Chapter 26
CARSON
My mother is in my living room.
My mother is in my living room, I’m holding a CVS bag full of condoms, and my panties are in Dan McBride’s pocket.
Oh. My. God.
“Mom, what are you doing here?” I ask, feeling red splotches creeping up my chest and into my cheeks. I try to ease the condom bag behind my back.
“Your aunt Gladdie scored front-row seats to see the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at IU, so I flew up on a whim! Isn’t that wild?
I booked my flight this morning! I figured I’d surprise you.
” Mom is grinning, but her eyes are sweeping over my wet hair and the mascara that’s probably pooling beneath my eyes.
“I’m definitely surprised!” I reply, taking one giant step into the living room and away from Dan.
“Daniel, it’s nice to see you again,” she says.
Her eyes go straight to the hem of his shirt, hanging unevenly since he missed a button after our skinny dipping session.
Then she looks back at me. She doesn’t say anything out loud, but the question is all over her face: What is going on, Carson Jane?
God, did she hear the filthy things he said to me out on the porch?
“I offered Dan the guest room after a pipe burst in his apartment,” I say.
Her brow furrows. “Is that why you’re wet?”
“I, uh—” Why is the only thing going through my head right now that’s what she said?
“I was showing Carson a place I used to swim out on Highway 9,” Dan says.
I suck in a breath, bracing for more questions.
“Swimming at night? Goodness, that can be dangerous. I hope you were safe,” Mom tuts.
“Absolutely,” I sputter, squeezing the condom bag in my fist.
“Good. I was wondering why you were out so late. I got in two hours ago and have just been sitting here waiting. I finished the book I got at the airport and was dang near finished with this issue of People. I was really starting to get worried,” she says, then yawns.
She closes the magazine in her lap and stands up.
“I’m pooped from the trip. I went ahead and put my things in my room. ”
“You’re staying here,” I say—not a question, just an attempt to process this insane reality in which my mother, who never goes to the grocery store without a strategic plan and four different lists, hopped on a plane this morning.
And is in my living room.
Where I was hoping to have hot, filthy, depraved sex with the man who lives here with me.
Oh fuck.
“Hey, Mom, I’m just going to put this stuff away,” I say, shaking the bag, throwing up a prayer to Jesus—if He still listens to me—that my mother can’t see that there are extra-large Trojans inside.
Mom waves me off in her I don’t want to be any trouble Midwestern way, even though she is being, at the moment, a metric fuck-ton of trouble. “Oh, I’m just planning to head to bed. And you should too. It’s really quite late, Carson.”
“Absolutely,” I tell her, even though it’s barely ten, then glance over my shoulder at Dan, silently ordering him to follow me.
As soon as we get to the kitchen, I open the pantry and hide the bag of condoms on the top shelf behind the ancient salad spinner we never use. Then I whirl around to face Dan.
“So I guess this will have to wait,” he says, giving me a look so hot it nearly melts the rest of my clothes right off.
“This isn’t funny!” I hiss. I give my hands a shake, like that’ll help me release some of the stress that’s currently approaching a boil inside my body.
But no. No matter how hard I shake, my chest still feels tight.
Suddenly I’m sixteen again, worried my mother is going to find the romance novels I hid in the back of my closet, the sex scenes dog-eared and underlined.
Dan seems to catch on to the fact that this is not a joke, because he steps forward, his voice dropping low in a way that is entirely too sexy for my state of mind right now.
“I didn’t want my parents to know I have a boy living here!” I whisper-shout.
“A boy?” His eyebrow quirks, and I can tell he still doesn’t quite grasp the seriousness of this situation.
And why would he? Dan grew up practically feral, one of many wild kids barely supervised by an overburdened father.
Mr. McBride is incredible, but it’s not a stretch to say that as teens, the McBride boys practically raised themselves.
Dan has no idea what it’s like to be raised.
To be watched, worried over, monitored like you have your own personal NSA agents living in the next room.
I had to achieve international life of crime levels of slick to get away with anything in my house, and if I stacked up all my sins, they’d still look pretty tame.
Mostly I just had that closet full of bodice rippers procured from library sales and candy hidden all over my bedroom like a Gen Z Claudia Kishi.
“What, you think ‘I have a man living here’ would go over better?” I ask, backing into the counter, because I need the support right now. The whiplash of this night—going from panty-melting orgasm to greeting my mother in my living room—is making me lightheaded.
“She doesn’t have to know we’re sleeping together.”
“She absolutely cannot know that,” I say, horrified.
Dan looks confused. “Carson, you’re twenty-five years old.”
“And my parents still think I’m thirteen.
To say nothing of the fact that my mother is the church lady to end all church ladies.
If she found out you and I were planning on fucking tonight, I wouldn’t put it past her to call Pastor Steve over here tomorrow.
And by the way, that would be the very first time she’s ever acknowledged the existence of sex to me. ”
This does not seem to compute with Dan. “You never got a talk?”
“I got whatever my public school saw fit to offer, plus a ‘check yourself before you wreck yourself’ lesson in Sunday school. Frankly, I was floored my mother signed the sex ed permission slip. I’m guessing she didn’t realize what it was, because if she had, my butt would have been in the library during ‘Family Life Class.’” I make sarcastic finger quotes so aggressively I fear I’ve given myself carpal tunnel.
“We are an abstinence-only household, Dan.”
Dan bites his lip to suppress a grin. “Not from where I’m sitting.”
“This isn’t funny!”
He shrugs, and it’s infuriatingly adorable “Come on. It’s a little funny.”
“Just…you have to sleep in your room. I’ll sleep in mine. My mom will sleep in hers, and for the duration of her stay, we will pretend you haven’t seen me naked.”
Despite his teasing, Dan doesn’t argue. He nods, accepting my terms, because apparently, despite my advanced age, to be involved with me is to participate in parental subterfuge.
“Okay,” he says, his voice even. He leans back against the counter opposite me, his hands in his pocket, and nods.
Then he gazes at me from beneath hooded eyes.
“But just know that every time I look at you for the rest of the weekend, I’m thinking about this.
” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out my panties, letting the white lace hang off one of the long, strong fingers that brought me so much pleasure earlier this evening.
Then he holds them up to his nose and inhales.
My head fills with static, and I nearly throw myself at him, mother in the other room be damned.
I want him so badly, my desire is practically a living thing.
I don’t know how I’m going to fall asleep tonight when I’m so wracked with need, my mind filled with all the filthy things I’m eventually going to get to do with Dan.
“Honey, where are the towels?” My mom’s voice dissolves the thick cloud of desire that surrounds me like French perfume. “I checked the linen closet, but I didn’t see them.”
“I moved them to the laundry room,” I shout back.
“Why would you do that?”
I sigh. “Because I’m turning the linen closet into a coat closet.”
Mom shuffles into the kitchen just as Dan shoves my panties back into his pocket.
“Well, that’s silly—that’s what the coatrack’s for.”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I can’t tell her that the coatrack is currently in a regional sorting facility for the Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana, because she will thoroughly lose her shit.
My parents never got rid of anything when I was a kid, and they didn’t start with their big lottery win.
Instead, they left almost everything in the house when they absconded to Florida, choosing to outfit their new condo with the finest Golden Girls–style décor—lots of pastels, seashells, and wicker.
I’m pretty sure my mother bought out the word art section of the Boca Raton HomeGoods.
No ocean pun goes un-punned in the Webber retirement condo.
To hear that I offloaded her coatrack (to say nothing of the coffee table, end tables, and a whole collection of vintage-style lamps that looked like they were acquired in a particularly vintage win on The Price is Right) might kill her.
But I don’t know what else to tell her, because I’m horny as fuck and my brain is scrambled eggs. For the first time in my life, I don’t know if I can come up with an appropriate lie to tell my mother.
And then Dan saves me.
“Mrs. Webber, can I make you a cup of tea?”
“Oh, that would be lovely, Daniel,” she says with a warm smile, “but I’m completely exhausted. I think I’ll just head to my room.”
Daniel? I mouth at him when she turns to take a mug out of the cupboard.
He shrugs and winks, and I mouth thank you in return.
I try not to bristle at her calling it her room.
I mean, yeah, it’s the bedroom my mom and dad slept in for the entirety of my life until last fall.
It still has hunter-green walls with an ivy wallpaper border and contains the dark wood bedroom set they bought as an anniversary present to each other in the early nineties, before I was born.
It’s practically a time capsule, a museum = of my overprotected childhood.
But it’s not theirs. This house is mine. And just because I haven’t changed it yet doesn’t mean I won’t. In fact, I should probably plan to move into that room. It’s the primary bedroom, the one with the en suite. It’s ridiculous that I’m still sleeping in my childhood bedroom, my childhood bed.
But then I realize that this is the very reason why I haven’t taken over the primary bedroom. Because even though this house is mine, even though I’ve made a few efforts at making it feel like mine, somehow it will always be theirs.
You could sell the house.
The thought simultaneously excites me and makes me exhausted.
“You know what, I think I’ll crash too,” I say, giving my mother a tight smile.
She pads across the kitchen and wraps me in a hug, her signature apple-spice smell enveloping me.
I breathe in and let myself feel the comfort of being really, truly loved.
I don’t take it for granted. Grace grew up without her mother, and I know that even in her worst moments, I’d still rather have Mom here than not.
I do wish she wasn’t here here, though. Not at this very moment.
“Good night,” I say into her hair.
“Good night, butterbean,” she says. “I love you.”
“I love you too, Mom.”
Over her shoulder, I see Dan drop his eyes to the linoleum, before gazing up from beneath his thick lashes. Good night, he mouths.
Soon, I reply.
I wake with a deep inhale just at the moment that dream Dan is about to slide inside me. Even my subconscious is cockblocking me. I sigh and turn over, but it quickly becomes apparent that I’m not going to fall back asleep easily.
I crawl out of bed and drag myself to the bathroom, hoping the bottle of melatonin I’m picturing in there isn’t also a figment of my imagination.
I trudge down the carpeted hallway, half thinking about someday putting in wood floors and half thinking about finding a whole new house that already has wood floors, so I don’t immediately notice the strip of light coming from beneath the bathroom door.
Not until I’m directly in front of it. Not until the door flies open and Dan steps out.
I gasp. He’s wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and no shirt, so his carved chest and the ink decorating it are on full display.
Without thinking, maybe because I actually am still half asleep, I reach out and trace a flower—a dogwood, I think.
He stands still, his eyes following the path of my finger along his smooth skin.
When I reach the stem of the flower, I let my finger wander down the valley between his pecs, over the ridges of his abs, to the waistband of his sweatpants.
I can see the outline of his cock, thick and heavy.
I felt it pressing into my belly on the dock and so tantalizingly close in the car.
I want to spend time with it, lavish it with attention until he’s as undone as I was earlier tonight.
The idea of taking apart broody, controlled Dan McBride is the sexiest fantasy my mind has ever created.
I start to crook my finger into the waistband, but I only get the very tip inside when he reaches down and circles my wrist with his big, strong hand.
For a split second I worry that while I’ve spent my time alone in my bed conjuring dirty dreams, he’s spent the time alone in his bed deciding that sleeping with me would be a terrible mistake. Maybe he’s decided he doesn’t want me.
But that terrible thought lasts only as long as a breath, because Dan takes a step backward into the bathroom, pulling me in after him. He pushes the door shut with his foot and then presses me up against it, his lips covering mine.
He presses his body into me, cradling my jaw as he kisses me.
When one hand coasts down my body to my ass, I raise my left leg, hooking my thigh over his hip.
Open to him, I grind against his thick length, the pressure of him on my clit delicious.
Again, he’s so close. We’re so close. I want him to yank my panties to the side and slip inside me. I want him so badly.
Dan pulls back. “Not tonight,” he whispers against my lips, and I let out a little whimper that would embarrass me if I weren’t so turned on right now.
His lips drift along my jawline until they brush the shell of my ear.
“Let me be clear,” he rumbles in a low voice that brings me to the edge of madness.
“Carson, I want you so badly that I can’t see straight.
I’ve been lying in that bed, staring at the ceiling fan and thinking about all the things I’m going to do to you when I get the chance. But not tonight.”
“Please?” I beg. “I can sneak into the kitchen and get the condoms.”
“No,” he says, his voice low and firm, and when I let out another small whine, he takes my chin in his hand and tilts it up until I’m looking directly into his eyes. The hot look on his face makes my knees go weak. “Carson, when I fuck you, I want to hear you scream.”