by Julia London
“Like what?”
“Like that.” She made a whirring motion at his face.
Because I love you. I always have. I always will. He slowly withdrew his hand from hers. “That’s just my face.”
“No,” she said, and caught his hand before he could pull it away. “Will you stop being so careful? I’m not going to screw up again.” She gave his hand a squeeze and let go.
Rafe wanted to kick himself all over again “Hallie . . . I’m sorry I am so careful around you. But I have my reasons.”
“Apology accepted,” she said, and solemnly bowed her head over her hands in prayer pose. “I understand. I am a master at pushing buttons without even realizing it.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” he said. “Honestly, I love how impetuous you are. I mean, short of getting blotto and trying to drive to Houston. I love that you can just be you.”
Hallie burst into laughter. She laughed so hard that she tumbled over backward, and Sulley was there in an instant to lick her face. She pushed the dog away with a belly rub and sat up, brushing loose strands of her hair from her face. “Oh, Rafe. I haven’t been just me since, like, 2008.” She suddenly stopped laughing and stared across the checkerboard at him. The firelight made her skin look as soft as butter, and he was thinking of the feel of her skin beneath his lips—
“But if you love that about me, then why did you say you couldn’t handle it?”
He stilled.
“Remember? You said you couldn’t handle it.”
“I remember,” he said quietly. “I’ve tried to explain it—there are too many issues with . . . us,” he said, gesturing awkwardly between the two of them.
“I know. Your dad works for my mom.”
“That’s one,” he said. “But there is more to it. I don’t know if I can ever make you understand.”
Hallie rolled her eyes. “I understand every word you’ve said, Rafe. I get it. You’re my friend, and I . . . I had a moment. Well, it was more than a moment for me, but sometimes I am not good at reading the room. The thing is, you really have no idea how much you mean to me, and I get it.”
Her eyes were glittering in the low light of the fire. Her skin was flushed. Rafe thought he’d never seen a more beautiful woman in a pair of sweats in all his life. “I just wonder if maybe you see what you want me to mean to you at this point in your life,” he said.
Hallie sighed irritably. “Don’t do that, Rafe. Don’t try and explain to me what I’m feeling. You want to know what you mean to me? Everything. How’s that? Your friendship—you—mean everything to me. And maybe I’m wearing crazy pants, but I think I mean something to you, too.”
So here it was, the moment he would come clean or slink off to Chicago like the coward he was. “You’re right. You mean more to me than I have ever said, Hallie. Frankly, there aren’t adequate words to describe how I feel about you.” He sat up. He looked her directly in the eye. “I’ve been living with a secret for a very long time.”
She blinked. “What? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. But if you haven’t already figured it out, I have been in love with you since we were kids.”
Hallie’s eyes widened, and she went very, very still.
He plunged ahead. “I love you, Hallie Prince, and I get to stay close to you by being your friend. But my greatest fear,” he said, pressing his hand over his heart, “is that I will do something to fuck that up and I won’t get to be near you, and I will spend the rest of my life regretting it.”
Hallie’s mouth gaped open. She stared at him so hard that he wondered if he’d been a fool to admit it. “Why have you never said anything?” she asked, her voice shaking.
“Are you kidding?”
“No! Why have you never told me?”
“When, Hallie? When you were dating that banker’s kid after high school? When you were engaged to the doctor?” He dragged his fingers over the crown of his head. “You have lived your life on a pedestal. You’re a woman who has everything. You can have whatever you want, whoever you want. You have no idea what it’s like to come from a family entirely dependent on another.”
“I don’t understand—I haven’t asked you for anything—”
“No, but think about it, Hallie. What if I’d told you, five, ten years ago? What if, for a period of time, you were into it? Like now, after you’ve just ended an engagement, and you are searching for the next thing in your life. What if things were great between us for a while, but then I couldn’t give you the sort of life you deserved, and something bigger and better came along? We’d break up. I’d lose you forever. Well, I can’t lose you forever. So I’ve kept it to myself.”
Her brows dipped into a frown. “Then why are you telling me now?”
“Because things changed between us in the last few weeks. You were right, there was something there, something beating like a heart between us. It used to be easy to keep this secret from you, but to keep it now feels like I’m lying to you, and I don’t want to lie to you. I needed you to know the truth before I left for Chicago.”
She was silent. Her hazel eyes were locked on his, and he was desperate to know what she was thinking. It seemed like several moments passed before she slowly rose up onto her knees. She leaned forward on the ottoman, and checkers cascaded off the side. “I knew it,” she said softly. “I love you, too, Rafe. Maybe not as long as you have, or in exactly the same way, but I love you, too. Don’t you know that? You are the closest thing to a best friend I’ve ever had. And now you’ve told me the truth, and you’ve thrown me for a gigantic loop, and I feel upside down and sideways and giddy and excited, and I want to know, what are you going to do about it? What now? And God help you if you make it weird, because I will kick you in the balls.”
Rafe smiled. She could not have been more beautiful. Her eyes were on his mouth, her gaze intense, her expression determined. He knew what now. The answer was swirling and crackling around them. This was a very bad idea. A very bad idea. He knew it in his gut, and yet he felt powerless to stop the wheels he’d set into motion with his confession. He lifted his hand and stroked her face. “I have one pretty solid idea what to do about it.”
She grabbed his hand, laced her fingers through his, and pulled him closer. “Then do it.”
It felt like his chest cracked open, and years and years of emotions that had been locked down were suddenly set free. It seemed as if a lifetime of desire was scorching the earth between them. He reached for her.
Or maybe she reached for him.
All he knew was that the board toppled off the ottoman, and he was dragging Hallie onto his lap, and Sulley was barking with glee.
The cork had blown, and there was no returning the genie to the bottle. Rafe had no hope that she would ever return his desire and regard in the same depth and breadth that he’d come to feel them, and he knew this would end badly for him. But he was tired of fighting it. “I can’t pretend anymore,” he said to her, and kissed her, and when he did, a deep shiver ran through him. A streak of lightning.
He cupped her face with his hand, and she gripped his wrist with amazing strength, sinking into him as he touched his mouth to her forehead, breathing in the floral scent of her freshly washed hair, then moving his mouth across her smooth skin. He tightened his grip on her as he lifted her face to his, and splayed his fingers across her cheek. He could not remember ever having felt sexual desire as urgently as he did on that bear rug. He could not recall a moment of ever having wanted to be inside a woman as desperately as this. “I’ve wanted you for so long,” he said roughly. “I can’t stand to be near you and not touch you.”
“Really?” she asked, sounding surprised, and put her arms around his neck to kiss him. Rafe grunted with all that want and fell backward, sliding down to the floor with her on top of him. He was kissing her like he’d always wanted to kiss her, holding nothing b
ack, and with all the longing he’d felt for years.
He caressed her body, his hand sliding up under her T-shirt and hoodie, landing on warm, butter-soft skin. Moving up to her breast, around and down her back, and then slipping into the waist of her sweatpants, moving to her hips.
The feel of her in his arms at last was intoxicating. He’d fantasized about this so often that it seemed like a dream to hold her now, touching and tasting her skin.
He rolled over, flipping them around so that she was on her back beneath him.
“I knew it,” she said, and closed her eyes as she kissed his neck, then the line of his jaw.
“Knew what?” he muttered against the hollow of her throat.
“Just this,” she said vaguely, and closed her eyes as her hands wandered his body, caressing his shoulders, his arms, pulling his shirt free of his pants, and sliding her hands onto his rib cage.
Rafe no longer cared about any consequences for this. The only thing he cared about was making love to her, at long last. Every stroke of her hands sent him a little closer to the edge of his control. Every touch of his lips to her skin sent him even that much deeper. The hunger in him raged. The desire to feel her, touch her, taste her, to be inside of her, resurrected old impossible hopes in him. As his hands and mouth covered her body, she gripped his head. “Wait, Rafe—this is crazy!” she said breathlessly.
No, no, no, don’t stop now.
“What are we doing on the floor? We should find a bed.”
He stared down at her with surprise. Yes, a bed. A big bed so they could roll all over it. He stood up, then reached down and picked her up off the ground, swinging her up into his arms.
Hallie laughed. “What are you doing?”
“You said bed. I’m taking you to bed.” He marched in the direction of what looked like might be bedrooms.
“I’m a princess!” she said with delight. “No, not this one. Too cold,” she said when he used his foot to push open the first door they came to.
He moved on, to the second door.
“Nope,” she said, and pointed catty-corner across the hall. “That one. It has a beautiful view—”
“So do I,” he said, and swung through that door, depositing her on a bed. Her things were scattered about that room, he realized as he shrugged out of his shirt. Hallie things—a camera. A pair of jeans and boots on the floor. A lacy bra on the end of the bed. Running shoes.
She bounced up to her knees and took off her hoodie. She was grinning like a Cheshire cat. “You’re not going to have second thoughts, are you?”
“I can’t even think right now, so no.” He could safely say, in that room, feeling as hard and as determined as he did then, that he would never have second thoughts about this. And especially not when Hallie pulled her T-shirt off and sank down onto her heels on the bed.
“Do you have a condom?”
“No.”
“No?”
He paused in his delightful review of her breasts. “I don’t carry them around on the off chance I might get lucky, Hallie. Do you have one?”
She plunged half her body over the side of the bed, reaching for her purse. She dug maniacally through it, yanked out her wallet, dug through that, and somehow, miracle of miracles, pulled a pair of attached condom packages from it. “Ta-da!”
He kicked off his shoes, then leapt—literally leapt—across the room to that bed, tackling her and smothering her in kisses. Her hands were quickly on him, caressing him, tweaking him, arousing him even more. She slid his jeans down his hips and wrapped her fingers around his erection.
Everything disappeared for Rafe. He was aware of his body pulsing in her hand, aware that he was perilously close to losing his control. He pushed her back, removed her sweatpants, reminding himself to take his time. She was wearing thong panties, and those, he decided, could stay for the moment. He rolled on the condom, then moved between her legs and began to rub against that little strip of fabric as he took the hills of her breasts into his mouth, one by one.
And then he slowly moved down her body, his mouth and tongue drawing a delicious line down her center, to the hollow of her abdomen, and down again. He took the thong in his teeth and pulled it free of her body.
Hallie was breathing hard. She pushed her hands into his hair as she arched her back and drew one leg up. When his tongue slipped between her folds, she sighed, long and low, and gripped his hands, which he’d wrapped around her legs to hold her. He very deliberately brought her to climax, taking great pleasure in her excitement, aroused beyond his own comprehension at the way she bucked against him. When he closed his lips around her bud, she spasmed, and her body shivered against him, her pleasure infusing his blood. He rose up between her knees, pressed the tip of his erection against her wet body, and drew a deep breath in a Herculean effort to keep from being too rough, taking her too hard, too eagerly.
Their gazes locked in that moment. He could feel the flow between them, the silent communication that had never happened with anyone else in his life. Was this love that he felt running hot through his desire? Was it love that fed his desperation to do this right? Was it love that made the connection with her as important as the release? Was this the difference between sex and actual lovemaking? Because this felt different to Rafe. It wasn’t just a corporeal thing, although his body was screaming for it. It was more transcendent than that. Important. Even a little unworldly, as he could almost believe he’d been put on this earth at this time to be with this woman. And the way she was looking at him—with affection, with hope—made him believe it.
It was such a tiny little moment, and yet he saw their future roll out before him, the years of happiness beginning with this very act.
And then he lost his damn mind and descended into fantastic, mind-melting sex.
He pressed inside her, a sensation so exquisite that he thought he might come at any moment. He managed to keep a lid on things, moving slowly at first, methodically, withdrawing to the tip, then sliding in again. Her eyes were closed, but her body moved with his. She gripped his shoulders, her hips lifting with each stroke. Her breath turned shallow; her body tensed around his. She arched her back in release, and raging desire exploded in him. He threw his head back, baring his teeth, letting loose a guttural growl of pleasure. With a final shudder, he collapsed to her side, his face in her neck, his heart pounding so hard he feared it might burst.
“Oh my God, Rafe,” she said, and groped for his hand. “You know what? I think I sort of kind of love you right now. That was fantastic.”
That was almost his undoing. Not that he believed she was making a declaration of romantic love, precisely. She meant she loved the sex. And yet, hearing those words on her lips was the stuff of this boy’s dreams. He closed his eyes, held her tightly, and tried to burn every moment into his memory so that he would never forget how he felt tonight.
They lay there until the cold began to seep into the room, and Sulley was whimpering at the door. Hallie got up, slipped into her hoodie and the skimpy little thong, and disappeared. Sulley planted his paws on the side of the bed, and Rafe lifted him up.
Hallie returned with a bowl of popcorn and a bottle of wine. “I’m starving,” she said, and crawled under the covers, curling into his side. When Sulley was convinced the popcorn wasn’t for him, he curled up at the foot of the bed.
Rafe made himself get up, too, and built a fire in the room’s fireplace before hurrying back to bed where it was warm. They watched the fire, snuggled together, eating popcorn, taking turns tossing kernels in the air to see if the other could catch it in their mouth while Sulley snored.
They talked about everything. How slow his Chicago project was proceeding. Her desire to practice ballet again and how she’d been thinking of going back to school. They marveled at how loudly Sulley snored for a puppy. They talked about spaceships to Mars—Hallie insisting it was a thing—
and how vast the universe was with the discovery of even more new galaxies. They wondered aloud if Mr. Creedy’s cows had gotten out since Rafe had fixed the fence, then giggled at how mad Mrs. Bachman would be if they had.
They kicked Sulley off the end of the bed and made love again when the moon started its descent into day, and spilled popcorn everywhere.
Hallie was the first to drift off, her eyes fluttering shut, a sleepy smile on her lips.
Rafe lay there a little longer, content in the quiet and stillness of this extraordinary night. He watched the embers of the dying fire and tried to think of the moment when their friendship had bloomed into something else. At what moment had they both felt the desire? He wished he knew, because that moment would mark his life forevermore. There was his life before that moment in time, and everything that would come after.
But for now, he had this moment, and Rafe knew it was the most contented he’d ever been in his life.
Chapter Twenty-one
Hallie was up first. She slipped out of bed as Sulley’s eager tail steadily beat against the bedpost. She put her fingers to her lips, grabbed her hoodie and panties and sweats, and pulled them on as she made her way from the room on tip-toe, Sulley trailing behind her.
She was deliciously sore and strangely, happily, nervous. This felt a little like an alternate universe where she and Rafe were together.
Still, she felt exuberant this morning. Last night had been amazing. She’d felt like she was floating on a cloud of pure joy all night, and this morning, she was still floating.
She made coffee and took Sulley out, stomping her feet to keep warm as Sulley joyously experienced snow for the first time. She made him come back and fed him, then gave him a toy to gnaw on for a while. She poured two cups of coffee and went back to her room.
Rafe was lying on his belly, one arm draped off the end of the bed, his back exposed. Interestingly, he did have a tattoo, and it looked like a military insignia on his shoulder. She admired his back, broad and muscular, tapering into hips that looked sculpted from stone. Every part of him was strong and hard, and a delicious little shiver of memory of last night warmed her cheeks.