He was pretty much the only person in May’s whole life who did that. She’d spent her short lifetime cultivating an image. She wanted desperately to be self-sufficient. To need no one. Not even her parents. Especially not her parents.
But that also meant that there was no one who thought to check in on her. To make sure she was handling everything all right. To simply make sure she was okay.
But Rook did. Rook was always checking on her. Asking her how she was and meaning it. He always had a set of eyes on her, not in a creepy way, but in a safe way.
Her mild attraction to him had exploded into full-blown crush territory a few weeks ago but she’d been scared of messing up her friendship with him. He was, after all, the only person in her life who took care to watch out for her, why would she screw that up by dating the guy?
But after her debacle with Travis, May had walked home from prom with an aching hand and certainty in her heart that she didn’t want anyone but Javier Rook. The large, handsome boy who wasn’t going to tug at her dress or call her names.
And now, after dancing the afternoon and evening away, he was walking her home. He was carrying her book bag, for god sakes! Her stomach fluttered with nerves, but mostly, she just hummed along with happiness. Good old happiness.
They didn’t say much to one another until they walked up to the small one-story bungalow with the postage stamp front yard. She could hear yelling from inside her house.
“Damn. My dad’s home.” She bit her lip and refused to be embarrassed. She was certain that Rook had already heard all the rumors about her family and there was no reason to get embarrassed about something she couldn’t control. Her parents were independent people. And so was she. Almost. She was a minor. And the second she turned eighteen she was gonna get the hell out of Brooklyn and the hell away from her family.
Rook cleared his throat. “Is it… safe to go in?”
She loved his gravelly voice. She loved that even though he was a boy, he already looked like a man. She loved that he’d canted one shoulder in front of hers, as if he could shield her from her fighting parents.
“Oh, sure. They’ll just give me shit about why I’m wearing this dress and—” she broke off. “Hey! I’ve got an idea!” She grabbed Rook’s hand, relishing the burst of electricity between them, and dragged him around the side of the house. There was barely two feet between her house and the house next door. She was careful not to let her dress snag on the chainlink fence that separated them. She pointed to her bedroom window. “Boost me up.”
“You want me to boost you into your bedroom so that you don’t have to deal with your parents?”
“Yup.” She popped that p.
“But how will we get the window open?”
May reached up and slid it open.
“May!” he gaped at her. “You really need to lock your window. This is Brooklyn!”
She just looked at him for a moment. That worried line between his low brows, his wide shoulders, his hands in the pockets of the suit he’d donned just for her. She didn’t stop herself from doing what she’d wanted to do all evening. She leaned in and buried her face in his neck, her arms banding around his chest. He was a block of warm stone underneath her for all of three seconds before his arms came around her back, holding her as tightly as she held him.
Funny, she would have thought that he would be ultra careful with her, holding her like she was a bird. But his touch was firm, almost rough. She relished it.
“I love how much you worry about me, Javi,” she whispered. “But seriously. Boost me up.”
She turned around and put her hands on the window sill, waiting for him to get her through the window. He put his hands on her hips from behind, his breath stirring her hair.
“Wait!” she hissed and he stepped back from her immediately. “I don’t want my dress to snag on the siding of the house.”
“Maybe we could just go through the front door and if I’m there your parents won’t hassle you.”
She glowered at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me! You want me to introduce you to my parents? Forget the dress. If I brought you home, they’d enroll me in an all-girls school.”
He blinked at her and then looked down at his suit, as if there were something about him that he hadn’t realized was there. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that you look like just enough man to scare my dad’s shotgun out of the closet. No. No way. We’re not going through the house and you’re not snagging my dress on the siding. I have a way better idea. Get that zipper for me, will you?”
She turned her back to Rook and pointed at the long, delicate zipper that ran all the way down her back. She was greeted with complete and utter silence.
“You… want me to unzip your dress?”
His voice was deeper and more gravelly than she’d ever heard it before.
“Yeah. I want to take it off so I don’t wreck it.” Impatient, she snapped her fingers and pointed at the zipper.
“May—”
“Javi, either you unzip this dress or I’m gonna have to try to wiggle out of it on my own. And this thing is tight.”
Apparently, that was enough to get him moving. First she felt his warm fingers on the skin at the middle of her back. His breath washed over the back of her neck, but his hands were steady.
“Jeez,” he grumbled. “This thing is tiny, how do you even grab it?”
May giggled, picturing Rook’s large, blunt fingers grappling with the tiny tab of her zipper. But sure enough, a few seconds later, the dress started to loosen and cool night air greeted her lower back.
“Is that far enough?” he asked in that gravelly voice.
She turned around to peer at his work. “I can get the rest.”
She unzipped the dress down to her knee, stepped out of it, and carefully folded the dress into a little, silken square that she placed into her bag. When she turned back to Rook, he had one hand over the bottom half of his face, tugging his features downward as his eyes sort of bulged out. That was another thing she really liked about Rook. He did his best not to ogle her. But whenever he got caught ogling her, he didn’t try to play it off.
She laughed.
“You look like a Neanderthal seeing fire for the first time.”
He winced and let his hand fall away from his face. “I mean, you just took your clothes off in front of me, May.”
His voice was gruff and his hands were in his pockets, but his eyes weren’t exactly back in his head. May laughed and couldn’t help but preen a little under the attention. It was a powerful feeling, to be found this attractive. Javier Rook would fall to his knees if she asked him to, she was certain of it.
“It’s not different than a bathing suit.” She looked down at her bra and underwear. They were simple, baby blue in color.
“But they’re not a bathing suit. They’re underwear. Totally different thing. Trust me.” He dragged a palm over his head and down to the back of his neck. “And there’s no, uh, straps on your bra.”
Well, he had her there. It was a strapless bra that was—yeah—only sort of containing her. She supposed he had just cause to have his eyes bugging out of his head.
“Are you going to help me or not?”
He gulped hard and nodded. “Yeah.”
She resumed the position she had before, facing away from him, with her palms on her window sill, waiting to help boost herself into the window.
She gasped when her legs were swept out from under her and suddenly Rook was holding her in his arms, princess style.
“Easier this way,” he muttered as he gently lifted her feet-first to the window sill. A moment later, May’s butt was resting on the sill, her feet were on the carpet of her bedroom floor, and she was ducking through the window. She scampered across her bedroom and flicked the lock on her door so that she couldn’t be interrupted by her parents and came back to the window as Rook was handing her bag through.
May rested her elbows on the sill and snapped h
er fingers toward Rook’s bag. “Hand that up.”
His brow furrowed. “You want my bag?”
“I’ll take your bag while you boost yourself up.”
May practically saw smoke clear out of Rook’s ears as he suffered a full-computer meltdown. “You’re inviting me in?”
“For such an intelligent boy, you can be kind of dense, Javi. Yes! I’m inviting you in. Get up here!”
He looked like he was going to argue with her, so May lunged forward and grabbed the strap of his bag, dragging it through the window. She tossed it aside and then lunged back through the window and grabbed Rook’s tie. She was just tugging him forward to yank him into their first kiss when he stopped her. A firm hand over hers had him pulling away from her.
He… was refusing her kiss? She pulled back from the window and looked at him. That had never happened to her before. No boy had ever pulled back when she’d leaned in. May had gotten very used to that feeling of power. Had she misread this? Rook was attracted to her but he didn’t want to kiss her? He didn’t want to be romantic? He was just a really good friend who’d rescued her today and wanted to show her a good time with the dancing and the dinner?
“Step back.” He put his hands on the windowsill and was up and through in a move that was surprisingly graceful for a boy his size.
May stood in the center of her room, the lights still off, the carpet soft under her feet, just watching him as he dusted off his suit pants.
She wasn’t used to feeling nervous or uncertain. But… for the first time since she’d put that red dress on that morning, that’s exactly how she felt. Well, screw that. May Jones didn’t shy away from anything. She dealt with things head on. And Javier Rook was no different, no matter how much she liked him.
“You… don’t want to kiss me?”
Rook laughed and shook his head at her. She tried not to feel silly standing in nothing but her underwear.
“May, you’re nuts if you think I don’t want to kiss you. Kissing you is pretty much the only thing I ever think about.”
He took a step toward her and the breath stalled in her chest. She was warm and churning on the inside, but her fingertips were suddenly ice cold.
“But you just stopped me from kissing you.”
“Exactly. I stopped you from kissing me.” He was just a foot in front of her now, looking down at her, well over a head taller than she was. He slid his hands into his pockets in a move that made him look much more like a man than a boy. “May, I know you. I know how bossy you can be. And I’m betting that sometimes, you get a little tired of being bossy. Just trust me on this. For our first kiss? It’s better if I’m the one kissing you.”
That did not make sense to May in the least and she was just opening her mouth to tell him so when one of his strong, rough hands slid around to the back of her neck, tipping her head back. His other hand clamped onto her shoulder and, later, May would realize that he was doing his best not to touch her in any place that was exposed by her lack of clothing.
She was looking up into Rook’s dark eyes and as he leaned toward her, his face sliced through a triangle of street-lamp light that shone in through her window. His eyes, lit from the side, she realized, were a cloudless blue. A shocking blue. A secret hidden beneath his heavy brow and scowling expression.
But then there was no more room for thoughts because his lips were against hers. His kiss was somehow light and consuming all at once. He didn’t plunge into her and take the way other boys did. No, he carefully slid her open and offered himself up to her. His flavor was masculine and intoxicating and he pressed his open mouth against hers almost as if he were telling her to do her worst. That he was strong, that he could handle her. That nothing she could do would scare him away.
So she pushed her tongue into his mouth and was rewarded with a pained groan reverberating through the cavern of his chest. She slid her hands into his suit coat and shivered at the unexpectedly ferocious heat of his midsection. He was so hot she was surprised he wasn’t composed of melted liquid. He was warmer than sunshine on the beach. She wanted to bask in his heat. To live there.
The kiss spanned on and evolved, the two of them alternately taking and giving with their mouths, but his hands stayed chastely on her shoulders and arms and neck and hair. They stayed standing in the middle of her room, though her bed waited tantalizingly in one corner.
Finally, finally, Rook pulled away from the kiss, pressing his forehead against hers and breathing so hard his nostrils flared.
“I have to go,” he whispered.
“Why?” Was that her voice? Sounding so grown up and so needy?
“Because if I get grounded by my dad for breaking curfew then I can’t see you tomorrow after school. And I really, really wanna see you tomorrow after school.”
May nodded. She wasn’t the kind of person who really cared about tomorrows, she cared about todays, but she could see in Rook’s eyes that there was no arguing with him on this point. “Your dad’s a real drill sergeant, huh?”
He laughed humorlessly and pulled his forehead away from hers. “Literally. He’s a former military man and runs his house, and his family, accordingly.”
“Oh. Wow.” May considered this for a moment. “That sounds terrible.”
He laughed. “It’s not so bad.” He paused halfway through picking up his bag. “Well, tonight it’s terrible. But usually it’s not so bad.”
May laughed too, flushed and turned on and complimented. She wanted Rook to stay so badly, but part of her was also relieved that he had to go. Because she’d never felt like this in her entire life and she wouldn’t mind a little space to sort through it.
He tossed his bag out the window and sat halfway on the windowsill, one of his legs dangling out along the side of the house. She walked over to him and gave him a kiss goodnight, letting it drag out for a long minute. He was panting by the time he pulled away.
She thought he was going to say something to her, something important. But instead he just knocked his forehead gently against his knuckles and cleared his throat. “Goodnight, May.”
“Goodnight, Javi.”
He jumped down and grabbed his bag. “Promise me you’ll lock your window tonight.”
And then he was gone.
***
The memory cleared and May realized that she’d been staring deeply into Rook’s eyes. And, as usual, she was held captive there. His eyes looked dark from this distance, shadowed and unholy. But, of course, she was in on the grand secret. That when one was nose to nose with Javier Rook, his eyes were the gentlest blue of all time.
She cleared her throat and looked away. It was dangerous to look at him for too long, sprawled out in one of her armchairs, his legs spread wide and the side of his head resting on one of his fists.
When they’d finally gotten divorced, five years ago now, she’d rejoiced. The day had come and she’d shed tears of rebirth, because she would finally, finally be free of this terrible, consuming need for him in her life. She would cut him out entirely, and she’d never have to depend on him again.
It had been a dark moment, holding her divorce papers in her hand, knowing that she was a free woman, when the truth had come crashing down on her. That a divorce had not stopped her from wanting him. Or needing him.
Five years later and sometimes she felt like not a day had passed.
She was supposed to be moving on from him. And that was just not happening. And how could it? With him looking at her like that every chance he got. With him stopping by to fix the sink in the upstairs bathroom that Ricky had mentioned was leaking. With him being such a good dad it was painful for all three of them to say farewell at the end of a weekend.
Ugh.
She stood up suddenly, trying to shake her way out of these maudlin thoughts. “Are we good for the schedule this week? Need to make any changes?”
Rook’s job could be unpredictable and there were times that they had to alter their custody agreement so that he still got
to see Ricky with regularity.
“Nope. I’ll be here on Wednesday night.”
Rook got Ricky every other weekend and every single Wednesday night. They’d also arranged it so that he dropped her off at school every morning. That meant that usually Ricky got to see her dad every day and May only had to see him a once or twice a week. Wednesday nights were often spent at May’s house because otherwise, the time just got too eaten up with driving Ricky from school to his house and back. They’d reached an agreement that he’d just spend time with her here.
Which meant that every Wednesday night, May got home from work to find dinner warming in the oven and her daughter and ex-husband either playing cards, watching a movie, or working on homework.
It was confusing as hell.
She needed a boyfriend. Things had been way, way less confusing when she’d had a boyfriend.
Rook had come around less, to give her space, and she’d had somewhere to focus all this energy that he always stirred up in her.
But also, having a boyfriend who wasn’t Rook had been excruciatingly awful and she’d kind of hated every minute of it. So there was that, too.
“All right.” She was standing, her arms crossed over her chest, and watching him, waiting for him to leave. He was just sitting there, not leaving.
“I’m gonna go watch tv in my room,” Ricky said, standing up and stretching. She walked over and threw her arms around Rook’s neck as he squeezed her up in a loving hug. “Night, Dad. See you in the morning.”
“On time,” he told her, his eyes serious and stern. “You have that Spanish test first period and I don’t want to have to break the land speed record to get you there on time.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Their daughter definitely came by May’s attitude naturally. She rolled her eyes at her dad, but her affection for him and his rules was apparent enough. She kissed his cheek, then her mother’s cheek and bound up the stairs of their townhouse.
Now, May and Rook were alone. She stood, arms still crossed, and he sat, still lazy as a cat. She raised her eyebrows at him, as if she were asking him why the hell he wasn’t leaving.
“Did you get Moreau’s email?” he asked in a gruff voice.
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