by Amelia Wilde
“Here’s the thing.” Emily is still wearing that little smile. “It can’t always be about what I want. The door’s right there. You could have walked through it. But you sat down.” She leans in. “You wanted this beer. This cold, delicious beer. And you wanted to have it with me.”
“You could have been anybody.”
“But I’m not.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“I saw your face after Kenzie attacked you. She’d have made room for you at the bar. But you didn’t want it.” Emily shakes her head. “You just didn’t want it.”
I reach for my own beer and take a long drink. “Fine. You win. I wanted to have a beer with you. God knows why.”
“Because you missed me.” She’s joking, her tone light, but the words ignite a dull ache in my chest that I haven’t let myself feel in years.
I’m not going to let her see it.
“You and your smart-ass attitude? Not for a single day.”
She laughs, and the sound is like a thousand wind chimes on a breezy day, the kind of thing I shouldn’t take pleasure in, but I do, and I can’t help it. “What have you been doing all this time, Finn?”
Days of work. Days of longing. Days that are half-full, no matter what I do.
“No way. You first.”
Emily looks down into her beer, her smile fading a little bit, and she blows a breath out between her pink lips. “That’s a long story.”
I lean back against the hard wood of the booth. “It’s early.” She glances out at the rest of the bar. “Are you meeting somebody?”
“No.” The word is a half sigh. “I came out to get away.”
“From your parents?”
“Not exactly.”
“You’re really illuminating things for me, Em.” I used to call her that back in the day, and it rolls off my tongue like I never stopped. I down more beer to cover. It doesn’t work. “No need to play coy.”
“Me? Coy? Never. Do they have nachos here?”
“What?”
“Nachos. You know. Tortilla chips, ground beef—”
She looks over her shoulder, out toward the crowd of people who don’t matter at all.
“I have no idea.”
“You don’t know what’s on the menu?” Emily glances back. “Oh, right. You’re a Jimmy’s guy. Why aren’t you over there?”
“They closed down.”
She lifts her eyebrows at me in surprise, then goes back to searching the bar. After a minute, she waves, and I’ll be damned, a server materializes at the side of the booth. Emily orders nachos. And then she orders a burger with ketchup, mustard, and pepperjack cheese, no onion, and adds lettuce.
Which is my order exactly.
When she turns back, I’m staring.
“What?”
“Did you order me food just now?”
“Yeah,” she says, as if this is the most natural thing in the world. “Where was I?”
You were gone, and now you’re back, and my entire world is igniting in flames. “You were telling me why you’re out here, having a beer with me and avoiding your parents on Thanksgiving.”
Emily takes a deep breath, sips more of her beer, and looks me straight in the eye. “I guess you could say that things haven’t gone according to plan.”
She always had a plan. Always. College. Law school. A firm in the city. Paying off her loans, as many scholarships as possible, savings, a condo, a life. A whole life in front of her, shining and perfect and clean. Emily was going to get out of Harbor Hills and all of it was going to be bigger than anything this town—quaint and small and quiet—could offer her.
“You and your plan.”
“Didn’t work out.”
“I don’t believe that.”
She drains the rest of her beer. “Buy me a drink, and I’ll tell you how it all fell apart.”
Chapter Four
Emily
Finn buys me one beer, and then we both have a 7 & 7 because that’s my favorite drink in the world, and by the time my nachos are gone and his burger has been demolished, the words are slipping from my tongue so fast that I’m losing track of the story.
“Back up,” Finn says, his eyes bulging with incredulity. “You dropped out of law school?”
“I’m saying—” I run my hands though my hair, transfixed by the brilliant blue of his eyes, by the tenor of his voice. Desire is coiling at the base of my spine, and I don’t deserve to feel it. I don’t deserve to be sitting in this booth with him. Not after what I did. “I should have dropped out of law school.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes sense, because I’m here.”
Finn’s lips quirk upward into a smile. “Nonsense.”
“Okay. You’re right. I’m buzzed.”
“I’d say you’re more than buzzed.”
“I am not.”
“What were you going to do if you dropped out of law school?”
I tip my head back against the high back of the booth. “Here’s the thing.”
He rolls his gorgeous blue eyes.
“Here’s the thing—I don’t know. I never gave myself a chance to know. I made that plan when I was in the eighth grade. You know that.”
“I do know that.”
I lean forward and put my hands on the table. “That’s not the time to be making life plans. That’s too young. I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.”
“But you’re a lawyer now. At a firm in the city. Aren’t you?”
I think of putting on yet another tailored pencil skirt and a smart blazer over the kind of silk shell that’s all the rage at Martin & Harlow, and feel ill.
“Yes.”
“That was your plan all along.”
“Yes.”
“So how is it not working out?”
The drinks have melted the false exterior I wore for my parents earlier, and it’s Finn sitting across from me. Finn, ten years older, with the same mesmerizing blue eyes and sexy, muscled body, which is even more defined now. The flannel he’s wearing isn’t a fashion statement. It’s because he was on the job today—I can smell the remnants of the wood he cut with a buzz saw in the air between us—even though, as he said, it’s a national holiday. And more than one part of me wants to peel that shirt back and tear off the t-shirt I know he’s wearing underneath.
“It’s not working out.”
Finn leans in, a smile teasing at his lips. “You said that. I want to know why.”
“Because.”
He beckons with his hand, like he’s drawing me in closer, coaxing me on. The alcohol from the latest 7 & 7 hits me with a whoosh, like a wave crashing over me in the ocean, all sun and salt and warmth, and there they go—the very last of my inhibitions.
“Because I didn’t get to see you.” A naughty tendril wraps around the core of my mind. “I didn’t get to—” I can’t bring myself to say the words.
Finn can.
“Fuck me like a wild animal?”
That’s what he’d call it, after we parked his truck somewhere dark and went at it, me praying the entire time that no police cars would make their way back to us and interrupt the wonderful things he’d do to me with his hands. I was eighteen years old. I didn’t know what I had.
“Exactly.”
This is a bad idea, and on some level I know that. On some level, I know that Finn and I aren’t meant to be. Yes, I’m experiencing some vague dissatisfaction with my job, but it can’t be as dramatic as I’m making it out to be.
Can it?
All these questions are lost under the haze of alcohol and food and Finn sitting across from me in this tiny booth, almost close enough to reach out and touch. I lift my hand from the surface of the table. Almost close enough. But not quite.
The question slips out from between my lips as if it was planted there by someone else.
“Did you drive your truck here?”
Finn doesn’t even drive us out of the parkin
g lot. No. There’s no time for that, and besides, he’s drunk. We’re both drunk. How drunk am I? Not very, but it enough.
No. All Finn does is steer the truck from his spot on the edge of the lot into a blind alley with a dumpster in back. There’s nowhere to go, and the instant he throws it in park, I throw myself across the cab and straddle his lap.
He’s waiting there to catch me, and his lips meet mine with a power that makes me think he hasn’t kissed anyone in years. Maybe ten years. And zing—the sheer electricity of him arcs down from my lips to my shoulders to my fingertips, lighting up every inch of me. Between my legs is pure, hot, wet desire, and Finn must sense it because he dips his hand between us and strokes me through my leggings.
That’s all it takes, and I’m on the edge, a low moan surfacing from somewhere deep down, somewhere I haven’t been since I was with him last.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispers, his other hand on my waist, under my sweater, and I buck into his hand.
“Please, Finn.” I don’t know what I’m asking for. I don’t have to know. Finn knows.
How does he get my leggings off? I don’t know, but one minute I’m wearing them and the next his jeans are shoved down under his ass, his glorious, thick, iron-hard cock between us, and I’m not shy about taking him into my hand. I’m even less shy about bracing myself against his shoulders and lifting up and then coming down hard, taking all of him in.
It’s a bright, glowing heat, being taken by him, as if every inch of him were made to tease every inch of me. I throw my head back. Hold on. Hold on. Don’t let it happen yet…
“Look at you,” Finn says. He’s grinning, a wicked, sexy grin, and then his fingers are teasing my clit, and my hips are rising and falling, meeting every stroke, and when I’m finally done riding the high of this orgasm, I bury my face into his skin and breathe, breathe, breathe.
Chapter Five
Finn
It wasn’t real.
The thought echoes in my head, the tail end of a dream, and I twist under the blankets.
There’s a bright, harsh light pouring in through the windows. I want nothing to do with it.
I pull my pillow over my head.
Wait.
Shit.
I throw the pillow off to the side and turn, hand searching.
The other side of the bed is empty and cool.
Fuck.
Maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe all of that—my truck, my house, my bed—was a drunken hallucination. If that’s the case, I’m really screwed. How am I supposed to keep up a career if one trip to the bar ends with me getting blackout drunk?
Emily.
I take in a deep, cleansing breath and prop myself up on one elbow.
There’s a sheet of paper on the other pillow.
Relief surges through me, followed by stark disappointment. So she was here, or else drunken Finn left a message for sober Finn at some point during the night. I snatch up the paper.
Finn—
Best Thanksgiving ever
—Em
I read it twice to make sure I’m not missing an invitation to come see her today, or at least find a fucking phone number.
Nothing.
What the fuck?
Give her the benefit of the doubt.
I don’t know why, but I do.
No jobs today. That’s what I promised myself for working on Thanksgiving. The alone time was supposed to do me good, but instead, I’m dwelling on the one-night stand I just had with the girl of my dreams.
It doesn’t matter what I put on the television or how many times I switch channels. It doesn’t matter how loud I blast my music. By noon, everything in my head reminds me Emily, all the time. The floodgates have been opened.
Too many memories.
I want to talk to her sober.
At one o’clock, I get in my truck and start driving. Everything is covered by freshly fallen snow.
Emily’s parents still live in the same house they always did, on the corner of Oak and Ferguson, a few blocks from the center of town. I know because they hired me to do a job for them a few months ago. New trim in the dining room. I shoved everything out of my head and took the money because that’s my life now. Work. The bar. No Emily. Repeat.
That’s where I’m going.
I avoid it as long as I can. I buy myself a coffee and drive in loops around town until it cools, and then I start working my way across town, each circle smaller than the last.
She has to be here still. There’s no way she’s gone. There’s no way that after what happened between us, she took off while I was still sleeping. How could she? We’re both adults now.
She wouldn’t.
Then again, she didn’t leave me her phone number.
Then again, maybe she had a hangover and wanted to make a graceful exit.
There are a lot of explanations for why I woke up alone this morning, when the last thing I did before I fell asleep was circle that sweet clit of hers with two fingers, just like she likes it, until she came, her hips rocking against mine under the sheets.
Too fucking bad if she doesn’t want to see me. At the very least, I’m taking her out for lunch. She can argue about it with me over food, if that’s what she wants to do. A taste of her was too much for an addict like me. I want more. I want to hear more of her voice. I want to touch and feel more of her body. I want more of her time.
Not that I’m going to tell her that.
But yes, I am going to show up unannounced at her parents’ house, the day after Thanksgiving.
“Finn!” Emily’s mother looks genuinely happy to see me, which is a surprise, because I’m not here to do a job and she wanted nothing to do with me when Emily and I were dating in high school.
“Hey, Mrs. Lawson.”
She laughs, and her face is transformed. Emily looks just like her, except for a few hints of her father. “Call me Marie.”
“I can’t do that, Mrs. Lawson. It would be too weird.” God’s honest truth.
Another laugh, and she shakes her head. “What can I do for you? I hope Robert didn’t hire you for an emergency job without telling me.”
My heart sinks.
“I’m here to see Emily. We met up at the Brew Pub last night, and she bought me a burger. I was hoping to repay the favor.” Even as the words are coming out of my mouth, I know they’re pointless. I don’t need Marie Lawson’s frown to tell me what I don’t want to hear.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Finn. She caught a flight back to New York this morning. They don’t give any of them time off at the firm. It’s awful.” She scowls, and then her face brightens. “It sounds like the two of you had a good time.”
You have no idea.
“We did.” I don’t know how to get out of this, so I make it blunt and fast. “I should be going. Thanks, Mrs. Lawson.”
“Send Emily a message and tell her you stopped by. I’ll do the same. Maybe we can convince her to push for more days off. Holiday should be about family.” She’s all fired up by the time she stops talking, but I’m at the bottom of the steps already. I give her a nod and a wave.
I don’t let myself bring my fist down on the steering wheel, just once, as hard as I can, until I’m out of sight of the house.
Chapter Six
Emily
I knew by the time I got to the airport that it was a mistake.
Going to the bar.
Getting Finn a drink.
The food we ordered. The conversation we had.
And going home with him to his bed.
I never should have done any of that.
Why?
Because now he’s all I can think about.
The month of December is a busy one at the firm. My division represents high-profile clients in personal cases, namely divorces, and they all want things settled by Christmas.
I hate it.
I hate everything about it—the divvying up of children like property, the screaming matches in mediation meetings, the way so
me people are so damaged that they can’t see the truth of a situation.
It was cruel of me to sleep with Finn, and there’s no excuse for it. My heart broke when I heard from my mom that he’d stopped by. “I told him to send you a message,” she said brightly, but how would he? He’s never been one for social media, and I’ve changed my phone number multiple times since I left Harbor Hills. It’s the one way to really start fresh, you know? The creepy ex who ruined your junior year in college can’t bother you if he can’t drunk-dial you five years later.
Not that Finn is a creepy ex. Far from it.
But I hurt him our senior year in high school. I hurt him badly. I hurt him so badly that he wouldn’t talk to me about it, wouldn’t let it show on his face. At least, he tried not to let it show. I saw it anyway. And back then, I should have run to him, fallen to my knees, and begged for his forgiveness.
It was all a big mistake, but the biggest mistake of all was sneaking out of his bed early that morning and heading home for a shower. I should have been upfront about the fact that I was only in town for that last night. The firm gave us Wednesday and Thursday off, and that was it—no day after Thanksgiving. Not with clients practically beating the door down to settle by Christmas.
He was sleeping deeply when I slipped out of bed, his face relaxed, his body tangled in the sheets. Folds of cotton covering the hard lines of his muscles. Every inch of me wanted to press myself against every inch of him one more time, but I resisted. I knew that if I woke him, I’d never leave.
And that feeling I’d been having, about wishing I’d made a different plan?
Ridiculous.
My life is turning out exactly how I wanted it to, and it’s good. I’m on track to paying off my student loans. I received enough law school scholarships that it’s only a large burden and not a soul-crushing one, and if I keep my head down, I can make partner by the time I’m thirty.