11. A Storm with a Grudge #3
The world explodes. It ends right here. It must because I sure as fuck know that Cole Whittaker’s lips did not just slam down on top of mine.
He slides his hand into my hair and fists it. Hard. He tugs my head back to angle my face so he can devour me.
Cole Whittaker is kissing me, ruining me, redesigning what it means to be kissed in real time.
He’s not slow. He’s not gentle. It’s not the soft, tentative first kiss of two people testing the water.
This is a lifetime of silence touching down like a tornado.
He pulls my hair, and my clit vibrates. He cups my face with his other hand—rough and calloused.
The dichotomy of hard and soft messes with my equilibrium.
And his mouth is on mine. It’s not a question. It’s an answer to something neither of us has been brave enough to ask.
Every self-preservation instinct, every spiteful retaliation I’ve dreamed up since the day he left is screaming at me to stop, step back, find the ice, run.
Instead, I grab his shirt with both fists and pull him closer.
The sound he makes—low, broken, like I’ve knocked the air out of him—undoes some fundamental law of attraction that’s sat unchartered in my chest for a lifetime. Like I bricked it over six years ago and swore I’d never reopen it.
His mouth is warm and tastes like bourbon. And when his thumb traces my jaw, my lids fall shut. I fall into the sensations of it, of him.
Cole drops his hand from my face and anchors at my waist. Like he’s holding onto something he’s been reaching for across a distance he created, and now that he has, his body doesn’t know how to hold it gently.
I savor the way each finger digs into my skin. Hope that it will leave marks—proof that this isn’t all in my imagination. Because this? It will be the thing that destroys me if it goes wrong.
Not my viral video. Not Paul or Grace or any of the small betrayals that cracked the surface. This is the foundation. He is my fault line. If Cole Whittaker breaks my heart a second time, there won’t be enough spite in the world to put me back together.
He drops his forehead to mine when I pull back first because I’m out of air.
It’s also my pattern now. Feel something real, then run before it can be taken from you.
Textbook Juniper Mercer.
His hands fall from my body in slow motion. I see the exact moment he lets me go—the way his fingers curl inward reluctantly, like they’re memorizing the shape of what they just held.
“Um. Thank you,” I whisper.
Just before I run.
“Junie.” He knocks on the bathroom door where I’ve been sitting in the dark for an undetermined amount of time.
“It’s fine.” Internally, I cringe. “I’m fine.” Fuck with the double fine.
“Come out here and talk to me.” He always did like barking orders.
Yeah, that’s a no.
The handle rattles, and then to my utter horror, a drill sounds. The door leans sideways, then he rips it off its hinges, places it in the hallway, then returns and sets a candle down on the counter.
“The lock has always caught,” he says, shrugging at my WTF expression.
He stares down at me, sitting on the toilet lid with my knees pulled up to my chest. When I don’t say anything, he sighs. “There’s a break in the rain.”
Does that mean it’s time to go home? Can I flee his house without having to hear him call this a mistake?
“Junie, I—”
Oh, God. Here it comes.
“Don’t.” The word comes out sharp. “Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t—” …make me a mistake you have to fix.
He closes his mouth and nods. I use the moment of silence to slip past him and find my shoes in the mudroom.
“Where are you going?”
“I should—home,” I say, grabbing the umbrella I used earlier. Hopefully he doesn’t need it.
“The stairs—”
“Will be fine.”
His brows lift in surprise, right before he shuts me out with another wall.
“Good night, Cole.”
“I’ll walk you over.”
“No need.” I’m already on the porch.
“I’ll try to start the generator again.”
We dart out into the rain—lighter than before, but still enough to soak through in mere moments.
He stops at the garage door while I continue to the stairs.
“Good night, Junie.”
Pretending not to hear him, I hustle up the stairs. Once inside, I press my fingers to my lips because I still feel him there. I fear I may always feel him there. The pressure. The desperation. The sound he made when I pulled him closer.
The microwave beeps, and the clock blinks twelve o’clock.
And instead of doing anything productive, I enter my bedroom, go to the window that faces his, and turn on my light, knowing he’ll see it. Knowing what it means in the language of porch lights and lanterns and two people who have spent a lifetime speaking in everything except words.
Less than ten minutes later, across the driveway, his office light turns on too, and then he’s there, staring at me as I stare at him.
Hope, sadness, and a lifetime of mistakes hang in the space between us. But for the first time since I arrived in Porchlight Cove, it feels like an olive branch is trying to grow from his heart to mine.
And it will either end up being the beginning of something or the most beautiful way I’ve ever fallen apart.