16. In Which Juniper Meets the World’s Most Glorious Abs
IN WHICH JUNIPER MEETS THE WORLD’S MOST GLORIOUS ABS
I am completely, totally, utterly stuck, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt this helpless.
I didn’t mean for things to turn out like this.
But I keep hitting dead ends at every turn.
The days keep ticking by with no news. Garrity has to coordinate with someone in Boise to analyze the photos Sandy is supposedly sending, and I still haven’t heard back from Matilda with any information about Thomas Freese, the man who was romantically involved with my mother and then bizarrely committed suicide.
I feel like I’m going insane with how helpless this whole situation makes me feel, and I wanted to do something.
So I did.
“Aiden,” I shout, trying to keep the panic at bay.
It’s fine. This is fine. Everything will be fine.
He’ll help me.
“Aiden!” I shout again, louder this time, and definitely edging into screech territory. I can feel my breath coming in short, sharp bursts, causing my chest to hurt, and—oh, no. Is this a heart attack? Am I having a heart attack? “ Aiden! ”
When I hear the thundering of feet coming down the stairs, my body buzzes with relief.
Or maybe it buzzes because I’m losing sensory input; I’m not sure.
Whatever the case, I do feel relief, and I am buzzing—an unpleasant tingling feeling that starts in my hands and feet and moves gradually up my limbs.
“Help,” I croak pathetically. “Help me, please. In here.” The tiled floor and walls of the bathroom cause my words to echo slightly, bouncing back, mocking me like mean kids on the playground.
A second later, I hear a tentative knock at the door. “What are you going on about?” Aiden says from the other side, sounding grumpy. “I’m trying to grade papers.”
“Help me,” I say again.
“I’m not coming in there. What you do in the bathroom is your own business. I don’t need to see that?—”
“Get in here and help!” I shout. The panic is starting to overwhelm me again, the pain around my middle becoming more and more unbearable by the second. “It’s not locked. Open the door and come help me!”
There’s a solid five seconds of under-his-breath grumbling from Aiden before he cracks the door open.
And I swear, he could not be moving more slowly if he tried. He is molasses running down tree bark on a snowy day, and I do not have time for that.
“Aiden!” I snap. “I’m not naked or sitting on the toilet. Open the freaking door or so help me?—”
The door flies open with a bang, revealing a glaring Aiden.? * “Listen up,” he begins, striding into the bathroom. “I do not want to be summoned when you’re in the—in the—in—” But his words fade away as he takes in the situation, his eyes widening, his jaw dropping.
I look down at him from the window where I’m stuck, half-inside, half-outside, legs flailing, my upper body dangling helplessly. “Please help me,” I say as tears start to pool in my eyes. “It hurts, Aiden?—”
“For the love, Juniper,” he says with a sigh, rubbing his temples in the way he always does when he’s annoyed by something I’ve said or done. He looks up, his eyes raking over me, clearly assessing. “Why are you like this? How did this happen? What on earth are you thinking?”
He hurries over to me, standing directly under the window and lifting his arms. His strong hands grasp me under the armpits, relieving some of the pressure and pain from where the windowsill is digging into my stomach.
“I’ve got you,” he says, shaking his head—probably at my stupidity. “Give me your weight, come on. I’ve got you.”
“I thought I would fit, but I didn’t! It’s because I’m pear-shaped,” I babble like a madwoman. “Pears aren’t supposed to go through windows?—”
“I don’t know what that means,” he mutters distractedly as he eases my body weight into his grasp. I wiggle my hips frantically, trying to find a little bit of give.
“It means you’re smaller on the top half and bigger on the bottom half,” I wail. “I’m a pear , Aiden?—”
“Your bottom half and top half are both fine. Stop talking about fruit.” He pauses, then adds, “Actually, just stop talking altogether.”
I whimper in pain as I force my non-rectangular body to squish through this very rectangular hole. Aiden’s grip under my armpits is starting to hurt too, especially as more and more of my weight falls to him.
“I’ve got you,” he says again as I finally manage to get the widest part of the pear in. And he says he’s got me, but I’m not quite sure I trust him—he’s grunting more than talking, and when he takes a tiny step backward, he stumbles a bit.
I don’t have a choice, though, so I finally give in, letting him have all of my weight. Then I pull my legs through the window one at a time, scraping the length of my thighs and shins against the unforgiving windowsill, tears stinging my eyes, until all of me finally makes it in…
And lands squarely on top of Aiden, sending us both sprawling to the cold tile floor.
We land like lovers in the midst of passion, my body directly on top of his, our faces inches apart, our breath knocked out of us—but the look in Aiden’s eyes isn’t the look a man gives his lover.
It’s the look a man gives the woman he’s just rescued from a very stupid situation.
It’s the look a man gives his roommate when he’s wondering if he could have her evicted.
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to banish the tears of pain. Everything hurts—my legs from scraping through the window, my arms from holding up my body, my torso from the pressure of the sill. That last one will probably bruise.
“Any time you feel like explaining…?” Aiden says from beneath me, and my eyes snap open again.
“I just wanted to know how to best break in through a window,” I say, sniffling.
“Is this another experiment for your book?” he says.
I let my head drop, my face squishing into his shoulder.
Maybe that will hide the flush of embarrassment.
“Yes,” I say. Then I add, “You smell stupidly good.” Which somehow makes me feel worse.
If I’m going to need rescuing, the least he could do is not be so freaking hot all the time. Level that playing field a bit .
“Next time you’re going to do research for a novel, tell me first,” he says. “So I can have the fire department ready.”
I give his shoulder a good whack, but I smile, too.
My smile inexplicably widens when I feel his hand patting my back, warm and firm. “Come on,” he murmurs, his lips no more than a hair’s breadth from my ear. “Get up. Unless you’re planning to stay there?”
“Just one more minute,” I say, taking another whiff of him. “You’re comfortable and you smell good. And…everything hurts,” I admit.
“One more minute,” he says with a sigh. When I lift my head to look at him, though, there’s a spark of amusement in his eyes, a little smirk on his lips.
“What’s that for?” I say quickly. “You’re smirking. There’s nothing funny here.”
“Yes, there is,” he says, his voice bland. “You got stuck in a bathroom window, landed on top of me, and then shamelessly told me how good I smell and how comfortable I am to lie on top of. I could tease you about this for years, and it still wouldn’t get old.”
I prop myself up on my elbows so that my upper body hovers over him by a couple inches—just enough that I can deliver a nice glare. “You wouldn’t dare,” I say, my eyes narrowed.
But that’s a stupid thing to say. Of course he would dare.
“I absolutely would,” he says—so there’s that suspicion confirmed. His little smirk tugs wider. “Did you not hear me? You were stuck in a window. In the bathroom. What part of that isn’t funny?”
“At least I don’t have mashed potatoes in my ears,” I say with a smirk of my own. “Unless that’s some sort of mold…?”
Aiden’s face morphs into a scowl, and he reaches both of his hands up. “Stupid high schoolers. I thought I got it all out the other day—which ear?”
“That one,” I say, nudging his right ear with my nose.
“Fine,” he says, pulling his sleeve over his hand and using it to rub furiously at the inside of his ear.
“Fine. Maybe I have mashed potato in my ear. But you ”—his other hand reaches down and pokes me in the side, causing me to yelp—“you called yourself a pear. I’m not the only strange one in this room. ”
“Hey,” I say hotly. “ Pear-shaped is a widely accepted term. Nine out of ten women would know exactly what I meant.”
Aiden snorts, a puff of breath I feel against my lips. There’s something challenging in his gaze, though, a spark of daring that appears two seconds before I feel them: his hands, on either side of me, starting at the outside of my hips and trailing lightly up until they reach my ribcage.
He never strays from his path up my sides, never drifts into territory that would earn him a knee to the groin, but his touch is full of fire nonetheless—though not even his fingertips burn as hot as his eyes. “There’s nothing pear-shaped about you,” he says.? *
“Careful.” I drop the word into the suddenly silent space between us, my heart thundering. “You’re moving awfully close to flirtatious.”
“At least I don’t go around telling people how good they smell,” he says, and there’s that smirk again.
“It’s called a compliment,” I fire back. “It’s part of being nice and social .”
His hands tighten around my ribcage, pulling a little gasp from me, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “I can be nice,” he says as his eyes blaze hotter, full of that stupid defiance that makes me want to slap him and kiss him at the same time. “I can be social.”
“I doubt it,” I say with a snort. “You sit around on the weekends reading Shakespeare?—”
“Shakespeare was a brilliant storyteller?—”
“He had a cute little earring, just like you,” I coo, leaning down a few inches and nudging his ear with my nose again.
“And maybe he went around licking his roommates, too,” Aiden shoots back immediately. There’s a breathless quality to his voice, and his hands tighten further around my ribcage.
Does he even realize what he’s doing? Does he realize that he’s trying to pull me closer as the fire in our words burns hotter?