Chapter 27 The Green Light #2
He took her hand again once they’d scrambled to shore.
He was matter-of-fact about taking them through the next steps.
Foot rinses were followed by full-body rinses in the shower, which, although it was old and utilitarian, was hot.
He struggled to get the world’s ugliest bathing suit off her, and when she made a joke about being a pixelated mermaid, he either didn’t hear it or chose to ignore it.
On the surface of things, the shower should not have been an erotic experience.
Whereas in her early days with Reggie, a shower might have been an opportunity for foreplay, Jack was all business, directing her to wash herself.
They each did their own soaping and rinsing.
There was no touching. But there was a great deal of watching.
Intense watching. At one point he even urged her to hurry.
It was sexy as all get-out.
It made her crazy, in fact, like she might explode the moment he touched her.
Jack threw a towel around her and led her out to the main room, where he grabbed his backpack before steering them into the bedroom. She headed toward the bed they’d used last night, which was still mussed, and said, “This doesn’t need to be some big, drawn-out thing like the last couple times.”
“Oh, would you like to register a complaint about how things have been going?” If she didn’t know him so well, she would have said his tone was genuinely combative.
She tried and failed to tamp down a smile while he tried and failed to look stern. He grabbed the duvets off both beds and pointed back toward the main room.
“I would never do that. I’m just saying that this can be more…”
“Efficient?” He steered her toward the ladder to the loft and patted her butt. It was the gentlest of pats, but she felt it everywhere.
“Condensed,” she said.
He barked a laugh but quickly reined it in. “Concerted.”
She ended the game early, because “Concerted sounds great.” She was shivering, but it wouldn’t matter soon. She climbed the ladder. “I guess we’re going for concerted in the loft?”
“Yes. We need more space this time.”
He contemplated her for a moment in the damp light cast by the single overhead bulb he turned on by tugging at a string.
She glanced around, getting her bearings.
She hadn’t been up here yet. The loft featured a queen-size bed, a small dresser, and an antique vanity that was going to be a perfect spot for Sunny, who was an aspiring makeup artist, to do her face.
They wouldn’t even need to change the furniture.
But time to turn off her scouting brain. There was a more urgent task at hand. She dropped her towel, and Jack’s pupils dilated despite the fact that he’d turned on the light. A curious mixture of smugness, lust, and joy surged through her.
Jack turned his attention to the bed, unmaking it from the bottom, undoing the snug hospital corners of the quilt.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting organized.” He pulled the top sheet and quilt back and guided her to lie down before covering her back up. He fussed a bit until she was fully covered all the way up to her chin.
“Wow, you got some real sexy moves here, Branksome.”
“Hush.” He added the two unicorn duvets to the top. He was trying to make sure she stayed warm, building her a nest. It was one of the nicest things anyone had ever done for her.
He lifted the covers from the bottom and started shimmying headfirst under them.
“What are you—Oh. Oh.”
He answered her incomplete question just before his mouth made contact with her center. “Concerted.”
She had half a mind to object, but why? She sucked in a breath as he used one hand to part her folds and lowered his mouth again, letting his tongue slide against the tender flesh.
As pleasure started gathering—efficiently, she had to admit—between her legs, she told herself to shut up.
She was under a pile of warm covers in the perfect lakeside cabin with Jack Branksome’s head between her legs.
She had asked for concerted, and she was getting concerted. She smiled and let herself go.
“Can we have a fire again?” Blair asked a while later, after their second go-round and some dozing. “It seems like it’s getting dark.” She reached for her phone out of habit, to check the time, but of course she had no phone up here in the loft. She didn’t need one. It was strange but great.
“Mmmph.” Jack disengaged himself from her and stuck an arm and a leg outside of their toasty nest. “No. All that water I poured over the fire yesterday means the ground is wet. But I have something better.”
“I don’t know if I can get out of this warm cocoon if there isn’t fire.”
“Trust me.”
She did, a fact she no longer even found surprising, so she got out of bed and bundled up as well as she could. He made tea, and they took it outside to the dock. He laid out a couple of beach towels, and she sat, taking care to leave a bit of space between them.
These were the awkward moments with Jack.
Not awkward between them—they seemed to have achieved a new level of ease with each other in pretty much all circumstances—but uncomfortable for her.
She could deal with expressions of lust, like the hand on the thigh in the car.
She could deal with expressions of care, even, as with the pile of blankets earlier.
She and Jack were friends, after all, even if their friendship was unlikely and hard-won.
She cared about him as a person, independent of the fact that she was sleeping with him, and she suspected he felt the same, even if he didn’t want to.
What she didn’t know was how to be with him when they weren’t having sex. Or sitting around talking about books—and life. They talked well. And, it turned out, they had sex well.
It was the in-between moments that tripped her up.
She told herself to be cool. She was in a good place, metaphorically but also literally.
It was another gorgeous night, perfumed by that elusive lakey-ness—she agreed with Jack that lakey, while insufficient, was better than earthy.
It was windy, so the lapping of the waves against the shore and the dock was louder than she’d heard before.
This was the kind of noise people paid to get via apps and sound machines.
She tipped her head up. It was partly cloudy, so the stars were blinking in and out of view. The clouds were moving fast. She followed one with her gaze as it slid across the sky, and…
Oh.
Oh my God.
A green light, shining dimly but steadily, almost directly across the lake.
“Look!” She pointed. “Was that light there last night?”
“No.”
“Did you put that light there?” Hearing the answer, which she already knew, was going to be the end of her.
“I did.”
She started crying.
“Oh shit.” Jack moved closer to her. “I thought you’d like it.”
She waved a hand back and forth in front of her face.
“I do like it.” She cleared her throat in the hopes of sounding less squeaky.
“I love it. I think it’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.
” The nicest thing anyone had ever done for her.
She’d had a similar thought earlier with the pile of blankets.
Jack turned out to be really good at the nicest things.
Seeming to relax, he settled an arm around her shoulder, and they gazed out across the lake. So much for not touching in the in-between times. “What did it mean, do you think?” he asked. “The light across the lake?”
“In Gatsby or Green Light?”
“Either. Both.”
“Well, that’s one of the big questions, isn’t it? Hope. Despair. Maybe a little more despair in Gatsby and a little more hope in Green Light. But also, for me, seeing it makes me think about Angela. So it’s also… grief.”
The green light was about hope and despair, which were opposites. Plus a dash of grief. She was being vague, and she fully expected Jack to call her on it. But he only said, “Mm,” and tightened his arm around her.
“How’d you get it there?” she asked. “Did you just go up to them and say, ‘Hello, stranger, may I affix a green light to the end of your dock?’”
“The place was all closed up—clearly a vacation spot—so I just went ahead and did it.”
“Sneaky.”
“I’ll retrieve it before we leave. It’s just a portable light I attached with a zip tie.”
They sat in silence for a long time, Blair thinking about how far she had come in the last few months.
Could she ever have imagined, that night her parents arrived, that someday not that far in the future, she’d be sitting by a lake in Minnesota, looking at a literal green light while location scouting for Green Light?
“What are you thinking about?”
“I’m thinking about that last night in LA.”
“What about it?”
“Why did I let you see me in one of my states? Why did I show you what was happening?”
“I’m not sure you had any choice. I barged in.”
“But you already knew that there was something wrong with me, didn’t you? Even if you didn’t know exactly what it was?”
“I suppose I did.”
“That must have been because some part of me wanted you to know, right? Which must also have meant some part of me wanted you to help me. Had known you would help me.”
“I’m not sure I did, though. I just left.”
“You were my security blanket. Human contact that felt safe. Once you were gone, I had to face the fact that I couldn’t have a semireclusive writer living in my pool house full-time, so I’d better figure out a way to get some human contact, some help, in other ways. From other people. So you did help.”
Jack didn’t say anything. Blair wasn’t sure what she’d expected. I’m glad I could help wasn’t really Jack’s style. He didn’t do trite social niceties.
No, he canoed across a lake and installed a green light on a dock on the other side, and she would take that over trite social niceties any day.