Anything More Than Now (Sutton College #2)

by Rebecca Paula

  Everyone can see us and for the first time, I don’t care. I don’t care if they talk about me, if they’re making fun of me, if they have shitty things to say about Noah. Those words mean nothing when Noah and I are dancing. Maybe it’s dumb or naïve, but when we’re together I almost think anything is possible.

  I twirl to face him and place my fingers against his mouth. His eyes light up for me, focused and knowing. “Shut up and dance with me, Noah.”

  *

  Noah crawls toward me on my bed a few hours later, his shirt off, and my heart slams against my chest. “I want to kiss you,” he whispers against my thigh as his hands roam upward and shove at the hem of my dress.

  “What?”

  My breath quickens with the attention of his hand. He’s taken me apart all night with his eyes, he’s undressed me and fucked me several ways until Tuesday, and that was only the dress rehearsal.

  “I said I wanted to kiss you earlier. At the restaurant.”

  “I know,” I lie.

  He laughs, his hot breath dangerously close to my hip. I’m not sure how he pushed my dress up past my stomach, but I don’t care much. I care about the string of words he mutters against my skin at the sight of my red lace underwear.

  “You’ve worn these all day?” he asks, his fingers lifting up the edge and brushing the red mark against my skin. “You’re gorgeous, Rea, and these—” he stops to kiss me through the lace against my center, leaving me breathless, “—are perfection.”

  “Where did you learn French?” I push at his shoulders and pull at his hair, frustrated. So fucking frustrated.

  Noah straightens and guides my body to sit up as his hands work behind me to unzip my dress. I turn around, resting on my knees as he moves my hair over to the side and slowly tugs at the zipper. “I’ve had a lot of time on my hands until you.” His lips chase the freshly bare skin down my spine until they land at the base of my back.

  I want to say something, to touch him, or explode. I’m not sure what exactly. I’m hot in his hands, a mess of bones and skin, and I can swear he’s taken me apart piece by piece tonight. I lean forward, quiet, when he pushes the hem of my dress over my breasts, and then slowly tugs it over my head. I roll over and sink against the mattress, my eyes meeting his. There’s focus burning in those whiskey-colored eyes. And lust. And maybe even love. I give in to it all, recklessly.

  I run my hand over the see-through lace of my bra and roll my hips, pushing up against his hand. This isn’t greed, not with him. We’re equals here.

  “Hold on to the headboard,” he says.

  I do as he says and close my eyes, only opening them again when he releases the front clasp of my bra and draws me into his mouth. The light pressure of his teeth rake against my nipple and draws out a moan from my lips.

  “I said I was going to kiss you.” His hands draw down my panties. Before I can object, he kisses me there again. Not softly. Noah can torture me with the way he softly handles me, but he knows that’s not all I crave. Instead, he licks my clit and grips my hips and brings me against his mouth with determined purpose.

  I moan again into my empty room. The half-packed boxes melt away, those books I spent four years lost in, the boy I foolishly thought I loved…those all disappear. They mean nothing, not when….

  “Don’t be quiet,” he says, softly kissing my hip.

  I catch my breath before his fingers slip inside me, his thumb pressed against my clit. I buck up on the bed and close my eyes, and scream.

  I don’t fall apart exactly. It’s not neat and perfect like that—it’s far better. Everything inside me rushes to a point and suddenly it bursts, like the sun flashing before it sinks into darkness. That’s what it feels like. Energy rushes through me before I relax and slowly melt into the mattress, slowly falling back into my own and whole again.

  My hands let go and I reach for him, dragging Noah up to cover my body. I kiss him, tasting myself on his lips. His body is a wildfire, his kiss a burning sip of whiskey. There’s no mistaking what’s happening between us. I might have tried to be blind to it during the past few months, but I’d be an idiot to say otherwise after tonight.

  “Please don’t leave just yet,” he says, raking his hands back through my hair to cup my head. Our eyes lock and I softly exhale, a stab of pain racing through my chest. “Come home with me. Come to Montana until you have to go to New York in a couple of weeks.”

  I lick my lips, fighting back the urge to kiss him, to feel his body against me again, to feel him inside me. “And then what?” I whisper.

  “Fuck if I know. But at least we won’t waste those last few weeks before everything changes. Having what we have now is better than nothing.” He lets my head fall back against the pillow, twines our fingers, and leans his forehead against mine.

  The birds begin to chirp outside my window, breaking the quiet, hiding our shallow breaths and racing heartbeats. This is the ledge, not that day in the stacks. You can’t help when you reach its edge, but you can decide if you’re going to leap.

  “Yes.” I kiss his temple before his mouth closes over mine. I mean to say more, but it doesn’t matter. I leap and with his answering kiss, he catches me.

  Chapter Ten

  Noah

  Reagan sticks her head out of the open window of my truck, the mountain air running through her long hair, filling the cab up with the smell of ginger and honey and hope.

  I smile to myself, hugging the corner of the familiar road, as she finally looks down and notices that we’re up in the sky. She peeks over her shoulder at me and scrunches her nose, then slides back down in the seat, stealing my aviators.

  “I’m not afraid of heights.”

  “You’re not afraid of anything.”

  She stretches and places her legs on the dashboard, and reaches for her iced coffee, pulling the aviators down the bridge of her nose. “Wouldn’t that be great if it were true?”

  I nod, my throat beginning to clog up. I hate this stretch of road. I shift in my seat, biting at my lip as I start to head down the mountain, keeping my eyes fixed on the double yellow lines.

  One, two, three….

  I suck in a breath, my heart racing in my chest.

  Four, five….

  On six, the phantom pain returns as I pass the small cross on the side of the road. I don’t look to see if my dad has put down fresh flowers. I haven’t looked on all my times home from Portland. I haven’t looked once since it happened. I don’t need to because every time I drive past, the world stops and I’m lying on the road again, unconscious and bleeding out, failing everyone I love.

  The day I got out of juvie for the second time, making promises I should have made before. The feel of her arms around my neck, the feel of her sloppy kisses against my cheek, her smile. The way I felt found for an hour before the car hit us and I shot through the windshield. If it weren’t for me, they wouldn’t be dead. If it weren’t for me, Isla wouldn’t be dying. But it’s because of me that I’m racing down the mountain, trying to outrun that day I’d rather forget. It’s because of me that everything changed.

  The deafening silence ebbs away to Reagan softly singing to herself, her attention focused on our decent down into the valley. If I could avoid this road, I would, but you can’t move mountains. And you can’t erase the past from yourself either.

  “Where are we going?” Reagan asks as we drive through the middle of town, past the general store.

  I beep the horn, something I do whenever I’m heading to the ranch instead of stopping by to see my dad. Besides, there’s a line of cars parked in front of the general store now that it’s tourist season.

  “My old house.” I leave out that it’s still technically my house since I bought it when my dad put it up for sale. He thinks I’ve been working on it for the new owner, some snowbird who flies in to ski during the winter.

  We pull off the main road onto a dirt drive. It winds up and around another hill, past a dense patch of mountain hemlocks before
the landscape levels off into golden fields that pour out to meet the big, endless sky on the horizon. The white farmhouse I grew up in sits tucked against the forest line at the foot of another mountain that soars above.

  It’s just a house now. Another reminder of what used to be. My dad put it up for sale soon after we buried my mother, and it sat empty for a while. I came home for summer break freshman year to see some local idiots had been squatting at the house, tagging it with dumb shit. I scrubbed the walls clean and found a real estate agent to buy the house once my advance checks cleared. Ever since, I’ve been working to fix it up. It’s not much right now. I only have a few pieces of furniture and the electric hooked up. But I figure if I can’t fix the past, but I can build a future. And my dad deserves this house.

  Dust from the hot summer day swarms around the truck as I throw it into park, stifling a sigh with a slap of my hand against the steering wheel. Reagan looks over to me, her shoulders free from the weight of Portland, and then she smiles. And everything falls into place.

  Her smile—my minutes crowded around this possibility and collapsed around it. And here she is with me, with a few precious weeks before the boy who fell in love with the angry girl at the library has to say goodbye.

  “Don’t say it,” she says.

  I have chapters upon chapters that I need to tell her, more to write about us in this short time. Some stories don’t have an end, not a clear one anyway. But as long as I have family here in Montana, I’ll be tethered here, and to my past. I’ll be paying for these sins of mine until I’m an old man, too broken to know better why he has to die alone. Hell, I feel like an old man now. God knows I’ve lived enough lifetimes already.

  Reagan jumps down from the truck then reaches in for her bag. She throws her arms up, spinning into the gilded summer night. Her skirt ruffles above her knees as her bare feet twirl over the shaggy crabgrass by the driveway. “I like that you can be a little wilder in Montana,” she says as I join her. “I like that you can hide away in these mountains.”

  If only she knew.

  I clear my throat, tugging her to my side, and drop a kiss at her temple. “Well, barn’s back over there,” I point to the left of the driveway. The fence I helped build for the paddock with my brother and dad is still there, but the horses are long gone. Yellow flowers dot the long grass. “And here’s the porch….”

  “Obviously.” Reagan spins out of my touch and takes the wooden stairs in a leap.

  I rest against the white column at the top of the stairs, watching her pad down the shiny gray floorboards to the chair in the corner, gazing out onto the fields and valleys below. A soft wind blows through the trees as the crickets’ chorus grows louder at the setting sun. Reagan is a specter, completely out of place in my mausoleum of regret. She leans forward on her arms and tips over the edge, gazing down at the forgotten flowerbeds my mother would work on after she had made us dinner. And just as quickly Reagan spins around to face me, propping herself up on the edge of the railing, her eyes filled with distance.

  “We’re not going to talk about it,” she whispers.

  I nod, stuffing my hands in my pockets. We don’t need to talk about the goodbye waiting for us because it’s suffocating us now, even before we can wonder about the end of things.

  “You’re going to have to give me a reason to hate you.” Her eyes break contact with mine, tracing the floorboards until she reaches the opposite corner of the covered porch. “It’s easier to hate someone, I think.”

  The bags at my feet were a much more hopeful thing a few minutes ago. Now it’s the dark windows of the house that call my attention, the void of life inside, all because of me.

  Me. I’m to blame. Even with Reagan.

  “Use your imagination, little fighter. I’m no saint.”

  She braces her hands across her stomach. “Do you ever think what would have happened if we never met him?”

  That’s such a loaded question. Beau’s my best friend and he’s helped me through the worst of everything after the accident since we met freshman year—the divorce, and dealing with Isla. But if he hadn’t met me in the library and seen Reagan, that would have gone differently too. I wouldn’t have had to love a girl while solidly on the sidelines these past two years.

  “No.”

  Reagan pushes off from the railing and softly steps over to me, her eyes downcast, her shoulders slumped forward. She inches closer, a whisper away from touching me, then bends down for her bag. “You’re a liar,” she says against my ear.

  I can’t fight the itch in my hand to touch her, so I brush back her bangs. I want to see so much more of her than the little she lets shine to the surface every day. I want Reagan’s bark and bite, that heart she stubbornly has hidden away in her chest. I want her secrets and dreams, to learn about her past, to find out what she wants from the future. I want to love her and for her to love me back, even if it’s temporary.

  I want to be able to say that for a few days, I knew what it was like to love the girl I was certain I was destined to meet, even if life wrecked the original plans. I want to know that for a few hours, a few days, we have the strength to bow and bend life to our will. I want so badly to know that we can have some say in life instead of constantly being knocked onto our asses and being surprised.

  Somehow, a blank page doesn’t scare me, but being brutally honest with her right then does, so I keep my mouth shut and look back out over the unending Montana night. I don’t deserve to be here and I’ve lost too much to believe we have any power over what happens to us.

  Reagan

  Auggie sits at my feet in the general store, the early summer night bleeding through the dusty windows to paint the floor fire orange. Noah and his dad are chatting with some tourists at the front of the store. Jim has a worn map across the wooden counter, his arthritic hand shaking as he traces the roads to Glacier National Park. There’s another tired old country crooner softly singing over the store’s speakers and everything seems perfectly in place, even me as I sit in the corner with a book I grabbed from Noah’s room.

  The brass bell over the screen door rings as the tourists leave. The door slams into the swollen jamb and the peeling emerald-green paint flakes off onto the stone path leading to the storefront. This place is somewhere time forgot, a moment that’s been on pause for years. I’ve never known anything like it.

  My phone rings, startling me and Auggie upright. Noah looks at me from across the store, the same intense want that’s been burning in his eyes since we arrived at the ranch two days ago. I’m not sure there’s a word to describe the feeling of knowing you have to let something good go. Either way, if it does exist, I hate it.

  Greg’s name flashes on my on screen and my heart lurches. I jump to my feet, answering and rushing outside, avoiding Jim and Noah. Auggie ambles after me as I stop and look both ways along the all-but-abandoned road through the center of Splendid.

  “Miss Landry. I’m calling with an update.”

  My feet move me across the road to sit on the grassy bank overlooking the wide, lazy river. My brain catches up, images of Kelsey and me as kids playing in the bayou flashes in front of my eyes. “Oh, good.” My answer is breathless. I’m breathless. If he’s found my sister, if my sister is alive…

  “But first I need more information about the last time you saw her.”

  And just like that, I feel like I’m being locked away in a closet again by my mother. Stuck in the dark, hopeless. “So you haven’t found her?”

  Greg clears his throat. “You and your sister moved around the country quite a bit. And because of the time you spent homeless, it’s going to take time to track her down. People can disappear easily if that’s what they want.”

  “But she didn’t want that.” Anger pollutes my voice, my defenses ticked. Kelsey was my sister, my best friend. It wouldn’t make sense for her to want to leave me behind, even if everyone else has. She was everything to me. “She couldn’t.”

  A car horn bee
ps in the background, somewhere in what sounds like a busy intersection, followed then by a raspy sigh. “I’m going to tell you something, Miss Landry, something that you’re not going to want to hear, maybe something you haven’t learned yet in life. It’s taken me my whole career of chasing down leads, of asking all the questions, to figure out that we’re all just shadows in this world. People, including your sister, never share everything, even if you think that’s the case. People guard their true selves because that’s all we have when life strips the rest away. And mostly, our true selves are nothing to write home about.”

  I pluck a handful of grass up by its roots and toss it into the air, fighting back the ugliness brewing in my belly. “I know my sister,” I say simply.

  Doubt creeps in though, as it’s done for years, because why would my sister leave me? I think back to her cradling her head in her hands, rocking back and forth on the sidewalk. Of her waiting for him, of those pretty promises she told me about how everything was going to be okay. Even after he had threw us out of the motel the night before because I wouldn’t sleep with him. He struck Kelsey when she tried to stick up for me, then turned his fists on me. My busted lip hurt, but surely not as bad as Kelsey’s bruised cheek, even if she claimed otherwise. She always told the world to fuck off so much better than I did.

  I answer the rest of Greg’s questions and hang up, leaning into Auggie as we both stare ahead, too broken to move. A rough hand curls over my shoulder, flicking the hair off of my hot neck.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Noah says.

  I don’t argue.

  A river cuts through town, racing through the valley alongside the train tracks and the road. It hides when you’re standing in front of the general store, its banks the only thing you see unless you cross street. Across the banks, the forest is a dark divide, a warning to stay on the right side of the river, to keep moving along on the road. For all its beauty, I see the decay in Splendid. In a sleepy town that isn’t exactly sleepy anymore, it’s geriatric.