Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
June
My dad and Flynn find a common interest over dinner. Basketball. Dad is a Lakers fan, and Flynn is a Timberwolves fan.
“You’ve been to actual games?” Flynn asks.
Dad looks at me for a second before returning a subtle nod to Flynn.
“I’ve thought about splurging on tickets to a Timberwolves game, but it never feels like the right time to spend that kind of money. Ya know?”
“That means you’re smart,” Mom says. “A lot of people your age get themselves into financial trouble all in the name of fun.”
“You should have bought tickets to a game instead of buying me a car.” I nudge his leg.
Flynn nudges me back and grins over his bite of steak. “No way,” he mumbles.
Mom gives me a look. It says she approves of him. It also says I could lose him if I don’t tell him everything. I’m going to. I just want to know that he won’t resent me for waiting so long.
“Speaking of tickets,” Mom says. “We bought you two tickets to the Minnesota Orchestra—this week. Think you can talk Flynn into going with you?”
Flynn wipes his mouth. “Oh yeah. She mentioned she liked the cello.”
Dad raises an eyebrow and slowly chuckles. “Well, she used to.”
I ignore his little jab.
“Yeah, I’d love to go with you,” Flynn says. “I know nothing about the orchestra, but there’s really nothing I can imagine doing that wouldn’t be amazing if it’s with June.”
Mom presses a hand to her heart.
I’m ready for the check. To-go containers. Whatever. Just get me out of here so I can be alone with Flynn.
It takes another twenty minutes of chitchat for that to happen, but when it does, I start to feel nervous. I like him so much; it’s hard to breathe sometimes.
“We’re flying out early in the morning, but we’ll be back. And you should come back to L.A. for a visit soon too,” Mom says, pulling me in for a long hug outside of the restaurant while Dad orders a ride (as predicted).
“I will,” I say. “Love you.”
“You too,” she says.
“Don’t just say you’ll come back to L.A.,” Dad warns, attempting to give me a serious expression before I hug him. “Actually do it.” He hugs me so tightly I nearly cry.
My dad has championed everything in my life, making my dreams his.
“I promise.” I kiss his cheek.
“It was wonderful meeting you, Flynn. You should come to L.A. too.” Mom hugs him.
He doesn’t reply with more than a smile. I’m not sure what that means.
“Young man, take care of my daughter. Got it?” Dad says in his most manly voice.
“Absolutely, sir,” Flynn says. Then he takes my hand and guides me to the car as I look back and blow my parents one last kiss.
“Is your roommate home tonight?” I ask.
“Uh, yeah. Why?”
“So is Ally. No biggie. I just wanted to be alone with you.” I wrap my arms around his neck when we get to the car parked on the street.
“Thought you had your own room,” he says, teasing his fingers under my shirt an inch or so.
“I do. But I don’t like the thought of someone listening.”
“Listening to what?” He presses his lips together, eyes wide.
“Stop.” I playfully nudge his leg.
“Are you a screamer?”
“Stop.” I giggle. “Don’t you have your own room?”
“It’s a one-bedroom. So I sleep on the sofa, for a break in rent of course.”
“You sleep on the sofa?”
He nods.
“What do you do with your clothes?”
“I have a big trunk.”
Why does this make me sad? But at the same time, Flynn’s contentment with living the opposite of a glamorous life also makes him more interesting. I love this about him.
“How do you feel about getting a hotel room for the night?” I ask.
“It’s …” He twists his lips for a second before releasing me and stepping backward with a long sigh. “I don’t have a credit card.”
“I’ll pay for it.”
“No.” He scoffs. “I’m not having you pay for it. I’m pretty sure my paycheck is more than yours, and”—he holds up his hands in surrender—“I don’t mean that as an insult. I have no clue why I’m being paid so much to do absofuckinglutely nothing. But I am.”
“It’s no big deal.” I step toward him, reaching for his hand.
“Well, it is to me.” He pulls away.
Our evening is spiraling—again. So I steer it in a new direction. “I love that about you. What if you give me the cash, but I put it on my card?”
“What if we just go back to your apartment and not give a shit what your roommate thinks?”
“Fine.” I return a tight grin.
“Good answer.” He kisses my forehead.
On the way to the apartment, I steal Flynn’s attention at every stoplight, loosening my seat belt to lean over and kiss his neck.
His hand works its way up my leg, stopping short of touching me where his mouth had been earlier. When we park near my apartment and unbuckle, our mouths crash, the anticipation reaching a fever pitch. My heart might explode.
“Inside,” he mumbles.
I nod, panting more than I do on the bike tours, but we don’t move. He snakes his hand up my shirt, and I rub him on the outside of his jeans. I pull away and blow my hair away from my face, relinquishing a naughty grin. “Let’s go.”
We make it to the door and kiss again. He hikes my legs around his waist and carries me upstairs, stopping several times to kiss me without falling backward. My back thunks against the door, his lips demanding, hands palming my ass.
“I think I’m going to love you,” I whisper when Flynn kisses my neck below my ear. “So, just be prepared.”
He lifts his head, eyeing me with an unreadable expression.
My heart sinks.
Shit. Shit. Shit!
Say something. What is he thinking?
“Why wait?” he says.
I might cry because I haven’t been in love like this.
I haven’t allowed myself to feel this deeply since the day I was taken on my twenty-first birthday.
Routine has made every day simple, a steady wave of emotions.
Nothing too high. Nothing too low. Years of self-medicating with monotony and a numbingly boring social life.
“I mean,” he begins, saving me from my drowning thoughts, “I’m not waiting.”
I lean the back of my head against the door and close my eyes, quickly wiping my tears.
“Or we can wait.”
“No.” I laugh, opening my eyes and grabbing his face to kiss him again.
We jolt, beginning to fall backward, and he grabs the doorframe to keep us upright when Ally opens it.
“Whoa. What’s going on? I was just leaving to—”
“Go,” I mumble over his lips as he walks us toward the bedrooms.
Ally laughs. “Have fun.”
“This one,” I say, breaking our kiss before he passes my room on the left.
He kicks the door shut behind us.
“Love you,” he whispers, framing my face, thumb touching my scar. He does it every time he cups my face.
And every time I melt, feeling beautiful in his eyes.
Can I let him love me when he doesn’t know everything about me? My brain says, no. Stop. Slow down. My heart is nothing more than a wild horse with the wind at its back. Maybe it doesn’t matter who I was, if I’m no longer that person. This can be my life.
I close my eyes and move my head a fraction to kiss his thumb, a silent thank-you for accepting all of me. “I love you,” I whisper.
My body aches to be as close to his as possible, but my heart doesn’t want to rush a single second. And the way he slowly unbuttons my blouse leads me to believe that he doesn’t want to rush this either.
“I need a better vocabulary,” he murmurs, our gazes meeting after he slides my blouse off my shoulders and removes my shorts, leaving me in my bra and underwear.
Goosebumps erupt across my skin. “Why do you say that?”
His gaze drops to my breasts and lower, taking in all of me while wetting his lips. “Because I just keep thinking that you’re the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen, but”—he shakes his head—“that word doesn’t feel big enough for what I really see when I look at you.”
A new round of tears threatens to escape as I remove my bra.
With my jaw cradled in his hands and his lips moving with mine, I hear Bach, “Cello Suite in G Major Prelude.” It’s beautiful and haunting, the way I’ve always imagined it would feel to fall in love.
The highs and lows. Thrumming the strings that attach my soul to my earthly body.
Love is passion. Desire with purpose. Life well-lived.
My mom said those words to me when I hit a low point, certain I could live forever without this kind of love.
Flynn removes his shirt and unbuttons his jeans.
Then he steps behind me, gathering my hair and gently placing it over one shoulder so he can pepper kisses along my back, easing my underwear down my legs.
It’s slow, almost agonizing, as he shows control while my chest feels like it could rip open from my heart thrashing around in its cage.
My jaw unhinges with a gasp when he playfully bites the flesh along the curve of my butt. He chuckles softly as I rest my chin on my shoulder, angling my gaze down at his mischievous grin.
The impatience to feel more, feel it faster, more intensely, wins over my desire for the moment to last, so I turn in his arms and kiss him, sliding my hand down the front of his briefs.
“Jesus,” he whispers, dropping his gaze between us, mesmerized by my touch.
We stumble the last few steps to my bed, discarding the rest of his clothes, save for a condom from his pocket.
He sets it next to my head as I lie on the bed.
The music in the back of my mind is almost deafening as our naked bodies intertwine, moving together like a bow across the strings.
“Flynn …” My fingers curl into his hair as he kisses my inner thigh.
When he crawls up my body, I peel my eyes open for a few blinks, admiring the lines of his body, taking a few extra seconds to feather my fingertips along the mottling of scars, each one squeezing my heart like I can take away some of the pain that they once caused him.
What kind of monster does that to another human, let alone a child?
“Hey,” he says, standing on his knees to roll on the condom. I lift my gaze, and he smiles. “It was a long time ago.”
I return a sad smile. “Are you reading my mind?”
He settles between my legs, slowly pushing into me while I fall a little deeper into the depths of his dark eyes.
He drags his lips to my ear and he whispers, “God, I hope so.”
We move like the ebb and flow of chords.
A natural progression of tension and release.
I push him onto his back, again, feeling his scars beneath my fingers as he looks up at me, reaching for my breasts and grinning.
I’ve lost the fight with my composure, blushing while bending forward, hiding us in a cascade of dark hair.
“I love how you feel inside me,” I say, kissing his top lip.
He grips my hips, playfully nipping back at my lips. “Maybe I should just stay here forever.”
“I think I’d like that,” I say through my shaky breaths as I approach my release.
When I succumb to the waves of pleasure, he rolls us over, and the padded headboard taps the wall like a mallet against a bass drum.
“June …” he moans while releasing. His body a deadweight on mine like a security blanket.
I hug him with my arms and legs, our bodies hot and sweaty like we’ve melded together.
“We need a shower,” I say with a giggle. “But I don’t want to let you go yet, so …” I nibble his earlobe.
“Then just hold on,” he says.
“What are you doing?” I squeal as he climbs off the bed with me hugged to him.
He opens the door and walks across the hall to the bathroom.
“Nooo! Ew … I’m eating my takeout,” Ally says.
I give her a wrinkle-nosed grin over Flynn’s shoulder as he offers her an unobstructed view of his naked backside for several seconds before shutting the bathroom door behind us.
This is what it feels like when all the notes just … hit.
When the music isn’t being played. It’s playing you.
The water envelops us like a rare, late summer rain shower on a warm beach in Southern California.
My giggles.
His grin.
The long glances and even longer kisses.
We wrap up in white fluffy towels, and he lifts me onto the vanity.
And …
He. Combs. My. Hair.
Flynn hasn’t dated. I haven’t had a serious boyfriend. But I have friends, and I know this isn’t normal. Does he? I’m not telling him.
“Have you ever hoped for something great to happen just to make sense of all the bad stuff?” I ask. “Not to make up for it, just to make sense of it?”
Flynn gently works the comb through my hair, using his free hand to take the tension off my scalp while freeing it from any tangles. He’s a natural.
“Hoped? No. But here I am, exactly where I never knew I wanted to be.” He pauses his hands and looks at me. “And regretting anything in my past is no longer an option.”
“I don’t know if regret is the right word.”
“No?” He continues combing my hair.
“Regret implies you had control over it. Don’t you feel like the bad things that happened to you were out of your control?”
His brow tightens. “Some of it. But I’ve done things I should not have.”
“But don’t you feel like you did them because you were trying to protect yourself or someone else?”
“We’re here.” He sets the comb aside. “That’s all that matters to me.”
My smile wavers, but I try to hide it by tipping my chin. “Yeah.”
“Not to sound dramatic,” Ally says, knocking on the door. “But I really need to pee.”
Flynn smirks, sliding me from the vanity so I’m hugged to him like we were on the way into the bathroom. When he opens the door and steps past Ally, his towel falls from his waist.
“Nooo … not again,” she says.
I giggle as he carries me to the bed. We settle under the covers, and I fall asleep in his arms within minutes.
The next morning, Flynn is gone by the time I peel open my eyes and squint at my alarm clock, three minutes after seven.
I hop out of bed and retrieve my phone from my bag on the floor, among my discarded clothes.
Each one is a memory of him slowly undressing me.
Just the thought brings a blushing smile to my face.
My phone is dead, so I plug it in next to my bed, run to the bathroom, and make a cup of green tea. By the time I return to my room, there’s just enough of a charge to turn on my phone.
A text from Flynn pops up. He sent it at five forty-five this morning.
Flynn: Morning! What time do u work? Mr. R thinks u should stop by again since Mrs. R likes u
I’m flattered, so I text back:
June: Hi! I have a 1:00 tour. I can grab breakfast and head that way
Flynn: Perfect!