Chapter 11
CARTER
Thursday was a good day at the training facility.
Three hours, sharp focus, Ty talking too much between sets the way he always did and Liam running film on the defensive zone coverage we'd been working on since June.
Cole had come in quietly, the way he always did — put in his work, didn't say much, left the second we were done because he had a school pickup and a mother-in-law holding down the fort till he got there.
I watched him go and didn't push. Cole carried what he carried — two kids, a house full of the people Claire had left behind, all of it — and he'd let you in when he was ready and not before.
I was in the middle of a cooldown stretch when my phone buzzed on the bench beside me.
Jess.
I picked up before the second ring. "Hey. Everything okay?"
"Everything's fine." A pause, and something in her voice made me sit up straighter. "Carter — I think I'm ready. To say yes. I haven't called Barnett yet, I haven't called my hospital — I wanted to talk to you first. Face to face."
I was quiet for a second, letting the weight of what she was saying settle over me — that she was ready to change her whole life, and that she wanted me in the room when she did it.
"Let me see how soon I can get to Chicago," I said.
She laughed, soft and a little undone. "I looked up the seven-fifteen out of Lambert tomorrow morning."
"You already looked it up."
"I knew you'd want to come." A pause. "I wanted to talk to you first. But I also knew."
"Book it," I said. "I'll be there."
She met me at the door Friday morning with coffee already in her hand for me, which was one of my favorite things about her — the way she thought ahead, the way she showed up for people in the specific, practical ways that actually mattered.
Justin was at camp. Rosa was out running errands.
The house was quiet and warm and smelled like whatever she'd baked the night before because Jess stress-baked, apparently, something I'd learned approximately three visits in.
"I'm so happy to see you," she said, like she still half hadn't believed I'd actually get on the plane.
"I've missed you." I set the coffee down, took her face in both hands, and kissed her properly — not a greeting kiss, a I've been three hundred miles away from you for ten days and I've been thinking about this the entire flight kiss.
She made a small sound against my mouth and grabbed the front of my shirt and kissed me back the same way.
When we finally broke apart she was slightly flushed and smiling.
"You look incredible," I said.
"I look like someone who changed her shirt several times this morning."
"Still incredible."
She laughed and took my hand and led me to the kitchen, and I got myself settled at the table that had become my table over the course of the last several weeks, in the chair that had become my chair, in the house that felt more like somewhere I belonged than anywhere I'd lived since the Ewings' kitchen in Ames.
We didn't talk logistics first. That came later.
What came first was Jess taking my hand and leading me upstairs with the quiet certainty of someone who'd made a decision — not about the job, about this, about us — and wanted to mark it the right way.
She turned to face me at the foot of the bed and reached for my shirt, unhurried, her fingers working the buttons from the bottom up while she watched my face like she was looking for something specific and finding it.
"I've been thinking about this since Tuesday," she said.
"Only Tuesday?"
"Since the interview call." She pushed my shirt off my shoulders. "I called you and then I called Anne and then I thought about you for approximately three hours straight."
"I'm going to take that as a compliment."
"It was." She pulled me down to her and kissed me slow, one hand sliding up into my hair, the other flat against my chest like she was checking my pulse.
I got my hands on her waist and walked her back to the bed, taking my time about it, both of us unhurried in the way of two people who knew they had the morning and weren't going to rush it.
I laid her back and kissed my way down her throat, her collarbone, lower, taking my time at every place that made her breath change. She arched up into me when I got my mouth on her breast, her fingers tightening in my hair.
"Carter—"
"Easy," I said against her skin. "We're not in a hurry."
She made a sound that wasn't quite agreement and wasn't quite protest and was entirely the sound of someone choosing to stop thinking about logistics for a while, which was exactly what I'd been hoping for.
I worked my way down her body slowly, deliberately, remembering what made her gasp and what made her say my name like it was the only word she had left. By the time I got my mouth between her thighs she was already trembling, both hands fisted in the sheets.
I licked up the length of her, slow, then flicked my tongue over her clit until it was swollen and she was rocking up against my mouth.
When I closed my lips around her erect clit and sucked, she made a sound that went straight through me — and I didn’t stop, didn’t let up, worked her with my tongue and my mouth until she came apart completely against it.
Loud and unguarded and utterly gorgeous about it.
"Come here," she said, reaching for me, voice wrecked in the best possible way.
I kissed my way back up her body, but when I settled against her she pressed a hand to my chest and pushed, rolling us until she was the one looking down at me, hair loose around her face, eyes dark.
"My turn," she said.
She kissed her way down my body the same slow, deliberate way I'd gone down hers, and by the time she settled between my legs I was already hard enough to ache.
She wrapped one hand around me, stroking, and I felt myself leak against her fingers — and she made a low, satisfied sound at that, like she'd been after exactly that reaction, before she leaned in and licked the head of me clean.
"Jess—" It came out ragged.
She smiled up at me, unhurried, and took me into her mouth.
One hand kept working the base of me while the other cupped and rolled my balls, and her mouth was hot and slow and merciless, her tongue dragging along the underside of me on every pass, and I fisted a hand in the sheets and the other, gently, in her hair and tried very hard to remember how to breathe.
She took me deeper, hollowing her cheeks, and the sight of her — mouth full of me, eyes lifting to catch mine — nearly finished me right there.
"Okay — okay, stop, or this is over," I managed, and she released me with one last slow drag of her tongue and a look of profound self-satisfaction that I was going to be thinking about for a week.
I reached for the nightstand and grabbed a condom, tore the foil, rolled it on — and then I hauled her up my body and rolled us again, back where we'd started, and she wrapped her legs around me and pulled me in, and I had to stop for a second — forehead against hers, both of us breathing hard.
"Carter," she breathed, one hand pressed flat against my back, her whole body arching up into me.
"Right here," I said against her ear. "Nowhere else I'd rather be."
She came apart in my arms a second time, my name on her lips, and I followed her under a moment later and stayed there — both of us breathing hard, tangled together, her hair across the pillow and her eyes still closed.
"Well," she said eventually.
"Yeah," I agreed.
She turned her head and looked at me with that smile — the real one, the one she didn't hand out casually. "That was a good decision."
"Relocating to St. Louis?" I said. "Or this?"
"Both," she said. "Definitely both."
"Ready to talk logistics now?"
She laughed and hit me with a pillow, and I caught it and kissed her again, and we stayed there another twenty minutes before either of us reached for our clothes.
She showed me the list at the kitchen table, notebook open, coffee going cold beside it.
I read through it slowly — the pros column, the cons column, Rosa's name at the bottom with its asterisk and its note: Not a pro or con. A person. That one caught in my chest in a way I hadn't expected.
"You really thought it all through," I said.
"That's what I do."
"I know." I looked at the cons column. Chicago. The brownstone. Justin changing schools. "These are real things."
"They are."
"Justin starting first grade in a new city, not knowing anyone?—"
"He'll have Finn. Right now his best friend is three hundred miles away and he sees him on visits — move to St. Louis and Finn's suddenly in the same city, weekends and playdates and all of it. And Sarah — the relocation specialist — already found a private school with a spot for him. St. Andrew's.
She sent me everything: the curriculum, the before-care hours, the whole thing." She paused. "So he'd start first grade at a good school, in a city where his favorite person in the world already lives. That con got a lot shorter once I started making calls."
I ran my finger down the pros column. The salary increase, the cost of living difference, the teaching component, the relocation package, the proximity to her parents in Kansas City. And there, at the bottom of the list, below all the practical things:
Carter.
Just the one word. Like it was a fact as simple and specific as any of the others.
I looked up at her. She was watching me with an expression that didn't try to be anything other than what it was.
"Before we go further," she said, "I need to ask you something. And I need the real answer, not the one you'd give to make me feel good."
"Okay."
"We haven't been together that long. And this is a big move — a new job, a new city, uprooting Justin's whole life.
I need to know that none of that is sitting on you in a way you're not saying out loud.
" She held my gaze, steady. "There are no obligations here.
I built a life on my own before you. I can keep doing it.
If this is too much too fast, you can tell me. "