CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Alex
Then
It had been a year since our first kiss.
Riley called it our anniversary. I didn’t argue, especially when the celebration involved gifts and a home-cooked meal at his mother’s table.
We ate with his family every Sunday now.
This one felt different, though. A year used to feel like a sentence.
Now it felt like proof I had not imagined the rock.
“The chicken’s incredible,” I said between bites. “Better than last time, even.”
“She could make this seven days a week and I wouldn’t complain once,” Antonio said.
It was my favorite of everything Della made. I suspected she used it, at least partly, to nudge Riley and me toward something more permanent. That wasn’t a decision either of us seemed in a hurry to make.
Della smiled, pleased with herself. “Thank you, dear.”
“If you’re celebrating a year,” Addy said, grinning, “does that mean there’s a wedding coming?”
Riley nearly choked on his food. “Excuse me?”
“A wedding. When’s it happening?”
He looked around the table, meeting each set of eyes in turn. “We’re. In. No. Rush. We don’t owe anyone an explanation. Alex is still in college. When she’s done, we’ll figure out what comes next.”
“What options are there?” Della asked, genuinely confused.
“I don’t know. When the time comes, we’ll decide.”
“We’re in no rush,” I added, hoping to smooth things over. “Everything’s good the way it is.”
Della made a face at her rice. “It’s ridiculous, if you ask me. I’d like grandchildren before I’m dead.”
“You’re not dying anytime soon,” Riley said.
“Nobody knows that for certain.”
He set his fork down. “Every time we sit down together, we’re under attack. Can we just eat?”
“Why fix what isn’t broken?” Antonio said, gesturing at us with his coffee cup. “They seem fine to me.”
“Hush.” Della gave him a look. “You’re not helping.”
I loved this.
The noise of it, the way affection in this family came dressed as argument. I could have kept coming back on Sundays for years without a ring changing anything.
Riley finished eating, got up, and disappeared into the kitchen. When I glanced through the doorway he was watching me with an expression I recognized. I excused myself and followed.
Since Christmas, something between us had shifted.
It had been building for a year. Every casual kiss now carried more weight than it used to, every quiet evening ending somewhere neither of us used to let it end.
I suspected everyone at that table could feel it too.
It occurred to me, walking my dishes to the sink, that it might be exactly what had prompted all the talk of grandchildren.
He was leaning against the counter when I came in, arms crossed, wearing the look he got when he wasn’t planning to behave. He’d let his beard grow in a little. My favorite version of him. He had on the same jeans and boots he always wore, and somehow it still worked.
“What are you doing?” I asked, and let myself look at him longer than I needed to.
His eyes moved over me slowly. A low sound came from somewhere in his chest, not quite a growl.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I said, without much conviction.
He didn’t stop.
I held my dirty plate against my chest like it might protect me from something.
“I’m about done with this waiting thing,” he said.
“Same.”
He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “I mean it.”
“Me too.”
His finger traced along my jaw, down my neck, to my shoulder.
He had a way of being romantic that no one would call romantic on paper.
It worked on me anyway. I glanced over my shoulder.
Della was clearing the table, Antonio and Addy talking near the window.
Then back at him, and I felt the whole length of my body agree with whatever he was thinking.
I set my dishes in the sink harder than I needed to. “You drive me crazy.”
He came up behind me, hands settling on my waist, his mouth close to my ear. “You make my cock hard. Just being here.” Each word landed warm against the back of my neck. Goosebumps rose along my arms.
“Stop it,” I said, meaning the opposite. I tipped my head against his jaw. “Your mother’s going to walk in.”
“I don’t care.”
I turned around. He put a hand on the counter on either side of me, boxing me in. The smell of him. Cedar, engine oil, something underneath that was just him. It did more to undo me than anything he’d said.
“Your mother is going to walk in,” I said again, mostly to hear myself say something.
She did, right on cue, an armload of dishes in her hands. She took one look at us and stopped. “What are you two lovebirds doing?”
“He’s got me cornered,” I said.
“Arturo Panzolini. Stop teasing her.”
He stepped back, and she handed the moment off without missing a beat. “Make yourself useful and get the cobbler out of the oven. It should still be warm.”
I straightened my shirt and tried to look like a person who hadn’t just been thirty seconds from disaster in someone’s mother’s kitchen.
“I made your favorite, dear,” Della said over her shoulder.
I already knew. The smell had been in the house since we arrived. Even peach cobbler couldn’t fully compete for my attention that afternoon.
“Peach cobbler?” I managed.
“Special day, special food.” She opened the freezer and started digging through it. “Oh, no.” She straightened up, hands on her hips. “There’s no ice cream. I would have sworn—”
“We don’t need ice cream,” Riley said. “It’s good without it.”
For once in my life I didn’t care about ice cream one way or another. Ten minutes alone with Riley in the Jeep, on the other hand, I cared about very much. “It’s not the same,” I said.
“She’s right,” Della admitted. “It’s not the same without it.”
We’d taken my Jeep that day, thanks to a downpour that had flooded half of Antonio’s driveway. An ice cream run, alone, in a car with no witnesses, was suddenly the most appealing errand of my life.
“We’ll go get some,” I said, already reaching for my keys. “We’re parked out front anyway.”
Riley made a face. “We don’t need—”
“You heard your mother. It’s not the same.” I looked at him until he understood what I was actually saying. “Come on.”
Something in his expression shifted. “You’re both right,” he said, sliding the cobbler back into the oven. He glanced at Della. “It’s really not the same without ice cream.”
We hurriedly left, without saying much to explain further.
After a few high-speed turns, I cut across two lanes of traffic and the Jeep shot into the church’s lot, catching enough air off the concrete apron to leave my stomach behind for a second.
I threw it into park while we were still rolling.
Riley braced a hand against the dash. “What are you doing?”
“Blowjob,” I blurted.
“We’re doing this in a church parking lot?” He looked around. “Off Silverbell?”
The lot was empty, though the road wasn’t. “This is probably safer than my apartment,” I said. “If I try to make it there, I’m going to combust at the first stoplight.”
“Are you serious?”
“Dead serious.” I kicked my sandals into the floorboard and started on my shorts. “If you’re scared—”
“I’ve never been scared of anything in my life.” He laughed and reached for his boots. “Just checking.”
I got out of my clothes faster than I’ve ever gotten out of anything, climbed into the back, and folded the seats down. Riley slid between the seats, undressing as he came.
His body wasn’t the kind you’d see on a magazine cover. No gym-built lines, no careful diet. I’d never wanted that from him anyway. He looked like a man who worked with his hands and ate whatever he wanted and didn’t apologize for either. That was exactly the point.
I took him in my mouth, and the taste of him pulled a sound out of me I didn’t plan on making. Salt, warmth, something that was just his.
“Jesus,” he said, arching his back.
Easy wasn’t the word I would use for any of it. Least of all the idea of waiting until I turned twenty-one, which felt, in that moment, like the single stupidest rule anyone had ever invented. I kept going anyway, because it was the only way I had of telling him everything I couldn’t say out loud.
Thirty seconds in, he pulled back, both hands cradling my head.
“I can’t—”
I thought I’d done something wrong. “What? You always—”
“I want to have sex with you,” he said.
I went still. I’d been so focused on his wait until twenty-one rule that hearing it now knocked the breath out of me.
“Me?” I asked. “But, I’m not twenty-one yet.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Here?”
“Right here. Right now,” he said. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Neither can I.”
He looked around the inside of the Jeep. “What would you think about our first time being in…”
“It’s perfect,” I said, before he could finish the sentence.
I meant it. I’d take the back of my own Jeep, windows fogging, one eye on the parking lot for parishioners, over any candlelit dinner or rose-petal trail anyone could have dreamed up for me.
His face fell. “I don’t have a condom.”
I was almost embarrassed to admit I did. A whole box, bought and tucked into my purse weeks earlier, just in case. “I do,” I said.
“You carry those around?”
“I wanted to be prepared.” I shrugged. “CVS.”
“You’re sure about this?”
I’d never been surer of anything. Whatever love was supposed to feel like, I’d found it. It hadn’t come with an instruction manual or a deadline. I wasn’t sure sex could make it any bigger than it already was. I wanted to find out anyway.
I dug the condom out of my purse and tore the foil with my teeth because my hands wouldn’t hold still.
Riley rolled it on with more patience than either of us had left.
The cargo area of the Jeep was a ridiculous place for a first time.
A blanket of old road maps, a socket set that kept rolling into my hip, the dome light painting us the color of a cheap motel room.
It was still the only place I wanted to be.
He settled between my thighs and paused. The head of him pressed against me. “Tell me if I hurt you.”
“You won’t.”
He did, a little. A sharp, stretching burn that made my breath catch. He froze. I dug my fingertips into the small of his back and pulled him the rest of the way in. The burn became pressure, then fullness, then something that was not pain at all.
“Jesus, Alex.” He winced.
“Don’t you dare stop.”
He moved like he did everything else. Careful at first, then certain.
The windows fogged. Someone’s headlights swept the lot and kept going.
I dug my nails into the leather of his kutte because he hadn’t taken it off.
He was still wearing the club’s colors while he was inside me, and the thought of that undid whatever was left of the girl who used to lock herself in a cliff house and wait for parents who never came home.
I came with my face against his chest and his name in my mouth. He followed a dozen strokes later, as a sound I’d never heard from him escaped.
Half growl and half prayer.
We stayed like that until the condom became a problem and the night air found the sweat on my skin. He tied it off, dropped it in an empty cup, and pulled my shorts back up my legs like I was something that might break.
“Ice cream,” I said, because if I said anything else I was going to cry.
He laughed against my hair. “Ice cream.”
We bought two pints of vanilla and a plastic spoon.
Della’s cobbler was still warm when we got back.
Nobody asked why a five-minute errand had taken forty.
Addy smirked into her coffee. Antonio talked about the weather.
Riley’s hand found my knee under the tablecloth and stayed there through dessert.
On the drive to my apartment I kept touching my own mouth, as if the shape of the night might rub off. He walked me to the third-floor door and kissed me like the church parking lot had only been a beginning.
“Twenty-one was a stupid rule,” he said.
“You think?”
He tapped the promise ring on my finger. “Still means what it meant on Christmas.”
“I know.”
He made me lock the door from the inside before he went down the stairs.
I stood with my back against it and listened to his boots fade.
Then I sat on the loveseat with my textbook unopened in my lap and understood, with a clarity that scared me a little, that I was never going to love anyone the way I loved him.