22. Jake
TWENTY-TWO
JAKE
I’m not surviving this evening without taking care of business.
And by business, I mean my furious cock.
I’m going to go make Darcy dinner, and I’m staying over at the homeplace just in case she takes a turn for the worse.
I couldn’t forgive myself if something bad happened to her and I wasn’t there.
Because yes, of course, I remember down to the molecule what her pussy tastes like from that little sample I got, but there’s this thing where I actually care about her too. It’s weird—pussy tastes better when you care about the pussy owner.
But I can’t keep spending time around my new favorite horny little slut without coming myself, because I don’t want to be the guy who comes in his pants when she says “hello.”
For now, I’m ducking into the shower’s spray at the cabin, praying Caleb doesn’t pull his bullshit of needing to shit the exact moment I’m about to jerk it in the shower. I think I locked the door this time. I hope so anyway.
I can’t even worry about it because the image of Darcy standing mostly naked in front of me is burned into my retinas, her hair messy, her lips full and red from pressing them together. Her eyes wide, then hooded by desire. That inexplicable scent when a woman’s turned on, so delicate but so perfect. Her breast filling my hand like one was made with the other in mind. I wash quickly, letting the images of an aroused Darcy get me hard. The spray makes me even more sensitive, and I turn so the water runs down my back, pressing one hand into the tile and dropping the other to my very needy cock. My hand is still soaped up, and I recall her taste on my tongue: clean, salty, slightly tangy. I picture myself burying my face between those thighs, spreading her knees wide or propping one foot on my shoulder. Feeling her settle on my face, her grinding, my licking.
Her moaning.
She moaned my fucking name today. My name. Her lips.
Darcy begged for me.
My hand moves faster and more blood rushes south.
She wanted a hand. She wanted it from me . I grunt, unable to keep quiet when it all hits me.
I want her. Her hands on me, even if it’s just while I’m making her come. Her fingertips digging into my shoulder while I was touching her. I edge my heels a little wider as liquid warmth gathers at the base of my spine.
She was so hot and wet and we didn’t even get to the point of getting off but I just know she has to sound?—
She says my name in my head again and that’s it. I grunt as I empty myself onto the shower floor, opening my eyes and finding I’m still alone.
But we said we wouldn’t leave each other lonely.
I dress slowly, the mystery of whatever made her stop our activity coming back to haunt me. Did I do something wrong? I got the impression she didn’t want to talk about it at the time, but I’ll have to try to get it out of her this evening.
I run into Caleb in the kitchen as I’m headed out the door.
“How’s boss?” he asks.
My stomach dips remembering how our boss was spreading her legs for me, trusting me to make her feel good. My cheeks burn. “Still not fully out of the woods. I’m staying over there tonight in case she needs something.”
Caleb makes big eyes at me. “Nurse Jake to the rescue.”
I just smirk. “Are you coming to her family’s Fourth barbecue this weekend?”
“Wasn’t planning on it. Don’t want to crash somebody’s family gathering.”
I shrug. “I don’t think you’d be crashing.”
Caleb lifts a brow. “Yeah, but you’re trying to become part of the family.”
I roll my eyes and grab the backup container of mint chocolate chip ice cream from the freezer. “Whatever. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I hear voices upstairs when I slide my boots off at the door of the farmhouse, one of which sounds like Becca. I drop the ice cream in the freezer.
“Who said anything about a relationship? Just knock boots for the summer!” Becca says.
Darcy shushes her, and Becca speaks louder. “Anyway, you’re coming out tomorrow night.” Becca leans to see me in the doorway, a bundle of cut white wildflowers in her hand. “Right, Jake? You and Darcy and her bestie are coming to the Legion tomorrow night to party.”
“No, I can’t party,” Darcy objects. “My family’s barbecue is this weekend. I have to make sure the farm looks good. And y’all have to come. Everybody’ll be there. My cousins, aunties, Maggie and Bill, my parents. My bestie Brianna is coming into town for it. There’s kind of a lot of us.”
“Well, maybe. Let’s start with partying tomorrow.” Becca tosses a hand where she arranges the wildflower bouquet in a jar next to Darcy’s bed. “I’ll come early tomorrow to help you. You can let go of the farm for one night.”
“What if I’m not better by tomorrow?” she protests.
“You will be,” Becca says. “We’ll have the farm ready, we’ll party, and Jake will drive you and your bestie around. Right, Jake?”
I’m not sure how I got roped into this, but if it’s a chance to see Darcy doing something that makes her happy, I’m game. I lean against the door frame. “Sure. I have to go to the lab for a bit, but I can drop you girls off and come back when I’m done. But for now,” I approach Darcy’s bed and hand her the Gatorade bottle next to her, “quit yappin’. Get drinkin’.”
“Yes, Daddy,” Becca mumbles, then giggles.
I fight the burn headed for my cheeks and shake my head at them. “You two are a mess.”
Becca jostles my shoulder. “You love us.”
I sigh and go quiet, my fingers finding Darcy’s pulse at her wrist. I pinch the skin of her forearm and it doesn’t snap right back. “Becca brought your favorite flowers,” I say. “No frilly roses for you.”
“Right,” Darcy croaks out. Becca makes eyes at her, having some kind of silent girl conversation.
I turn to Darcy. “Will you eat buttered noodles? Might be easy on your stomach.”
Darcy’s brow wrinkles and she rests back against her pillows. “I can cook my own dinner, Jake. I’ll survive the evening.”
Without giving it much thought, my hand lifts to cup her cheek, brushing her hair out of her face. “You’re sick.”
Becca’s eyes almost bulge out of her head before she slides off the bed. “Well, I’ll let you two duke it out, but I’m pretty sure Daddy’s going to win, Darcy. Let the hot guy take care of you for once.” She winks at Darcy. “See you two tomorrow.”
My mouth hangs open as she leaves. “Did she just call me hot?”
Darcy giggles. “Think so.”
I snort and shake my head. “The loosest cannon I ever met. Buttered noodles?”
“If I can come hang out while you cook,” she says.
I extend my hands. “Let’s go.”
Downstairs, Darcy sits on a bar stool at the island, a modern addition to the otherwise original kitchen. “Noodles are up there,” she says, pointing to a cupboard.
I reach to get them, and when I turn back, Darcy’s staring at her hands. “I should probably tell you some things about earlier. About what I’m doing here.”
This is it. She’s finally letting it all out, the thing she’s been hiding for the last month.
“Alright. Shoot.” I get out a pot and fill it with water from the sink. When I set it on the stove and kick on the burner, Darcy eyes the pot.
“Wait, are you not going to salt the water?” she asks.
“Salt the water?”
She gasps. “You don’t salt your pasta water? Nonna Rossetti’s going to rise out of her grave and put the evil eye on you.”
I hold my hands up. “What? How am I supposed to know this stuff?”
Darcy shakes her head. “Just when I think I have you figured out, you do something unhinged like not salt your pasta water.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll salt it. But come on. Out with it, boss. You were about to confess your secrets.”
“Ugh, fine,” she grumbles. She examines the calluses on her palms and hesitates. Just before I’m about to nudge her again, she speaks.
“So, before I came here I was in Raleigh, where I’ve lived for a long time. With my fiancé.” She winces, checking my face. “I mean, ex-fiancé now. I broke it off and came here. Quit my job. Ran.” She pokes at her left ring finger.
“Runaway bride, huh?” I ask, trying to balance keeping it light with letting her know I can handle the big stuff. I’m a jokester, but if she’s hurting, I want her to feel like she can come to me.
Fuck, maybe I am a daddy.
“Already had my dress and everything,” she snorts. “We were supposed to get married in September, but yeah. That’s not happening now.”
I nod, setting two bowls on the island between us. “What happened?”
Stormy jumps up into Darcy’s lap and she softens, giving her a pet. “We both worked for the hockey team, him in sales and me in marketing. That’s how we met. We had to work together a decent amount and we just kinda hit it off. Made it official, signed the papers with HR to say we were dating. Long story short, it’s been—or, it had been—three years, and he kept getting promoted, while I stayed in the same spot. I finally had a shot at the head of marketing position and um, he sabotaged me.”
“What?”
Her voice breaks as she goes on. “He told the hiring manager that after we got married, I was going to quit anyway so he could be the breadwinner. That was not my plan at all, just what he was pushing me to do. I still thought I was in charge of my own career. But since I’ve been here and unpacking it all . . .”
She rolls her lips between her teeth and sucks a breath through her nose. “I think he’d been manipulating me for a long time. In a lot of ways. I straightened my hair because he said it looked more professional when we went to work events. We went to the gym together so he could make sure I got my workouts in. I did a lot of things to look good for his family. He slowly isolated me from my family. He got jealous of some of the players on the team that I had inside jokes with, even when they were in committed relationships and I knew their wives.” Darcy pauses and her jaw tightens, then she shakes her head to clear it. “There were a lot of things he did. He just . . . picked on me a lot. Never trusted me. I was so tangled up in it that I couldn’t see it for what it was. And now I don’t know what’s left of me.”
Oh, fuck no. Rage bubbles in my gut. It’s hard for me to believe guys like that still exist, something I hoped died in the generations before us. Guys like my stepdad who stepped in and swung their dicks around like they were the most important things in the world. My back teeth grind and my lips tighten.
Darcy watches me warily. “What? Why are you mad at me?”
I shake my head. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad for you. That’s fucking awful, Darcy. For someone you love to treat you like that, it just really pisses me off. But I’m glad you got out. It’s hard to do.”
“Sure is,” she agrees. “But with what happened between us in the bathroom . . .” She heaves a sigh.
“Were you not ready?” I ask.
She weighs that, tossing her head. “Partially that, but there’s also a chance that I . . . have herpes. Rob had it but didn’t have a flare-up when we were together. It can still get passed on, though. It’s just less likely.”
I was not quite thinking that’s where this was going. I stand silent with my gaze trained somewhere between us. My first instinct is mild panic. No one likes having to deal with the possibility of an STI. Yet, people do it all the time. I mentally revisit some of my pre-med coursework and go through the list in my head of STIs you can’t get rid of: HIV, Hepatitis B, and herpes. It’s not fatal. It’s not ideal either, but tons of people live with it. It’s manageable.
“So when you put your fingers in your mouth, I got scared. I haven’t been tested since my physical last year.”
The corner of my mouth lifts. “That all?”
“All? Jake, it’s one of the kinds that doesn’t go away.”
I nod. “I know. But it’s also not life-threatening.”
“I hear it’s pretty painful,” she winces.
“Yeah, but survivable.”
She holds Stormy closer in her lap. “I’m just trying to keep you from getting it. This is my first time being on the market since him and?—”
Fuck, it’s a really vulnerable situation for her, and I’m just writing it off. I round the counter and put my hands on her shoulders. “Hey. Thank you for telling me. For trusting me. My last serious girlfriend was a while ago, and my tests have been negative since. But they make condoms for this kind of thing.”
“Right, but,” Darcy says, “there’s oral sex too. Any contact is a risk.”
I nod, leaning a hip against the counter. “But you decided at some point that you were cool with the risk for him? I assume you didn’t always use full protection.”
“Yeah. We used condoms or avoided sex for a while if he got another illness or got super stressed out, because sometimes that can cause a recurrence. We just stayed open about it.”
All of this makes sense. People’s lives don’t stop just because they get herpes. I know a lot of people get it, and I could have easily had a partner with it at some point and just not known. “And you never tested positive or felt like you got sick from it?”
“Nope. But I haven’t been checked since . . . everything.” She chews the inside of her lip. “So, now you know. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before we were in the bathroom. That was all very unexpected.”
I smirk, peeking down into the pot. “It was hot.”
Darcy’s cheeks flush. I settle beside her, drawing in a breath.
“I’ll take some time to think about it, but I think I’d be okay with the risk. Worst case, there’s medication to treat it. If you want to use protection until you get tested, that’s cool too.”
She finally cracks a smile. “Who said you’re getting a piece of this?”
I cough out a laugh, wiggling her shoulder. “Just somebody who wanted a hand earlier.”
She acts offended and points at me. “You offered! You committed mail fraud to make the offer.”
“ Light mail fraud,” I object. “I didn’t open it all the way.”
“Now I know you have ulterior motives with all this caretaking. You’re just doing all this so I’ll sit on your cock,” she says.
“I mean, I could leave if you take issue with my intentions,” I say, hooking a thumb over my shoulder.
“Oh, quit,” she sighs.
I open the box of pasta and dump it in the boiling water, then lean back against the kitchen sink.
Darcy looks around all innocent-like. “What was her name?”
“What ‘her?’ My ex? Are you jealous, Rossetti? You were just engaged.”
“No,” she insists. “I’m just curious.”
I sniff in a breath. “Sierra. Knew her since we were kids. Reconnected when I was back home between college and grad school.”
Darcy’s listening so intently that I’m not so sure it’s just curiosity. “What ended it?”
“She wanted marriage and babies, and I wanted grad school. I didn’t want a long-distance relationship distracting me.”
She lifts a brow. “You not the marrying kind?”
“I am. Just wasn’t the right time.” I stir the pasta.
“Do you still love her?” Darcy’s voice is more tender, like she’s afraid of the answer. Her hand speeds up where she pets Stormy, which Stormy grows sick of and leaps off her lap. I hear the subtext in her question: Are you going back to her?
I lift a shoulder. “Love’s a strong word. I don’t harbor any ill will. Last I heard the guy she was seeing was about to propose. I hope she gets what she was looking for.”
Darcy nods, seemingly satisfied with my answer. “When do you finish grad school? Do you know what you’re doing after?”
“Twenty questions,” I tease, but I’m glad she wants to know more about me. “I finish in December, assuming my robot works. And I don’t know.”
“Going home?”
I cut a knob of butter into each of our bowls and get out a shaker of Parmesan cheese. “Probably not. I don’t really get along with my stepdad. He’s kind of like your Rob, controlling. After my dad died, my mom was a mess.”
“You’d kind of expect that, right?” she asks.
“Well, yeah. But we weren’t expecting to lose him.”
“Right,” she says, pain in her eyes.
“But anyway, Mom still wanted me to go to college like we planned, even though she was stuck running the farm and raising my little sister by herself. I originally planned to go to medical school, did the EMT thing to try it out. But I could never get past the car crash calls. I got sick every time, shaking, puking.”
Darcy reaches for me across the kitchen island, her thumb stroking over the back of my hand. “Sorry.”
I nod, enjoying her touch. “Thanks. But yeah, that’s how I ended up in engineering. A little drier, and it still helps people. And the person I want to help most is my mom, so I did robotics?—”
“For a fruit picker,” Darcy finishes.
“Yep.”
She shakes her head. “You’re a helper, Jake. A fixer.”
Yeah, well, when your dad dies when you’re a teenager, you feel some responsibility for everything to go well for everyone in your family.
I drain the pasta over the sink, holding my face away from the steam cloud. I mix the pasta with the butter and sprinkle cheese on top, adding salt to up her electrolytes. I stick a fork in each bowl and sit a couple of stools away from Darcy.
“What are you doing after this summer?” I ask. “Do you want your old marketing job back?”
She sits with that for a minute, her expression darkening. “His whole thing in blocking me from getting the promotion was that I didn’t like that job anyway. And that he’d pay for everything after we were married. But I did like the job, until it was clear how hard it was going to be to get promoted.”
I shrug, spearing a pasta bow tie. “You could do what you want if he was going to bankroll you, though.”
She rubs her lips together. “That’s not really the point. The point was him controlling me, never consulting me. I was just a passenger in his life, an accessory.”
I plant my knuckles on the counter, then glance at her. “Hmm. Yeah, I guess I didn’t see that. Sorry. I didn’t mean to diminish what you’re going through.”
“Thank you,” she says, seeming stunned. “I’m not used to human males admitting fault.”
I chuckle. “I’ll tell my sisters they trained me well. You think you’ll get back to writing?”
Darcy blows a raspberry. “Marketing pays the bills. Creative writing rarely does.” She takes a moment to gather her thoughts. “My parents are kind of whimsical, you know? They’re very much ‘go for your dreams, no matter what!’ types. Pseudo-hippies. Fully living RV life, just going wherever the wind blows them.”
“They sound cool.”
“Well, they are. Almost too cool. I have to be the pragmatic one sometimes. You’ll see. You’ll meet them. They’ll be at the barbecue.”
I pucker my face like I’m thinking. “‘Hey, I’m Jake. I’ve seen your daughter naked a couple times and let me just say, nice work.’”
Darcy growls and rests her head on the counter. “Always a fucking pest.”