Whatever It Takes
EASTON
Aday off, finally.
The past week has been a killer. More like a trip to hell, with Coach Brennan running the breakout drills until everyone involved regrets being born.
I stretch my sore limbs in bed, grateful for the break. But then, my arm lands on her soft body.
I freeze.
Memories of the previous night pour in. We had dinner, and I retired to bed immediately. My body had gone limp the moment my eyes closed. And I last recall seeing her heading toward her bedroom for a shower.
She came back.
My chest stirs, and a small smile tugs at my lips. She loves my bed, and she came back, without invitation.
This realization has me rolling over and draping my arm around her mid-section. She’s in one of my tees as usual, and it has ridden up, revealing the smooth creamy skin of her thighs, and Lord knows I can’t look away.
Damn. This woman is going to be my downfall.
What I’d give to put my mouth all over her…
These thoughts travel to my cock, and I feel it growing in my briefs.
I pull her close and nuzzle her neck. She lets out a whimper that goes straight to my cock, and my lips take over.
I kiss her neck, sucking gently.
“Mmm…” she murmurs, still asleep.
I smile and settle back into bed, just content to have her here, in my arms, sleeping peacefully. I press a kiss to her head, drinking in her sweet fragrance.
I’m about to close my eyes for a few more hours of sleep when my phone beeps. I merely glance at it and try to ignore it.
Maya. The photographs.
And just like that, my mood drops. I know I can’t keep ignoring her anymore. I need a plan, and fast too, if I’m going to keep Riley safe.
I roll off and sit up. The device is on the nightstand, and it beeps again. I grab it to see a text from last night, and two notifications. I read the preview in the notification, and that is enough.
Maya:
Tick Tock.
That was from ten-thirty last night.
Maya:
She’s Riley Brooks, isn’t she? Preston Sinclair’s missing bride? Bet he’d have a field day with your career if he knew you were hiding her.
This was from a few minutes ago. The last is a notification from a random app.
My eyes scan Maya’s texts again. My heart races. I stare at them until the words mix, and all I see is her devious face.
I want to respond. Say something, but I kill the urge. Not today. As soon as we’ve dealt with the photographs, Maya’s next.
I delete the texts and drop my phone.
My eyes return to the woman on the bed. She’s still fast asleep, soft snores slipping from her lips.
I exhale and get up.
I pull on sweats and head to the kitchen for my morning coffee. I walk into the kitchen, and the first thing I see is my laptop on the kitchen island.
She borrowed it two days ago to do a bit of research.
Curiosity gets the best of me. I slide my fingers across the screen, and it lights up.
She left a tab open. A camera review site.
Beginner versus intermediate bodies. A comparison chart still pulled up, five models side by side, with one of them circled in a notes app screenshot pasted into the browser bar.
An idea pops into my head. One I can’t tell her, but I need to execute it fast. Abandoning the coffee I came for, I make my way upstairs, grab a shirt and my phone, and I’m downstairs again.
Ten minutes later, I’m at the island, perched on one of the stools, scrolling through my phone, on an online marketplace, with coffee in hand.
Another twenty minutes pass, and I see it.
A garage sale on Mulholland, with a flyer listing all items available on sale. That’s my cue. It starts in thirty minutes. Enough time for me to make it there and be back before she’s fully awake.
Time passes in a blur. It takes another hour before I’m pulling into the driveway. I walk through the door, and the first thing that hits my nostrils is the smell of pancakes and maple syrup.
“Perfect timing,” she says with a smile, sliding a plate to the center of the kitchen island before hopping onto a stool. “I made enough for two.”
I cross the space between us. Place the bag on the table and kiss her temple, palm wrapped around the back of her neck to hold her in place.
“Morning, sweetheart.”
“Mhmm… m-morning,” she stutters. It’s cute. I peck her lips and sit opposite her because I want to see her face while she eats.
She raises a fork with a slice of pancake dripping with maple syrup to her lips, but I lean over and swallow it.
“Hey!” I kiss her lips and wink at her.
Her cheeks turn a bright shade of crimson… and my eyes follow the trail down her neck until it disappears into the neckline of the shirt.
She's in the cream blouse she bought at Valentina’s, the one that looks like it was made for her, and the jeans in the faded indigo. Her hair is down. The freckles are out in full. She looks like she slept well.
“No practice today?”
“Rest day,” I grin.
“Lucky you. My guess is you’ll be at the home gym?”
“Actually, I was thinking we could get out of the house today. Somewhere quiet.”
She starts shaking her head.
“Hey, trust me. It’s private. No public appearances.”
Her eyes narrow on me. She wraps both hands around the mug. Her eyes move to the window.
“No cameras?”
“Except this one.” I push the bag I’d dropped on the counter toward her. Her eyes take in the bag. Then they return to mine. “Come on, open it,” I grin.
She’s skeptical, but she reaches for it and opens it. Slowly, she pulls out the old camera. The one I drove out to get an hour ago, at the garage sale.
“E-Easton…”
“It’s yours, sweetheart. Something to begin with, while you find your rhythm.”
“N-no…” she shakes her head and steps away from the counter, leaving the camera. “I can’t. You can’t… I don’t need…”
“Shhhh…” I’m by her side, wrapping my arms around her. “You need it, Riley. It’s not exactly the ideal one, but it’ll make for a good start.”
“No.” A lone tear rolls down her cheeks. “I can’t accept this. Can’t afford it.”
I cup her face and gently tip her chin up until she looks at me, brushing the tear away with my thumb.
God, this woman is stubborn.
Doesn’t she understand yet that I don’t give a fuck about the money?
“Riley, it was fifty dollars at a garage sale. You need it.” I keep my voice soft. “And if it makes you feel better, you can pay me back later. Okay?”
She looks past me to the camera still sitting on the counter, and her arms circle my waist. She presses her face to my chest.
“Thank you.” The words are barely audible, but I hear them.
“Anything for you, sweetheart.” I kiss her head. “Now, finish your meal, and we’ll begin our day. You can test your new camera, and start fine-tuning those skills.”
Thereafter, I watch her eat and occasionally steal from her plate, but she lets me. When she’s done, she grabs the camera, and we head out to begin our day outdoors.
The place is a stretch of state park trail that runs east of the city, the kind that doesn't show up on the popular hiking apps because the access road is unmarked and the parking area is a dirt lot with a hand-painted sign that looks like it was made by someone’s grandfather in 1987.
Kai showed it to me two seasons ago. I have come here maybe a dozen times, alone, usually when the noise of everything gets too loud, and I need somewhere that has no reception and no reason to have it.
We drive in comfortable silence. She has the window down, her elbow on the sill, watching the city thin out into scrub brush and the long dry gold of the hills.
When we park, she gets out, stretches, looks at the trail ahead, and breathes in like she's remembering what air is supposed to taste like, outside a home.
I hand her the camera, and she takes it. Her eyes travel around the expanse of land, and I patiently wait for her to begin, or decide where to start from.
For the first ten minutes, she doesn't shoot. She holds the camera down at her side and walks beside me on the trail, talking a little, pointing at things, doing everything except lifting it
I don't comment on this. I walk, and I simply entertain her questions and curiosity.
When she does finally raise it, it's at a rock formation about a quarter mile in, the kind of layered sandstone that catches the morning light in horizontal bands of orange and amber. She lifts the camera, looks through the viewfinder, and goes very still.
I stop walking.
She adjusts. Moves two steps left. Crouches slightly. The shutter clicks.
She straightens, and her face is different. Just slightly. Like something that had been faintly braced went loose.
“Okay,” she says, mostly to herself. Then she's moving again, off the main trail toward the formation, and I follow at a distance because it's obvious she has forgotten I exist.
This is the part I was waiting to see and did not know I was waiting to see.
She goes quiet, moving through the landscape with the camera up and then down, stepping around things, crouching, tilting, trying angles that don't work and not being bothered by it.
Shutter click. Advance. Shutter click. She pushes her hair out of her face without looking away from the viewfinder.
I sit down on a flat rock and watch her work, and I think about what it takes to make a person put down a thing that lights them up like this.
What six years of small, careful, deniable erosion actually looks like from the inside. Whether she knows, standing on that dry golden hillside with a fifty-dollar camera and her hair in her eyes, how visible it is that she's returning to herself. Whether she can feel it.
I think she can.
She turns around at one point to check I'm still there and catches me looking. She smiles, and continues. A minute later, her eyes are back to me.
I look away, at the city spread in the valley below us, as if I have been looking at that the whole time, trying not to distract her.
“You’re staring,” she calls.
“I’m looking at the view.”
“The view is behind you.”
I don’t answer that.
She laughs, and the sound is soft like a melody.
My heart shifts, and I know it.
I'm completely gone for this woman. Three weeks. I have known her for three weeks.
That’s not long enough to justify the warmth that spreads through me when she laughs. Or the way I instantly want to take her pain and worries away when she’s distressed or in tears.
And watching her in her own world, with the camera, lighting up, and enjoying what she’s doing? I don’t know if my heart will be able to recover from this one.
I want to keep her forever. Capture that smile and keep it on her face everyday.
Not until she knows the truth about Maya.
A sour taste instantly materializes on my tongue. My chest tightens.
Maya. She’s going to cost me all of this when it comes out.
I’ll lose it all. This version of her, lit up and moving through the hills like she owns them. This thing between us that has no name yet but is moving in a direction I'm not going to be able to walk back from.
I know this. I sit on the rock and watch her anyway.
We drive back in the late afternoon. She has the camera in her lap and she's looking at it with an expression of renewed hope.
“Thank you,” she says when we are almost home. “For the camera.”
“You’re welcome.” I keep my eyes on the road because I know if I look at her, I wouldn’t be able to resist it. Kissing her lips.
“The shooting out there… It felt like something that was mine.” She turns the camera over in her hands. “I forgot what that felt like. Having something that was just… mine.”
“Glad you loved it, Riley.”
The rest of the evening is quiet.
We eat. She showers and sits on the couch with the camera in her hands, scrolling through what she shot, occasionally smiling at the screen in a way I'm going to think about for a long time after.
Later that night, when she climbs into my bed, I’m still awake. I wrap my arms around her and pull the covers over us. Her soft body settles against mine, and her lips find mine in the dimly lit room.
They move against mine slowly, and her fingers trace my torso, like she’s memorizing every curve.
“Thank you for today,” she murmurs against my lips.
“Anything for you, baby.” If only she knew the truth behind those words.