Chapter Twenty-Four Fitz
Even with all the crazy shit in his past, Fitz had never had an out-of-body experience before. But when he and Ren climbed out of the hot tub, put themselves back together in silence, eyes averted, and stepped into the elevator, it was like everything that happened in the previous hour existed only in a vague fog somewhere behind them. Gone was the loose-limbed heat of the hot tub; their shoulders were now squared, gazes pinned on the closed doors as they rose through the building.
He felt trapped in his own head, unable to think of the best thing to say. She had to know what that was, right? She had to know that he didn’t just want to teach her how to kiss, he wanted to kiss her. He wanted her.
No matter what you’re thinking right now, that was the best kiss I’ve ever had.
I want to see you again when we both get back to Spokane.
It wasn’t until Ren got out on the fifth floor with a quietly mumbled “Good night” and the doors closed again that the truth hit him like a slap: A better man would have said these things out loud to her. Kissing Ren had been the first thing he’d done in a long time that wasn’t motivated by resentment, revenge, or fear. And right now, Fitz stood squarely at the fork in the road.
In his own room, he looked around at the empty darkness, imagining the rest of the night spent alone, with room service or snacks from a vending machine, the television on in the background, a vague, muted drone. A shapeless sadness began to take root, and when he imagined Ren doing the same thing, the amorphous feeling spiked into a pulse of anxiety.
What was he thinking, kissing her and sending her off like that?
He showered at light speed, pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and took the stairs two at a time to the fifth floor and room 546. He knocked once, then again, and leaned in closer to the crack in the doorway. “It’s me, Sunshine.”
A few seconds later, Ren pulled the door open, her hair still loose and wet, a clean towel in her hand. “Hey.”
She stared up at him in confusion, and yeah, he got it. He was being confusing again.
“I was just about to get in the shower,” she told him, waiting for whatever it was he’d come there to say.
“My room was so big and quiet,” he explained, stepping past her. “And it was sort of boring up there alone.” He flopped back onto her bed. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind some company.”
She let the door swing closed but hovered in the entryway, studying him. “I’d be okay, Fitz,” she said finally. “You don’t need to worry about me.”
“Who says I’m here because I was worried?”
She walked deeper into the room and stood at the foot of the bed, cheeks pink, lips still a little swollen from his gentle attack on them not ten minutes ago. “Come on.”
“What would I be worried about?” he asked, knowing his face wasn’t masking a thing he felt for her.
She laughed. “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”
He grinned. “Yeah.”
“You’re worried that I’m here feeling confused after…” She pointed down to the floor, indicating the lower level. “After that.”
“A wise woman once told me, if I can’t talk about it, I shouldn’t be doing it.”
“A wise woman, huh?” Ren asked, pinning him with a raised brow.
He swallowed, warring with the instinct to take back the way he’d opened the subject. Finally, he said, “Her name is Mary. She’s one of the reasons I’m going to Nashville.”
“Is she a friend?”
Friend, mother, savior…His thoughts trailed off. “She’s a lot of things,” he admitted.
Ren’s expression crashed, and Fitz realized how it had sounded. “No, no. Mary is in her sixties,” he told her, and he could immediately see the way her eyes grew hungry, wanting more. But his stomach growled loudly, and they both laughed. “For another time, apparently.” Ren looked like she wanted to protest, so Fitz spoke before she could. “How about we order room service and have a slumber party?” He patted the mattress at his hip. “We get to Nashville tomorrow. You’re going to miss our roomie routine.”
“You can’t be serious,” she said, but she was grinning. “This is only a double bed.”
“Like you said, I barely move all night anyway.”
“Yesterday you looked like you wanted to crawl out of your skin because we had to share a bed twice this size.”
“Because I wanted to kiss you so bad,” he blurted.
Ren’s lips parted, her hand going lax and dropping the towel to the floor. “You what?”
“Yeah, I—” He pushed up onto his elbows, skin prickling with nerves. “It was one thing to share a room before then, but in the same bed…I worried I’d wake up wrapped around you.”
Her cheeks flushed again. “Fitz.”
“I mean…am I off base here?” Putting himself out there was terrifying, an emotional rope bridge over a yawning canyon, but he shoved the words out. “That wasn’t a normal kiss, Ren.”
“It wasn’t?”
He laughed out an incredulous “No way.” Swallowing, he took a breath and threw himself into the void. “Are you feeling this, too?”
“You mean, am I feeling like all I want to do is be near you every second?”
He nodded, choking out a relieved “Yeah.”
“Yes. I’m feeling it, too.”
All of a sudden, he realized how this probably looked to her: Fitz inviting himself in, lounging on her bed. “I don’t want you to feel pressured. Shit—I can go back to my room. This isn’t about kissing or whatever. I mean, it is, but it isn’t just about that. I promise I won’t try anything.”
She shook her head, biting back a smile at his babble. “I don’t want you to go back to your room.”
He exhaled a long breath. “Then go shower. I’ll find us a movie to watch.”
Fitz had made a lot of bad choices in his life. He’d lied, he’d borrowed a few things that didn’t belong to him, he’d talked his way out of trouble or into places where he should never have set foot. The first time he clearly remembered breaking a rule was in the second grade. He’d just been placed with Mary. His pants were too short, his ears were too big, he’d been to three different schools that year alone and was just plain lonely. Bullies can smell that kind of desperation, and Fitz absolutely reeked of it.
When a couple of older kids sat next to him at lunch, he was starstruck. He hadn’t yet mastered the art of indifference and was immediately and clearly on board with whatever it was they had in mind.
Turns out what they had in mind was that it would be funny if they all pulled the fire alarm. It wasn’t the kind of thing Fitz would do, normally—he’d bounced around the foster system for four years by then, and if anything, his vibe was more to fly under the radar whenever possible—but it seemed like a worthy price to pay to gain a few friends. Unfortunately, when the siren blared and everyone began filing into the halls, Fitz was the only one left standing near the alarm. His wingmen had left him holding the figurative bag and fled to their respective classrooms, where they would be accounted for. Fitz was suspended for a week.
But there was an unintended consequence. The fire department came, and everyone got to go home early. He was in trouble, sure, but suddenly he was also cool. People wanted to be his friend. He learned a lesson that day that has served him well: Sometimes bad decisions can turn into something very, very good.
In the clear light of morning, he wondered if coming down to Ren’s room should be lumped in with this brand of bad decision. Because waking up curled around her, with his hand beneath the hem of her shirt and resting against the warm, soft skin of her stomach, all he wanted was to bail on every other plan he’d made for the week—for his life—and stay in that bed with Ren forever.
The instinctive thought pushed in, that he should call his father, that he was off track and a few minutes on the phone with the elder Fitzsimmons’s disappointed silence and passive-aggressive advice would remind Fitz exactly why he was on this road trip in the first place. Robert Fitzsimmons wasn’t responsible for Fitz ending up in foster care, but he was the reason Fitz had lost the only real home he’d ever known. If his father taught him anything, it was that the only person Fitz could depend on was himself. Ren made him want to forget all of that. He couldn’t afford to.
But then she rolled over, sleepily humming into his chest, and every other thought evaporated into the ether.
He’d been on his best behavior last night, though at the time it felt like it might kill him. They watched a movie, then brushed their teeth in the new side-by-side routine they’d fallen into. They climbed into bed, and he kissed her only once. Just a simple peck. When she pushed up, wordlessly asking for more, he admitted he was worried it wouldn’t end there.
“Is that bad?” she’d asked.
“No, of course not,” he’d told her. “But you only get these firsts one time. We shouldn’t blow through them.”
“You mean I shouldn’t blow through them,” she’d said into the darkness.
“No, I mean we. These are firsts for me, too.”
He hadn’t known what she’d thought of that, because she hadn’t said anything else. He didn’t even know what he thought because he didn’t give himself time to examine it too closely. It felt too soon to say it, too heavy, but Ren had only ever been fully herself with him, and so he tried that type of bald honesty on with her like a borrowed coat. It felt good. It felt so good that they’d both fallen asleep the way a match goes out, a gentle, soundless surrender into darkness.
When the sun streaked across the foot of the bed, though, Nashville called, only a handful of hours away. Fitz felt the pull of two directions again: forward to the next step of his plan, and down, rooted to the bed and the promise of things he’d never let himself hope for. He wasn’t sure how to handle the way this new, hungry feeling mixed with the sour cocktail of all his old ones, so he did what he did best: He pushed forward.
“Wake up, Sunshine,” he told her, kissing her neck. “We gotta hit the road.”