Chapter 7
chapter seven
No One Else – Weezer
LAINEY
Lainey woke slowly, a hazy image from her dream lingering behind her eyes—Justin, holding her arms above her head as he thrust into her, their bodies tangled in heat and pleasure.
Only, it wasn’t a dream.
She pressed a hand to her flushed cheek. After everything they’d shared in the last twelve hours, blushing felt a little ridiculous.
Without opening her eyes, she reached for him, only to find cool sheets and solitude. She wanted him again. She wanted him forever . Sitting up, she swallowed hard against the knot of fear tightening in her throat.
Maybe the obsession was hers—and hers alone.
She glanced around his bedroom, searching. Sleek furniture, subtle overlays of color, pillows strewn across the floor like petals—a perfect reflection of Justin’s minimalist style. Last night, she’d barely noticed anything beyond the softness of the mattress he’d dropped her onto before climbing over her, claiming her with the same fierce intensity he had thirteen years ago.
A soft laugh escaped her as she remembered.
During the last round, they’d tumbled to the floor, where he’d pulled her on top of him, and somewhere in that breathless tangle, she’d finally understood what it meant to belong to one person, body and soul.
Lainey’s breath caught when she found him.
His long body sprawled in a leather chair pulled close to the window, wearing nothing but jeans—the same worn denim from yesterday morning, the button-fly half undone in his haste. A graphite pencil in one hand, a sketchpad in the other, his head bowed as he drew furiously…paused…then began again.
Fascinated, because even back then she’d rarely seen him work, she quietly slid from the bed, bringing the sheet with her.
He was so absorbed in his art, he didn’t notice her.
The scent of their passion still clung to her skin, the honeyed taste of him lingering on her tongue. She’d returned the oral favor in the shower. A truly powerful feeling, bringing him, quite literally, to his knees.
As a floorboard creaked beneath her, Justin stilled, an unreadable emotion tightening the skin around his eyes and mouth. His head lifted. Their gazes held for a long moment before he dragged a hand through his hair and looked away.
“What are you sketching?” she asked, her voice cutting through the silence.
He tapped his pencil against the page, as if he debating what to say.
His hair stood in ebony tufts, and dense stubble shadowed his jaw. A bite mark—one she clearly remembered giving him during their impassioned foray on the floor—rested like an exclamation point on his neck. His lean belly contracted as he exhaled. “Putting images on paper helps me clear my mind. You know that, Lain. Or you used to.”
Sensing his withdrawal, she tugged the sheet higher, past anything he might still want to see. The slight collapse of his smile gave her just enough courage. “You’ll think I’m crazy, and I probably am, but I almost like your anger. It’s the only time I believe you still care.”
Without a word, Justin dropped the sketchpad to the floor and stood, bracing both arms against the window ledge. The tattoo on his forearm shifted with the movement, and the urge to trace the tail with her tongue was almost overwhelming.
Lainey tucked the rumpled edge of the sheet between her breasts, her voice thankfully steady. “Why do I feel like I’m not going to like what you have to say?”
He shook his head, laughing softly. “Because you’re not going to like what I have to say.”
She wondered where the hell her clothes were, knowing she’d soon have to make the walk of shame home. Her body was deliciously spent—tender, supple, relaxed—but her mind was snapping like a rubber band. “You may as well get it over with.”
After a charged silence, Justin rubbed a spot on the windowpane with his thumb.
Her pulse thrummed, pleasure rippling through her, settling low between her thighs. He’d driven her wild with that hand. “If I asked you to, would you forget about last night?”
She kicked a pillow out of her path and reached for his T-shirt. Anything but nudity would do for now. “Will you be able to forget it?”
His shoulders lifted and fell on a sigh. “Even if I want to”—he nudged the curtain aside, and a narrow strip of sunlight slid across his shoulder, spilling to the floor—“no. Who am I kidding? I’ll never forget it.”
“I’m not asking for promises, Justin,” she said, shrugging into his shirt and letting the sheet fall to the floor. “Just a crack in the wall you’ve built, one I’m struggling to break through.”
“Promises in Promise. Funny as hell, right?” He tapped the windowpane once, twice. The shifting muscles in his shoulders and along the broad line of his back sparked a quiet fire inside her. “I seem to recall giving those before—and being cleanly rejected.”
“You were headed to Dartmouth, on scholarship , while I was lucky to get into a shitty community college two counties over. You know how many classes I missed senior year bailing my father out of one mess after another? Medical, financial, criminal. My permanent record, as they called it, wasn’t stellar. Nothing like yours. The day you offered to stay was the day I knew I had to let you go.”
“Let me go,” he whispered, the weight of those three words hanging in the air.
An empty condom wrapper lay on the floor. Lainey nudged it aside with her toe as a cold knot settled in her stomach. She wasn’t supposed to feel this deeply about a dalliance headed where others had—ending with a veiled smile and a tentative mental handshake.
“I’m not telling you this to shift blame, but your father came to see me three days before you were set to leave for college, and he asked me?—”
She slowed to a halt as Justin gave the pane a hard knock, though his gaze stayed fixed outside.
“He told me to leave you alone. That you had a bright future, something I would only screw up for you. I thought a lot about it, Just, the long-distance relationship we had planned.” She pinched the hem of his T-shirt, twisting it between her fingers. “The truth was, you and I had as much chance of making it as my father did of quitting the horses.”
“So you ran.”
She curled her toes into the heart pine planks and admitted it for the first time out loud. “So I ran.”
“I get it. You were setting me free. How noble. Though I would have appreciated being asked what I was sacrificing.” He let the curtain fall as he turned, plunging the room into muted darkness. “My father had no idea. Not one day in his life did he understand a damn thing about me.”
Either Justin couldn’t help it, or he wanted her to finally understand what he was feeling—but his gaze was no longer unreadable. Fury, passion, and bewilderment raced across the distance, striking her like an electric shock. “I’m a little upset, because we’ve spent all these years consoling ourselves with someone else .”
“We were kids, Just. Na?ve, stupid kids.”
Perching a hip on the window ledge, he crossed his arms over his chest, unwilling to come one step closer. Like he’d made a vow not to touch her. “Want to be honest about why you’re here, Lainey? It’s not to make goddamned repairs to your dad’s house. I get that, too.”
She frowned, pressing her fingers to her suddenly aching temple.
“Because I know you,” he said without missing a beat, answering her unspoken question. “And I also know something is wrong.”
She sat on the edge of the bed, gathered her breath—and let it all come out.
About trying to save a young man from an appalling future, only to be forced to watch him spiral toward hell, just like her father. About the helplessness she couldn’t shake, the guilt and fury over a world she couldn’t fix, no matter how much she wanted to.
“After his trial, this emptiness crept in, like I was looking out a window and seeing nothing but fog. Oblivion. In my professional world, pinning your hope on saving someone who can’t be saved destroys you.” She folded her arms across her stomach, as if she could hold herself together by force. “When the last renter left my father’s house, I thought, maybe the timing wasn’t a coincidence. Then, my first night home, I see you.”
She fidgeted with the tattered hem of his T-shirt, smoothing it over her thigh. “Is that fate, or just a meaningless flicker in the dark?”
Justin crossed the room and dropped to his knees before her. His presence steadied her, but she didn’t dare meet his eyes, terrified she’d come undone by whatever waited there.
“Lainey, I always believed we were meant to be together. Kismet—yeah, that’s exactly what that teenage boy thought. Fate . And I didn’t care that I was just a kid when I thought it. Then you left, and you didn’t just break my heart—you blew up the only relationship in my life, outside of the ones with my brothers and my cousin, Campbell, that felt real. Talk about being destroyed.” Reaching for her, he tilted her chin up, forcing her to meet his gaze. “I’ve never let another woman in because of you. Thirteen years later, and here I am, still twisted up inside.”
“You’re never going to forgive me,” she whispered, the spark of anger still flickering in his eyes. Faint, but there .
His hand moved to cradle the nape of her neck, the tenderness of the touch sending a shiver through her. “I am. But I don’t want to be. And that, my love, is a monumental change.”
She breathed in the scent of sandalwood and their lovemaking, imprinting the feel of Justin’s touch and the emotion in his eyes, as if preserving a photograph of the past. When he left her—the moment he left her—this would be the only memory she had to hold onto. “Just, I?—”
He pressed his lips to hers, cutting off her plea. “One month, Lain. Meet me at the gallery in one month. I need time to think…and so do you. Please, give me this. And take it for yourself as you build a new life here.”
“One month,” Lainey whispered, not trusting herself to say anything more.
His thumb grazed her lower lip before he rocked back, his expression conflicted. “If we have a chance,” he said softly, “I want the forever kind.”