You Between the Lines

Chapter Twenty

J ERRY ORDERS THE CAR, AND within five minutes, we’re crammed into the back seat, me in the middle, everything from my thigh to my shoulder pressed against Will. Jerry is quiet on his phone the whole time, and I can’t pay attention to anything, so I concentrate on my own breathing, and Will’s—his low, deep breaths, slower than mine.

At the hotel, Jerry’s on floor three, so he leaves us at the elevator with a wave and a Have a good night with an eyebrow raise.

Will and I get off on floor four. His room with Morris is an entire hallway down from mine, but when I stop in front of my and Kacey’s room, he pauses.

“Do you have a moment to talk?” he says, and I feel my pulse so strongly I’m worried he can see it at my throat.

“Um, yeah.” I unlock the door and we both go inside and look at each other. He runs his hand across his mouth and I feel like my entire body is a bottle of cola seconds before someone drops a Mentos in it.

“I think I’m going insane,” Will says and the words pinball through me.

He stands in front of the door of the hotel room, his arms crossed. He looks at me like he’s a disappointed camp counselor after his charges refused to go to bed at curfew, once again.

I put my purse down on the table. Kacey’s makeup bag takes up almost the entire rest of the space—a reminder that she could be back at any time.

“I’m not sure why you’re the one going crazy.” I walk up to him, leaving about two feet of distance between us. “You’re the one making it worse.” The recent memory of his finger, flattening mine to my thigh—so small, such a nothing I could be convinced I dreamed it—sears across my brain.

He takes a step closer to me, so close his heat radiates, but not close enough to touch. It’s a position we’ve found ourselves in far too often over the past six months. The boots he’s wearing must add an extra inch of height because he feels so imposing. Like he takes up the entire room.

“You could have taken the bus.” His voice is even lower than usual.

“You could’ve not left with me and Jerry,” I retort.

“Yeah, well, you could have not climbed on top of me in Penelope’s bed on Halloween.”

“And you could’ve not submitted that poem to workshop.”

We stare at each other. He’s stern and I’m seething and I can’t think like this. The heat, his scent, the musky, salty cedar with some undercurrent of high school nostalgia—it’s a heady combination that is no longer allowing me to think straight.

“What are we doing?”

Wide-eyed, I shake my head. “After Thanksgiving, you made it clear that you thought this would get in the way of your precious art.” I bite out the last two words.

He inches even closer, so I’m talking more to his chin than his face. Not one molecule of me touches one molecule of him and I feel every single atom in the narrow ravine between us.

“Let me remind you,” he murmurs above my ear, “you also stopped this in the Writing Center because you said, and I quote, ‘There’s no way this ends well.’ And yet, here we are. Again and again.”

The desire to scream builds in my throat. I’m choked by my own stupid logic. I think of Middlebury, of high school, of my parents’ separation. The ways Will and I don’t fit together.

The ways we could tonight.

I take a step back to see his whole face again. “Okay, maybe we just get this out of our systems.”

Will laughs, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Famous last words.”

“No, listen, you’ve built this up in your head now for a decade. God knows why but you have. It’s just this stupid physical thing. But the longer we put it off, the more ‘forbidden’ it’s going to feel and the more we’re both going to get off on that and turn this into something we both know it will never become, so let’s just do this, put it aside, and then move—”

I can’t finish my soliloquy because Will’s mouth is on mine. One hand behind my neck twined in my hair, the other snaked around my waist, pressing me to his chest. My body freezes at the shock, and even more when he pulls away.

That’s when I take what feels like my first breath in months.

“You can call it whatever you want,” he breathes into my mouth, his forehead pressed to mine. He smooths his hands on either side of my waist, gripping me so I’m pinned against him, forced to feel his staccato heartbeat. “Get it out of your system, whatever. But at least for right now, I’m done overthinking this.”

He moves to push my coat off my shoulders, and it falls to the floor. His hand trails down my shoulder, along my arm, to my hip. His eyes are black, so transparently full of want.

I teeter onto my toes to reach his mouth again and he immediately coaxes mine open with his tongue, deepening the kiss. I shove his coat off his shoulders and his hand goes under my shirt, underneath the cup of my bra, his other to the back waistband of my pants, running his thumb along my lower back. I pull off his sweater-vest and start unbuttoning his shirt, my fingers working quickly to touch his skin faster, faster. He grabs my wrists and holds them behind my back, more tightly than he needs to.

“Slow down,” he orders. “If it’s just this once, I’m going to take my time.”

“You started it,” I murmur, and he smirks against my mouth.

Releasing my hands, he resumes kissing me and walks me into the dresser at the side of the room with the mirror where Kacey and I put on makeup this morning. Just as my back hits the edge, he spins me around and crowds me into it, his chest to my back, until I see both of us in the dim light of the room, the dresser’s edge digging into my hips.

Our eyes lock in the mirror, both of our chests going up and down quickly, my lips bitten pink and his neck flushed. His hands wrap around to my front, and he begins unbuttoning my shirt and kissing my neck, the faintest scrape of teeth turning me liquid.

“What I don’t think you understand,” he begins, and he says each word slowly, each syllable pronounced, the way he reads poetry in workshop, “is that I haven’t built this up in my head.”

He moves my unbuttoned shirt down my shoulders and unhooks the back of my bra, slipping that off, too.

“Because that implies that the reality isn’t as good as my imagination.”

I reach my hands back around to his chest to tug on his own unbuttoned shirt. He gets the hint and shrugs it off, our clothes landing in a pile on the floor. I want to close my eyes so badly—to lose myself in the feeling —but I want to look at him, too. I like the way his shoulders fan out beyond mine, the contrast of his hard chest against my softness, his arms lightly ridged with muscle, the way he looks at me like I belong to him.

“And trust me, my imagination is really good.” He spreads his hand possessively across my stomach. “In my head, I’ve already had you every way I can think of.” He cups my breast and runs a thumb over my nipple until it’s pebbled and hard. “Spread out beneath me on my bed. Bent over the table in Gilman. On your knees in the mountain house.”

“Will, please.” I move to turn around to kiss him, but he tightens his hold, shaking his head in the mirror.

His skin burns hot against my back, and I lean into him, pushing my ass against his hard length. His fingers move to the waistband of my pants, unclasping them, and I help him push them down until they land in a flood around my feet.

“But despite all of that, it hasn’t been true.” His fingers run along the hem of my underwear and he makes eye contact with me in the mirror, a question in his eyes. I loop my fingers through the sides and pull them down, too.

He lets out a large exhalation, as if he’d been holding his breath for the last minute. He slides his hand down my stomach to the crest between my legs, his finger moving in lazy circles. It’s almost embarrassing how heavily I’m breathing, how flushed I look, how every bit of this is better than every daydream I’ve concocted in months.

“See, the reality has been so much better than my imagination that I really don’t see how I can get this out of my system. I’ve already tried for ten years.”

My breath hitches as he slides a finger inside me, then two, releasing something guttural from my throat. The stretch is so good and my knees buckle so hard that I have to put my hands on the dresser. He wraps his free arm around my waist, keeping me upright.

“And look at you,” he whispers into my ear, his head in the crook of my neck, staring at me in the mirror. “How can I get this out of my system? I want to do everything with you.”

I let out a whimper and a wave rides over me, forcing me to close my eyes for a second. I turn around to face him and unzip his pants and push them down.

“Stop making me wait any longer,” I hiss. He captures my mouth in a deep kiss, and I feel the contours of his grin.

He’s only in his boxers when I walk him backward onto the bed. When he scoots himself up to the headboard, I straddle him, his hands landing on my outer thighs.

“I brought condoms,” he murmurs, taking the opportunity to trail his mouth down my neck and collarbone. The sentence crackles in my stomach—that he expected this, knew it. Wanted it just as much as me.

“Where? I’ll get them.”

“Wallet in pants back pocket.”

I scramble to find his wallet in the pile of clothes discarded on the floor. I bring a condom back to him and he puts it on.

“You go on top,” I whisper, and he wraps an arm around my waist, rolling us over. His hips press hot against me, my legs trembling until he places a palm lightly on my thigh, his thumb making small, grounding rainbows on my skin. And then when he pushes into me, it’s slow, slow, slow. He looks up—a caesura. A deliberate pause in a line of poetry. I whisper Come here , and his mouth is on mine once more. My hand winds itself down his low back, pressing all five fingertips hard against his hip in encouragement. And then he begins to move, controlled and measured.

His thrusts are shallow until I tell him more ; as if he were waiting for permission all along, he pushes in all the way to the hilt until I gasp his name. He’s so overwhelming and all I want to do is overwhelm him back, make him lose control, so I roll my hips against him, seeking friction. He asks how it feels, how he can make it better for me.

When I feel pressure building, I close my eyes, lost in his smell and the sound of his deep breathing, in the horrific, decadent ache of feeling seen. Of feeling complete.

“Look at me,” he says, because he wants to be seen, too. I open my eyes and his gaze sears through me like a bolt of electricity. It sends me over the edge and I explode into a million pieces, each one a different shard of the Leighs I am, and the Leighs I could be.