Chapter 28
Ellary
“…Iwant you in ways I don’t deserve.”
Jackson’s husky words roll around in my head on the drive away from the suburbs and toward downtown Melton.
Out of the corner of my eye, he seems relaxed. He’s not. I know he’s tense because of his hands.
His pale blue shirt clings to powerful muscles.
He never stopped working out, even after his injury.
The scars around his left knee from his surgery are still visible years later, but his workouts aren’t as intense as they were when he was a Division I hockey player, so his knee only really bothered him in the winter when his muscles stiffened from the cold.
It’s something he learned how to do in high school: look after his body, pay attention to nutrition, and sleep well. All good habits for sustaining a professional career, which he had been training for throughout his teens, but which ended abruptly and far too soon.
Sometimes life isn’t fair.
“You okay?” he asks, casting me a rapid glance as the stores come into view.
“Fine.”
“You’re quiet.”
Yep. I have been since he led me to his car, opened the door for me and closed it once I’d buckled up my seatbelt. As if he thought I might change my mind about this date and bolt if he wasn’t standing outside my door.
“Just wondering about where you’re taking me,” I say with a smile.
That’s a lie.
His soft, husky admission from outside the house hasn’t stopped rolling around in my head since I got in his car.
The kiss outside the house wasn’t supposed to change things.
Yesterday, he kissed me in the backyard, and afterward, we talked about the future, marriage counseling, and all those practical things involved in tentatively rebuilding our lives together.
Everything except him moving back into the house.
I think he’s too afraid to ask, and I’m not sure if he’s waiting for me to dictate what comes next.
Now I’m thinking about sex with my husband.
“It’s okay if you’ve changed your mind,” he says, aiming another rapid glance at me. It’s an enigmatic look, impossible to read, but the fingers he tightens around the wheel of his car tell me everything I need to know: he’s afraid.
Afraid I haven’t just changed my mind about this date. But about us.
It was easy to joke and tease over text.
I could blush like I was sixteen, texting a boy for the first time.
Harder to be cute and flirty when we’re sitting side by side in his car, the seatbelt is digging into my belly in a way I don’t like, and my husband is afraid I fell out of love with him when he hurt me.
“I haven’t changed my mind.”
About the date or giving our marriage another chance.
It’s the fear of what might come after this date that I worry about.
Will sex still feel like us?
Will I love it as much as I always did?
Will all I be able to think about is him and his assistant?
Shouldn’t this be something we discuss when we have a nice, unbiased buffer sitting in front of us, in the form of a suit-skirt-wearing therapist with sensible shoes and black-rimmed glasses, ready with a notebook and pen, along with a box of tissues?
I have no clue why my view of a therapist is that specific.
“Ellie?”
I snap my head to the side.
While I was lost in my thoughts, Jackson parked the car, cut the engine, and is studying me, visibly concerned. “We can do this another time, or not at all if you want. You’ve had time to sleep on what we talked about yesterday. It’s okay if you changed your mind about us.”
Wanting to look away, I force myself to keep meeting his gaze when I say, “I’m thinking about sex.”
He stops breathing.
I start counting
One, two, three…
He takes a breath; it goes down the wrong way, and he starts coughing, cheeks red, eyes streaming with tears.
“Are you okay?” I fight with my seatbelt, cursing when my belly keeps getting in the way. Then I lean over to smack him on the back to help clear his airways.
I’m not sure at what point this becomes funny to me. Probably around the same time it starts to be funny to him too.
Between coughs and wheezes, we fill the car with our laughter. It lifts the tension from him and the embarrassment from me.
Our eyes meet, and he smiles. “Sorry about that.”
“I shouldn’t have blurted out what I did,” I apologize for nearly killing him. “Obviously, it was going to get a reaction.”
“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have said what I did at the house. It was bound to put you on the spot and it’s way, way too soon to be—”
“I want it,” I blurt out, feeling the tips of my ears heat.
“Sex with you. One day. Not sure what day. I just…” I take a breath and release it in a noisy exhale, head down as I piece together my feelings.
“I just don’t want to be awkward or weird.
And it’s good that we talk about it. I tried with Lila when we had Chinese takeout one day, but we agreed years ago, after she blurted out this weird sexual detail about her ex that I wish I could burn out of my brain, that we would never discuss the specifics of each other’s sex lives again. ”
“You never told me that before,” he says, sounding surprised.
I shoot him a wry smile. “I didn’t want you to know that I’d talked about some of our sex life with my sister.”
He sits up in his seat, doing a truly terrible job of looking casual. “Oh? And what was that thing?”
My lips twitch. “Are you fishing for compliments?”
“Maybe… Do I have one coming?” His grin is so gorgeous I wish he would kiss me.
I look away so he won’t see the need in my eyes and blink in surprise when I realize where we are. “Uh… Jackson? You said we had a reservation.”
“I was trying to throw you off the scent,” he says, laughing.
I look at the diner. On the face of it, it’s just an ordinary small-town diner with big glass windows, red leather bucket seats, booths, and a long white counter with all five barstools occupied. But this diner is special.
The last time we came here was years ago. As we got older, our tastes shifted from burgers and shakes to restaurants with three-course menus and French red wine.
We came here on our first date. We were so nervous that I nearly poured milkshake in my lap, and Jackson nearly knocked over the sugar caddy.
But it was perfect.
We had our first kiss just outside, and he walked me to his car, drove me home, and I knew I wanted to see him again.
“Ellie?”
I turn to find Jackson watching me, a tiny frown line between his brows, anxiety bleeding through his pores.
He looked just as nervous when he picked me up from my parents’ house all those years ago.
I lean toward him, touching my lips to his. “Do they still do root beer floats?”
His hand curls around the nape of my neck, his breath warm against my lips. “They do.”
“Then what are we waiting for?”
The milkshakes are as thick as I remember, the burgers as good, and our table a little sticky.
We spend two hours in our booth, talking, eating, and laughing about high school and how the world felt so big until we left Melton for college. And about wanting to do this again, just like we did on our first date when we were sixteen.