Chapter 15 #2
I lean against the doorframe and let my chest do its thing. Right now, there’s nothing better than watching Claire Holt grinning at her grandson while her cartoon car continues to drive into a wall.
My phone buzzes in my back pocket. It’s my sister, Maddie.
Maddie: call me
Maddie: zo
Maddie: ZOE
Maddie: i think hunter is going to dump me tonight
Maddie: at dinner
Maddie: at Guac I’m not. Come on.”
We dry our hands and go.
The walk-in pantry in this house is an embarrassment of square footage.
It has its own light, motion-activated, which clicks on with a soft hum the second we step inside.
Shelves to the ceiling. Bins for flour and sugar with chalkboard labels that Jonah definitely didn’t make himself.
A whole wall of spices in matching jars, alphabetized, because when you’re paying someone, why not?
I point at it. “Top shelf. To the left. Go.”
He goes. He has to step around me to get to the back wall, and the pantry, despite its square footage, does not actually have a lot of width, and we end up with his chest at my shoulder and his hand braced on the shelf above my head, and I’m very busy watching paprika go into his hands.
He puts the paprika down.
The heat radiates off him, and the pantry is approximately a million degrees, which makes no sense because pantries aren’t saunas.
The temperature is being generated by two specific bodies, and one of those bodies is currently inching toward me, and the other body is mine, and it cannot remember the last time it took a full breath.
Jonah lifts his hand.
He doesn’t touch me. He puts it on the shelf next to my head instead, and then his other hand on the shelf on the other side of my head, and now I’m caged in by a six-foot-two NHL defenseman in his own pantry, and I can feel the shelves at my shoulder blades because I’ve taken a step back without realizing it.
His chest is an inch from mine.
His mouth is even closer.
Here we are again. Dammit.
We don’t speak. There’s a list of things to say—the gym was a mistake, we have a rule, I’m your employee, although not for long, but we shook on this in a parking lot—and it’s not making its way from my brain to my mouth.
This is because my brain patterns are now all wrong, and all my neurons are monitoring the distance between his lower lip and mine, which has to be a centimeter.
His breath catches.
Mine does too.
He’s trembling with want—I can feel it where his arm is almost-but-not touching my shoulder. I’m going to die in a pantry, and my family will write a tasteful obituary. Sydney will absolutely lose her mind.
Move, Lane.
I don’t move.
His eyes drop to my mouth.
I don’t breathe.
I kiss him first.
I don’t know if it’s because I want him to know, with absolute certainty, that I’m a signed and consenting party to this, or because if I don’t, I’m going to combust in a spray of pantry dust. Either way, I push up on my toes, hook my fingers in the collar of his shirt, and I kiss him.
It’s not like our first tentative kiss. This is a collision with teeth, tongue and a low sound in the back of my throat that I’m desperately hoping no one else can hear.
He responds like he’s been waiting for this exact thing.
Like he’s been breathing the same air and thinking the same thoughts.
His hands cup my jaw, gentle and sure, but the rest of him is anything but.
He pulls me up against him like he’s afraid I might get away, and he kisses me back with years of pent-up something—regret, want, I don’t know, I can’t name it, I’m too busy living it.
Our mouths are greedy, messy, tasting, taking.
His stubble scrapes my cheek and I love it, I want it, I want everything.
I wind my arms around his neck and I’m trying to climb him like a tree, because even the full length of my body pressed to his is not enough.
He must feel the same because his palms slide down my back, anchoring, and the way his hips roll against mine is not, under any circumstances, a family-friendly motion.
My tank top rides up—and suddenly his hand is on my bare waist, fingers splayed like he’s memorizing the shape of me.
He’s so much bigger than me, everywhere, and it’s intoxicating, the way he doesn’t use that size to push or cage or dominate, but to surround, to protect, to make me feel like I’m the most important thing in the room.
I can feel his heart pounding, wild and frantic, like maybe he’s as off-balance as I am.
I dig my nails into his shoulders and swallow his groan, and then he lifts me—he actually lifts me by the hips like I weigh nothing, like I’m air, and my butt is on the cool pantry shelf and the spice jars rattle behind me.
His hands are all over me, one in my hair, one at the small of my back, and then his mouth finds my neck and I gasp.
His lips travel down my throat, along my collarbone, then lower, and I can’t help the sound I make when he finds the spot just above my bra strap.
I think I might actually black out. I don’t even care if I do.
My head falls back against the wall, and I’m fairly certain I will never recover from this.
His hands slide up, under my shirt, and he’s so careful, so reverent, but also so hungry.
The rough heat of his palms heats my ribs, then higher, and then his thumb brushes across my nipple, and the shock of sensation nearly buckles my knees, which is impressive, given that I’m already sitting.
I want to laugh, I want to cry, I want to ask him if he’s sure, but the look on his face tells me he’s so sure he’s never been more sure of anything.
And then his mouth is on my puckered nipple, sucking it, and I think I might shatter.
The world is nothing but the two of us and the taste of spices in the air and the sound of glass jars rattling and the wild, wild pound of my heart.
“Jonah?” Claire calls from the kitchen, bright and ordinary, the most normal sound in the world. “Honey, where do you keep your tinfoil? I’m making Eli alien antennas.”
It’s a bucket of cold water.
We both fix our shirts, and I’m attempting to put my bra back in place when Jonah steps back, the way you create distance from something that might detonate, and he wipes a hand down his face and clears his throat. “In the drawer by the dishwasher, Mom.” His voice is all gravel. “The big drawer.”
“Found it!”
He looks at me one more time. The kind of look that is a whole paragraph that neither of us is going to say out loud.
Then he picks up the paprika, says, “I know, this didn’t happen,” and walks out of the pantry, and I stand with my back against a shelf of alphabetized spices, breathing in and out, with absolutely no idea whether I’m relieved or wrecked.
Both. The answer is both.