Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Adam’s avoiding me. Not rudely or dismissively, but enough to let me know spending time with me is the last thing he wants.
“Want to come garden with me?” I asked yesterday morning, giving my best convincing smile. I was planning to take pictures of Lovie’s forget-me-nots for Instagram. I thought I’d post one each week with every episode. The dirt will only get more dry and gray as we slip further into winter. That’s sort of the point.
He smiled back, and I thought I’d won. Until he said, “No, thanks. The last time a guy named Adam was in a garden, it didn’t turn out too well for the general population.”
And I was too busy appreciating his joke to protest. Or realize he’d dodged me.
This morning when I said I needed to get out of the house and invited him on another field trip, he didn’t meet my eyes as he let me down gently.
“Lovie’s having a bad day. She’s not up to going anywhere.”
“Oh, I can …” I trailed off. I didn’t want to offer to stay, because I had Shit to Do. But was it rude if I didn’t offer at all? What I said instead was, “You haven’t had a true day off in almost six weeks.”
He shrugged from where he was wiping the counters. Lovie’s pills used to sit there, but we can’t leave them unattended anymore. A few days ago I caught her trying to peel off the labels. “I’m okay, Elle. I promise.”
I hesitated in the doorway, waiting to see if he’d look at me. Do something other than keep his back turned. “Well, let me know if you want anything from Starbucks.”
He didn’t.
Of course.
When I get back from my failed attempt to find a sense of peace stocked on the shelves of Target (I’m considering calling someone; it concerns me too), Adam’s got the entire kitchen table covered in gadgets.
It takes me a second to place them, but when I do, I have a moment of pride. He’s making it through my episodes faster than I thought if he’s already up to my partnership with SafeSpace Home Security.
I lean in the doorway. “What are you doing?”
He hardly looks up from where he frowns down at the sensors, dwarfed in his hands. “Installing a security system. I figure we can keep it on all the time. If Lovie gets out, we’ll know instantly. There’s an app you can use. I think it will give us both a better sense of—security.” He grimaces. “Bad choice of words, but you know.”
Something tells me if I push far enough, he’ll start avoiding me again. I can’t take that chance, especially since I’ve already been out of the house once today. Leaving if things get heated—or worse, awkward—would be cruel.
Taking a few steps into the kitchen, I spot the order slip and slide it from under the mess of packaging. The price doesn’t look right. I rest my hip against the table. “You didn’t use my code?”
He looks up. “What code?”
“Oh, Adam,” I chide, laughing because I just can’t help it when he gets that confused groove between his eyebrows. “You completely overpaid for this system. I have a sponsorship deal with them. You could have saved twenty percent.”
“Well.” He blinks. “Fuck.”
I set down my half-gone coffee on the island, safely out of reach of the electronics. “Want some help?”
He looks me over, and the memory of his hands on my waist and in my hair, my mouth on his, settles between us. He’s a puzzle I don’t have all the pieces to yet, but maybe today I can put a few more in place.
“Seriously,” I say. “You can hold the sensors, and I’ll just grab what I need. I have this same one in my apartment. I’m familiar with it.”
Finally, he nods, straightening his shoulders to take his job seriously. The way he always does.
We start in the kitchen with the window behind the table. Adam keeps frowning at the sensors that won’t behave due to magnetic force, nudging them back in line.
The one above the sink proves to be more challenging. Most of the windows in the house open easily, but this one got painted shut about ten years ago and hasn’t seen a fresh breeze since. Adam says we can leave it, but last night I had a dream Lovie climbed through the porthole in the bathroom that’s designed not to open at all. I’m tempted to slap sensors on the dryer ventilation and the mail slot.
He reappears from the laundry room with a putty knife.
“How’d you get into nursing?” I ask, working the knife along the windowsill. “And is it your end goal to do home health care like this all the time, or is it just a stepping-stone? Oh, and where’d you grow up? It wasn’t here, if you didn’t know the Dairy Queen secret.”
He blows out a breath. “I don’t think I had enough caffeine this morning to withstand this line of questioning.”
“I’m not surprised, considering that coffeepot is only capable of producing battery acid.” I lift a shoulder. “I offered Starbucks.”
He snorts. “Anything would taste like battery acid in that atrocious plastic butterfly you drink it out of. Can you imagine all the BPA you’ve ingested over the years?”
I pause, frowning at him. “Is that why my tummy hurts? I thought it was all the lead paint.”
His eyebrows dip so low his eyelashes touch them, and I make sure to bat my own. “You’re joking,” he says.
“And you’re deflecting,” I say back. “I ask questions for a living. I’m nosy by nature.”
“I’m starting to figure that out.” His eyes are almost kind, though, and his jaw twitches the way it always does before he says something important and astute.
“You’re right; I’m not from Indiana,” he says, his eyes trained on the most recent unruly sensor. “I grew up in Toledo. But my little sister moved here for school. Purdue.”
Purdue is basically a midwestern Ivy League. “That’s amazing.”
“It was. We were all so proud of her.” His tone is guarded, though, not quite matching his words.
I flex my fingers around the putty knife and give the window another jiggle. It’s barely loosened.
“And then she got pregnant when she was a freshman,” Adam says.
My heart plummets for this woman I’ve never met. Elle on the L has given me the chance to hear the most amazing stories—and the most heartbreaking. I can’t help wondering if Adam’s sister is someone I’ve talked to.
“My parents were not a fan of her keeping the baby. They’re big God-people, my parents, so they wanted Ruth—my sister—to give the baby up for adoption. Nothing else was on the table. She was a checklist to them. Have the baby, give it to a straight, rich, white couple who couldn’t have one of their own, get back to school and pretend it never happened.”
His earlier joke about Adam in the garden makes my heart hurt more.
“But then baby turned into babies ,” he says.
My eyes bug as I look at him over my shoulder. “Twins?”
He nods.
“Yikes.”
He nods again. “You sure I can’t try that?”
I shake my head and wedge the knife into the corner slowly, sinking it in another half inch. I may not have gone to an Ivy League, but I know seeing Adam’s forearms in action will be counterproductive at best and detrimental at worst. “She didn’t go through with the adoptions.”
His stare is heavy on my skin, my hands. “No. But when she didn’t, my parents refused to keep paying for her education.” My insides twist. I think I know how this story ends. “I offered to help. She wanted to transfer to a community college, but I wouldn’t let her. So she took out as many loans as she could, and I took out the rest. It—”
The putty knife sinks in.
“It what?” I say, unexpectedly breathless. I’m terrified he’s going to leave me dangling off this cliff.
“It was fine,” he says. “Until a year after she graduated, when she met Scott.”
I let the putty knife rest in the crack and flex my fingers around the handle. I’ll need to touch up the paint. “Based on your tone,” I say, “he’s not the favorite.”
“He might have been. Could have been. The opportunity was his for the taking. But then they had Claire, the baby. Claire spent a lot of time in the hospital when she was born, in and out for the first year or so of her life. That was too much for him.”
“For him ?” The knife handle bites my palm; my knuckles are white. “What about Ruth ? And Claire?”
Adam shakes his head. “What they needed didn’t matter to him, which is why I think it’s better this way, in the end. I’d rather my sister have no one than be stuck with someone who doesn’t deserve her. You asked why I work so much. That’s why. I support my sister and her three children. They’re mine.”
My head spins and my gut clenches. He cares so much, so selflessly. Every decision I’ve made since coming here has been self-serving in some way. Adam is the opposite.
It is both beautiful and heartbreaking. He lives his entire life for other people.
This doesn’t feel like an interview, not like the ones for the podcast. Our back-and-forth is as easy as talking to Liss, or Lovie before her memory crapped out on her.
Is Adam my friend? When did that happen?
He clears his throat. “Your fingers are turning purple. Let me try to unstick the window. Please.”
I don’t have the capacity to push him away again. He steps into my space—takes it over for his own. I have to back up or risk our bodies touching in more places than one.
The window glides open fifteen seconds later. Show-off.
“How are your nieces now?” I ask, after he’s installed the sensor on the patio door and we’ve moved to the living room. There are three windows in here—two side by side behind the couch and one on the other side of the room, by the bookshelf and television. Should be easy enough. We’re practically done already. “And what are the twins’ names? I don’t know if you’ve ever mentioned them.” I climb onto the couch, leaning over the back and pulling the curtain away from the sill.
Adam splutters, and I quickly realize why. He’s stepped up, preparing to hand me the sensors. With the way I’m positioned, though, I’d fall over if I reached for them. Which leaves him to lean forward into me, putting his crotch right in line with my ass.
Being on my hands and knees near him does something to my bloodstream. Turns it hot and fizzy, like a Coke shaken and left in the sun. I also am likely to combust under pressure. I imagine the things Adam would do. Tug my hair. Make my back arch so I could look at him upside down.
He sucks his bottom lip into his mouth, dragging it with his teeth. My breath hitches.
“Cora,” he coughs.
I chuckle, my laugh dipped in smoke and sex. “That’s not my name.” I want to tell him I know about five hundred ways to get him to say my name, but he heads me off.
“Cora is my niece .” He places the sensors in my palm. “She and Chloe are nine. Claire just turned two in August.”
My heart is a hummingbird in my throat. As I turn back to the window, the smaller of the two sensors slips from my hand and falls to the black hole between the couch and the wall.
The living room isn’t big enough to move the furniture, so I push up to my feet and bend over the back.
A pained groan floats to me. “What are you doing?”
I’m thankful he can’t see my face. I may be grinning now. After that very first morning wherein Adam was maybe looking at my butt, I upped my routine to include fifteen extra squats three times a day so he would definitely look at my butt. “I dropped the sensor.”
My face smushes sideways and I lose sight of the little white rectangle. I also lose my balance and go tumbling headfirst into the abyss of dust bunnies and hair balls.
Or I would, if hands didn’t suddenly grip my hips in a vise. I clamp down on a moan, mostly because I can’t tell whether it would be one of pleasure or embarrassment.
“Are you okay?” he calls.
“Yeah, just—” I close my fist tight around the sensor before I lose it again. “Wondering if this can get any more awkward. Hating how often you have to ask me that. The usual.”
He works me free slowly, gentle tugs back and forth, side to side. When my head emerges from the shadows, my face is blazing hot and his hands have slipped under my shirt, lighting fire to my bare skin.
“You good?” he asks, except it doesn’t sound like a question so much as a demand. You’re good, because I’ve got you.
Any words I’d choose would come out obscene and vulgar, not safe for work, which is what this is. We’re basically business partners. Nothing more, nothing less. And if this is truly, strictly, a business arrangement, I shouldn’t care how he spends time with his nieces or how he takes his coffee or the color of his scrubs each day. I should be fine with the few offered details he gives me and leave it at that.
He doesn’t let go of my hips until I nod, and even then, he’s slow to release me.
I almost drop the sensor again when I put it on the window. The only reason I don’t is because Adam’s on the other side of the room now, far away from me and my hips. Which is for the best.
The front door is next, and Adam takes that one because he’s taller. I, courteously, give him space. Getting close to him won’t solve anything except the ache between my thighs.
His shoulders stretch as he reaches overhead, the cords in his neck disappearing and reappearing as he shifts. Same for the ones in his forearms, and on the backs of his hands.
When he clears his throat, I realize I’ve been staring, and based on the dryness in my mouth, it was open far enough to catch flies. “Sorry.” I hold out the equipment, my heartbeat refusing to calm.
He gives me an amenable smile, and my gaze snags there, on the deep-pink color that matches the bathroom so perfectly. His fingers brush my palm as he picks up the sensor, and if I think about it hard enough, if I force it, that felt mostly platonic. Which is a step forward.
But my train of thought takes several leaps backward when Adam mutters, “You’re staring at my mouth.”
How are we playing this, Elle? Coy or straightforward?
“It’s a nice mouth,” I say. Straightforward it is.
This surprises him, if the laugh that splits his lips is any indication.
“You have a nice mouth too,” he says. The same way he said You make me want to make mistakes . His eyes flash bright blue, the hottest flame in the fire.
Adam must be made of lightning, because the air between us turns staticky, electrified. If I touched the doorknob, I’d get shocked. The hairs on my arms are standing up.
“Goose bumps,” he murmurs, running a lone fingertip down my betraying forearm.
I try to keep my wits about me. “Home security turns me on.” And watching you install it makes me so hot I can hardly hold myself up.
“You,” he murmurs, “are a terrible liar.”
My wits have fled. The bastards.
His fingertips trail my arm, across my collarbones. I’m shaking. When they drag across my lips, I part them. He touches the tip of my tongue.
“If I kissed you right now …” His eyes are dark, the way they are first thing in the morning, and whenever I catch him looking at me. “Would you let me? Would you want that?”
The noise I make is feral. I moan like he’s already doing it. “Only if you don’t apologize after.”
“I won’t,” he whispers, his hand curving along my cheek. A promise and a threat.
My response gets trapped between us, suspended and half given as he takes my mouth with his.
That first kiss was fake. Terribly, undeniably fake . Fake enough for my brain to get busy rewriting it as something other than a kiss. That was … a whisper, a slight breeze. A drop in the bucket. In the fucking ocean .
This kiss is a precipice. The knife’s edge between deliciously tipsy and devastatingly drunk, the best decision and the worst. Adam kisses like he looks—hard around the edges but soft somewhere just below the surface. His hands clutch my face, wrap around the back of my head to hold me still. Right here , he’s saying silently. You belong right here, in my arms, with your mouth on me and my mouth on you. Got it?
I do not got it. If this is how he’s proving his point, it will take me a long damn time to get it.
Needing a taste of him, I plunge my tongue into the seam of his lips, rewarded when his hold tightens. Hot, soft velvet welcomes me. It’s the last concession he gives me, and as his hand slides down and fits around my rib cage, he reminds me with a tug closer: I kissed you. He tells me again with a graze of his teeth to my lip, a hum in his throat when I return it. I started this. With a groan, his lips move to the junction of my jaw, and he shows me once more as his knee slips between my legs: I own you right now.
When my fingers find the hem of his shirt and slide underneath, scoring across his stomach, groan turns to growl, and my hands are pinned to the wall above my head.
His mouth returns to mine, trapping my tingling lips as he knots our fingers. I grip him tight, nails biting flesh.
Not to be dramatic, but this is the best kiss of my life. Grady who? Adam is a living paradox—the way his mouth is moving, pulling my skin between his teeth, grazing and sucking, is inconsistent with how the thumb of his other hand rubs lightly at the groove of exposed skin between my shirt and waistband. How his knee between mine offers a pressure that is both stable and insanity inducing.
He pulls away first. We’re breathless. I’m sweating. My body is high and tight, and I won’t be able to get off ever again without imagining his hold on me, his lips pressed against my neck. Whereas he’s ripped me apart with his mouth—with clothes on, no less—he seems more put together than before.
I’ve been told I wreck men. Why isn’t he wrecked? He should be wrecked. I want a refund.
Or another kiss.
His hand traces the line of my jaw and down my throat, and I swallow beneath his touch.
“Mmm,” he rumbles, pressing two fingers to the pulse point in my neck. He almost did that my first night here. “Your heart’s racing.” His eyes trail his fingers, down my neck, across my low-cut collar. His pupils have devoured the blue color. “Can you feel it?” He spreads his fingers wide, the heel of his hand resting over my sternum, dangerously close to my breast. “Here.”
What I feel is the burn of his stubble, fresh on my chin and jaw and throat. The millimeter of space between his thumb and the place that desperately wants his touch.
“I … I think you broke me,” I rasp.
His mouth, reddened and swollen, morphs into his fullest grin yet. It’s blinding, and, yes, Adam Wheeler is electricity incarnate. “We can’t have that, can we?” Torturously slow, he pulls away, the nail of his index finger scraping fabric and sending a shiver down my spine. “You can put your arms down now if you want.”
“What—”
By the time I realize my hands are still pressed to the wall above my head, his laugh is far away, floating to me from down the hall.