Chapter 14
Chapter 14
If there was one bad habit Scarlett didn’t practice, it was sneaking out of a lover’s hotel room or apartment the morning after a tumble in the sheets. She wasn’t a thief escaping from the scene of a crime. No, Scarlett liked sex. A lot. When she invited herself into someone’s bed, it was very much on purpose. Why act mortified by the hungry creature she’d been, when she wasn’t?
But all those other times and all those other men hadn’t been Jaime Croft. They extra-especially hadn’t been Jaime Croft seventeen years after the first time.
No, this was the sequel to the most devastating relationship of her life, and so if she could’ve snuck out and gotten away with it, she would’ve been tempted to do a runner.
With everyone else, Scarlett was on the attack, but with Jaime, she was on defense. And as every chess player will tell you, defensive play is infinitely harder. If an attack fails, you make another attack. But there’s no room for error when you’re trying to keep your king safe.
So rather than rising from his bed—his! bed!—a groggy mess like normal, the morning after she’d slept with Jaime, Scarlett woke up fully and utterly alert. She entered the kitchen showered and dressed, her hair styled and her makeup in place, with enough adrenaline zinging through her that she could’ve taken a pass on her coffee.
But she almost started vibrating when she saw what was sitting next to the coffee mug she’d been using every morning.
A box of condoms.
She couldn’t tear her eyes from the box. It was a value pack of thirty-six. If she left in five days ... that was an extremely hopeful number.
But an exciting one.
“Morning.” Jaime’s voice was scratchy in the best way, and so Scarlett couldn’t help it. Her eyes darted to him and immediately regretted it. His gaze was pure fire. Just distilled heat and sex and longing, and every inch of her started to smolder.
She opened her mouth to ask how he’d slept, then she remembered where she’d slept, and she half swallowed her own tongue.
The morning after was a flipping minefield when the person you’d boned was your ex.
She was going to have to remember that for the future. Make dubious sexual decisions with anyone else—but not with the one guy whose heart you broke.
Jaime filled her mug. It took forever. If he had grown the coffee beans, harvested them, roasted them, and ground them, it couldn’t have taken longer. Then with deliberate carefulness, he set the carafe in the machine and began stalking toward her.
Right, the morning after wasn’t some hurdle they were going to leap over before never seeing each other again. It was the opening move in the next stage of their game.
A stage she feared and desperately, desperately wanted.
Scarlett drew a harsh breath that burned all the way down her throat. The look on his face was—wow. All of her came to sharp, aching attention as she took a step back and collided with the counter. At least it kept her standing.
Jaime set one hand on the counter to her left. She almost darted right. Then he placed his other hand there, blocking her escape.
“You’re trapped,” he whispered.
But Scarlett had already known that. For better or for worse, she was caught.
“What are you going to do with me?” If Scarlett could’ve had some cool dignity here, that would’ve been awesome. Instead, she sounded like a phone sex operator: ridiculously, comically turned on.
Which she was , but she didn’t want him to know that.
“This.” With dizzying slowness, Jaime pressed his mouth to hers. When he kissed her like this, where the only point of contact between them was their mouths, Scarlett almost lost her mind. The touch was so delicate it made her feel precious and cared for and special. His mouth became her only link to the world of emotions and pleasure she was desperate to get to.
It hadn’t been like this with anyone else. Kissing and sex were pleasant and pleasurable, but it had been all too easy for some part of her to still be imagining all the ways to get out of a difficult position in the last match she’d lost or what she was going to have for dinner.
When Jaime kissed Scarlett, there wasn’t room for anything else. Not even all the reasons this was a terrible idea.
With a moan, Scarlett surged forward, needing to touch him, and obligingly, he pressed her against the counter. Every inch of him was hard, and he worked himself against her until she was making needy, begging noises. This was so not enough.
He moved one of his hands to the base of her throat, and he lifted his mouth from hers. Her pulse fluttered against his fingers like a hummingbird’s wings against the air.
“How do you feel about counter sex?” she asked, trying to make the question light. Instead, it was painfully sincere.
“I like it fine”—his smile was amused—“but first, we’re going to polish that scene in the radio station.”
“I can’t work like this.” Scarlett wasn’t even being coy. Quite simply, her brain needed her to find release, otherwise, the only things she was going to be able to write were harder and faster and more .
“That bad?”
She could tell him. Or she could show him. Trying to look cool, she unbuttoned her jeans and slid the zipper down. Jaime’s eyes went wider. His dark-brown irises were nearly swallowed by his pupils.
Then she slipped her fingers around his wrist and drew his hand down her body. They breathed as one while his touch, guided by her, passed over her T-shirt between her breasts. Down over the slope of her stomach. Over the bare skin of her lower abdomen.
By the time she pressed his fingers under the waist of her panties, she was panting. Her nails dug into his wrist while he continued his exploration.
She’d been trying to get her way here with this gambit, but when he pinched her clit—actually pinched—Scarlett made a half cry.
“Shhh.” He was spreading wetness from her entrance over her clit. “I can take the edge off.”
“I need you. Please. Please.” There wasn’t much dignity in it, but now that she’d seen the condoms, satisfaction was going to come one way, if it came at all.
Jaime pressed two fingertips into her and worked the heel of his hand against her.
She tilted her hips, trying to increase the contact. “More.”
“My greedy, greedy baby.”
He had no idea.
For several seconds, Scarlett wasn’t certain which way this was going to go. If she was going to get off, but not in the way she wanted to, or if he was going to respond to her appeals and offer what she really wanted.
Given that her eyes were rolling back in her head and that she was already, already , so close, the first one didn’t seem like such a bad compromise.
But then Jaime’s hand was gone, and he was turning her around and pushing her jeans and panties down to her knees. Her hands slapped onto the counter with grateful percussive whacks, and he was ripping the box open. Strips of condoms poured onto the counter, and Jaime was pulling his own pants down and cursing.
Then, after what seemed like an eon but could’ve been only thirty seconds, he was guiding himself into her and she was crying. She was actually crying. Which felt like too much and felt too silly and felt just right. After so long to have him again was ... overwhelming.
One of Jaime’s hands crushed around her hip, and the other wiped the tears from her cheek. “Baby.” He thrust into her, and she raised her ass, needing to take him deeper. “ Baby. ”
All the air left Scarlett’s body. Jaime filled her up entirely. Every inch, every cavity was all him.
“Is this what you need?” he asked, and the question was so loaded.
“Yes.” Whatever he thought he’d asked, that was the answer. Yes , she needed him to take her. Yes , she needed him to see her tears. Yes , she needed him to watch over her.
Yes and yes and yes and yes.
“The way you feel right now,” he rasped into her ear, “like you’ll explode if I don’t fuck you?”
“Uh-huh.” She couldn’t manage anything more verbal than that. How was he putting together complex sentences?
“That’s how you make me feel every goddamn day. Every. Single. Day.”
It couldn’t be true. To feel this much hunger every day, to not be satisfied for literally decades—surely that would consume a person.
But then again, the smell of his skin in her nose and the taste of him on her tongue were sensations she’d been chasing for years without knowing it. It was only when they reappeared in her life that she’d been able to name the thing she’d wanted.
Jaime.
He touched her then, exactly where she needed it, exactly how she needed it, and Scarlett couldn’t help herself. She moaned his name, and with that, she fell over the edge.
Later, when they’d cleaned up, and she’d had her coffee, and they’d launched into a regular work day—albeit with less eye contact than normal—it was those words, not the orgasm, that she kept contemplating.
This thing between them was elemental. Undeniable. Except once upon a time, Scarlett had very much denied it. How and what she’d done in that moment were exactly why she couldn’t, absolutely couldn’t, have him again.
Right now, she wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to.
But the truth would come out eventually. It always did.
When he’d been kissing Scarlett and leading her to his bed, Jaime had known he was tossing sticks of dynamite into the air here, and he couldn’t juggle.
He hadn’t deluded himself about the likely outcome of this: they were going to destroy each other again. He couldn’t con himself into denying that the smart money would be on them flaming out. He ought to be treating this as a sweet coda to whatever trip down memory lane they’d indulged in the last two months and nothing more.
But when one day of them sleeping together became two, and when that became three. When Scarlett lost her scaredy-cat look and became bratty and confident again. When she began to brazenly demand what she wanted from him, in the bedroom and outside it. When their identity as lovers began to merge with their identity as friends and writing partners, Jaime began to indulge in some daydreams.
Or what he hoped weren’t daydreams.
Puffy, needy, naked little hopes that could maybe turn into full-fledged prospects, if only Jaime could shelter them from reality for a little longer. Keep them watered and fed. Give them room to grow.
This time, it could work. The words were on his tongue every time he moved inside her. Every time she caught his eyes in the kitchen and looked away because whatever she saw on his face was too much.
Them together forever wasn’t some absurd sci-fi thought, like a functional Congress or a natural deodorant that worked as advertised. It could happen.
It could totally happen.
Take Monday morning of their last week together. A few assertive rays of light pushed in around the edges of Jaime’s blinds, growing brighter and brighter until, at last, Scarlett stirred on his chest.
“Arg.”
That meant she wanted him to make the sun stop shining.
“Sorry, I can’t manage that.” Though he was willing to try for her.
Jaime pressed his lips to the place where her forehead became a messy tangle of strawberry blond curls and inhaled the scent of her skin, mixed with what was left of her shampoo and the sweat they’d worked up last night. It was an intimate smell. An imperfect one. And it hooked him more cleanly than whatever designer perfume she put on every morning.
“We have to get up,” he whispered.
“Don’t wanna.”
They hadn’t actually spent a night together before, back when they had first been together. Sometimes, when her mom was out for the night, they’d set a timer and doze in Scarlett’s bed for a few hours, and even that had felt deliciously illicit.
But now that he had her next to him for several nights in a row, Jaime knew that as much as he liked having sex with Scarlett, the simple pleasures of this—holding her in his arms, becoming fluent in the language of grunts and mumbles she spoke in before fully waking up—was a zillion times more cozy.
This was what he wanted, now and forever.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
Then he set about showing her some of the benefits of being awake.
In the shower afterward, it hit him that Scarlett satisfied an appetite in him that no one else ever had. It wasn’t only a first-love thing. It wasn’t just him idolizing a ghost. They fit each other like a custom lock and key. They’d filed each other down until they were each other’s perfect match. No one else could open Jaime up. No one else was enough for her.
She’d been right when she’d said that their breakup wasn’t a tragedy but a result of where they’d been at and what they’d wanted. But now, they were at a different place, and they wanted different things.
Maybe. Maybe this time, things could be different.
God, it was a dangerous notion. But with Scarlett in his home, Jaime had grown used to dangerous notions.
A few hours later, after they’d had coffee and breakfast and started working, Scarlett looked up from her computer. Her smirk was a stroke to his groin. “You aren’t formatting those pages, are you?”
“Nope.”
Her eyes shifted back to her work, but he knew she was imagining them picking up where they’d left off earlier. “Stop it. You said not until after lunch.”
“Morning taskmaster Jaime sounds mean.”
“You made me promise.” She pointed to the whiteboard where, at his instruction, she’d written I will not have sex with Jaime until after noon and signed and dated the pledge.
He hoped Evelyn didn’t make a surprise appearance. That would be a hell of a thing to explain to his little sister.
“And besides,” Scarlett said in a singsong voice, “the sooner we get done for the day, the sooner we can go back to bed.”
That was logical. “I’m going to hold you to that.”
“And I’m going to hold onto—”
“Don’t finish that sentence until after noon,” he warned.
Her answering laugh was low and throaty—and it really didn’t aid the cause of getting some work done now.
But as Jaime finally, reluctantly began formatting the damn pages they’d written yesterday, something like calmness settled into his gut along with all the arousal.
He and Scarlett were in their thirties now. They were established and mature. Most importantly, he and Scarlett suited each other like peanut butter and jelly. They could get work done, alongside each other if not together. And their chemistry was the stuff of legend.
It wasn’t delusional to see that, to know it, and to hope that before she left for New York, he might be able to convince Scarlett their story didn’t have to have the same ending.
They lived in a world of multiverses, right? They just had to find their way into a universe where, this time, things were different.