Chapter 19
This.
This can’t be Smithson.
Smithson is polite and proper, his brain constantly whirring.
But this man is all body, spinning Ripley to put her back against a broad, smooth fence pole.
Smithson is a distant, untouchable Superman; this is a piercingly mortal Clark Kent, his forehead curl drowned in the rain, his eyes closed tight with painful pleasure a superhero’s body would never feel.
James. This is James, Ripley thinks dimly as he licks into her mouth like he’ll die if he doesn’t. It feels so insanely good that she does it right back just to hear him make that ragged, uncontrolled sound in the back of his throat.
He’s smashingly irresistible without his veneer of perfect control. Like a bone with a scar in it, he’s a thousand times more interesting when he’s not perfect.
And he fucking takes her apart.
No part of his kiss is tentative or questioning. It’s a hard, sure press of his mouth, a whispering brush of his thumb at her throat, an impatient jerk that brings her hips up to his. His hands catch her and hold her like he wants all of her right now, and tomorrow, and forever.
Time is a gift, and James Smithson is showing her how to unwrap it.
She winds her arms around his neck and pulls until only her toes touch the earth. His thigh slides helplessly home between her legs. He makes a low, quick, desperate sound like she’s hurting him and soothing him at the same time.
“Good God, Ripley.” He tips up her chin so he can suck water from her neck.
The way he says her name is hypnotic, like there’s a raindrop between the syllables.
It washes away her surface defenses, exposing the secrets underneath.
Everything about him is muscle and heart, unyielding strength and reckless need.
Her thoughts are fuzzy; her skin is sparking where his mouth is fastened.
She can feel him hardening against her stomach.
Something opens in her chest when his eyes meet hers. It’s physical almost, like a rock cracking under her hammer to reveal the beauty of the bone beneath. It feels like she’s been looking for this—for him—for such a long time.
“I found you,” she says, and it doesn’t make sense, but it does. She’s not sure whose mouth finds whose, but either way, she’s not on the side of the interstate anymore. She’s in his arms and on his thigh and against his mouth.
James. James. James.
“Ma’am? Excuse me, ma’am. Sir. Friendly reminder that this is a public highway,” says an infinitely weary voice from another world.
With agonizing slowness, James pulls back. High color has seeped into his cheeks. His heavy eyelids and wide pupils make him look slightly stoned. Based on how sluggishly her mental faculties are coming back online, she’s pretty sure she looks equally destroyed.
Icy rain trickles down the back of her neck. One boot is filled to the top with watery mud. On the other side of the fence, her baseball hat is on the ground, filling with rain.
From across the guardrail, a state trooper gives them a stony look. “Thank you,” she says, packing the words with a thousand eye rolls. “Are either of you the driver of a yellow Dodge Charger, license plate D-I-N-O”—her eyebrows arch up over her mirrored sunglasses—“G-R-L?”
It sounded way less childish when Ripley picked it out. “Yeah, that’s me.”
Deciding the hat isn’t worth climbing over a fence and trespassing on private property in full view of a law enforcement officer, Ripley settles for shoving her wet hair out of her face and attempting a smile.
“I’ll need a statement. If you’d like to follow me, ma’am?” She looks from Ripley’s dripping hair to her one mud-caked boot and back up again.
“No problem, Officer. Can I make sure my friend’s all right first? He’s, um, a little shaken up.”
“Sure,” the cop says dryly. “Take a minute with your friend.”
Ripley turns to James, and her heart sinks. He’s got an agonized look on his face again. “Are you okay?”
“Your rules,” he says, looking like he wants to send himself to prison. “I’m so sorry, Ripley. I shouldn’t have—”
“You’re fine. You’re fine,” she repeats when he shakes his head. Her rules seem so small and far away right now, it’s like she’s looking at them in the rearview mirror. “I don’t think anyone who might start a rumor about us is on the side of the interstate right now.”
He smiles half-heartedly. “You’re very kind. But I also broke my own rules.” He’s back in his fortress of manners. After what just happened, it feels like a door slamming in her face.
Ripley blinks rain out of her eyes. She has a lot of questions, but now is clearly not the time. “Okay. But I need to know you’re all right before I give my statement.”
He seems to relent a little. “I’m all right, Ripley. I’ll wait in the…the car while you give your statement. Unless you want me to accompany you?”
“I’m good on my own.” She’s always been good on her own. “You should take your medication if you need it. We’ll figure out a plan once I’m done.” She turns to head up the embankment.
“Ripley.” There it is again, that plosive raindrop in the middle of her name. Except now it feels like a teardrop. Her throat aches where he stroked it, tight and burning.
“Yes?”
“You dropped this.”
He’s holding out her hat. Mud is smeared along the crown. Matching streaks decorate his right sleeve, like he doesn’t know you don’t wipe off a twenty-dollar ball cap with a two-hundred-dollar shirt.
“Your shirt,” she says, dismayed. The mud might wash out, but the rusty streaks from where he reached through the fence will not.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not,” she says, frustrated. She takes a breath, trying to reset herself. “Thank you, James. Would you mind holding on to that?”
“Of course.”
He brings it to his chest, where it ruins his shirt some more.
The storm has moved on by the time Ripley’s finished giving her statement, the sun peeking anemically through the clouds. James says he’s fine to keep going, but there’s no way Ripley’s putting him in the car for another three hours when he looks this ashen.
Her dad’s place isn’t far from here. They can take it easy on the back roads. They’ll eat and rest, and she can check on her dad.
Ripley insists on waiting for James’s medication to kick in before they leave.
He takes one of his pills—or, rather, two perfectly precut halves.
She tries to imagine him biting through one of the tablets but can only picture him in a spotless kitchen wielding an overlarge Japanese knife.
How a man this exacting has managed to get himself a tattoo six inches from the most sensitive place on his body, she has no idea.
She cancels the rental place in Drumheller for tonight, books one for tomorrow, then turns on the true-crime podcast so she won’t think about his tattoo. Or anything else in that anatomical neighborhood. It doesn’t work.
After twenty minutes, James sighs, closes his eyes, and curls against the window. Ripley doesn’t bother to turn on her navigation app. She knows these country roads.
It’s half an hour to Golden, a flat, two-stoplight town decked out in a bursting excess of red, white, and blue. Its Main Street belongs in a Hallmark movie, the false-fronted brick buildings covered in ghostly lettering from long-gone frontier hotels and feed stores.
The storm was supposed to miss the northern half of the state, but it looks like the edge grazed Golden. The organizers must have gone ahead with the parade, because the streets are jammed with people.
The sounds of friendly honking and impromptu renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Party in the USA” rouse James.
He seems captivated by the odds and ends of Americana: cars moving at a post-parade crawl; damp, flag-bedecked people streaming along the sidewalks; kids taking maximum advantage of their noisemakers before the adults snap and confiscate them.
A teenager, his brass-buttoned jacket hanging open, plays a Chappell Roan melody on his trombone as he moseys across the street.
“Tell me about your parents,” James says, his voice slow and a little dreamy.
“I need cheat codes before I meet them whilst high as the bloody sky.” He gestures at himself, eyes closed, head resting on his rolled-up jacket.
He ironically failed to retrieve it from the back seat before kissing her in a downpour, so it’s dry.
“You’re not going to remember anything I say right now.”
“Tell me anyway. Talk to me, Ripley.”
I like it when you talk, Ripley. I like talking with you.
She can’t believe it’s been less than two hours since he said that.
An hour since he told her he hasn’t stopped thinking about her for three years, laid the kiss of her life on her, then walked it all back like he was trying to save her from something.
She pauses the podcast.
“First thing, it’s not parents, plural. It’s just my dad. Everyone calls him by his full name, like he’s some kind of legend. Even I think of him as Steve Adams sometimes.”
“Ahh,” James says drunkenly. “Steve Adams, Ripley Adams. He passed the full-name thing on to you.”
“Sure,” Ripley says so as not to end up in an argument with someone so incredibly loopy. “Dad was a mechanic, but now he’s on disability after he lost most of his right lung to cancer. He’ll joke about it. You’re allowed to laugh.”
“See, this is extremely helpful. Is your mother one of your American formidden—morbidden”—he wets his lips before trying again—“forbidden topics?”
Ripley wishes she hadn’t seen his tongue touching his lips. Especially now that she knows what its touch feels like on her mouth. In her mouth.
“No. No, it’s not like that. It’s more like she isn’t relevant to the conversation. My parents got divorced when I was pretty young. They haven’t been in the same room for twenty years.”
“Are you close with her?”
“Not really. She made an effort after she remarried and had my half brothers, but she and I don’t really understand each other. She’s very…” Ripley gropes for the right word. “Very beautiful.”
James rotates his head limply toward her, looks at her with half-lidded eyes. “You’re very beautiful.”
“You’re very high.” Ripley does her best to ignore the tug between her legs.
“What I mean is, my mom’s obsessed with the way people see her.
Like, she’ll tell my brothers a story she ‘remembers’ from my childhood, but it’s cobbled together from three separate birthdays plus photos my dad sent her from school pageants she didn’t come to. ”
“Ah,” he mumbles. “She’s a bone bed.”
An amused sound escapes her lips. “You really need to sleep this off.”
“No,” he insists. “Think about it. Thousands of animals killed by the asteroid impact, their bodies washed out to sea by the tsunami. All their bones in a pile on the seafloor. We can put together a skeleton for a given species, but every bone might be from a different individual. It looks like a dinosaur, but it was never alive.”
“True,” she agrees, her throat tight. “And there are some fossils you just won’t find in a bone bed. Birds, for one. They would’ve been too light to sink with the other animals. You’ll never find them no matter how deep you dig.”
“And you, Ripley Adams, are looking for birds,” he says dreamily, his mouth pulling into a tender, melancholy smile.
Her heart twists, part pleasure, part pain. “Yeah. I am.”
A few minutes later, she turns at the faded Golden Times Mobile Home Community sign.
The blacktop is rougher here, pocked with unrepaired holes from last winter’s snowplows.
Trailers line the street, most fronted by neat yards dotted with play structures, trees, and clotheslines.
Bitsy Roos’s house is still hot pink, and she’s added a stripe of lime high on the north side where Joe Humbert’s reproachful hedge hasn’t yet grown tall enough to hide it from view.
Ripley slows down, glancing over to see whether James is asleep again. In his boneless state, he’ll end up with whiplash if she hits a pothole going anywhere near the speed limit.
He’s nestled against the window, awake. His gaze lingers in the places where his mouth touched her: lips, collarbone, throat. The aftermath of their kiss curls in the air like smoke.
“It’s not that I don’t want you, Ripley.”
She stills, hands frozen at ten and two, some wild emotion crackling through her limbs. “Could’ve fooled me.”
He scoffs. “Of course I want you. I have been unable to forget you for years, and even that is a dull comparison to the way I feel when I’m actually next to you.
Your passion is so…did I tell you I’m working again?
Although I can’t say I’m sleeping. My nights…
God, you’re exquisite, Ripley. You make me want to…
” He shifts in the seat, tugging at his trousers.
Jesus. The burst of heat in all her lonely places is so sharp she can’t breathe. She has a million questions, but she’s not about to take advantage of him.
“You’re high, James. So, so high, and I promise you do not want to keep going with—”
“But I need, I need to be your last line of defense. If all else fails, I have to be able to intervene. In any capacity you require. If you and I start a relationship—”
“Literally no one mentioned a relationship—”
“Then my ability to help you is compromised. And because the world and science and paleontology are the way they are, you will be hurt far worse than I if any conflict of interest comes to light. My reaction to you three years ago was my problem, but I turned it into your problem. And now it’s my responsibility to be the solution. ”
“I didn’t ask you to solve my problems, James.”
“You did once,” he says. “I won’t let you down again, Ripley. Which is why this cannot continue.” He nods, his whole upper body dipping along adorably. “I’m not saying never. But right now you need a chance to get back on your feet.”
He’s right. It’s wrong to want him to abandon his principles just because she can’t stop thinking about the parts of himself he keeps hidden. The hungry James with soft lips and hard angles. The one who adjusts his pants and turns away to spare her the sight of his humanity.
“Okay.” There’s no reason she should be this sad. “Consider the subject closed.” She turns in to a gravel drive flanked by a pair of twenty-eight-year-old spruce trees and pulls up to a worn, off-white double-wide with faded brown trim.
“Well,” she says, killing the engine. “We’re home.”