talk to someone, get professional help, but more than once I’d heard him make a comment about psychiatry in general. He claimed it was “feel-good nonsense,” and that therapists and doctors