Chapter 7 #2
My hand pauses on the tray. My pulse does that irritating little hitch in my throat. My body, traitorous thing that it is, reacts before my brain can even catch up.
Because Jimmy.
Of course.
Always.
Kya doesn’t notice. None of them do. They’re too busy in their own little domestic war zone to catch the way one name can still knock me off center after all these years.
But I feel it.
I always feel it.
Mac’s mouth twitches around the edge of her glass. “He’s not dead, Kya. He’ll probably hear it all on his own in about thirty seconds.”
Brooke perks up a little. “He’s coming?”
“Whip called him,” Logan says, finally dropping into the armchair nearest Mac like he’s been granted permission to sit. “Said he was still at the garage.”
Dom snorts. “Translation, Uncle Whip wanted him to haul something heavy.”
“That’s literally why God made Jimmy,” Carter mutters. “To move furniture and scare people.”
I laugh softly, but the sound comes out thinner than I want it to.
Because now I know he’s coming. And that shouldn’t matter.
It shouldn’t.
I’m twenty-three years old, not sixteen anymore.
I’ve lived enough life since then to know better than to let one man still have this kind of hold on me without even trying.
I’ve gone on dates. I’ve had men flirt with me.
I’ve been kissed and wanted and looked at in ways that should’ve finally shaken this stupid, embarrassing, ancient crush loose.
They didn’t.
Because none of them were Jimmy.
And Jimmy has never had to do anything extraordinary to ruin me. He doesn’t have to flirt. He doesn’t have to lead me on. He doesn’t have to say sweet things or touch me too long or make promises he doesn’t intend to keep.
He just has to walk into a room.
That’s enough.
It has been enough for years.
“Allie,” Brooke says, drawing my attention back to her. “Can you see if there’s more ranch in the fridge?”
“Sure.”
“And if there’s curly fries hidden in there, I’d like to formally accuse Carter of a hate crime.”
Carter drops his head back against the couch cushion. “Jesus Christ.”
I grin and head for the kitchen before anybody can rope me into another food-related tribunal.
The fridge is full in the way it only ever is when the whole club’s orbit starts landing in one place at once.
Containers stacked on containers, leftovers with Sharpie labels, too many condiments, fruit trays, sandwich meat, two different coffee creamers nobody’s claiming, and enough drinks to hydrate a small army.
I grab the ranch, snag another bottle of water for myself, and find the last container of cut pineapple shoved behind a carton of eggs.
Kya’s gonna kill somebody over that later.
I’m still smiling to myself when the back door opens.
I feel him before I see him.
The scrape of boots against the tile. The low murmur of a male voice answering somebody from outside. The heavier tread that I know as well as I know my own.
My fingers tighten around the ranch bottle.
And then Jimmy walks into the kitchen like he hasn’t spent the last decade making me feel sixteen and breathless and stupid every time he gets too close.
He fills the doorway in a way that should be illegal.
He’s bigger than he used to be, broader through the shoulders and chest, all hard lines and quiet strength packed into worn jeans, a fitted black T-shirt, and his cut hanging open over the top of it.
Ink snakes down both forearms, dark against tanned skin, disappearing under the sleeves and reappearing over the backs of his hands.
His beard is trimmed close, his dark hair a little too long on top like he’s overdue for a cut and doesn’t care enough to fix it yet, and his expression is somewhere between mildly annoyed and deeply amused, which means he’s probably already heard at least half the insanity from the common room.
He looks older now.
Not old.
Just…more.
Harder. Rougher. More settled into himself.
And somehow even more impossible than he was when I was a teenager staring at him across bonfires and cookouts and club nights, trying to pretend he didn’t make my whole body go warm and weird.
He glances up.
Our eyes meet.
And there it is. That same stupid, awful, humiliating reaction.
My stomach flips. My chest tightens. My pulse trips over itself like it’s never learned a damn thing in all these years.
I hate this. I hate him. I hate me most of all.
His gaze lingers for maybe half a second before it drops to the ranch in my hand and then the pineapple container tucked against my hip.
One corner of his mouth lifts. “Planning to survive the apocalypse in here?”
I should say something normal.
Something easy. Something that doesn’t sound like I’ve secretly been in love with him for years while he remains completely, infuriatingly unaffected.
Instead, what comes out is, “Depends. Are you eating everything again?”
His brows go up slightly, like he wasn’t expecting me to have a comeback ready. Then he huffs a laugh.
That sound does stupid things to me too.
“Unfair accusation,” he says, stepping fully into the kitchen.
Unfair my ass.
Jimmy eats like he’s trying to personally keep every grocery store in the county in business, and if he doesn’t get to the leftovers first, Logan usually does. There is no safe food in this building unless one of the women threatens violence over it.
I set the ranch on the counter and try very hard not to notice how close he is when he reaches past me for a bottle of water out of the fridge door.
I fail.
He smells like clean soap, leather, outside air, and something that’s just…him. Familiar enough to be dangerous. Familiar enough to make my chest ache with the weight of years.
“Your timing’s great,” I say, because talking is better than silently combusting.
“Oh yeah?” He twists the cap off the bottle and leans one shoulder against the counter. “Who’s winning?”
“The women.”
“That was never in question.”
I smile before I can stop it.
He notices.
Of course he notices. Jimmy notices everything.
From the common room, Kya’s voice carries clear as day. “If that man ate my pineapple too, I’m gonna make him sleep outside.”
Jimmy glances toward the doorway and deadpans, “Sounds tense.”
I snort.
Then he looks back at me, and something in his expression softens just a little. Not flirtation. Not heat. Just familiarity. Ease.
Like this is nothing. Like I’m nothing he has to think too hard about.
And that should probably bother me more than it does right this second, because there’s something achingly easy about Jimmy when he’s like this. About the way he looks at me like we’ve always known each other. Like I’m just Allison. Like there’s no weight under it for him at all.
For me, there’s too much.
There always has been.
He reaches past me again, this time for the paper towel roll on the counter, and pauses when he notices the little line of lemonade running down the outside of the glass in my other hand. “You’re dripping.”
I blink. “What?”
He tilts his chin toward my fingers. “Your glass.”
“Oh.”
Before I can set it down, he takes it from my hand with an absent kind of ease, wraps the bottom in a paper towel, and hands it back like he’s done me some tiny practical favor without even thinking about it.
That’s all.
That’s literally all. And somehow it still hits me straight in the ribs.
Because Jimmy has always been like that. Not in a sweeping, dramatic way. Not in the kind of way that gets songs written about it.
In little ways.
Quiet ways.
He notices when somebody’s hands are full and takes something without asking.
He walks on the outside of the sidewalk when there’s traffic.
He makes sure the girls get to their cars at night.
He remembers how people take their coffee.
He checks locks before bed if there’s a storm coming because Aunt Lucy worries.
He just takes care of things.
Of people.
And God help me, I’ve been in love with him for so long that every tiny, thoughtless act of consideration feels like getting skinned alive.
“Thanks,” I say, and my voice comes out softer than I mean it to.
His gaze catches on my face for a beat. Then his mouth twitches. “You always this polite now or should I be worried?”
I narrow my eyes at him, grateful for the tease because it gives me something solid to push against. “You say that like I used to be feral.”
“You did throw a flip-flop at me once.”
I gasp. “You deserved it.”
He laughs, low and easy. “Probably.”
That memory hits all at once.
I was seventeen, he was twenty-one, and he’d hidden my keys before a club barbecue because he thought it was funny to watch me tear through the common room threatening his life while Ana and Shaina laughed so hard they couldn’t breathe.
I’d found the keys in his jacket pocket and thrown my sandal at his head in retaliation.
He’d caught it. Then he’d grinned at me like I was the most entertaining thing he’d seen all day.
I’d thought about that smile for weeks.
My life is humiliating.
From the other room, Brooke calls, “Did everybody die in there or am I getting ranch?”
I clear my throat and grab the bottle off the counter. “Coming.”
Jimmy pushes off the counter and reaches for the pineapple before I can.
I look up at him.
He lifts one shoulder. “If Kya sees that in your hands, she’s gonna think you’re trying to steal it.”
“She’ll think you stole it too.”
“Yeah, but I can outrun her.” I laugh again, and this time it feels freer. Easier.
He opens the kitchen door wider and gestures for me to go first.
I hate that I still notice things like that too.
I walk back into the common room with Jimmy at my back and immediately the room shifts around him the way it always does.
Not because he’s loud. Jimmy’s never been the loudest man in a room.
But because he carries himself like someone people naturally make space for.
Not in fear exactly, though there’s some of that if you don’t know him.
More because he feels solid. Capable. Like if something goes wrong, Jimmy’s the one who’ll handle it.
Mac spots him first and points at him with her tea glass. “Oh good. Another one.”
Jimmy glances around the room once, taking in the scene with a slow smirk.
Logan still looks shell-shocked. Carter is sitting on the edge of the coffee table trying to negotiate peace with Brooke through a milkshake and sheer emotional endurance.
Dom has somehow ended up with Kya’s feet in his lap and the expression of a man who knows this is his life now.
Jimmy’s grin deepens. “Damn,” he says, voice warm with amusement. “Y’all really got these men out here fighting for their lives.”
The room erupts.
Brooke laughs so hard she nearly spills her shake. Kya points at Dom like Jimmy just delivered gospel. Even Mac’s mouth twitches around the edge of her glass while Logan mutters, “Traitorous bastard.”
And just like that, Jimmy is folded into the middle of it, all broad shoulders and lazy amusement and easy confidence while the women roast the men and the men try to defend themselves with the kind of doomed energy that says they know they’ve already lost.
I stand there for one stupid second longer than I should, holding a bottle of ranch and trying not to stare at him like I’m still sixteen on the clubhouse porch.
He acts like he’s always acted with me.
Easy. Familiar. Like whatever this is in my chest has never existed at all.
And the worst part?
I still feel every single second of it anyway.