17. Jessica
Jessica
I couldn't sit still.
The apartment was too small. The couch was wrong.
The TV was wrong. The book I'd picked up and put down three times was wrong.
My skin was buzzing — a low, constant hum that had been building all day and that no amount of pacing or coffee or reorganizing my events folder was going to fix.
I stood at the kitchen counter and drummed my fingers on the granite, but the walls were closing in and I needed air.
I needed space. I needed water and stars and the particular quiet that only existed in one place.
I grabbed a blanket from the back of the couch. Shoved my feet into my boots. Drove to the ranch with the windows down and the warm night air on my face and my pulse doing something I was choosing not to examine.
The workshop light was on. Of course it was. The man lived under that truck the way monks lived in monasteries — devoted, consistent, communing with something the rest of us couldn't see.
I leaned against the doorframe. He was underneath the truck. I could see his boots and his jeans and the creeper he was lying on and his hands — grease-dark, wrapped around a wrench, doing something purposeful to something mechanical.
"Hunt."
The wrench stopped.
"I'm restless. I'm crawling out of my skin.
I've reorganized my events folder twice and rearranged my kitchen cupboards.
I tried to watch a movie and the movie was terrible and the couch is terrible, and my apartment is approximately the size of a shoebox, and I need to not be in it for another second.
" I shifted the blanket under my arm. "Take me to the creek.
Please. Like we used to. I need to float on my back and look at the stars and remember what it feels like to breathe in a place that isn't a four-hundred-square-foot box with bad water pressure. "
The creeper rolled. He slid out and looked up at me from the floor. His eyes moved from my face to the blanket to my bare legs beneath the sundress to my face again. His jaw shifted. Something moved behind his gaze — not the usual stillness, something alive, a decision arriving in real time.
"You brought a blanket."
"I brought a blanket because the last time I sat on the creek bank, I got twigs in places twigs should never go, and I am a woman who learns from her mistakes, Hunter. Are you coming, or am I swimming alone in the dark like a horror movie protagonist?"
The corner of his mouth pulled. He stood. Wiped his hands on the rag. Grabbed his keys from the hook.
The drive was quiet. Windows down, the warm air whipping my hair across my mouth, the moon full and white above the tree line, the fields silver on both sides of the road.
His hand on the wheel. My hand in my lap.
The blanket between us on the bench seat.
My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my fingertips, and the restlessness was still humming under my skin.
Except now it had a direction, and the direction was the creek, the man beside me, and the warm dark waiting at the end of the road.
The creek was silver. Water dark and still. Trees hanging low. Crickets loud. Frogs calling from the shallows. The truck doors opened and the night poured in — thick, humid, pressing against my skin.
I kicked off my boots on the bank. Pulled my sundress over my head and dropped it on the grass. Black cotton underwear. A bra that was nothing special. I walked into the water without looking back.
Cold. The creek climbed my calves, my thighs, the shock of it tightening my skin, hardening my nipples against the fabric.
I gasped through my teeth and kept wading.
The water hit my waist. My ribs. I dropped under, and the cold swallowed me.
I surfaced laughing, hair slicked back, water streaming down my face.
Behind me — boots coming off. A belt unbuckling. The rustle of denim hitting the grass. A shirt pulled overhead. I turned.
He was wading in. Boxer shorts and nothing else. The moonlight on his shoulders, the flat stomach, the lines of muscle that disappeared into the dark cotton at his hips. The water rose around his thighs, and his stomach contracted against the cold. My own stomach clenched watching it.
We swam. I splashed him. He didn't splash back.
"You're no fun, Blackwood."
"I'm plenty of fun."
"Prove it."
I splashed him again — harder, a full arc of water that caught him across the chest — and his hand shot out and caught my wrist under the water. His fingers closed around it. His thumb pressed into my pulse point. My heart slammed against the pad of his thumb.
He didn't let go.
His eyes dropped to where his hand held my wrist. His jaw tightened.
His breathing changed — deeper, slower. He lifted my wrist out of the water.
The creek ran off my skin in silver lines, and his eyes came up to mine, and the look in them stopped my breath.
He looked at me like I was in trouble. Like something in him had broken free and was moving toward me, and the moving was going to change everything.
He pressed his lips to the inside of my wrist. Against the pulse. His mouth was warm and dry against the wet skin, the pressure deliberate. My pulse hammered against his lips. My knees went soft. My free hand found his shoulder — wet muscle, hard and warm under my palm.
His mouth moved up my arm. The inside of my forearm — slow, open-mouthed kisses on the wet skin, his lips dragging, his breath heating each spot he touched.
The crook of my elbow. The tender skin of my inner arm.
Each kiss higher. Each one pressing harder.
My breathing was coming apart. My fingers were digging into his shoulder, and my body was leaning into him.
His mouth found my neck. His lips pressed against the tendon — warm, open.
His teeth grazed the spot below my ear, and a sound tore out of me, low and needy.
My spine arched and my hips pressed forward, and found his through the water — the hard length of him against my stomach through the wet cotton of his boxers.
My hand slid to the back of his neck and held his mouth to my throat.
He pulled back. His forehead against mine. His breath harsh on my mouth. The water at our waists. His eyes close and dark, the decision right there on his face.
His hand came up. His fingers curved along my jaw. He tipped my face up. His other hand gripped my hip under the water, pulling me flush against him.
His chest rose against mine. One breath. Deep.
"I want you, Jess." Low. Rough. His voice vibrating through his chest into mine. "Not for show. Not because of the arrangement. Not because of anything except that I have wanted you since I was seventeen years old, and I have never once in my life said that to anyone, and I am saying it now."
My breath left me. My hands pressed flat against his wet chest, his heart slamming against my right palm.
My eyes burned. My throat closed. His voice was shaking.
His hands were shaking. Nothing about him was steady — the man who was always steady, always still, always held — was standing in a moonlit creek with his fingers on my jaw and his voice breaking open.
"Say it again." My voice came out broken. A whisper. "Hunt — say it again."
His thumb pressed harder against my cheekbone. His grip on my hip tightened. His eyes didn't leave mine.
"I want you. I have always wanted you."
I made a sound — half laugh, half sob, the two colliding in my throat. My hands slid up his chest and around his neck, and my fingers dug into the wet hair at the base of his skull, and I pulled his mouth down to mine.
The kiss wasn't gentle. His hand gripped my jaw and his mouth opened against mine and his tongue found mine and the taste of him flooded my senses.
His hand on my hip pulled me flush and the contact hit — his cock, hard, thick, pressing against my stomach through his wet boxers — and my hips rolled toward him and the sound that came out of me vibrated against his tongue.
He kissed me deeper. His hand slid from my hip to the small of my back and pressed.
My spine arched, and my breasts pressed against his bare chest through the wet cotton, and his other hand was still on my jaw, holding my face where he wanted it, angling my mouth, controlling the kiss.
His teeth caught my lower lip — a graze, a tug — and my knees buckled, and his arm around my back tightened and held me up.
He pulled back. His forehead against mine. Both of us breathing hard — his breath harsh against my mouth, my body heaving against his.
"Truck," he said. Low. Not a question.
He didn't wait for my answer. His hand found mine under the water.
His fingers laced through mine, and he turned and walked toward the bank, and I followed — wading, stumbling on the rocks, the cold air hitting my wet skin as we climbed out.
He grabbed the blanket from the cab with one hand.
He didn't let go of my hand with the other.
He spread the blanket in the truck bed with a single toss.
He turned to me, and his hands found my waist before lifting me onto the tailgate.
I gasped, and my hands gripped his shoulders when he stepped between my legs and kissed me again.
Standing between my legs on the ground, his mouth on mine, his hands on my waist. My legs wrapped around him.
He reached behind me and unclasped my bra — one hand, one twist — and pulled it off.
The night air hit my bare breasts, and then his hands were on them.
Both hands. Cupping, lifting, his thumbs dragging across both nipples at once, and the sensation made me cry out against his mouth.