Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

by Lisa Renee Jones

He looks down. “Okay. I’m glad. Obviously, I would have given you anything, anyway. But I’m glad it wasn’t just some reminder of the fact of life. It wasn’t like that for me, even like it was. I didn’t want to just be some reminder that there is something nicer in the world. I didn’t want to just be another kind of guide out of some darkness for you. I—”

  I take a breath, and it is so hard to. “God, Evan, I’m sorry, I—”

  “No, no. My point is, I didn’t want to be just this safe guy you could grab the shoulder of so you could walk out of whatever mess you’d found yourself in, but I was willing to be, if that’s all it was. I want you to know that. I wanted you to understand my willingness, but I also want you to understand what it is I want. I don’t want to table that, I want to talk about that Jenny, I want to talk to you about what I want.”

  It’s hard to keep him in focus. The snow’s bright, even without the sun. My tears are faster than the snow, and I’m trying to hold them back, my throat aching. “Okay, you can. You can tell me. What do you want? Tell me what you want.”

  “Jenny Wright.”

  He says my name, low and fierce. Grabs my wrist, then slides his hand over mine.

  He looks up at the overhang covering my stoop. “Most of the time, if we’re lucky, all through life, we never really know anybody because, I think, it’s only possible to know someone if they’re losing.”

  I rub my hand across my face. “I don’t want to lose.”

  “I know. My mom didn’t want to lose, either. She fought and fought. She fought so long, eventually I thought I had to fight for her. But what I didn’t get then, is that she fought so long she figured out what she was fighting for, which was ordinary things, like the love she enjoyed with her kids and her friends, and by then, it was okay, she could rest in that. She could be comfortable knowing she had managed some kind of life that meant so many people loved her, that she was always going to lose that love, that like all of us, she was always going to die, but that she didn’t have to fight for it to enjoy it, to know it.”

  “I fought you.”

  “I know. And your fight has been so beautiful, Jenny. When I saw the pictures on your desk, realized you were the same woman who I was crushing on over the Internet because she liked to see, liked to understand things, and then, after I had been with you in your lab, seeing what it was you were fighting for, that’s when I knew I couldn’t help you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because to help you, I have to believe that what I teach you gives you the world. I didn’t believe that anymore.”

  “What did you believe?”

  “I believe you’re losing just one version of the world and I wasn’t sure the one I was offering to you, as Evan Carlisle, OT, was better. I had to be sure of that to help you. Instead, I started to become sure of something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You. Just you. Your world. You and your big brain and not just that you fight, but the way that you fight, like a scientist, like someone who will find the answer, no matter what. Like someone who trusts the data as they come to tell you something. Like the world is observable and beautiful both.

  “I want to see that world with you. I want you to take me where you’re going, because I can’t even imagine it. All this stuff we haven’t been able to see about each other? Doesn’t it feel like if we just held on to each other we would be—amazed? That’s what I feel like. I feel amazed. I feel like none of this is comfortable but it’s not supposed to be comfortable, if we’re down in it, really living.

  “Also, this thing, this thing that happened between C and Lincoln, I feel like it was like, this aperture. Like you couldn’t, at first, handle too much light, you’d be too exposed, so Lincoln was a way to let in just enough, and then maybe, I hope maybe, you can take in more light, and be Jenny, with me, who was always Evan. It was always me. And my amazement is so connected to all of it, to all these tiny moving parts that added up.

  “The only thing I can’t imagine is being without you. Everything else, I don’t know if it’s dark or light, but that’s okay. I think that’s okay.”

  “In theory,” I say, softly, but my insides are all on alert, interested, circling around how something small, a lot of small somethings, are coming together.

  “Yeah?”

  I look at him, tall and bulky and graceful, his eyes squinting and blue, his eyebrows mashed together. “Theories aren’t bad. It’s just that, really, it takes a lot of data to make a theory. It takes a lot of data that piles on top of itself, and is the same data, over and over. A theory also has to bear a lot of variation and still come out the same way in the end. Close-up, all the different methods you use to start the experiment could look scattered and chaotic, but as you pull back, you can see how all those different methods are converging into the same conclusion.”

  “A lot of data?”

  “A lot. For a theory, you basically need all the data.”

  He reaches for my face, holds it, and then he’s stepping close to me, and I’m stepping close to him.

  I’m so glad to be kissing him, his snowy-mint smell just like he said, amazing. Hard to imagine it’s real because it’s something I want, so much, and that I have.

  When do we ever get what we want?

  Maybe we do if we’re willing to lose everything, or maybe what we want is so bound to loss, is so inevitably something we will grieve even if we manage to find and hold on to it, that to grab what you want is to accept the grief of losing it.

  If I love Evan, I will lose him. If not now, inevitably.

  To be willing to love him is to be willing to lose him, to grieve over him.

  I have always wanted to see the world, and I have seen so much of it—the small things that make up the whole origin of the beautiful world.

  I can’t imagine how it is I will see them, now.

  I can’t imagine, but I will, I’m willing to lose, and lose, and lose again and again just to be able to see what it is I can in all the ways I can’t imagine, standing on my porch in the cold, kissing Evan.

  “Come in,” I tell him, our breath making clouds around us.

  “Okay.”

  He follows me in, still kissing me, holding back my hair.

  He’s backing me into the sofa, and when my knees hit, the lamp on the end table goes on.

  He looks over at it, at us suddenly bathed in light in the room dark from the snowstorm.

  I laugh. “I put a little motion detector on it so I wouldn’t have to remember to turn it on in low light, before it was too dark. I can turn it off.”

  He looks at me, sparkling again. “No. I do not want you to turn off that light.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Touch yourself,” he whispers.

  “I don’t—” But I can’t finish. I don’t want to? But I do, I feel heavy and tight, like everything’s bigger, open, and a pulse has started.

  He runs a finger over the gusset of my pants, soft. “I want to watch you.” He looks in my face. “It’s just—I’ve imagined it.”

  Oh. I know it is what he wants.

  It’s what I want.

  “You, too.”

  He doesn’t hesitate. He sits down next to me and unbuckles his belt, opens his fly, and starts to reach inside his briefs, looking at me. When he pulls out his cock it’s so hard it seems to spring into his palm, and then his gaze falters from mine and he looks down, his ears and cheeks red.

  That he’s a little shy about this, too, gives me the courage to come close, hook a leg over his, unfasten my pants.

  He lets go of himself and pulls me by my nape to rest my forehead against his, then wraps his other hand around the base of his erection, letting out a desperate huff of breath.

  When I slide my first and second finger over myself, I make the same sound.

  “Show me,” I whisper.

  I watch him drag his fingertips up and down the underside, pressing a little with his thumb right under the head. That make
s him suck in air and reach to kiss my cheek.

  “You, too,” he says—exchanging my words for his.

  I watch his hand gripping and stroking, and I push my two fingers right through my folds, slow, just to revel a little in how good and wet and shivery it feels.

  When I touch myself, he grips and strokes harder, faster.

  Oh.

  With my jeans mostly on, all I can manage is tight, slick circles and it’s not long before it’s unbearable. He’s already bucking into his hand, his strokes more like pulls, and his hand at my nape is tight.

  He’s looking at my hand circling and rubbing under my pants, and I admit, it looks good.

  It’s torture not to kiss him, but if I did, I couldn’t watch.

  He’s slick, flushed, so hard, and for some reason his strip of pale stomach right over his dark curls is crazy-erotic and if I was using my mouth, I would start there, sucking pink kiss marks over that place until he was pulling my hair to get me to suck in the tip, taste him, lick down his length.

  Now I want his skin, I want to see more of him, not just his beautiful hand slicking up and down, that crazy-making strip of skin.

  I grab the edge of his sweater and yank it up, just to see his muscles bunching, where’s he’s gone rosy, the hair on his body, and he bucks when I do, when I decide to use both hands in my eagerness to see more of him.

  He stops and helps me get his sweater and T-shirt all the way off, and God, it’s like I’ve never seen a guy before, and I don’t even know where to look—those curving shoulders, the lean muscles of his arms, the hair in the furrow bisecting his chest.

  I press over myself with my whole hand, just looking. His erection is so naked and awesome against his skin, I want to touch him.

  I do, softly, he’s hot, so hard.

  When I look at him, it’s impossible not to kiss him.

  Our kiss is open, soft, breathless. His tongue leaves my mouth to kiss over my neck and throat, and the way he does it makes me move against my hand again, little pushes to keep myself from going crazy, that just end up making me crazier.

  He pulls off my pants and my underwear at the same time, and then his hands are over me, searching and shaping and making me crazy. His touch is firm when he smooths over my legs, and then firmer over my inner thighs as he drops to kneel on the floor.

  “Oh, okay,” I whisper.

  He kisses my knee, grabs my calf, and hikes one leg over his shoulder. “Yeah, oh.”

  He grabs my other knee and pushes it wide, and I close my eyes, my face hot, everything hot, his mouth kissing my hips, licking them.

  “Touch your breasts,” he says, and I pull off my shirt, pull down my bra cups, squeeze and curl my toes when he licks through me, his voice, a hum, in his throat, one of his hands around the leg at his shoulder, the other circling my clit.

  And it’s like this, in this circle of light, the snow falling fast through the window I can see over his shoulder, his mouth insistent and unhesitating, this is how I fall apart.

  He lets me find my breath again, and then I need him closer. “Come here,” I tell him, but he’s reaching behind him, for his coat, then pulling out condoms.

  He sits next to me on the sofa, almost sheepish, crazy-aroused, his skin flushed, warm, all against mine. “I mean, if you want to.”

  “I like your hopeful condoms.” I turn in his arms, hike my leg around his.

  “You make me feel hopeful.”

  I kiss him, smiling, because he says that like he’s both happy and in pain, trying to please me. We kiss, slow, until we can’t kiss slow, and then we just kiss any way we can, rubbing and touching.

  He backs me down into the sofa, bracing over me, letting me watch him put on the condom, stroking over himself. Then he drops his forehead to mine and slicks through me, not really trying to enter me, everything going slow.

  “Wait,” he whispers.

  “Okay,” I say. “You are.”

  “Give me a minute,” he says, kissing my neck.

  I buck a little, the buzz only a little desperate, but it feels good to let him play, and kiss. “Take a minute.”

  He puts his mouth over my ear.

  Then his movements slow more.

  “I love you,” he says. “I love you.”

  Then he moves inside, and I can’t breathe, his hands tight at my nape and shoulder, his thrust sure, and it opens everything, everything, and there is so much to see, I can’t even speak, or even name everything I am looking at.

  He’s still telling me he loves me, soft, almost to himself, the way he moves, for once, doesn’t have any grace in it.

  And it’s that breathless lack of grace that yanks me over, sensitized and raw, the light from the lamp too bright, and before I think he can even understand what it is I’m saying, I tell him, “I love you, too.”

  But he hears me, his arms tight around me, his laugh perfect, both of us coming all over each other.

  Once we catch our breath he pulls me to sit, and I drape in his lap. He gets the throw from the back of the sofa down around us.

  I reach over and turn the lamp off, and the ambient light from the windows halos into my vision, distorted from all the darkness around it.

  We watch the snowfall.

  “What did you bring?” I ask, just before I start to feel sleepy—I remember the paper bag he came here with, still on the porch.

  “Oh, I forgot. I made you a pinhole camera.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. From a cereal box. I was hoping you’d like that.”

  I do like that. I turn and look at him, and he touches over my face. “We can go take pictures later?”

  “When the snow lets up.” He yawns. “What does f/16 mean?”

  “It was the setting on my camera when I took the last picture of my mom.”

  I snug my arms around him and feel him eventually relax into sleep.

  It’s so quiet, I think I can hear the snow.

  I close my eyes.

  Listen harder.

  Between Evan’s breaths, I can definitely hear it, the sound of snow.

  I listen so I know the very moment it lets up.

  Christmas

  “Okay,” Evan says. “I’m hanging it up.”

  I can barely hear him over the bathroom vent, and I have my nose pressed against his shoulder blade because of the horrible chemical smells, but when he reaches up to unscrew the red lightbulb and turn on the bank of lights over the vanity, I stop his arm.

  “Not yet, we haven’t had the moment of the big reveal.”

  He runs his hand over my hair and turns me in his arms so I can lean into his chest.

  “So,” he says. “It’s kind of dark in here.”

  “It’s a darkroom.” I breathe in his smell to crowd out the developing chemicals.

  I don’t mind the dark, and because it’s Christmas, we’ve been busy putting lights up everywhere. High, so everyone knows we’re okay. In here, the dark has kept the fragile negative from getting overexposed.

  Out there, the Christmas lights expose everything, us, our new and fragile love, the New Year.

  Light and dark have their purpose, in them, we can see different kinds of things, or protect others. Or sometimes, the most beautiful lights would not be seen as well without some blackness behind them.

  Joy is myriad and luminescent.

  He kisses my neck. “How well can you see the picture?”

  The room is small, with lots of white and reflective surfaces, but it really is light tight. The red bulb makes everything grainy, and I really can’t pick up good visual details, of anything, but I’ve been in here so long, Evan talking me through the whole process because I’ve wanted to know everything.

  He’d been as precise in the process as a seasoned bench scientist, explained his homemade enlarger, the developer, stop bath, fixer, and the stages of rinsing.

  The bathroom was crowded with both of us inside, hardly any room to move, especially with the piece of plywood
he’s cut to lay over the vanity as a table.

  Everything he had explained to me before he put in the safelight and I watched his grainy shadow move my print through the process.

  I had insisted on an eight-by-ten, and I was anxious, because his enlarger could be a little iffy with the film exposed from the pinholes. I’d had to wait until yesterday to use the camera to expose my film because Christmas Eve’s Eve had stayed gray and stormy, and we’d stayed naked.

  Christmas Eve dawned sunny, and we took my camera outside to expose my film.

  To make out in the snow that had gotten hip deep through the drifts.

  My mom came into town today, a full trolley of luggage with suitcases that made Evan’s van incredibly useful, and I was so proud of her for playing it cool with Evan.

  Even if I couldn’t.

  There has been lots of laughter, and knowing looks, and looks that know are the best kind, of course. There have been presents, impractical ones.

  Misunderstandings cleared up to make way for love in the New Year.

  Carols are playing from every radio station.

  I reach up and curl my hand around his nape, pull him down to me.

  “Is this the part where I’m irresistible?” he says. I can feel him smile against my temple.

  “There’s always that part, but yes, and I’m drawn to you despite my hard-boiled and gruff exterior.”

  I kiss him, not an almost kiss.

  “Is it good?” I ask. He breaks our kiss to look up at the picture, hanging behind me. It’s an exposure of me—I know that.

  We set the camera up on a fence post and I stood in its line of exposure, close-up. I wanted to see how it saw me.

  “It’s beautiful, Jenny. You’re looking right at the camera. Your eyes are—so happy, wide open. Your hair’s kind of blowing across the bottom of your face, but it looks pretty and wild like that.”

  “Turn on the light,” I tell him.

  He turns on the vanity lights, and I step in front of the picture hanging up over his bathtub.

  I look gorgeous.

  I touch the print on the edge of the paper, to tip it up away from the glare.

  “What’s she thinking?” Evan asks.

  “I think she has a lot to look forward to. I think she knows that it isn’t how her eyes see that makes her a scientist, but who she is that lets her see the world. I think she’s thinking about how much she hasn’t seen, yet.”