Keep Me in the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page B

and I’ve slept with men who were probably lying to me. But I enjoy having a good time. My heart isn’t in the equation. And, no matter what happens, I respect myself.”
    “I know. I don’t judge you…” Anna babbles.
    “Actually it sounds like you do,” Dolly interrupts. “And do you know what? That’s fine, and Cass is right, we’ll deal with it later. But I’m trying to give my friend some good advice about men, and you’re sitting here spinning a fairy tale.”
    Dolly turns to me. “He’s hiding something from you. If you were more like me, if you’d been burned before—hell, maybe if you’d had a serious relationship before—this might not be as big of an issue. But this is obviously someone you have something going with, and regardless of what you want, you’re getting into it deeper. You can’t keep meeting up to sleep with a guy in a mask forever. Sooner or later one of you is going to want more, and so you have to start thinking about what you’re going to do when the mask comes off.”
    Everyone is silent. We all know she’s right. It doesn’t matter if the issue is something simple like vanity or something so heavy I don’t even want to think about it.
    “I don’t know what I’ll do,” I whisper as Dolly’s face softens. “You guys are right. I’m starting to need him more and more, and this attachment is growing beyond what we have.”
    “So ask him to take it off,” Dolly says.
    “I have, and he won’t.”
    “Then you take it off,” Dolly says.
    Anna glares at her. “That’s horrible advice! What if he isn’t ready?”
    “Then he learns how to man up and get ready,” Dolly says. “A week of something like this is hot and kinky. Three months means there’s serious problems.”
    “Anna has a point though,” Cassie says. “What if he tries to hurt her if she takes it off? This guy could be unstable.”
    “Look, stop everyone!” I stand up and start pacing around the chair. I don’t want to look at anyone’s face. All of this suddenly got too real. Before, it was a fantasy. An indulgence. I knew it was a little weird—alright, a whole lot weird—but I could deal with it. Sort of. I was weird too after all. But thinking about my masked lover attacking me if I took off his mask was frightening.
    “We just want you to think things through,” Cassie says. “How do you meet up with him?”
    He finds me, or sometimes he tells me where to meet in a letter .
    “We just find each other,” I respond lamely. “And I am thinking things through. I just don’t know what to do.”
    Dolly crosses her arms. “You need to take off that mask.”
    “Dolly!” Anna chastises.
    “Dolly’s right, but just pinning him down and yanking it off might not be the best idea. You should talk to him,” Cassie says.
    “They don’t talk, they do other things. He’s a man of action. Pin him down, take charge and rip that baby off,” Dolly says.
    I don’t think it’s possible to blush any harder.
    “You guys are embarrassing her,” Anna notes.
    Thanks Anna . Well, at least everyone knows. Didn’t think it was possible to be more pathetic but I guess there’s a way, and unsurprisingly Anna was the one to find it.
    “We don’t mean to embarrass you,” Dolly says. “You just need to get to the bottom of this. Whatever secret he’s hiding, you deserve to know. You’ve been together long enough that if he respects you at all he’ll tell you.”
    All of this sounds so reasonable. So right. So why do I feel stupid? Why do I feel like this could never happen?
    “Be honest with yourself,” Dolly continues. “You want to know, don’t you?”
    I can’t deny it. “I used to not want to know, but you’re right, I do.”
    I exhale and my friends sit patiently, waiting for me to continue.
    “I really like him.”
    My friends look at each other.
    “And I’m starting to wonder if I look at him, it isn’t me who will have their feelings change, but him.”
    “You can’t think