Ten minutes later Juno had brushed her teeth and washed her face, and she was sitting in the semi darkness with a steaming mug of black coffee, contemplating what had just transpired in the last twenty four hours.

This was so unlike her, it was scary.

Juno was a writer and a romantic at heart – she knew that. She loved to write the far reaching romances about perfect men sweeping almost perfect (but charmingly flawed) women off their feet as much as the next would-be novelist, but she hardly believed it could happen in real life.

At least, not to her.

As she had explained time and time again to her friends, to Jamie, to herself, Juno was always the planner. Juno always had a plan, had a direction, had an idea of where things were going and exactly how they were going to end up. She wasn't reckless, she wasn't stupid, and she wasn't a girl who believed in fairy tales.

She'd known men in her life, had had boyfriends, but they never seemed to fit into her ultimate plan for her tidy life. The ones who might fit with her always treated her atrociously. The ones that didn't fit made her crazy until she couldn't take them anymore and broke things off.

The few good men she'd met, the few good men she'd even managed to date she'd quickly pushed away, knowing that she wasn't good enough for them. Juno just couldn't seem to grasp the belief that a perfectly kind, intelligent, attractive man would ever be content to be with her.

She was… well, she certainly wasn't much of a catch, Juno thought ruefully.

Instead of waiting for the inevitable break up from these few good men, Juno took matters into her own hands and seemed to run them off in no time.

She hated herself for it, but that was the problem with self destructive patterns.

They were self destructive.

Juno took another sip of her coffee, her mind wandering away from the reality of the hotel room to again reassess Juno's seemingly twisted emotions.

God knew, her emotions and her neuroses were myriad. This could take a while, Juno smirked to herself. She just couldn't seem to disengage emotional entanglements from physical ones, no matter how hard she tried.

Basically, the sex.

Juno envied Darcy for her ability to sleep with men if she wanted, not sleep with them if she wanted, and feel no guilt or remorse about a one night stand, a casual fling, or a late night booty call from an old boyfriend. She wished she could be that progressive and forward thinking about it being 'just sex', but Juno still subscribed to the old belief that sex meant an emotional relationship, meant a connection to one another, meant something.

She just wasn't one of those girls who could happily engage in a one night stand and never give it a backward glance after the sun came up the next morning.

She really wished she was sometimes, though.

Come to that, Juno wished she was one of those girls with total confidence in herself, since her confidence meter registered somewhere around 'non existent'. Confidence in who she was, no insecurities about her appearance or her weight, and content to throw a guy to the curb just because the spark wasn't there. Juno had tried and tried to force that spark in some of her relationships, but it never got her anywhere.

There were some people that sparked when they meet, and some that didn't.

Grudgingly, Juno had to admit there might have been a tiny spark between her and Jamie.

More like a five alarm forest fire, Juno amended in her mind. She'd be fooling herself to think otherwise. The moment he'd rescued her in that cramped café, the moment he'd kissed her, she'd felt that spark ignite in her chest, and now it seemed to be blazing along as though attached to the world's biggest source of gasoline.

Just because there was a spark between people didn't mean they should just hop into bed together, though, Juno reasoned.

After a moment, she slumped down in the hotel room chair and leveled her gaze over her coffee mug to the king sized bed across the room.

So what the hell was she doing in a hotel room with a naked Scotsman she'd known for less than a week?

A naked Scots she'd had sex with.

Several times.

Okay, a lot.

Happily.

And why didn't this feel like a one night stand, even though it clearly could be nothing else?

Juno looked glumly down at her cooling coffee and tried to figure out what the hell was going on in her brain as well as her romance-weary heart, since they seemed to be at polar opposites of each other at the moment.

She didn't sleep around, and she didn't sleep with strangers, she reminded herself sternly.

And yet.

Juno sighed heavily as her eyes trailed over Jamie's sleeping form before taking another sip of her coffee in an effort to rush the caffeine to her clearly addled brain. Obviously, she and Jamie had a conversation or two about this whole… situation in front of them.

Too bad the last thing Juno wanted to do with Jamie right now was talk about her insecurities and her craziness. The only thing she wanted to do was crawl back under the covers and never emerge from that bed again – except maybe to grab a pizza here and there to keep their stamina up.

Talk about conflict, Juno thought to herself with a heavy sigh.

Talk about major conflict.

1006 / 25012 / 50000

before . after