Chapter 16
It’s report card day.
Which means one of two things.
My daughter will be in a great mood, or don’t speak to her for at least two days while she contemplates how her life is ruined over a single letter.
She got that from me.
By the time she gets home, she’s already seen her grades online on her phone, and when she looks up at me, her smile takes up her whole face. Straight A’s.
“We’re going out to eat,” she announces.
This has been the tradition since the first report card that came home with nothing but A’s. We’ve been doing it ever since, and I don’t think it’s crossed her mind that we could go to her favorite Mexican restaurant some other time.
“Who are you texting?” Ollie asks from the backseat while I navigate the afternoon traffic.
“Uncle Will. He’s meeting us there.”
Of course he is.
Will is already standing outside when we pull into the parking lot, wearing a green flannel shirt that makes me feel things every time he wears it, bringing out the green in his eyes.
I park the car.
I take a deep breath.
I don’t think about the other week when he had his cock in my mouth.
“Uncle Will!” Ollie throws his door open and is out of the car before I’ve even opened the door. I scramble to catch him, but he’s already sprinting across the parking lot. Will meets him halfway, crouching to catch him, scooping him up off the ground. “How’s it going, bud?”
My heart does the same thing it always does when Will is with my kids, and I hate it. I have no idea what to do with my face, and I know Will can tell I’m feeling something because when the kids aren’t looking, he winks.
Addie appears at my shoulder, and she’s not dumb. She looks at me for a second, her eyes narrowed, and thank god, she thinks I’m just being uninviting.
In this instance, I think I prefer that assumption to the truth.
The hostess seats us at a table in the center of the restaurant, and Ollie has to sit by Uncle Will, so Addie and I settle in across from them.
Will’s looking at the menu like he’s never been here, and maybe he hasn’t. “The fajitas are good,” I tell him.
“Doesn’t that have vegetables?” he asks, scrunching up his nose.
“Vegetables are good for you.”
“Says the doctor,” he scoffs, looking back to the menu.
The chips come, along with the queso and the salsa, and Ollie is bouncing in his seat because he’s been waiting for this since we left the house. It’s the only thing he’ll eat. Will reaches across and grabs a chip the same time I do, making our fingers brush.
I pull my hand away quickly, looking around the room for something to do.
“Man, I think I got lucky,” he says, taking a sip of his soda. “None of the old church ladies are here to glare at me.”
“That’s because they’re all at the church dinner. Mrs. Campbell’s been talking about it all week.”
He picks up another chip. “Is that the lady with the—” He gestures toward his hair. We all nod. “Last time she looked at me, I thought she was gonna smite me with her eyes.”
Addie laughs. “She probably has a crush on you.”
Will raises an eyebrow. “You think?”
“Think about it. She’s like a hundred, and the only man she’s been with in the last eighty years is her husband. And then you walked into her church donation drive looking like that.” She gestures at him.
I don’t like this conversation.
Will is quiet for a second, genuinely thinking about it. And then he nods. “Yeah,” he says with a long-suffering sigh, exhausted that he has to live with such a handsome face. “You’re probably right. I do have that effect on people.”
“You can’t help that you were born this way,” Addie agrees.
I bury my face in my hands with a groan. “Don’t encourage him.”
“Your dad’s just jealous because Mrs. Campbell doesn’t look at him like that,” Will says, smirking when I look up to glare at him.
I don’t notice Karen until she stops at the head of our table.
“Nolan!” she says, leaning in to kiss my cheek in the easy way she’s started doing. I smile, even though I can feel everyone at the table watching us. “I didn’t know you were here!”
“Report card tradition,” I say, nodding at Addie.
“Straight A’s,” my daughter adds with pride.
“That’s wonderful!” Karen says, genuinely warm. She waves at Ollie, who waves back, chip in hand, before she notices Will.
“This is Will,” I say. “He’s Jess’s brother.”
“Right…” By the discomfort in her tone, I know she must have heard something. Who knows what in this town. “I’ve heard about you.”
Will keeps his expression steady, something I know has taken him months to perfect, but the corner of his mouth creeps up.
“All good things, I’m sure.” Beside me, Addie makes a sound that would be a laugh if she hadn’t stifled it, and I can’t help but smile, directing it to Karen instead of the man it’s for.
“Would you like to join us?” I offer, because it feels rude not to.
“Are you sure?” she asks, already grabbing a chair from an empty table nearby, and Tyler doing the same, sitting beside Ollie.
Will picks up his menu again, even though I thought he’d already decided on his meal.
Tyler and Ollie immediately get sucked into a game on Tyler’s phone, taking turns better than I would have assumed, leaving the adult side of the table to talk amongst themselves.
Karen asks Addie about school, her friends, and where she plans to go to college when she graduates in the spring. She remembers things I’ve told her, asks her about her art, and follows along well when Addie rambles about her current project.
She’s great at this.
I knew she would be.
“So you’ve been doing some work on Nolan’s practice?” she asks Will, who hasn’t said a word since she sat down.
“Yep.”
“That’s wonderful. It’s good to have something to keep busy.” A small pause, heard around the entire table. “To stay out of trouble.”
I reach for my water and hope that Will doesn’t make a scene when he meets her eyes, a crease to his brows that I don’t like. Beside me, Addie is still, waiting for the explosion the same way I am.
But it doesn’t come.
He looks back down at the menu, and Karen turns like nothing is wrong, angling her body toward me. “Did you ever call the specialist about your shoulder? You mentioned it was bothering you the other night.”
“Oh. No, I keep forgetting.”
“Nolan,” she chides, exasperated by my forgetfulness, but she’s still smiling, and her hand is resting on my forearm. Across the table, I hear Will put his menu down too hard.
Karen orders the chicken quesadilla and asks me to try it when it comes, holding a piece up to my mouth. I allow her to put it in my mouth, even though discomfort is prickling at my neck, at the thought of who might be watching this.
My kids.
Will.
I can feel him through the entire meal, watching us. Every time Karen’s body makes contact with mine. Every time she laughs at something I say. I don’t see him take a single bite of his food.
When the tension of sitting between Karen and Will gets to be too much, I excuse myself to the bathroom. Skipping the stall, I head straight for the sink, running cold water over my hands, dragging it over my face that’s been flushed since I got here.
I’m in the middle of giving myself a sad excuse for a pep talk when the door to the bathroom opens. But I don’t look up until I hear the lock turn. “Will—”
“What’s wrong with your shoulder?”
“What?”
“Your shoulder.” His eyes land somewhere around my shoulder, while I look at him in the mirror, confused about where this is going, the water still running beside me. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Oh. It’s nothing.” I turn off the water, waving a hand. “An old injury. It flares up sometimes when it’s cold.”
“You never mentioned it.”
“I didn’t think you would care.”
He keeps looking, and I know what he’s thinking. Karen knows things about me that he doesn’t. She and I are building something, and what we’ve been doing—
It has an expiration date.
It’s wrong. I know that. I’m sure he does too. I’m seeing Karen, and at some point, probably soon, I’ll move on from him, and he won’t have any control over me anymore.
“I should get back,” I say, starting toward the door he’s standing against. “Ollie’s out there—”
“Addie can watch him.”
He steps forward, and I step back, because I am not doing this here. “Will,” I warn, but it comes out softer than I would like, as good as a yes to the offer in his eyes.
It’s the first time we’ve kissed since outside the church, weeks ago, and I’m never prepared for the way he consumes all of my senses. He turns us, and my hands clutch at his flannel when my back hits the door, my teeth accidentally nibbling on his lip.
He makes an approving sound against my mouth and presses closer, his tongue tangling with mine, his hands roaming my body.
We haven’t kissed like this since the exam room. Slow and deep and so hot. My knees are weak, and I hear myself moan as I grip his flannel harder, the only thing keeping me up besides the door at my back.
His hands land on my ass through my jeans, and I don’t care that Karen is on the other side of the door with my kids or that we’re in public and someone could try to enter the bathroom at any moment.
I don’t care about anything but his lips and his hands moving from my ass to my waistband, getting my zipper open.
“Will…” I plead, wanting anything he’s willing to give me.
He shoves my pants down, followed by his own, to wrap his hand around both of us at the same time. I exhale hard, dropping my head against the door at the feeling of his fingers and his cock—
And then he starts to move.
I grasp his arms, looking down, watching him stroke us, feeling the skin of his perfect cock, bigger than mine by a few inches, move against my own, dribbles of come from both of us slicking the way.
I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing this. So I drop my forehead to his shoulder, and hold on.
It’s different than anything before. He’s right there, panting from the desperation, feeling the exact thing that I’m feeling, and fuck, his lips find my ear. “She can’t make you feel like this.”
I squeeze my eyes shut when he speeds up.
“No,” I say into his shirt, thrusting into his fist, out of my mind. “She can’t.”
Satisfied with my answer, he strokes our cocks with a single-minded focus, aware as much as I am that we don’t have much time before they start to wonder where we are. And as much as I know I need to be quiet, I can’t stop moaning.
I bite my lip to muffle the sounds, but they come anyway, echoing off the bathroom walls.
“Shh,” he says against my ear, his breathing gone ragged, contradicting his request by twisting his hand in a way that sends me falling over the edge instantly. I bite into his skin, muffling the sound as I come hard enough that it has my toes tingling in my shoes.
He follows, pressing me harder against the door.
His hand stills between us, and as the haze of my desperation for him begins to fade, the bathroom becomes very small. I can hear the noise of the restaurant outside the door, the clatter of plates, someone laughing. Karen, maybe.
I close my eyes, resting my head against the door again, not bothering to pull my pants up yet.
This has got to stop.