14. Lacie
LACIE
He was kissing me. Jared was kissing me.
And I was kissing him back.
I gripped his firm shoulders and soaked in his insistent lips. Everywhere our bodies touched tingled. Heat surged in my lungs, making me gasp for breath. My thoughts turned to a flurry, adding to my disorientation, to the sense that I was no longer standing but soaring.
“Tell me to stop,” he muttered against my mouth.
His grip tightened, and when I didn’t—I couldn’t—he guided me backward, thrusting me against the wall. We knocked into the dresser, and he bent, lifting my legs and planting me on top of it before his hands, so strong and commanding moments before, slid to my jaw with the tenderness of a bird’s wings.
He opened his mouth, deepening the kiss. My hands flew to his hair, fisting it as I accepted everything he had to give me. He kissed me with abandon. It was as though he’d been wanting to do this for far too long, and now that he’d allowed himself to, he was giving this kiss everything he had.
And his fire latched onto me, catching, pooling through me so that when he pulled away and rested his forehead against mine, I was breathless.
“I couldn’t help myself,” he said, breathing just as hard as I was.
I really liked the gruff tone of his voice in that moment. I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard him sound so feral before, and I wanted him to do it again.
To kiss me again. To growl at me again.
He stood between my knees while I sat on the dresser, and his hands rested on my waist as he caught his breath. As I caught mine.
“I told myself I wouldn’t do anything impulsive,” he went on in that husky tone that I found I really really liked.
“Jared—”
“All this talk of us being married, that I’m not with Tia anymore—staring at those pictures with you—having you right next to me—saying you wish they were real—I don’t know.”
“I get it,” I said.
“Something took over me, and I couldn’t spend another second without you. I’ve been pushing all of this away for so long, Lacie, and I think the dam is bursting.”
Lacie? He never called me by my full name. I was always Lace.
“The dam? What dam?”
“The one I put up on my feelings for you. That’s the reason I didn’t want to come with you. That’s the reason I’ve been trying so hard to keep my distance. Why I hated Wyatt. I hated him because you were always meant to be mine.”
Sudden coldness struck me to the core, adding to the fluttering still taking place in my belly.
“You—you have feelings for me?”
He bent in and pressed another kiss to my mouth, one that tied a knot in my stomach and ended in an exhilarated smile on Jared’s face. Like he was relieved to finally be able to confess as much.
“For years,” he said, pressing his forehead back to mine. “I’ve been a wreck since you got engaged. You’ve dated other guys before, and I just accepted it, but being engaged was so much more. So final. It’s why I started dating Tia in the first place.”
“You—you’ve only been dating her about a month.” I spoke each word with deliberation, registering the concept.
The timeline added up perfectly. Wyatt had proposed to me a little more than a month ago. Around Thanksgiving. Jared had started dating Tia shortly after that.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I knew I couldn’t function without you. I was hoping I’d fall fast for her so you and I could still be friends. So I wouldn’t have to avoid being with you completely because it killed me to see you with him. I should have known no one could take your place in my heart.”
Your place in my heart.
You were always meant to be mine.
Was this really happening? The feel of his mouth, the heat of him, still swarmed my senses. I waited to wake up, for the punchline, for the proverbial rug to be pulled out from beneath me.
But his ardor, his genuine tone, his strong hands now braced on either side of me from where I sat.
This was no joke.
“So you don’t want to be with Tia?”
He shook his head against mine. “I’ve only ever wanted you.”
With my hands on his shoulders, I pushed him gently back, enough to allow me to slide off the dresser and back to my feet once more.
Jared watched me with guarded eyes. “I nearly called her to break it off before we left Texas but figured that would be lame to do as she was leaving on vacation. Then I wasn’t sure about ending things if you were going to find someone else—that maybe a future with her could be possible—but now I wish I had.
“You’re the only one I want, Lacie. The only one I’ve ever wanted.”
My heart banged in my chest, accentuating the weakness in my legs. The edges of my vision blurred.
I couldn’t stand him looking so pained, so worried. I reached for him, ready to pull him to me again when this time, he stepped back, rubbing his chest as if pained.
“That’s why I shouldn’t have done this. I should never have come here, knowing how I feel about you. I should never have kissed you just now. And if the circumstances were any different, I probably wouldn’t have.”
I didn’t want him to say this. I wanted him to pull me to him again, to kiss me with desperation as though his life depended on me. Whew, had any man ever kissed me like he just did?
“I was swept away in this tide of the unknown. Are we really married?”
The question seemed rhetorical, and I was still trying to sort through his confession before I dared to say anything.
He loved me. Jared loved me.
“I don't remember a wedding,” he went on. “I don't remember proposing—and though I've imagined getting down on one knee countless times, I didn’t do it.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “And I’m a fool for that, Lace. I should have. I should have told you all this years ago, back when that painter broke up with you because you spilled his acetone all over one of his projects.”
I suppressed a snort at that one, and yet I couldn’t ignore the flush of adrenaline tingling through me. My relationship with the budding painter, David Wood, had ended over four years ago.
FOUR years.
Jared had felt this way about me since then?
I still didn’t speak. I wasn’t sure I could.
“I can’t give in to anything I might be feeling right now. Not in this dream, this stupid, incredible, exquisite, torturous dream.” He let out a humorless laugh. “Even in a reality where I can have you, my good sense won’t let me.”
A reality where I can have you.
Did he think I was out of reach? I supposed I had been. I’d always insisted we were just friends.
The help he always gave me, his reliability, the way I could talk to him about anything and wanted to hear anything he had to say, too. We were just friends—I’d thought that was all he thought of me, too.
But what if my insistence on being just friends was my way of denying what had been right in front of my face?
Oh, gosh. The comments everyone made about us. The assumptions from people we just met that Jared and I were together. The guarded way he’d accepted the explanations every time.
Was I the only one who hadn’t seen it?
“I’m—” I said, not sure where to go from there. “I?—”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you just had your heart broken, so my timing is terrible. And then there’s Tia…”
“Tia.”
Every elated balloon swelling inside of me popped with sudden, jarring loudness.
Tia.
“Oh, Jare. I’m sorry, too,” I said.
Sorry I hadn’t noticed him before now. Sorry I’d let him kiss me when in the alternate universe—the one where my driver’s license, our social media, and even our own families didn’t act like we were newlyweds—he had a girlfriend.
With the pictures, the way he’d whisked me in for a devastating kiss that would ruin me for any other kisses I’d ever have, I hadn’t even thought of her once.
A lump of shame wadded in my stomach. If this scenario was real, then maybe he and Tia weren’t together anymore. According to our new social media feed, to our parents, that was the case.
More shame washed through me. Here, I’d been wishing the kisses, the ceremony, the life shared between us in those pictures was real—and he’d been thinking of his girlfriend.
As he should be.
His loyalty should be with her. Why, then, did the thought hurt so much?
I knew. In an instant, I knew exactly why.
I didn’t want him to be with Tia. I wanted him to be with me .
I wanted to go on like we were, calling each other at all hours, playing jokes, meeting up for lunch or zipping away on distant destinations without concern for anyone else but us.
The knowledge struck harder than the thud of a battering ram attempting to knock down whatever foolish barriers we’d built between us. How could I not have seen it before?
I loved Jared. I always had, and I wasn’t ready to let him go.
Part of me worried these were rebound feelings, but I wasn’t sure that was the case. Still, it was enough to keep me from saying anything.
If I were to tell him I loved him, now, after he’d borne his heart and soul to me in such a tender, beautiful way, and then I changed my mind later, that would crush him.
I refused to be the reason he felt such misery. What he’d expressed had made him vulnerable. I would be careful with his heart.
At least he wasn’t expecting any kind of reciprocation right now. If anything, he seemed relieved to finally have the confession off his chest.
He’d mentioned something during our argument about how he would have dated me if I’d asked. He loved me.
What were we both doing with other people?
I prayed it wasn’t too late. Mostly, I prayed I wouldn’t hurt him.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
My thoughts veered to the dresser, to the passionate way he’d let go and kissed me. Heat coursed through me all over again with the memory. I wouldn’t mind a repeat.
But now wasn’t the time.
“We need to talk to Junie,” I said, attempting to remain composed.
Could he tell the revelation I’d just had? Even if it wasn’t love I was feeling, did he have any clue how much he meant to me?
“She told me the radio plays tricks. I mean, I was kind of freaking out at her, so I didn’t really listen?—”
“Sounds like you.”
I ignored this. “But maybe I’ll talk to her and see if we can find some way to undo it.”
The word undo caught in my throat. While I’d fought the idea of us being married initially because it was so foreign and so completely unbelievable, right now, I didn’t want to undo anything.
Right now, I liked the idea of being married to Jared, and I craved whatever connection to him I could get. And that scared me. Because I wanted him in this sharing-a-room, kissing-behind-closed-doors kind of way.
A way we couldn’t have.
“Why don’t we both go?” He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Let’s find her together.”
I agreed. Anything to get us out of this charged atmosphere where I wanted nothing more than for him to kiss me again.