Chapter 14 #2
Back outside, I find Lana in the small parking lot, sitting on the hood of the McLaren.
Fuck, she’s gorgeous—wearing jeans, sandals, and a simple floral off-the-shoulder top with short sleeves.
Her bronzed, olive skin on display. I want to kiss every inch of her.
Trace those lines from memory and hope nothing has changed, hope I haven’t forgotten any of it.
I pull out my phone and open the camera app before I call out, “Lana.”
She looks right at me and smiles—either at me, the phone, or the milkshake, I’m not sure. I don’t care. I’ve got that picture now and it’s mine.
She gasps as I come closer holding her milkshake. “Is that for me?”
I sigh, taking the seat beside her on the hood of the car. She’s biting her lip to contain her grin, and I’m smiling as I hold out the milkshake for her. She doesn’t take it from me, she just puts her lips to the straw and drinks it. Then I drink some.
“I can’t believe Katherine let you do this,” she says and angles the straw for her.
“She was easily convinced.”
Lana snorts. “Oh, I’m sure.”
I kiss her head and tilt my head back, looking up at the stars. Lana rests her head on my shoulder, hugging my arm and nestling closer and closer into me.
I think that if I were normal, we could do this with a bottle of wine instead of a milkshake and pass it back and forth like lots of other normal people do. Laugh and look up at the stars with a little buzz that makes us bold enough to say anything.
But I’m not normal. At least not by definition. By Lana’s definition? I’m not normal either, she makes me feel extraordinary. Like I’m more than all of this.
I’m more than alcohol and everything else. I don’t need any of that to be normal.
“Christian,” Lana breathes. “Hey, stop thinking so much up there.”
“I’m thinking about you,” I say. “Just…how you make me feel.”
“Yeah?” She smiles up at me. “How do I make you feel?”
“Special,” I breathe.
“You are,” she huffs, smiling. “Always have been.”
I smile and wrap my arm around her to pull her into me. “Can we look up at the stars like normal people?”
“There is no such thing as normal, Christian,” Lana says. “Normal is just a concept made to keep us contained. And you are the best thing far from normal.”
Her words wrap around my heart like a warm hug.
“Lana,” I breathe.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I rasp, smiling.
I’ve done things, tried things. Different drinks, different drugs. And I’ll just say this: love is one hell of a drug once you try the real stuff. Because this is euphoria. This is the highest I’ve ever been, staring into her eyes and being next to her, and I don’t ever want to come down from this.
I’m a junkie for this.
But I got clean for this. I worked hard to wash away the ugliness that Lana loved me through despite it all, and it’s mostly gone. As I was washing it away, I wondered how she saw past it, how she loved me even with all of that.
She nestles closer than she already is, like she wants to be on my lap.
I hold her close and pull her legs across my lap. “What’s wrong?”
She shrugs. “I’m just missing my mom.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she rasps. “It’s just the diner and the date. You’ve taken a lot of sad things in my life and turned them into happy things, Christian. This diner is one of them.”
“Your mom would be proud of you, Lana,” I tell her. “She is. Wherever she is.”
“I like to think she’s started her next life,” she murmurs. “That right now she’s a young girl. She hasn’t met my father yet or anything. But she’s waiting for me to join her over there. In my next life.”
“I think that’s a beautiful thought, Lana.”
“I’ve been on my own since I was twenty, Christian,” Lana says quietly.
“No,” I say. “You’ve had me.”
“I know,” she whispers. “But then you were gone… And I didn’t know how to do anything without you. Or my mom.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I learned,” Lana says. “I learned how to…live on my own.”
“Without me.” I frown.
“I had to. It was…part of the process. Healing. I didn’t have room for pain so I had to make room for good things. And, you know, I just… I couldn’t depend on you showing up on my doorstep.”
“I know.”
“I cleaned the house and made room for things, but I could never really clean you out, Christian,” she says quietly. “I held on to a lot of silly hope.”
“Me too, baby,” I breathe out. “You have no idea.”
“You are the best thing far from normal,” she whispers again, sitting up and brushing the tip of her nose against my cheek.
“So are you,” I whisper and turn my head to brush my lips across hers. “Kiss me, Lana.”
“I’m usually the one to ask you that,” she whispers.
“I just really need it right now,” I whisper and she presses her lips to mine, silencing me.
It’s Lana who deepens, bringing us back to where we left off as she parts my lips and moans into my mouth. Then I hear glass shatter and a splat on the ground, and Lana laughs.
“Shit,” I hiss.
“We’ll clean up after,” she says on my lips, pulling me by my nape. “You better not stop kissing me, Christian.”
“Not even in my wildest dreams,” I say, and urge her backward until she’s down against the windshield. She chortles against my lips, which in turn, makes me giggle with her.
The position isn’t comfortable, but every time we keep trying to shift, it somehow gets worse and makes her laugh a bit harder.
I kiss her left dimple, then the other, until finally she is lying back and I’m on my side, leaning over her.
I hold her thigh in my hand, burrowing my fingers into her skin through her jeans, and she throws the leg around my hip.
We should probably take this home. My entire body is at the point of trembling and I’m so hard it hurts. Lana rolls her hips and presses down them, whimpering. “Christian.”
“We should probably go.”
“Mhhm,” she moans but does nothing to stop us. So neither do I.
“Hey!”
I push up frantically, seeing a bright light from the corner of my eyes pointed directly at us. My hand slips on the windshield before I’m sitting up. I squint past the light.
A sigh comes from behind the flashlight before it clicks off. “Calloway. Gomez.”
“Shit,” Lana hisses under her breath. “Hello, Raymond.”
The Willow Springs sheriff laughs. “Even when you two were younger I never caught you like this. Frankly, I’m disappointed.”
I groan and sit up, rubbing at my jaw. “Sorry, sir.”
Lana laughs. “Won’t happen again!”
“Better not,” Sheriff Holt chuckles. “Go home kids.”
“We’re adults, Raymond!” Lana shouts back.
“Go home before I arrest you both!”
I scratch my jaw and push my fingers through my hair, my heart racing from being caught. It was worse than being doused in ice water. “That was…fun.”
“To be fair,” Lana laughs, “we always did get away with car sex."
I laugh. “Several times.”
Lana laughs with me, a bit harder, and leans against me through her fit of giggles. “Those were good times.”
“Wanna make out with me in the driver's seat, Gomez?”
She giggles, pink filling the apples of her cheeks. “How could I say no to you, Calloway?”
I hop off the hood of my car and my hands wrap around her waist, picking her up. She yelps into a laugh, wrapping her legs around my waist.
That laugh is the thing that holds my hand and pulls me into comfort. I wrap my arm around her from under her ass and hold her to me as I open the driver's side door, and I slip into the seat. I’ve barely settled down before she’s pulling the door closed and her lips are on my neck.
“I hate this rule,” I moan as her lips move up to my ear.
She chuckles and nibbles at my ear lobe. “You do it to yourself,” she whispers in my ear.
“This was a bad idea,” I mumble when her lips move on mine.
“So what?” She nips at my bottom lip. “We used to have a ton of bad ideas.”
I chuckle quietly and push her hair behind her shoulders, letting my fingertips brush down the curve of her neck and across her collarbones. “We did.”
Lana trails wet kisses down my neck, nipping here and there with her teeth. “We almost got caught in the ferris wheel once.”
I laugh. “That was your fault.”
“You were being obvious!”
“I was scared of getting caught!”
Lana laughs and holds my face in her hands. “Christian?”
“Yeah?”
Lana pauses, biting the inside of her cheek. “This is it, right?”
“What is?”
“This,” she whispers, her voice cracking. “This is it, right? You and me?”
I nod. “It is. I’m still trying so don’t let me off too easily yet.”
She sniffs a laugh. “Okay, but don’t block me out.”
“I won’t.”
“And you talk to me on a bad day, Christian, I mean it.”
I nod. “Actually, I, uh…”
“What?” Lana says immediately, concerned.
“I asked Terrance to be my sponsor.”
Lana blinks, sitting back a bit with her hands planted on my chest. “Terrance…”
“No one knows,” I mutter. “Shit. I shouldn’t have… Lana—”
“I’m not going to tell anyone, baby, you should know that.”
“I do, I do,” I sigh. “I just… I wanted to tell you. So you’d trust me.”
“I do,” she says. “So long as you trust yourself, and you trust me enough to tell me things, I trust you too. It goes both ways, baby.”
“I’ve always trusted you, Lana.”
“Good.” She smiles. “Then take me home so we can watch a movie.”
Lana removes herself off my lap and plops herself into her seat. “Oh shit, wait!”
Lana gets out of the car and kneels out by the hood for a moment. When she stands up again, she’s holding the plastic cup of the milkshake and large shards of glass, and drops them in the trash bin.
She gets back in, wipes her hands on her jeans, then buckles her seat belt. “Okay, now we go.”
“Environmentally conscious as ever,” I tease.
Lana stretches over and kisses my jaw. “Take me home, Christian.”
Lana lets us into the house, giggling and kicking off her sandals at the door.
I take off my shoes and set them beside hers, and it’s an image I wish I could save.
Just a picture of her shoes and my shoes next to each other at the front door of a house we live in together.
Something to say that, when I come home, I know she’ll be here. Or when she comes home, I’ll be here.
And at night, it’s the two of us. Our shoes at the door.
Lana skips toward the kitchen barefoot, and I follow behind with a silly grin on my face. She spins on her toes, arms flailing out at her sides until she tosses her arms around my neck.
“So now that this is the end of the date,” she says, “does that mean I get a goodbye kiss?”
“A goodbye kiss?”
“Yeah,” Lana bites her lip with a smile. “You didn’t give me one on our first date.”
I smile at the memory. “I wasn’t sure if you liked me yet.”
Her eyes narrow and her lips tip with amusement. “You knew. I liked you before we met that night.”
“You did?”
“I knew Luca because of Isabelle. And Isabelle knew you because of Luca. So maybe we can thank the twins for this,” she says.
I chuckle. “So you liked me, huh?”
She shrugs. “More like a crush. Didn’t think you’d like a girl like me.”
“The only kind of girl I love is you,” I whisper.
“Hmm.” She reaches up on her toes, brushing her nose against mine, then her lips brush mine. “You’re such a romantic sometimes.”
My hands holding her hips move up her curves and stop at her ribs. I love the way my fingers fit slightly into the spaces between them, the way I can sometimes feel her heart thudding against my hands.
“I really love you, Lana,” I whisper against her lips.
“I know,” she whispers. “And I really appreciate the way you’ve been showing it. I love my garden. I loved our date tonight. All the flowers and the sufficient communication. Cooking breakfast and dinner. Maybe to you, it doesn’t seem like a lot or maybe you feel you aren’t doing enough—”
“Am I—”
“Yes,” she says quickly. “You are. So thank you.”
“Thank you for saying that.”
“Thank you for coming back to me,” Lana whispers.
“I was always going to come back to you.” I move in slowly, brushing my lips over hers at first—a featherlight touch. Her hands smooth down from my nape to the collar of my shirt, curling and pulling me in closer.
She exhales quietly and softly through parted lips, that breath tickling my lips. I press my lips a bit harder against hers, allowing our mouths to fit together like puzzle pieces before it grows deeper. Before she pulls me in and in and in, until there is no room to breathe or move or think.
It’s Lana who intensifies it, sending my body into overdrive.
There’s an ache growing, blood rushing to my cock to more she presses into me, and as she moans into my mouth.
Her tongue parts my lips flawlessly, grazing her tongue against mine, and I devour her how I wish I could between her legs right now.
How I wish I could bury myself inside of her.
I groan into her mouth and she returns the affection with another moan.
My hands run down her delicate curves and over her ass, gripping tightly and pressing her hips into mine.
One of her hands slide down my chest until her hand is cupping my erection, rubbing her palm along the length to torture me.
“Lana,” I growl, my hips jerking with a mind of their own.
She pulls away, her face flushed and lips swollen before she bites into them. A smirk grows on her face as she holds her lip between her teeth. “It’s more fun this way.”
“What is?” I rasp.
“The rule,” she says. “All the teasing.”
I groan and press my forehead to hers. “Lana—”
“Want to walk me home?” Lana takes a step back and holds my hand.
I nod stiffly, my body singing with desire to the point of pain as she leads the way toward the stairs. She stops at the bottom and stands on the first step up.
She smiles. “This is me.”
I chuckle softly. “When can I see you again?”
Lana shrugs and kisses my cheek. “I don’t know. I’ll call you,” she says, turning and beginning her trip up the stairs. “Maybe.”
I scoff. “Maybe?”
“Goodnight, Christian,” she says, smiling over her shoulder.
“Goodnight, baby.” I smile and watch her walk the rest of the way upstairs.
The best possible way to end my night.