31. Emory
EMORY
Iknock our special knock out of habit. Then I remember he told me I didn’t have to knock, so I let myself in.
Jake’s standing in the kitchen. No shirt. Low slung shorts riding just above the cut of his hips.
He’s leaning against the counter with a glass of water in one hand and phone in the other, having no idea what he does to a room just by existing shirtless inside it.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Hank’s head pops up over the back of the couch. I walk over and kiss the top of his wrinkled forehead before rubbing along the back of his ears.
“No bandana tonight?” I ask him.
“It’s past his bedtime. He doesn’t wear one when he sleeps,” Jake says as he crosses the kitchen toward me. He moves through the world like he has somewhere to be but he’s going to enjoy the journey getting there.
He must’ve recently had a shower because his hair is damp and he smells like eucalyptus, pine and sea salt.
“How were the girls?” he asks.
“Educational.”
His mouth tilts. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Lainey has strong opinions about the universe and foot pops.”
“That doesn’t clarify anything.”
“Good.”
He reaches up and brushes a strand of hair away from my face.
My breath catches.
His fingertips trail slowly along my jaw.
I feel the touch in places that a jaw touch has no business affecting.
I lean into it.
He studies me with those deep blue eyes, and I think, not for the first time, that it’s genuinely unfair to be looked at by Jake Wheeler.
It’s direct and warm and attentive in a way that makes you feel chosen.
Most people spend their whole lives hoping someone will look at them like that and never find it.
His thumb brushes once across my cheekbone.
Then he leans down and kisses me.
My hands slide to his sides. Warm skin beneath my palms. The hard plane of his stomach. The hello shifts, deepening into something slower and heavier.
His hands settle at my waist, pulling me closer, and I go willingly because there is nowhere else I want to be.
He kisses me with patience and complete attention. And my brain—my loud, crowded, overthinking brain—finally goes satisfyingly, mercifully quiet.
“Jake,” I whisper against his mouth.
“Mo.”
“I didn’t just come over to talk.”
He pulls back just far enough to look at me, that familiar expression already there. The one I spent years running from and now want to drown in.
He reaches behind me and clicks off the kitchen light.
His bedroom faces the bay. The windows are cracked open, and the sound of the rocking water under the dock comes through the screens.
He turns toward me.
I’ve seen Jake in a lot of different stages of life and a lot of different ways. Sweaty and sunburned on a dock. In a football uniform. Half asleep in Tall Tales, waiting on an Americano. Shirtless like tonight.
None of it prepared me for this.
For him looking at me like this in a quiet room at the edge of the water with nothing between us but a lifetime of history and about eight inches… of air.
I take a second to just look at him. Broad tanned shoulders. The clean line of his collarbone. The faint scar along his ribs I don’t know the story behind yet.
And suddenly I realize something surprising.
I’m not nervous.
I thought I would be. I’ve been in my head about this for weeks in the way I get in my head about everything. But standing here with him, I’m not nervous at all.
I reach for the hem of my shirt.
His hands cover mine. “Hey,” he says quietly. “We don’t have to—“
“Jake.”
“I just want—“
“Jake.” I look up at him. “I came to you.”
He pauses. Then he smiles. The one with the dimple. The one that has been making me stupid since I was a teenager and apparently hasn’t lost its potency in the intervening decade.
“You did,” he agrees.
“So stop being careful with me.”
He steps closer and finishes what I started, pulling my shirt up and over my head in one smooth motion before tossing it somewhere behind him.
His hands glide slowly over my bare skin.
I inhale sharply.
His mouth moves to my jaw. My neck. The sensitive spot just below my ear, which turns out to be deeply relevant information about myself I’ll be revisiting later.
His hands find the clasp of my bra. He undoes it without fumbling, his fingers sliding the straps down my shoulders slowly enough to make me ache with it.
Now he’s the one inhaling sharply.
His palms cup my breasts, his thumb brushing over one peaked nipple.
I stop caring about composure entirely.
A low sound escapes him, rough and quiet.
His mouth presses against the spot between my neck and shoulder before working its way back up to mine.
He walks me backward without breaking the kiss.
The backs of my knees hit the bed.
Jake lowers me onto it carefully and braces himself above me. Then he pulls back just enough to look at me in the dim moonlight coming through the windows.
“Hi,” he says softly.
“Hi,” I whisper.
He kisses me again, slower this time. Deep enough that my fingers curl into his shoulders. Then his mouth starts traveling downward with the same thoroughness he applies to everything else in his life, like there is nowhere else he needs to be and nothing more important than paying attention to me.
I’ve been kissed before. I’ve been wanted before.
But I have never in my life felt this seen.
“You’re everything,” he murmurs against my skin, and it’s so simple and so direct and so Jake that I feel it everywhere.
His hands settle at my hips as his mouth moves lower, and I stop trying to keep track of what either one is doing because his attention is a full sensory experience and I have been catastrophically underprepared for it.
He hooks his fingers into the waistband of my shorts and pulls them down. I help him because my hips have made their position on patience very clear.
He laughs quietly against my skin at that, warm and low, and then his mouth follows the path his hands just took, and I stop being capable of coherent thought altogether.
I decide I have no complaints about Jake’s thoroughness. None. Zero. I retract every impatient thing I have ever thought about this man.
He takes me right to the edge of unraveling with his mouth.
I reach for him, pulling him back up to me. He settles against me.
He moves slowly at first.
“Jake,” I breathe, “go slow and I’ll spend all night edging you.”
He laughs softly against my neck. “That so.”
I wrap a leg around him. “Try me.”
He takes the instruction.
I press the back of my hand against my mouth because the alternative is saying something deeply embarrassing at volume.
Jake catches my wrist gently and pulls my hand away. “You don’t have to do that.”
“What?”
“Be quiet.”
The look he gives me when he says it nearly finishes me off.
I move my hand.
And when we finally close the last distance between us, I am absolutely not quiet.
Jake’s head drops slightly, a rough exhale leaving him.
“Emory.”
Low. Wrecked around the edges.
Not Mo.
Emory.
“Yes,” I answer breathlessly, even though it isn’t really an answer to anything. It’s just the only word I have left.
He says my name like that one more time.
Then words disappear entirely.
Afterward, the room settles into the kind of quiet that only exists near water late at night, when everything unnecessary falls away and leaves only the things that matter.
Jake lies beside me on his back, one hand resting warm on my hip. I turn my head toward him.
He’s already looking at me with that expression that I have spent years running from and toward and sideways around. The one I tried very hard to convince myself I didn’t miss.
“I’m good,” I tell him before he can ask. “Really, really good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
The dimple appears.
He reaches over and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers trailing slowly down my jaw like he’s trying to memorize this version of me by touch alone.
Jake pulls me closer, and I go without thinking about it, my head settling into the space between his shoulder and chest like it was designed specifically for me, which I choose to believe it was.
I think about don’t let the logistics win.
I think about ten days.
I think about how the sound of the water outside is the same sound I fell asleep to every summer of my childhood and how nothing in my life has ever felt this much like something I’m not supposed to leave.
I don’t say any of it.
I close my eyes.
And I let myself stay.
Just for now.
Just for tonight.
Tomorrow is still ten days away.