by Serena Bell
“’Kay,” he said, and hung up.
She texted Sibby, who said she could easily make the phone calls she was making from the reception desk. Ten minutes later, Becca pulled up in front of the KidsUp office, and a minute after that she stood, heart pounding absurdly, in the big room that housed the study booths.
Griff looked up from where he was working with a thickset, towheaded boy to smile at her. The smile did nothing to slow her heart rate down, but it did steady her a little.
She spotted Jed, unruly carrot hair and wall-to-wall freckles. Giving Griff a small wave, she slid into the booth across from her student and said, “All right. What’s the assignment?”
Without looking at her, he muttered, “We have to write about something that scares us.”
Typical high school composition idiocy. What high school student wanted to talk about what scared him? “What did you choose?”
“Nothing scares me.” He shrugged.
“Yeah? Really? What about spiders? Snakes? Guns?”
He shook his head. “Nope.”
“Girls?”
He smirked, and she could see a hint of the man he’d grow up to be. “Nope, nope, and nope.”
“Come on, Jed, something’s gotta freak you out. At least a little. How about stupid English assignments?”
Jed’s eyes flicked up to Becca’s face. “I’m not scared of them. I just think they’re a waste of time.”
She didn’t try to argue with him. Maybe the pit-of-her-stomach dread she’d felt when she’d been faced with a high school composition assignment wasn’t the same for him. But she doubted it, somehow.
Across the booth from her, he took a deep breath.
“I don’t like being home by myself in the afternoons,” he said.
It was just a sentence, but she felt such a rush of adrenaline that she got dizzy.
“Write that down.”
“Write what down?”
“Write down what you just said. ‘I don’t like being home by myself in the afternoons.’”
“That’s not how you write a paper. You write it fancier than that.”
“No.” She remembered thinking the same thing, especially when she’d sat down to write letters to Nate. “The words in your head are good. And they’re way better than no words at all. If we put them down on the page, we can make them better, after. We can polish them. But if they stay in your head, you don’t have anything.”
She could see how hard he was thinking about that. The stillness in his face, the far-off look in his eyes.
She held her breath. She could feel it, the thread between them. She could see him thinking about it, a small wrinkle forming between his eyebrows. Her own heart felt like it was in her throat, she wanted this so bad.
“That’s probably why you couldn’t write worth shit in high school, either,” he said darkly.
Then he rolled his eyes, pushed his chair back, rose to his feet, and grabbed for his backpack.
“Wait!” He couldn’t leave.
He gave her a hard look. “You know what? You were right. You can’t help me. Because no one is gonna be able to help me. This is fucking stupid. I’m outta here.” He turned and fled.
“Don’t go—”
She got up and hurried after him, out into the main lobby.
“Jed, wait—”
But he didn’t. Instead, he slammed the door in her face.
31
When Jed ran out of the study area, Becca on his heels, Griff almost ran too.
He’d been watching her as she worked with Jed. She’d been smiling. Lit up. Full of energy, leaning across the table, talking with her hands. She loved it. Anyone could see.
So when Jed ran—
Yeah, Griff had wanted to chase that kid down, snatch him by the scruff of the neck, and shake him.
Instead, he made himself sit still and finish up the lesson with his student, Hal. He made himself put a big fat bow on Charlemagne’s empire and send Hal away feeling like they’d made some progress.
Then he went out into the lobby and found her sitting in a chair in the waiting room, looking like—
Well, like her light had gone out. Like someone had doused her flame in cold water.
He was going to give Jed a piece of his mind the next time he saw him. About not appreciating what people were trying to do for him. About not appreciating a woman who really and truly had something to offer.
What he could do now, though, was try to help Becca see it differently. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t beat yourself up. Jed’s tough.”
“I thought I was getting through to him.”
“Tell me what happened.”
She told him. When she got to the part where Jed had told her, more or less, that she didn’t know what she was talking about, she looked at him with big, sad blue eyes that said, See? I’m stupid. Thanks for putting me in this position so that I could be humiliated, just like I said would happen.
You’re not stupid, he wanted to howl.
“He’s just pissed. You know how teenagers are. They get angry at themselves and take it out on everyone else. He lashed out to bring you down to where he was. You can’t let him get to you.”
She bit her lip.
He couldn’t help it, he reached out, touched her lip just below where the tooth dug in, and freed it. Rubbed his thumb back and forth. Leaned in, kissed her.
She accepted the kiss but didn’t return it.
“Hey. Him running away doesn’t mean you didn’t do a good job. He hasn’t even been willing to let anyone else help him yet, but he let you in. That’s something.”
“But now he’ll never come back.”
“Doubt that,” Griff said. “He’ll be back, because he’s not an idiot. He knows you’ve got something good to say to him.”
“But I don’t,” Becca said. “I don’t know how to help him.”
“You were helping him, just by listening to him and sharing what you know about struggling. And he’ll figure that out.”
She rolled her eyes. “Bet he won’t.”
“You want to bet? Fifty bucks—no. The best head you’ve ever had says he’ll be back, asking for you.”
She rewarded him with a dark blush, which won an answering surge of blood to his dick.
“Hey. You want to get some dinner?”
“Like, just us?”
The shy way she asked that—given everything else that had happened between them—made him smile. “I was thinking we could invite Nate, Alia, Robbie, Jake, Mira, Sam—you want me to call Hunter and Trina, too? And their girls? CJ? Yes, just us. That okay with you?”
“Yeah,” she said, lips tipping up.
He kissed her again and this time she kissed back. He had to call a hard stop on it several beats later before he ended up with both his hands up her shirt and the two of them panting audibly in the KidsUp lobby.
“I have to go back to the desk for,” she consulted her watch, “an hour and a half. But you could pick me up after that?”
He grinned. “Deal.”
He met her when her day ended and drove her to the Tierney Bay Diner.
“This place used to be a dive, and then my friends Lily and Kincaid bought it and fixed it up really nice.”
She looked around at the decor, big and brightly lit with a nautical theme, like someone’s ritzy beach cottage. A sign said Please Be Seated, so they slid into an empty booth across from each other, and a red-headed waitress with freckles and a ponytail brought them menus.
Lily was cooking, but she came out anyway and greeted them, trailed by Kincaid. “Hey,” she said.
“This is Becca,” Griff said. “Becca, this is Lily. And Kincaid.”
Becca shook their hands. “This place is beautiful.”
Lily smiled back at her. The two were an incongruous pair—Kincaid an ex-con and lawyer, tattooed and as big as a linebacker; Lily, a chef by training, petite and pixie-faced. They were crazy about each other and their restaurant.
“Wait till you taste the food,” Griff told Becca.
“Wish I could sit for a minute with you guys,” Lily said, “but it’s crazy back there.”
“No worries,” Griff said. “We’ll come some time when it’s quieter and eat pie and chat.”
“I’d like that,” Lily said. “We both would.”
Kincaid—who hadn’t said much—put his arm around her waist, tugged her close, and nodded.
A few minutes later, Lily brought them a couple of special burgers. “Just for you guys,” she said, and winked at Becca.
“She’s nice,” Becca said, after Lily left them.
“You’re nice,” Griff said, and he meant it, in the best possible way. She was sweet and kind and good, and it made him feel so fucking great to spend time with her.
She beamed at him and he didn’t know what to do with his hands or his feet or the surge of feeling in his chest.
Lily’s burgers were like no others—thick, tender, and juicy, and these were loaded up with caramelized onions, bacon, blue cheese, and some special sauce that made Griff’s mouth water obscenely.
“There’s a job I think I have a really good chance at,” Becca said, when she could talk between bites.
“Yeah?”
It made no sense to feel surprised and a little disappointed. He’d known she was looking for a job in Seattle, but he guessed he hadn’t expected it to happen so fast.
“Nice salon not too far from where I live. I liked the people.”
“Ah. That’s great.” Because he was happy for her. He was.
“I’m not selling myself short.”
Shit, she’d mistaken his confused feelings about the fact that she was leaving for something else. “No, I know. I didn’t—I know you’re not.”
“I’m not,” she repeated.
“When I said that, it wasn’t really what I meant,” he said. “I just—”
He had to stop because the sentence that had been about to come out of his mouth felt too serious. But then he decided to say it anyway, because it was true:
“I just want you to do something that makes you happy.”
Her face got pink. She gave him the sweetest smile. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s—That’s really—”
They both stopped and just looked at each other for a long minute.
Griff thought maybe one of them was going to say something, but then neither of them did. When she broke the silence, she moved them back into safe territory. “This job’ll make me happy.”
“Then it’s good. Then that’s good.”
She took a long drink of her chocolate shake, and he watched her mouth form a sweet little O around the straw. Hell yes. Only bigger and better.
“So when Nate gave you his big lecture, what did he say? About us, um, screwing around?” she asked.
He didn’t like that phrase. Screwing around. Their fling might be casual and it might be temporary, but it didn’t feel like screwing around.
“He didn’t say anything I didn’t already know. He told me about your mom, which you’d told me, but—I guess I didn’t realize quite how bad her illness was. Was she always like that?”
Becca tilted her head. “Um—well, mostly. But I remember some times—when we were little and before my dad died—that were really great. All of us together as a family, sure, but also just my mom. She used to do a lot of craft projects with me, and she had the best stuff, the best ideas. Glitter and feathers and sequins and googly eyes and pom-poms in all different sizes, and she would get so, so excited . . .”
Her voice, which had brightened as she reminisced, trailed off, and she looked into the distance, chasing the memory.
She took a bite of her burger and he thought she was done, but then she set it down and began speaking again. “And sometimes she’d have good stretches. Like, the year I was twelve, she came out of her depression. Before that, she’d surfaced from time to time, enough to take on chores and driving and stuff, but this was a whole series of months that she really came back, like she’d just woken up from hibernation. She’d sit down with me after school—I was getting home an hour earlier than Alia then, because we were in different schools—and she’d make me cinnamon-sugar toast, and we’d talk. Really talk. I told her about my friends and guys I had crushes on and which classes I was having trouble with, and she listened and gave advice, and—I remember, I felt—”
She paused abruptly, and took a deep breath. “Like, Is this is how other kids feel all the time?”
Griff, who had grown up with a mom who did craft and cooking projects with him and his sister, a mom who had fed him a snack every day after school for thirteen years, could not find words.
“But it didn’t last long,” Becca said. “Just before Christmas that year, she got back in bed, and—” She sighed.
Griff reached out and covered her hand with his. It didn’t feel like anywhere near enough, but he had to touch her. Offer twelve-year-old Becca some speck of comfort in a world where parents could die and be lost in their own suffering without warning.
Becca’s gaze flashed to his, surprised, and gratitude warmed her eyes.
“Do you ever see her, now?”
“After I graduated from high school, I saw her at holidays, but I haven’t seen her for a couple of years. Alia thinks I should visit. And maybe a year ago I would have caved, but I’m in a good place, and, I don’t know, New Becca doesn’t need that, you know?” She didn’t wait for his confirmation, but picked up her burger again. “What else did Nate say? I’m sure you guys didn’t talk about my mommy issues the whole time.”
“He also brought up your ex. The one who made you save yourself for him and then—”
He could feel the expression on his face morph into murder, which made Becca smile. “Todd,” she said. “Yeah. He probably said I was a hot mess after that, huh? I mean, not that he saw it for himself, but I know Alia’s told him. Something like that really screws with how you think about promises, you know? We were both saving ourselves for the rest of our lives. And then—”
“I really want to hurt him,” Griff said quietly.
“You wouldn’t though, would you?” she asked uncertainly.
That made him smile. “Nah. Lately I’ve wanted to hurt a lot of people on your behalf. But I’m not really that guy. I mean, war, yeah, obviously, but I’ve never even punched someone as a civilian. Not even—”
He stopped.
“Alia told me about what happened with Marina.”
That socked him in the middle of the chest. Maybe because she’d guessed it was Marina’s boyfriend, Scott, who he’d fantasized about hitting. Or maybe it was hearing her say Marina’s name. Like Marina was supposed to be completely separate from Becca. Or maybe it was the other way around.
“That must have been awful.”
Her expression was soft. It made the ache in his chest worse.
“Pretty bad, yeah.”
“You got blindsided.”
Startled, his eyes met hers. And he didn’t have any time to hide either the surprise or the truth, which was, yes, that’s it exactly. Blindsided.
She saw him so clearly. It was fucking unnerving. “Yeah.”
“You must hate surprises, now.”
“Guess I do.”
Her eyes searched his face. A little worried, if he had to guess, like maybe she shouldn’t have gone down this path. But then her expression changed. She got a mischievous look on her face.
“So if I told you I wasn’t wearing any panties . . .” she teased.
She barely had the sentence out, but he could already see, feel, and smell it: her bare ass against the fabric of her skirt, the silk of her pussy touched by the cool air between her thighs, spread just a little, her clit stiffening. He imagined he could catch the sea-salt scent of her from here.
All the blood in his entire body had detoured to his dick, leaving him light-headed. “Are you really not?” he demanded.
She laughed, cheeks pink, eye
s bright. “No. I mean, I really am wearing panties. I was just testing how far your hatred of surprises goes.” She smirked. “Although they have had kind of a . . . damp day, what with the copier room and all.”
“Oh, Jesus, baby.” He leaned back and gave her a lazy perusal. She folded her arms over her peaking nipples and then, with a deliberateness that made it even sexier, crossed her thighs. He leaned over the table. “What if I said you should go to the bathroom and take them off?”
“I’d do it,” she murmured, leaning in. “Of course. In the interest of my sexual education.”
He was having some trouble breathing, on account of how much of his body’s resources had been diverted south.
“Go,” Griff said, his voice barely more than a rasp.
And she went.
32
She was glad she’d worn a slip under her dress, because the way he looked at her through the rest of dinner, eyes burning, she would have had a wet spot when she stood up.
“Do you want dessert?” he asked her, when a waitress—not Lily—had taken their dinners away.
“Would it be painful if I said yes?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I’m enjoying the anticipation,” he murmured. “I hope you are, too.”
She was. The cool air between her legs and the silk of her slip against her bare skin.
She had Boston cream pie, licking the custard off the fork in a way she meant to turn him on. He never took his eyes off her, like she was his dessert, and her body was all confused between the taste and sensation on her tongue and how lit-up the rest of her felt, like sex and food couldn’t figure out how to coexist in her brain.
Afterward they walked out to his truck. She snuck a look his way and saw that he was watching her.
“Ever had sex in a pickup truck flatbed, under a blanket, in a field, beneath the stars?”
She shook her head.
“Want to?”
She grinned at him and nodded.
On the drive out on Route 26, the anticipation was sweet, the two of them side by side in the dark cab, knowing what was going to happen.
“Are you thinking about it? What it’s going to feel like?”