Chapter Twenty-Two #2
He shook his head. “No. Everyone in the family has theirs. Sam told Jake that, but he seemed unmoved. But Sam and Landon and Aly got together and remembered the knife Nate found in the creek last spring. Its owner was never identified, which means it’s likely still police property.”
Police property. Like someone really was framing Nate. Before she could think of anything to say, anything to do, Cal turned again, this time more violently. In a shocking move, he hurled his phone against the wall.
Jill flinched in surprise as the phone clattered against the hard surface, then to the ground. For a few silent, throbbing seconds, they both just stared at it. The screen had cracked.
“Fuck,” he muttered viciously.
“Cal…” She didn’t know what to say. He so clearly needed a breath, a moment, and instead, he kept getting bad news he didn’t know what to do with.
“Look, I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to witness me come unglued. I—”
She crossed to him then. She didn’t feel like there was any choice. He desperately needed someone to ease all these aches inside of him. So she wrapped her arms around him, tightened her grip as best she could.
For a moment, he was only stiff in her arms. She was about to release him, step back, apologize for crossing some boundary, but then he finally just relaxed on a long, slow exhale she felt in her hair. His arms came around her.
Jill felt like she’d done something. Given him something. She’d gotten to know him well enough over the past year or so that she knew no matter how much he’d worked to repair his relationship with his brothers, there were always things he didn’t know how to let his family see.
He couldn’t hide his trauma or how he viewed himself as some kind of … broken. He used that as a shield and weapon more than something he hid away. But there was an element of his own insecurities that he kept tightly hidden under all the bigger things.
And by letting her hug him, by relaxing into it and hugging her back, he was giving her some small piece of that part of himself that he hid from everyone.
She rubbed her hand up and down his back, her face tucked into the crook of his neck and shoulder. “You can’t handle everything,” she told him softly. “You’re only one person. That’s why we’re all working together.”
He inhaled through his nose, then out through his mouth, which fluttered through her hair. He didn’t tense at the words exactly, but he started to pull away.
“I guess I needed to hear that,” he muttered.
He kept his arms around her, and she hadn’t quite worked on telling herself to let him go, so that even as they looked at each other now, space between their faces, they clung to each other a bit like an anchor.
She wanted to be his anchor. Which was a surprising realization, or at least the force of that feeling was. How much she wanted to give him. This man who could be so damn difficult.
But had such a good heart buried underneath all his issues.
And had her pulse thumping when his gaze moved from her eyes to her mouth. Like that moment before that she wanted to convince herself was her overactive imagination. He had more important things to think about than her.
But his face was closer now. His mouth just a whisper from hers. All it would take would be to lift her face a little, and him to lower his a hair. Just fractions of space needing to be crossed.
A moment that stretched out, taut as any rubber band. Except it never snapped. It just … eased. Into lips touching lips.
She couldn’t be sure if she’d been the one to cross that last line, or he had. She couldn’t be sure of anything, because with his mouth on hers, she felt like someone else. Suspended in a different time altogether.
She might not have been sure who initiated it, but he was the one who pulled away. At least a little. There was air between their mouths again, though her hands remained fisted in his shirt, and he didn’t release her completely.
But he was studying her. Not breathless and shocked like she felt. He looked studious. A man solving a complex equation.
Jill wasn’t sure she liked that.
“That was…”
“Bad timing?” she offered, because she didn’t know how to see any other way around this than … that.
He laughed. She could feel his laugh against her cheek. What the hell did she think she was doing?
“Yeah.” But he was staring at her so intently, she didn’t think she could find any other words. “I’m not sure there will ever be good timing,” he said quietly. Seriously.
Jill nodded. She wasn’t sure what that meant—as in this was never going to happen, or maybe it just should because the timing wouldn’t ever be right.
She knew she didn’t understand what any of this meant or what she should do.
Part of it was being so rusty that the kiss had felt like …
something different and more special than any kiss she’d ever had.
Surely that was just the time between kissing someone messing with her brain. Her heart.
Then he pressed his mouth to hers again. Surprisingly gentle. Like they had all the time and space in the world to figure out what a kiss could mean.
She couldn’t help but melt into that. Who could? It was persuasive and drugging and wonderful. He cupped her face with his hands. He took his time. He savored, and she felt as though she had no choice but to meet that slow, seductive pace.
When he pulled away this time, she had to fight to open her eyes. To return to earth and the here and now. His hands were still on her cheeks. Her breath was coming in strange little puffs. His dark eyes, hazy and conflicted, stared right into her.
He swallowed. “I apologize. Because … I really don’t have the time or brain space to make sense of that right now. So I shouldn’t have initiated it. Even if it was…” He trailed off, clearly searching for a word that would fit.
And coming up as empty as she had.
“I don’t want to keep giving you mixed signals. I don’t want you to think that wasn’t enjoyable,” he continued.
He was starting to sound like a lawyer now. Carefully outlining an argument, which frustrated her enough to poke through the warm, bleary haze of kissing him.
“I can’t deal with this in any kind of reasonable, rational, adult way right now. So we should probably … not.”
She wasn’t surprised he would come to that conclusion. She actually thought she knew him pretty well by now. She still didn’t quite understand what put her in this little box for him, where he felt like he had to protect her from him … and maybe that was the answer to her many questions about him.
He wasn’t protecting her. He was protecting himself.
“You don’t have the time or brain space to deal with this right now, and you want to deal with it because you want to reason it away.”
He studied her. His dark eyes seemed very deep and fathomless. He was very smart. His brain moved faster than a lot of people she knew. He was also very … well, traumatized. He had a lot of walls and masks to hide that soft center.
But he did have a soft center. She’d seen glimpses of it. With Aly. With Grandma. Even with her. There was a gentleness in him hidden behind all those dark, jagged edges, and it didn’t take a psychiatrist to understand he used that sharp to shield the gentle because of everything he’d been through.
And she could keep that to herself. He didn’t need her analyzing him.
But … well, the truth had a way of unlocking locks that didn’t serve a person anymore. She knew that from dealing with her grandmother. So she went for it, even if it might make him mad.
“Did you ever consider that you only want to reason it away because it might be something good, and you’re very afraid of anything good?”
“I have a therapist, Jill,” he said it with a hint of chastisement, but it wasn’t mean.
She knew, because when Cal wanted to be mean, he was sharp and to the point.
“Maybe you should bring that one up next time you talk to her.”
He let out a huff of breath, almost a laugh. “Yeah, maybe I will.” He shook his head. “Come on. Let’s go. Sam said she wasn’t going to do anything stupid, but I’m not sure that’s going to hold up now that she knows that report got deleted.”
Jill nodded. Because she could tell him all sorts of truths about what she thought of him, but his brother was still in jail, and he was tasked with somehow fixing that. Whatever little blip had happened here could wait. It would have to.
Then he held out his hand. And she didn’t know what else to do but put hers in his.
His fingers entwined with hers, and he pulled her out of the building.
Because somehow, no matter what happened, they were all in this big mess together.