Chapter 29 – Waylon
chapter
twenty-nine
Waylon
Two girls were on me, and all I could think about was the girl across the room.
The blonde pressed against my chest, grinding against me to the beat.
The brunette was tucked into my side, her mouth on my neck, doing something that should have felt good and didn’t, because I was too busy watching Josie Washington forty feet away, tracking the swing of her hips through the crowd.
I’d moved my hand from her chest to her hip because I had some manners, and I smiled at both of them in a way that probably passed for interested. Really, I was just going through the motions while every part of me screamed wrong girl, wrong girl, wrong girl.
Then I’d left. I said something to Trace, pulled on my jacket, and walked the twenty yards to my cottage without looking at her once. I counted every one of those yards to keep from turning around.
Wanting someone I couldn’t have didn’t get easier.
It got worse, and more specific. I’d stopped wanting her in some vague way and started wanting the exact way she tucked her hair behind her left ear when she was nervous, and the sound she made when she laughed before she caught herself.
She’d said steady back to me once, throwing my own word in my face, and I’d been wrecked for days.
She’s not yours, Johnson.
No, she wasn’t. But my body hadn’t gotten the memo, and somewhere around week three of dawn runs and stolen looks and her shea butter and citrus scent, I’d stopped pretending I was going to get over it.
I sat on the edge of my bed with the TV on mute and a Gatorade I hadn’t opened when I saw figures crossing the yard. The cottage smelled like old pine and cold air, and the bass from the main house was still thumping faintly through the walls.
There were three of them, moving fast through the cold. I could pick out Josie’s silhouette before they were halfway across the lawn. I’d know that walk anywhere. Whatever was wrong was bad enough that she needed me.
She knocked twice and didn’t wait for an answer. Then Josie was through the door with Kimmy and Lena flanking her, and every thought I’d been having about distance and discipline was gone.
She wasn’t crying, and that was worse. She was locked down so tight that willpower and spite were the only things holding her together.
Christ, Flash. What did he do?
“Hey,” she said. That was all.
Kimmy was already talking, something about Marcus being in an upstairs bedroom with some girl.
“It happened right after you left,” Kimmy said. “She went upstairs to find Marcus and found a whole lot more.”
Josie was watching me, steady and waiting. “I’m sorry. I didn’t ask if you had company.”
Was she kidding right now?
How did she not know how gone I was for her?
“Nope,” I said. “Came home all by my lonesome.”
Her eyes moved across my cottage, over the dark TV, the untouched Gatorade, my jacket on the bed. It was the whole pathetic picture of a man who’d left a party full of willing women to sit alone with a muted screen and a hard-on for a girl he couldn’t touch.
“You didn’t need to leave,” she said quietly.
I held her gaze. “I only want one girl. But she’s not exactly mine.”
Her mouth pressed together, and her eyes went bright. Kimmy looked at Lena, and nobody said anything for three seconds.
Kimmy’s phone buzzed. “Trace says Marcus is wasted. Ryder needs us back there.”
“Go,” Josie said. “I’m okay.”
Kimmy gripped her hard. “Pancakes tomorrow.”
Lena touched Josie’s arm, nodded at me, and stopped when she saw the bobblehead.
If she knew Josie had given it to me she didn’t say a word about it, which I appreciated.
Then the door closed, and it was just us.
“Flash. Are you okay?”
“No. Not really.”
I shoved my hands in my pockets because I didn’t trust them anywhere else.
She’d just caught her boyfriend with someone else, and she stood in my cottage, and I was terrified I was the closest warm body.
I was terrified that tomorrow she’d wake up wanting him back, and I’d be the mistake she made on the way to forgiving Marcus Kane.
“You’re upset about Marcus.” I said it carefully.
Her chin came up. “No. Not the way you mean.”
I must not have looked convinced.
“I don’t want him, Waylon.”
“Then what is it?”
She pressed both hands over her face, breathing through her fingers.
“I’m upset because I was so stupid. I thought I could fix it, and it just got worse.
I’ve been trying to break up with him for over a week, and instead of talking to me, he chose to humiliate me.
” She swallowed. “Was he always like this? Because everyone seemed to know. Kimmy knew. Lena knew. You knew.” Her voice cracked. “I’m embarrassed that I stayed.”
I crossed the room and pulled her against my chest. She went rigid for a second and then sagged against me, fisting my shirt. She didn’t cry, just breathed hard and ragged, her cold fingers burning through the cotton.
I will take him apart piece by piece.
But that wasn’t what she needed. So I pressed my face into her hair and held on.
After a minute, she tilted her head back and rested her chin on my chest, her eyes bright.
“You were going to break up with him,” I said.
“After my birthday. After what you did — the jersey, the cake. You made me so happy, Waylon. All I wanted was for you to stay.” Her voice went quiet. “I’ve been trying for a week, and he just —” She pressed her lips together.
“You didn’t do anything wrong. Not one thing.”
She pulled back enough to look at me. Her hands slid up to my jaw.
“Kiss me,” she said, and there was nothing uncertain about it.
“Josie.”
“I’m not confused. I’m not rebounding. I have wanted to kiss you every day since the storm. Kiss me.”
My hands were on her face before my brain caught up, thumbs at her cheekbones, tilting her chin up, and the second my mouth hit hers, every bit of restraint I’d been holding on to for months was gone.
The taste of her — wine from earlier, underneath it just her — hit me hard. I kissed her harder, and she made a sound against my mouth that vibrated through my chest, and the control I’d been hanging on to since September started to slip.
Slow down. Slow the fuck down.
I couldn’t. My hands slid from her face to her waist, and I walked her backward until her calves hit the bed and she sat.
I followed her down, one hand bracing beside her head, the other at her hip, my body over hers.
My weight settling against her dragged a sound out of both of us that I felt low in my gut.
She was underneath me, and her hair was fanned across my pillow, and she was looking up at me with those eyes, and every excuse I’d made since September stopped mattering.
“Waylon.” She said my name, and I felt it everywhere.
“Tell me to stop.” I pressed my forehead to hers. My voice was shot. “Tell me to stop, and I will.”
“Don’t you dare.”
I kissed her neck, and her back arched off the bed, pressing her body flush against mine, and my cock, fully hard since my mouth touched hers, ground against her center through our clothes, and the breath went out of me.
I did it again, deliberate this time, a slow roll of my hips that dragged the length of me against her, and the sound she made was quiet, almost surprised, like she hadn’t expected to feel me that clearly through the layers.
“That’s what you do to me, Flash.” I pressed my mouth to the hollow behind her ear. “Every fucking day.”
You need to stop. You need to slow down. She just walked out of —
My hips rolled again, and she gasped, and her legs wrapped around my waist. The new angle was almost too much.
The pressure and heat and friction of her body under mine sent jolts through me that I felt all the way down my spine.
I braced on both arms and set a rhythm, slow and grinding, and she moved with me.
Her hands gripped my shoulders, her breathing going sharp and shallow.
I was shaking. My arms, my hands, the muscles in my jaw from clenching it so hard. Every roll built the ache worse. I was losing control fast, and I could feel how hot she was even through the denim. All I could think was more, closer, skin, now —
Not tonight, and not all the way. She deserves better than the edge of a bed twenty minutes after her world caved in.
But my body wasn’t listening to my brain, and it hadn’t been since the night she crashed into me on a running path and looked up at me with that mouth.
I dropped to her neck and bit down lightly, and she arched hard, grinding up into me, her fingers clawing my back through my shirt.
The friction shifted sharper, the seam of her jeans catching against the ridge of me and against her on the same drag, and the sound she made told me she’d found exactly the angle she wanted.
“There,” she breathed. “Right there. Don’t stop —”
“I’ve got you.”
I set the rhythm and held it. Slow, deep rolls of my hips, the length of me dragging against her center through two layers of denim, and I felt the exact spot that made her breath catch because she chased it — lifting into every pass, her heels digging into the backs of my thighs to pull me harder against her.
I watched her face the whole time. Lips parted, flush climbing her throat, that little broken catch she made every time I ground down slow instead of fast — like slow was somehow worse.
I learned what made her gasp, what made her hips chase mine, the pressure that made her whole body shudder, and I gave her more of it until she was shaking under me.
I filed all of it away, what she liked, what she needed, what undid her. That was mine to keep now.
“Like that?” My mouth at her ear, my voice wrecked. “That what you need? That what you came for, Flash?”
“Yes — God, yes —”
Her thighs were trembling around my hips, and her grip on my shoulders was tight enough to leave marks.
I’d be hearing the sounds she was making, broken little gasps against my jaw, in my sleep for weeks.
I was still rock hard against her, and every roll sent another pulse of need through me that I gritted my teeth against, against the heat of her soaking through to me, against every instinct screaming to strip the denim away and feel her bare. Not tonight. Tonight she gets this.
“Waylon, I’m — I can’t —”
“You can. Let go. I’ve got you, baby.”
I dropped my weight into the next roll, grinding hard and slow against the spot that made her shudder, and she came apart underneath me — back arching off the bed, thighs locking around me, my name breaking in her throat.
I worked her through it, easing the pressure as the shudders rolled out of her, my mouth at her temple, my body steady while the rest of me shook with the effort of not following her over.
She went boneless. I eased my weight off her and pressed my lips to her forehead, then her temple, then the corner of her mouth. Her hair was damp at the edges, her pulse hammering, and she looked so soft and undone that I forgot how to breathe for a second.
I rolled to my side and pulled her against me. “Stay. Just a minute.”
She curled into my chest, face in my neck, and I wrapped both arms around her and let myself have this — her body against mine, her breathing slowing, and the quiet of the cottage settling around us. The lamp threw warm light across the ceiling, and the wind had gone still.
“You didn’t —” she said against my neck.
“Tonight was about you.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Nothing about this is fair. Give me this one.”
If this was all I got, Josie in my bed, warm and wrecked and trusting me enough to close her eyes, I would take it and not ask for more. Even though I wanted everything, every morning and every night and every dawn run until we were old and slow and she still pulled ahead on the hills.
You’ve got it bad, Johnson.
Yeah, and I didn’t want the cure. And tomorrow, she’d be mine.