CHAPTER TWELVE JAY
CHAPTER TWELVE
J AY
J ay, I’m really worried about you,” I say to my reflection in the bathroom mirror. “What is wrong? Why are you doing this? You can go get a piece of ass if that’s what you’re after.”
My stomach twists because that’s not what I’m after. Not specifically, anyway.
I shove away from the vanity and head back into my bedroom. I whisper a prayer that it somehow started storming in the last twenty minutes, making outside housing projects out of the question. But as expected, it’s the brightest day Ohio has seen since I moved here.
Damn it.
Feelings that I’d forgotten existed surge inside me. It’s that need to be around someone, that almost unbearable urge to say their name. It exceeds wanting to fuck or to fuck around. It’s bigger than that. It encompasses all the senses—seeing her smile, breathing in her perfume, touching her soft skin, listening to her laugh. The only thing I don’t know is how she tastes.
“Fuck,” I say, growling into the air. I’ll never find out how she tastes either.
I could say no. I could just not show up or tell her that I got busy. Nothing would be worse for the wear. Even though I shouldn’t, I want to see her .
As preoccupied with Gabrielle as I am, I’m that angry with Melody. I haven’t been angry with her—not like this—for a long time. The sentiment was more bitter. Loathing. So disgusted that I couldn’t even think about her. But now that Gabrielle is next door and I can’t manage my damn self, I’m pissed as hell at Melody for doing this to me.
She didn’t just take my beautiful daughter. She took away my future.
I shove my feet into my boots and head for the door.
Birds welcome me outside with a song. I pause on the porch and take a moment to focus, to center myself for the day ahead.
“I can be around her,” I say to myself. “Have fun with her. I just can’t cross a line.”
My stomach tightens and I know I’m right. I know I’ll stop before I cross a line. I don’t think I could cross it if I wanted to.
“Good thing I’m not paying you!”
I turn toward the sound of Gabrielle’s voice. She’s standing on the back deck, coffee in hand, with a pink bow wrapped around her ponytail.
This woman is going to be the death of me. “Why is that?”
“Because you’re late.”
I start across the lawn. “Traffic was a mess.”
She grins. “That’s what they all say. Want some coffee? The kids are at school today, so it’s not as hostile an environment as it was on Saturday.”
I hop onto the deck and jump to hold the door for her. She smiles, nodding appreciatively as she enters first.
“I’m not going to say Dylan and I are friends,” I say. “But I think we made headway.”
Gabrielle pours me a cup of coffee. “He didn’t say anything bad about you last night.” She hands me the mug. “I mean, he didn’t say anything good either. So take that for what it’s worth.”
I chuckle.
“Let me send this email, and then we can get started,” she says, sitting in front of her computer. “If this woman doesn’t name her twins Elodie and Ophelia, I’m going to die.”
“So people really pay you to name their kids.”
Her fingers fly across the keyboard. “They pay me to give them suggestions. It’s really hard naming kids.” She pauses to watch me over her shoulder. “Do you have any kids?”
I clear my throat and sit across from her. “No kids I’ve ever named.”
It’s a curious answer to an unwanted question. Why do these people keep harping on me having kids? First Carter, then Dylan, and now Gabrielle.
She pulls her brows together but goes back to typing. “Then you don’t know how hard it can be. And sometimes it becomes too emotional, and the parents argue. Getting a third party involved helps.” She hits “Enter” with a flourish. “There. Sent.”
Silence descends upon us. In any other time and place, I’d welcome it. There’s something great about being able to sit in the stillness with another person. But with this woman and her questions and innuendos, I’m better off filling the void.
“So what’s on the agenda today, Boss?” I ask.
“Ooh. I could get used to that.”
I look at her over my mug. “Don’t.”
She laughs. “I really don’t know where to start. There’s so much to do that I kind of just want to not do any of it today.”
“You tore the steps off your front porch.”
“So?”
“So? You can’t just leave it that way.”
She shrugs. “I mean, I could .” A grin slips across her face as she reads my annoyance.
This woman.
“I fixed the drain in the sink last night,” she says, closing her computer. “Do you know how to stop toilets from running?”
“Generally, you just adjust the float in the back. That is, unless the guts in the tank need replacing.”
She grimaces. “Toilets give me the ick. Could I fix it? I’m sure I could. But if you could fix it ...” Her nose wrinkles like she’s bracing for me to say no.
I can’t tell her no. Case in point: I’m here. If I were able to resist her, I wouldn’t be standing in her house and on my way to fix her damn toilet.
Try harder, Stetson.
“Where’s it at?” I ask.
“Up the stairs. Second door on the right. It’s the boys’ bathroom, so be warned.”
We get up from the table and I start toward the steps. She doesn’t follow.
“Are you coming up with me?” I ask.
“I have something to finish down here. Then we can work outside.”
I shrug. “Fair enough.”
The stairs creak as I climb them, and the landing squeaks as I step onto it. There are two doors on my right, one at the end, and two on my left. As instructed, I enter the second one on my right.
The bathroom is small. Light-blue paint, the color of a baby bird egg, is on the walls. The shower is the color of mustard. I wonder how old that thing is. And the toilet, as promised, is running.
It takes all of a minute to make it stop. As I’m placing the lid back on, I hear Gabrielle shriek and a loud pop from downstairs. The power goes off at the same time.
Shit.
“Gabrielle?”
“Do not tell Cricket about this.”
I chuckle, shaking my head as I go back downstairs. “Don’t tell Cricket about what?”
“In here,” she says from the living room.
She’s standing next to an outlet dangling from the wall. She gives me a sheepish grin.
“That’s electrical,” I say.
“I know it’s electrical.” She rolls her eyes. “I can change an outlet.”
“Well, by the sound of it, you just shocked the shit out of yourself.”
She fake cries, making me laugh.
“It hurt,” she says, shaking her arms. “It went all through my body and, like, sizzled me or something.”
“This is why Cricket told you no electrical.”
“Cricket needs to mind her own business.”
“Where’s your breaker box?”
She shrugs. “I have no clue.”
“Does this house have a basement?”
“Yes. The stairwell is in the hallway off the kitchen.”
“Do you have a flashlight?”
“Yup.” She holds up her phone. A light shines from the top. “See? I’m prepared.”
I sigh. “Okay. Show me the stairwell, please.”
She leads me through the kitchen to a short hallway. At the end, there’s a laundry room. She points to a closed door on the left.
“That’s it,” she says, thrusting her phone my way.
“What are you doing?”
“Giving you the flashlight.”
“Oh no, Miss Fix-It. You’re coming too.”
She gasps. “I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
Her jaw clenches. “Jay, there was a snake outside a couple of days ago. Basements are snake havens. And spiders. And bugs. And ... just do it for me, please?”
It would be so easy to do it for her. But this isn’t like the railings or the stairs. If those break, she could wait days, even weeks, for someone to help her if she couldn’t manage. But a thrown breaker? She needs to know where her breaker box is located.
“Come on,” I say, coaxing her to me.
“No.”
“Gabrielle.”
“Jay,” she whines.
“Where’s that can-do spirit now? Huh? Where’s that ‘We don’t need your help’ ?”
“It’s with the electricity. It’s gone. Now please go flip the breaker and bring back my spirit.”
I open the door and let my eyes adjust to the darkness. The stairs look pretty sturdy—probably twenty of them or so.
“You need to know where your breaker box is, Gabrielle. Come on.”
She glares at me and steps behind me. “You’re going first.” Her wrist rests on my shoulder with the phone dangling from her fingers. “Here.”
I take it. “You know, when I offered to help you, I didn’t realize it would be this involved.”
“That’s your fault. I fell off a deck, and you had to rescue me. I have a hard time believing you didn’t realize this would be so involved.”
We step into the darkness. Gabrielle keeps a hand on my back at all times. She’s giving me the lightest touch, but it feels like it’s burning into my skin. The heat bolts through me and coalesces in my cock.
Good thing it’s dark.
I wish it didn’t feel so good to be with her. I wish she had something annoying about her that made it easy to sit at home with a beer on my day off like I usually do. But that’s not the case. And it’s problematic.
“Jay ...” She stays up against me from behind. “Do you see the box?”
I swing the flashlight around the basement. It’s bigger than I anticipated. “No. Not yet.”
Something scurries in the dark. Gabrielle yelps and dives under my arm.
With her breasts pressed against me, her arm slung around my back, and her head buried into my side, it’s like fireworks going off in every corner of my body.
“Relax,” I say, guiding her through the darkness. “I got you.”
“I like when you say that to me,” she says softly.
“When I say what?”
“I got you.”
My heart starts to pound.
“I know it’s a figure of speech,” she says. “And I know you’re not saying it in any kind of way. You’re not leading me on. But it’s nice to have someone like this, you know?”
Yeah. I know.
I didn’t know. I hadn’t known that I’d missed this at all.
Careful, Jay.
“There it is,” I say, shining the light onto a silver box on the wall. I sigh in relief. “Let’s get this thing open.”
She releases me, and I miss her touch.
“Look,” I say, prying the door open and flipping the main breaker. The power flickers on. “Did you see how I got that open?”
“Yeah.”
I peer down at her. She didn’t see shit.
I grin at the way she investigates her basement, studying each corner like a clown might jump out from behind a wall at any moment. Slowly, she gets farther away from me and starts to mosey around.
“It’s nice and dry down here,” I say. “But you would’ve known that, had you had an inspection.”
She laughs. “Don’t start on me about that.”
Gabrielle stands away from a half wall separating two spaces but bends over to see on the other side. Her ass is up in the air, the ends of her shorts riding up to the sweet spot where her ass meets her thighs.
I could slide up behind her, pull those shorts to the side, and sink my cock deep inside her. She would push backward, grinding against me, then look over her shoulder at me and beg for it harder.
Stop it, Jay.
“I don’t see any snakes, so that’s good,” she says. “Hey, did you ever catch that one that tried to eat me?”
“It didn’t try to eat you.” But I might.
She faces me. “Did you catch it?”
“Yes, I caught it. You’re safe.”
“Good.” She looks around. “Are you ready to go back upstairs?”
“No more electrical for you.”
She huffs as I hand her the phone back. “You are no fun.”
Oh, but I could be.
Her eyes darken. “What did you just think?”
“About what?”
“What just went through your head?”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because you had this look in your eye, and I want to know what caused it.”
I consider lying to her. It would be the mature thing to do. But something tells me she’ll call me out for it and this conversation will take ten times as long—and I’ll wind up telling her anyway.
“You want to know what I was thinking?” My head screams at me to stop. To not put this into the world. To not go this far. “I was thinking how you’d sound bent over that wall while I nailed you from behind.”
Her breaths come out in quick gasps.
“Would you scream for me, even though you said you don’t?” I ask, holding her gaze. “Would you moan? What little sounds would come out of your mouth when you’re coming all over my cock?”
I watch as her chest rises and falls.
“That is what I was thinking,” I say before turning to the steps.
“Wait.”
I keep moving. I can’t stop. I shouldn’t have said that—I shouldn’t have taken it there.
Gabrielle squeezes between me and the stairs. She hops on the bottom one and faces me so there’s little more than our clothes between us. Her eyes are wild, and she’s panting as if she’s out of breath.
My blood burns with the need to have her on me and over me. An unbridled demand screams at me not to let this moment pass.
This is what I’ve needed to break the darkness I’ve lived in for so long. Her laugh. Her smile. Her playful demeanor.
But if I do that, how does it end? How do I guarantee it doesn’t end with one or both of us getting destroyed?
She lays a finger against my lips.
“I would scream for you,” she whispers. “I would moan your name. I would tell you how good you feel inside me, and I’d beg you to give me more.”
My God.
She pulls her finger away and searches my eyes. Finally, she smiles. Sadly, maybe.
“I don’t know what you’re doing, Jay, but you don’t have to be scared of me.”
Before I can reply, she walks up the stairs and leaves me behind. I’m grateful for it. Because I don’t know what in the hell just happened.
“I would tell you how good you feel inside me, and I’d beg you to give me more.”
No, I do know what happened. I played with fire, and now I’m about to be burned.