Chapter Twenty-Two #2
Then it’s more than mouths. His arms are around me, hard and hot, and his grip makes me breathless. I reach my hands up and
rake them through his hair, the way I’ve thought about doing before.
It’s hot. It’s all this chemistry that’s been swirling around us from the beginning, but it’s more than that, too. It’s this
thing between us I can’t put my finger on.
Maybe this is meant to be. Maybe that’s what my mother told him. Maybe this has been preordained from the start and far be
it from me to complain about fate when it has abs like Jack.
I shrug out of Nora’s cardigan and he starts to lift my pajama top off, and I’m not complaining, I’d be happy to return the
favor, but . . . “Don’t you have a bed or something?”
“It’s my grandma’s old bed upstairs or my grandpa’s office cot.” He pulls the neck over my head, then drops my pajama top
on the diner floor. “Or here.”
“Here works.”
Here definitely works, because Jack sits me on his counter like I weigh nothing and steps between my legs and his mouth is on mine again. His hands are everywhere. Hot and rough. That same intensity he uses in the kitchen, but it’s all on me.
I manage to wrestle his shirt off him without losing too much contact with his mouth. Then it’s skin and heat and him.
Like he’s mine.
I think that for him to be so mad about it, about me and the moment we met and my mother telling him about us, he must believe that he is mine. Whether he likes it or not.
So I suppose I set out to make him like it.
It’s easier without words. With just mouths and bodies coming together. His hands on my pajama bottoms, shoving them down
and out of the way. Then his hands on me, beneath my panties then without them, making me want to make the kind of noise I
absolutely can’t, so I kiss him instead.
We get ferocious. He makes me buck against him, then my hands are on his fly, until I finally find him.
He picks me up again, his grip hard and sure, and I wrap my legs around his waist.
And we both groan when he pushes inside. Deep. Then deeper still.
There’s a pause. A stillness, while my heart hits like a kettle drum and I can feel his pulse like a goddamn percussion section
and yes, they match. His forehead against mine. That green stare that right here, right now, is as naked as I am.
Only then does he move. Only then do I move.
And we don’t need words here. We both know.
We build it together, back to kissing so we groan in each other’s mouths.
Until that flashing, blinding, life-altering moment that feels like it must shake the whole building. The whole block or town
or something.
I thunder apart around him. He shudders in my arms.
Then we stare at each other, still breathless. Still connected. My arms are still looped around his neck. His hands are still
on the tops of my thighs.
Now we know, I think. Exactly what this is.
Though maybe I say it out loud. The way his gaze shutters, I think I probably did.
Jack sets me back on the counter and starts picking up clothing. He hands me my underwear and pajama bottoms and I slide off
the counter to put them on. He doesn’t hand me my top. He bunches it up and puts it over my head for me, then tugs it into
place and helps me with the sweater, too, pulling my hair out of the collar to boot.
It’s an intimate gesture. Sweet, I’d call it.
But not to his face. Especially when he starts looking intense once our clothes are back on.
“I don’t know what the hell we’re supposed to do with this,” he mutters.
I look behind me at the counter. “Call the health department about potential code violations?”
He laughs. Actually laughs. Which does nothing to help the giddy feeling coursing through me.
I stretch, happy and sated. Content, maybe. A state I am not familiar with. “Sex was probably a good start, though.”
He snorts, then looks around the diner. “Shit, Lexi. What are we doing?”
I laugh then. “I’m not sure I’ve ever known what I was doing.”
Jack looks at me then, his gaze as soft as I’ve ever seen it. “That isn’t true.”
That shudders through me like another kiss. I swallow at the sudden lump in my throat.
“Well,” I manage to scratch out.
He runs a hand over my hair. “You should get some sleep. We’ve got a lot to figure out tomorrow. Maybe . . . Maybe we need to go to that rock. I want to think about it, talk it over with Grandpa, but I think that’s the next step. You and the rock. I think your dreams are telling us something.”
It’s a terrible thought, because my dreams have been hideous. Always. But I am exhausted.
“Are you going to rest?” I ask pointedly, nodding at his books and my written accounts of my dreams, still spread out along
the counter.
His frown is back. I can tell he’s deciding whether or not to lie to me. In return, I decide not to tell him that I can read
him now. “I have to put the journal back, but I’ll give it a rest for tonight. I’m not getting anywhere anyway.”
I accept that. I even believe it. Then I let him walk me to the stairs, like we’re teenagers, walking each other home.
Though home tonight is me going upstairs to a creepy antique store display room festooned with hair.
I decide that I’ll deal with that epic come-down from the most spectacular sex of my life once I get into my shabby-chic bed
and try to hide from the hair of it all.
In the meantime, there’s this. The two of us alone in this hallway, where no one can see us. Where it’s only the two of us.
So I smile at him, telling him all those things that words can’t fit.
All the things we both know now. Like it or not.
His mouth curves, and he fits his hand to my cheek. “Night, Lexi,” he says, and then he gives me a little nudge up the stairs.
“Good night, Jack.”
I don’t look toward the window at the clock tower. Instead, I pad up the stairs in my bare feet. I pause at the top and look
over my shoulder at Jack, still standing there at the bottom.
He stays there, watching me, the whole way.
I feel warm and giddy, deep inside, like that feeling plans to stick around.
I have to order myself not to skip down the shadowy hallway to the room Nora assigned me. The last thing I need to do is wake up anyone who might expect explanations
I don’t want to give. I slip inside the crowded space and then, with only a little trepidation and no glance toward the hair
wreaths I hid away, I crawl into bed.
I don’t even take off my sweater—Nora’s sweater. It’s too cozy. Plus, Jack helped me put it on.
I’m exhausted, but in a good way. Less maybe I’m sick and more I am deeply and eternally relaxed. It feels better than anything has in a long time. I feel better than I have in a long time. Maybe ever.
And there are a million things to contend with tomorrow, but that’s tomorrow. Tonight I’m going to bask in my post-Jack glow,
get some good sleep, and believe for the first time since we got to Midas that it’s all going to be okay.
Maybe even good.
I believe that. I really do.
Until I wake up on the flood wall.
Surrounded by blood.