“Jasper,” I breathe, clenching my fingers in his hair, pulling him up from where he has just spent an incredibly satisfying few minutes. “Please tell me you have a condom. Please.”
It’s his turn to look startled, and he practically jolts away from me, moving back to the love seat and bending to pick up his pants off the floor. I watch as he clumsily yanks his wallet from the back pocket, tossing the pants like he’s angry at them, and I put a hand over my mouth to hide my smile, and also to hide the howl of sadness that will surely come out of my mouth if he doesn’t find a condom in there.
But he’s victorious, a foil wrapper held between his fingers and a triumphant smile on his face that dims momentarily while he stalks over to the little Christmas tree, holding the square package underneath one of the fiber-optic branches and squinting.
The fact that he has to check the expiration—it is ludicrously gratifying to me, even though I know I’ve got no business wondering.
“Thank God,” he says, coming back to me, standing at the foot of the bed. “What if I’d had to go to the house and ask that Tanner guy for a condom?” He bends and kisses my stomach, the skin there quivering with the laugh I let out.
“Probably he wouldn’t have had one.” I gasp at the feel of Jasper licking upward. He hasn’t even unwrapped the condom and I feel dangerously, embarrassingly close to the edge, his tongue doing incredible things to me. “Because—of the baby?”
“Hmm.” He kisses across my collarbone, and I’m so flushed with heat and anticipation. All at once it’s hitting me, even more so than before—I have wanted this with Jasper for so long. I have loved him for so long, and I’m so relieved to be doing this finally that I hardly know what to do with all this feeling. Somewhere, kicking around in the deep recesses of my mind, is the knowledge that we haven’t dealt with work—that inside this cottage Jasper has been all mine, but out in the world, it’s always the job for him first, and I don’t know what that means for tomorrow.
But I don’t pay attention to those deep recesses, not right now. I have to keep talking to distract myself. “Gil and Romina seem pretty connected, though. Maybe he’d have one.”
He laughs now, pulls away and looks down at me. “Kristen. If you want us to keep going here, you’d better get that image out of my head.”
For a second we stay like that, smiling at each other like coconspirators in this trouble we’re making together. The moment is so easy and simple and happy, and then I realize that all I need to do with this overflowing feeling I have is to . . . hang on to it. To enjoy it and celebrate it like the holiday it is.
I reach down, tuck my thumbs in the edge of my plain cotton boy shorts, and push them down.
He leans back and watches.
“Better image,” he says, his voice rough, and then he’s tearing open that foil square, and it’s nothing like how it’s always been before for me—nothing like when I avert my eyes for this part, worrying that it’ll feel too routine, too pragmatic, something that will spoil the mood. Nothing like when I stiffen slightly at that first press between my legs, the intimacy of joining with another person always somewhat awkward for me. Nothing like those moments where a fleeting thought—about work, about bills or laundry, or, most often, about Jasper—will tug at my mind, distracting me from what I’m doing, the person I’m with.
With Jasper, I watch everything. I feel everything. I focus on everything.
And nothing, nothing, has ever felt better.
Chapter Eleven
JASPER
This time, I wake up long after five a.m. The sun’s up, the sky bright from the reflection of the snow, and I can hear a soft dripping, melting off the edges of the cottage’s roof. Outside, the air is still, and no snow is falling.
I’ll bet she can fly out later today. She’ll get to her family; she won’t miss their whole Christmas, and I’m glad.
I close my eyes again, breathe in the smell of her hair, feel the warm curve of her back against my chest, block out the sun and the day for a little longer. I’ve got a thousand feelings rushing through my blood: the hot, insistent desire that kept us up almost all night, finding new ways to make each other feel good once we’d used our one, blessed condom. The warm, settled assurance of my love for her. The creeping anxiety about what today will bring, when we have to face the Dreyers at their Christmas lunch, and when Kristen will get on a plane to her family.
But the thing I notice most is the absence of a feeling.
This morning, for the first morning in six years, I don’t miss her.
Instinctively, my arm tightens around her waist, and I feel her stir and stretch, a movement that presses her ass against my lap. “Careful there, darlin’,” I murmur. I feel like I can hear my dick cursing me out about the condom situation.
Kristen turns in my arms, her hair a messy tangle over her eyes and her smile sleepy. “You sound like a cowboy, calling me that.”
I smooth the hair from her face, kiss her nose. “Guess I used to be one, sort of.”
“I like it.” She leans in to kiss me—brief and close-mouthed, a holiday movie kiss, and there’s something to be said for a kiss like this. It’s a happily-ever-after kiss, the kind of kiss that assumes there’ll be a bunch more after.
Still, I stroke the backs of my fingers down her chest, over her stomach. Feel her shudder in pleasure and twist her body against the sheets.
Sometime in the middle of the night, exhausted and satisfied, we’d stumbled from the bed, gathered the rest of the linens and made it up properly, smiling goofily and getting into a ridiculous, good-natured argument about which side should face down on the flat sheet. It’d been strange, after all we’d done together, to have that single domestic moment be so crystallizing for me. But when I’d lain down next to her afterward, the sheets cool and clean, I’d made a decision. Today I’d do everything I could to get Gil to change his mind, to show Kris that we could still work together, be successful. To keep the firm together—us in our office, Carol our admin, all our plans staying on track. To make it so she’d never regret being with me, no matter what rules we’ve broken here.
It’s that determination that gets me moving.
I give her another brief kiss, roll over, and grab my phone from the nightstand. It’s later than I thought, only an hour before the lunch is supposed to start. “I want to look over some things from GreenCorp before we get over there,” I tell her. “You want to shower, or . . . ?”
She’s quiet behind me, and when I look over at her, she’s tugged the sheet up over her skin, turned onto her back. After a few seconds she shifts, keeping the sheet pressed to her chest while she sits up, her other arm reaching for her own phone. She clears her throat delicately. “You can go ahead,” she says. I open my mouth to clarify that I meant it as an invitation, something we could do together. But she speaks before I can. “I should look at flights for later, see what’s going on there.”
I don’t like the way her face has shuttered, the way she’s tapping away at the phone. I reach back to set a hand on her leg. “You okay?”
Tell me you don’t regret it.
She looks up at me, the light in her eyes dimmed but her smile in place.
“I’m good.” She leans forward to kiss me again, quick like before. It doesn’t feel so happily ever after this time but I try to trust her, to trust this. I can make this work with her. I can show her how good it’ll be.
When I come out of the shower she’s pulling clothes from her suitcase, holding them to her while she walks toward the bathroom. She smiles as she passes but also tells me she’s on standby for a flight out tonight. I tell her I’m happy, and I am—but tension ratchets up inside me. If she goes tonight, and we don’t have this job settled, what’s she going to think about this, about us? About how we’ll be able to do the job and do this, when this has only just started? What happens when Christmas is over and we’re back in Houston, the place where we set all those boundaries that have kept us apart?
“Don’t put on your work clothes,” she says. “It’s a family meal. We don’t want to make them uncomfortable.”
Her tone is so different than it was just a half hour ago. But maybe she’s just feeling the way I’m feeling. This is a good tip about the job, one I probably wouldn’t think of myself, and isn’t that what’s always made us such a good team?
“Yeah, of course,” I say, and stand to get dressed.
I’m still uneasy when we pull the door closed behind us twenty minutes later. I’ve got the cookies we made yesterday, and Kris is clutching a small gift bag in one hand, a set of note cards she’d been planning to give to an aunt she’ll be seeing the day after Christmas. The sun is blinding, the snow so white it feels like there’s nowhere comfortable to look, and we mostly squint our way across the expanse of yard that takes us to the ranch house. I hold the tray of cookies tightly in one hand, keep my other at the ready as we trudge through the snow, in case Kris slips.
But she knows snow better than I do, and she doesn’t need me at all.
On the porch we both stamp our feet, knocking off excess powder. As I watch her, eyes cast down and mouth free of her easy smile, I decide I don’t want to ignore that uneasy feeling. Something’s gone wrong enough that it’s got me missing her again. And I’ve already decided: I can’t go back to that.
So when she lifts her hand to knock, I say her name.
She turns to look at me, her eyes flat and her mouth in a line.
“What are we doing here?” she asks.
I slide my eyes to the door. “The lunch?”
“Is this for the job, or is it for Christmas?”
“I . . .” I swallow, not sure what to say. Isn’t it both? Isn’t part of what I’m trying to give her for this Christmas some assurance about the job? I realize, with a sinking sense of dread, how ill-equipped I am to handle this newness between us. Six years and all I’ve practiced with her is the missing part, and I feel the depths of my ignorance like a slap to the face.
“It’s the job,” she says.
“Of course it’s the job.” I’m frustrated with myself, with her, with everything that’s not us in that cottage. “We have to—”
Just then, the front door opens. Gil’s standing there, holding the same mug, wearing the same green sweater, except this time I think it’s turned inside out. “Pretty cold out here just to be standing around,” he says.
“Gil,” Kristen says, shoving the gift bag in his hand unceremoniously, but keeping a false smile pasted on her face. “Could you excuse me for a few minutes? I think I forgot something back at the cottage.”
For once I’m not the one who’s done the socially awkward thing in a business interaction, and while what I want is to simply drop this tray of cookies and follow her, it’s so out of character for Kristen that I feel a protective instinct to mitigate the embarrassment I know she’ll have later. I turn to Gil, still working out what I’ll say to excuse myself.
“That Christmas stuff didn’t work then?” Gil asks. He’s sipping from his mug, watching her stomp through the snow.
“Work for what?”
He shrugs. “I was wrong about you being married to her. But you want to be, right?”
“I—” I look away, watch Kris’s retreating form. Yeah, I want to be, but I’m not telling Gil that first. Hell, I’m not telling Kris that until we manage at least a few months in a functional relationship; I’m not a barbarian, or a doctor in a Santa suit. “How’d you know that?”
He takes another sip of his drink. Inside, I can hear his family laughing, pots and pans clanging.
“That look on your face when you came around here yesterday morning. That’s about what my face looked like for the whole first month I knew Romina, trying to get her to like me. She thought I was ridiculous.”
“Kristen doesn’t think I’m ridiculous.” Wait, does she? “Also I’ve known her for six years, not a month.”
Gil laughs. “You are ridiculous, then.”
I am, I think. But I say, “It’s because we wor—”
“Uh-huh,” Gil says, not letting me finish. “You know Romina was pretty worried about me changing my mind about the GreenCorp thing.”
I blink in surprise, both at the change of subject and at this admission, since I’d been working under the assumption, especially after that scene at the table yesterday, that it’d been Romina who hadn’t wanted to go. Any other day, maybe, and I’d be focused on this as a new piece of information related to the job. I’d be thinking, Change tactics. Work harder on Romina, and Romina will work on our behalf.
But right now, all I want is for Gil to stop talking long enough for me to go after Kris without it seeming rude.
“Guess she thinks like you, about the difference it could make. She’s worried I’ll regret it later.”
I tighten my hand on the tray I’m holding, my eyes going back to Kristen. “You don’t think you will?”
He sets down his mug on the arm of the wooden bench by the front door and reaches out to take the cookies. “Nah. I’ll find a way, with the tech. I pretty much try to put things in the right order in my life, and if I’ve got my wife and kid in the top two places, everything else tends to work out all right in the end.”
“I’m in love with her,” I say. That’s the right order. I feel it in my bones.
“Right.” He picks up the mug again, gestures it in her direction. She’s almost to the cottage door. “What’s all this, then?”
This, I think to myself, is the low moment.
And then I step off the porch and go after her.
Chapter Twelve
KRISTEN
Halfway to the cottage, and I know I’ve made a mistake.
I shouldn’t have run, and I know it. First of all, there’s the matter of how it must’ve looked to Gil, especially given my flimsy excuse, and he’s probably back in his house right now shrugging and giving a look to Romina, one of those married people something’s-going-on-there silent communications that’ll surely make it even more awkward when I do go back. For the family Christmas lunch they were kind enough to invite us to in the first place.
Second of all, I know Jasper will follow me back here. I know he will, and then we’ll have to have this conversation, the one I should’ve insisted on having this morning. I should’ve set an alarm to wake up early, should’ve made a list of points to cover. In what universe would I have thought it was a good idea to try to work with him, to attempt a more challenging than usual recruiting conversation after such a monumental shift in our personal relationship? The morning after? I know better. I know that at the very least you have to identify the boundaries, set the rules—
“Kris,” Jasper calls from behind me, right as I’m getting to the cottage’s tiny porch threshold.
Third of all, Jasper followed me back here looking like this.
Focused. Determined. Ambitious. Jasper on the job.
I stop short of opening the door, instead standing my ground on the porch, raising a hand to shade my brow from the sun. It’s better than doing this inside there, inside the place where I woke up with a chorus of holiday bells ringing in my heart, thinking I’d finally seen and been with the real Jasper, the Jasper who wouldn’t risk a relationship for a job. But then he’d rolled over and gotten to work, and everything inside of me had gone cold and silent, and I haven’t been thinking straight since.
“I just need a minute,” I say, and he takes a step closer and slightly to
the side, the perfect spot to block the sun from my eyes. I drop my hand and try not to fall more in love with him, which is hopeless.
Now that I can see him better I can see that his determination is a little frayed around the edges, his hair mussed and his cheeks flushed, his eyes wide with concern.
I’m about to tell him not to worry about it, to go back to Gil, to count on me being ready to do the job. I’ll say I got my period and need a tampon or something; that always makes men disappear into thin air.
But instead Jasper blurts, “I want to be in each other’s top places.”
A clump of snow from the roofline plops onto his shoulder.
“What?”
“That’s what Gil said, about the job.” He’s breathing a little heavy, and I know from gym time and now also from sex time that it’s not from exertion. “He puts his wife and kid in the top place, and then he makes everything else work. I think we can do that, me and you.”
“Jasper—”
“So what if we lose this job? That doesn’t have to be because of this, of what happened between us. Or maybe it does, but it doesn’t matter. We’ll find a way. We’ll do what we have to do with the firm. We can keep Carol, lose the office space, downsize for a while—”
“What?”
“Listen, I know what you’re thinking.”
“You clearly do not know what I’m thinking. You think I’m worried about losing the job?”
Another small clump of snow falls from the roof, lands on the right side of his head, but he simply brushes it off and keeps going. “No—I mean, not this one, specifically. I think maybe you think Gil’s doing the right thing, staying here. But I also know you broke your rules with me last week and last night, and I don’t want you to think I’ll let it mess up us working together. I won’t. I thought if we could convince the Dreyers, you’d see that we could handle this.”
I blink at him. A tiny chime in my chest. “What’s the this?” I ask him.
He stares at me, the snow on his shoulder sliding down. “The . . . this?”
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