by Kennedy Ryan
Messy.
“What?” Banner touches her chest like my words wound her. They probably did. “How could you say that, Jared? If you knew what this is doing to me, that I’ve hurt him and ruined our friendship, you wouldn’t say that.”
She attributes more empathy to me than she should.
“If the shoe were on the other foot,” she says, blinking her puffy eyes at me. “How would you feel? How would you respond?”
She should be glad this is purely hypothetical. I’m not as civilized and kind as Zo, but I think we’ve established that.
“I would deal with him first.” I tug on her hands until she’s standing in front of me, close enough to feel each other’s heat. “I would beat him to just short of dying because we both know I’m much too pretty for prison.”
She cracks the smallest smile as I hoped she would.
“And then,” I say, my voice dropping to a rough vibration in my chest. “I would deal with you.”
I trace my thumb over her lips, squeeze her chin so her mouth opens the smallest bit and I can see her sweet pink tongue. My thumb fits neatly inside, and I push her jaw closed, watching, waiting for her to suck down. When she does, my dick twitches. I draw a sharp breath through my nose and caress the lining of her jaw and the sharp edges of her teeth.
“You, I would fuck clean.” I bend until our foreheads press together. “I would fuck you until you felt like a virgin. Like I was your first. I’d stay inside you until your body couldn’t remember how he ever felt. How anyone else ever felt.”
She blinks quickly and pants around my thumb in her mouth. I pull out and track a wet trail down her neck and over her collarbone.
“But I plan to do that anyway.”
Her lashes drift closed and sweep over the splintered veins fanning out from her eyes and across her cheeks where she has cried so much.
Over him.
I knew this would happen. That I would have to watch her grieve this way for him, but it still upsets me. Angers and frustrates me. I want her to be able to discard him and move on, focused only on me, on us, and not give him a second thought. Ironically, she wouldn’t be the woman I want if she did that. I can be so heartless in so many ways, and I love that she is good. Not like me at all. It’s sometimes inconvenient and more trouble than it’s probably worth, but it’s what makes her glimmer. I want all that shine for myself and will endure her crying for another man to keep it.
She steps away from my touch and shakes her head as if clearing away the thoughts and feelings my words stirred in her.
“I kind of flaked today,” she says abruptly. “Skipped my workout, didn’t go to the office, missed a meeting. I need an early start tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I say, waiting for her to try to kick me out.
“So . . .” she looks off to the side and bites her lip “. . . so I’m gonna turn in.”
“Great idea.” I toe my shoes off and fake a yawn. “I’m beat myself.”
Her mouth gapes open with shock.
“You aren’t spending the night.” She folds her arms around her midriff, protecting herself. “We can’t . . . Jared, I can’t . . .”
“We won’t.” I tip up her chin and make sure she sees I mean it. “But I am staying. I don’t like the state you’re in right now.”
“Surely you don’t think I’ll hurt myself.”
“I think you’ll condemn yourself,” I correct. “The way you’ve been condemning yourself in this room all alone in the dark all day.”
Her seven freckles are lost in the capillaries dotting the skin around her eyes. I’m fully prepared to argue if she protests anymore, but her shoulders slump and her head falls to my chest and she sighs heavily. Exhausted.
I gently turn her toward the hall, link my arms around her middle, my front to her back, and walk us to the rear of her house. I have no idea which room is hers. She turns us to the right and into a spacious room, darkened. I have a vague impression of a large headboard and bed, a side table and a bench of some sort at the foot of her bed, but it’s all shapes. I want to turn on the light because I’ve had enough of touching her in the dark, but I don’t. I slip my thumbs in the waistband of her pants and push down. She goes completely still as they slide over her thighs.
“Jared, I told you—”
“I know. We won’t.”
I peel the T-shirt over her head and unsnap the bra at her back, tensing as her breasts spill free against my chest.
“Is there something you want to sleep in?” I ask, looking around for her closet or a dresser.
And surprising me, as Banner always manages to do, she tugs my T-shirt over my head, works silently at my belt and zipper for a few seconds, head bent, slides my jeans down, before looking back up at me.
“Yes,” she whispers, sadness and hope knotted in that one word. “I want to sleep in your arms.”
26
Banner
Like I have so many mornings before, I wake up feeling guilty. Guilty that I dreamed of Jared with Zo warm and solid at my back. Then in the gray predawn light before all the alarms clamor to kick me out of bed, my senses pick out the subtle differences. The arm around me grips tighter, higher with a large palm cupping my breast. The torso at my back is smoother to the touch, a fine line of hair arrowing down the middle instead of the thicker hair on Zo’s chest. And the scent. I smell him and see a deserted laundromat and hear the thump-thump of a spin cycle.
Pleasure sets guilt aside long enough for me to breathe Jared in, and then shame shoves its way through as the memory of yesterday’s catastrophe with Zo reminds me that all is not well. That although being in Jared’s arms feels so right, in my world now nothing is.
“You’re awake,” he sleep-slurs into my hair, giving my breast a gentle squeeze and sliding his hand down to my waist.
After all these years and in spite of all the pounds I’ve shed, I still tense when he touches my stomach under his Kerrington T-shirt, which I put on at some point during the night. The rolls of fat I worked so hard to rid myself of are back. At least in my mind and at least for an instant.
Everything jiggled when I fucked her.
It’s amazing, the power of words, cruel or kind, even from someone you don’t respect. How they stay with you, healing or haunting. Growing up a good Catholic, I heard tales of God creating the universe with nothing more than His words and His intentions.
Let there be light.
And there was light.
Life and death in the power of the tongue.
And we are made in His image, with the same life-giving, life-stealing power nestled between the rows of our teeth. So many times that power has been used against me. My imperfect body the ammunition others needed to put me in my place when I was too smart, talked too much, soared too high. Oh, they knew how to clip my wings. They aimed for my heel, the only weakness they could find, and their aim was sure.
“Ban?” Jared asks, his hands tightening at my waist. “You’re awake?”
I shake off those old foes, my insecurities, and turn over to face him.
“If I wasn’t,” I say with a voice graveled by sleep. “I would be by now.”
A strip of white flashes in the gray light, his smile chasing the last of my self-doubt away. I watch the shape of his hand approaching, feel it warm against my face. Sense him drawing closer until his lips curl in a smile he buries into the curve of my neck.
“We slept together,” he murmurs, sounding so pleased I want to reach over and turn on the lamp to see his face.
This man, this guy practically cuddling isn’t the Jared Foster I’ve come to expect over the years. He’s made his hunger, his desire clear the last few weeks, but there’s something . . . else. Something that harkens back to our days at the laundromat when we were first friends. When I looked forward to him loping through Sudz’ door with his backpack and a bag of dirty laundry. Those two people, those kids, lived a hundred years ago. Things felt so complicated that night when Prescott pulled hi
s prank, but now, with Jared in a bed I’m used to sharing with my ex-boyfriend, with my career imperiled because of our recklessness, that night feels like what it was.
Child’s play.
“That first time,” he continues, toying with the curling hairs at my temple. “Was so quick and in the dark. And the second time was rushed and on your desk.”
He traces the bones of my face, lingering on my lips.
“When can I make love to you slowly, Banner?”
My body screams NOW while he kisses my nose.
“In a bed?” he asks.
A trail of kisses blaze my jaw line.
“With the lights on?” he whispers.
He threads his fingers into my hair and licks into my mouth, and I forget that my breath may not be the freshest and that I’d probably look a fright if he turned the light on. He moves over me, his strong forearms framing my face on the pillow, lean hips cradled between my thighs. His erection is insistent, already demanding. He moves and the tips of my breasts brush through the T-shirt against his chest. Our breaths mingle in a gasp at the feel of each other under the sheets.
“Can I make love to you?” He sprinkles kisses down my neck. “Can we turn on the light?”
When I turn my head to find the lamp with my eyes, my face presses into the pillowcase. These sheets are clean, but the faint traces of Zo’s cologne freeze me.
“I can’t, Jared.” Tears gather in my throat. “Not here. Not now. The bed. The sheets smell like him.”
He stills over me. The lighthearted, almost boyish pleasure I sensed in him from the time I woke withers. I feel it die in the air.
“What the hell did you say?” Now he sounds like the man I’m used to. Irreverent and hard. “The sheets?”
He fists a handful of Egyptian cotton.
“These sheets?
“They’ve been washed,” I say hastily. “It’s just a trace of his cologne, and I can’t.”
He rolls out of bed, reaches back, drags me out. I land unceremoniously on my rear while he strips the sheets from the bed and strides, surefooted in the near-dark, out of the bedroom with them bundled in his arms.
“Jared.” I scramble to my feet. “What are you doing?”
I check the laundry room, but he’s not there. I hear rustling under my sink, and by the time I reach the kitchen, he’s stuffing a thousand dollars of bedding into a garbage bag. I lean one shoulder on the doorjamb.
“You just tossed a fortune’s worth of sheets in the trash,” I say calmly.
“I’ll buy you new sheets.”
He strides over, grabs my jaw, and kisses me hard, pressing my teeth against my lips. I deliberately soften under him, open my mouth to his, hoping to soothe him with my compliance. At first I’m not sure it will, that I can. Brutal hunger drives him into my mouth, chasing and capturing my tongue. I whimper, reaching up and tangling my fingers in the soft hair curling at his ears and neck, and he changes. He shifts and his hands gentle on my face. He presses his forehead to mine, never breaking contact with my lips.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles into the thawing kiss. “I know I’m being ridiculous.”
“Hmmm,” I agree, kissing under his chin. “Zo is the only one entitled to outrage in this situation.”
I pull back and peer up at him in the growing sunlight breaking through my kitchen window.
“We’re in the wrong.”
“Are you telling me,” he says, sliding his hands down to the small of my back. “That it felt wrong when I was inside you?”
“No, I—”
“Have you ever felt anything like that before?” He lifts his brows, waiting in my surprised silence for a second or two before going on. “Because I haven’t. Not with anyone else.”
His unexpected confession knocks my answer right out of me, and I blink at him owlishly. He dips to push my unruly bedhead hair back.
“How did it feel for you?” His eyes never leave my face.
Perfect. Right. Finally.
Those are the words that leap to mind when I recall Jared inside of me, moving with the certainty of a thousand times when it was only our first, then only our second. Like in some time hole, behind a secret door in the cosmos, we had been making love to one another since time began.
“It was good,” I say instead, avoiding the probe of his eyes.
“Banner, give me this.” He’s as close to pleading as I’ve ever heard him. “Tell me the truth.”
No one has ever pushed me the way Jared does, demanded my surrender at every turn. I am the resistance, and yet I can’t resist this man.
I drop my forehead to rest against his chin. “God, it was so good, Jared. It was like nothing I’ve felt. You know that.”
“I don’t know. I hoped.” His words melt into the curve between my neck and shoulder. “I want you so bad right now.”
Pressing my breasts into his firm chest is an involuntary response to the desperate need, to the passion roughening his voice. I angle my head to kiss his neck, sucking at the warm skin. He tilts his head, offering as much of him as I want.
I’m losing myself in the taste of him, of his saltiness on my tongue, when “Girl Gang” blasts on the nearby counter. We both jump and then laugh, startled by the loud music shattering the early morning serenity.
“What the hell?” Jared walks over and picks up the device, turning it in his hand and looking for the off button.
“Alexa, stop,” I say, mixing humor in my command.
Alexa rewards me with her abrupt, obedient silence, but Quinn’s app immediately follows, charging in with reinforcements.
“Girl, you better rise and grind,” shouts from the living room.
“Is this every morning?” Jared asks, folding muscle-corded arms over his bare chest.
“Pretty much.” I walk toward the living room to catch the app before it digs out a follow-up phrase to make sure I’m out of bed.
I’m inputting the pizza from last night, trying not to think about my points overage, when Jared comes behind me, rests his chin on my shoulder, and hugs me from behind. At first I hold myself stiffly in the circle of warm muscle, but he runs his nose along the line of my neck, smells my hair like he’s absorbing me. I sink back into him and drop my head against him.
“That’s it,” he whispers in my ear. “That’s all I want.”
His erection twitches against my ass, and I turn to look at him with one lifted brow.
“Okay, not all,” he admits, laughing and rocking me from side to side in his arms. “Is this the app your lashes were working overtime to get Kyle’s help with?”
“He actually did help Quinn a lot.” I chuckle and tuck my head deeper into him behind me. “And, yes. This is the Girl, You Better app.”
“Lemme see.” He plucks the phone from my hand and walks away to explore the app’s functions. After a few seconds, I realize my whole life is logged in there. What I eat, how much I exercise, when I—
“You log sex?” he asks, his voice deceptively mild.
“Uh, yeah.” I reach for the phone, but he holds it above his head where I can’t reach. “Jared, give it to me.”
“Wait.” He walks a few feet away, still sliding his finger over the screen. He leans against the mantelpiece over my fireplace. “I’m not in here.”
“What?”
“We had sex two days ago. I see your activity from yesterday, but I’m not in here.”
Stunned silence drifts into discomfort as we stare at one another across the gulf of my living room.
“I . . . well, I didn’t have time.” I bite my lip and know that isn’t entirely true.
“Ahhh.” Jared nods and holds the phone up to read. “Seven a.m. Yoga. Morning salutation.”
I close my eyes and swallow any protest. I know where he’s going, and he’ll see right through any denial I make.
“Nine o’clock. Three boiled egg whites. Zero points.” He glances up at me. “Well, that’s good, huh? Who knew egg whites are free foods?
Three slices of turkey bacon, three points.”
“Okay, Jared. I—”
“Lunch,” he continues. “Three points. Not bad.”
“You can stop now. I know—”
“Wow, when I look back, I can even see you had a four-point salad after fucking me,” he says, looking confused. “But somehow there’s no record in here of us actually fucking.”
“You’re being ridiculous.” I brush a hand over my eyes.
“Let’s see about good ol’ Zo.” He scrolls, eyebrows lifting. “Oh, look. Excellent records here. Fucked. Fucked. Fucked. Fucked.”
He offers me a wry false grin.
“He’s had a good summer.”
I walk out. This is an exercise in futility in which I won’t participate. In my spacious closet, I jerk open a drawer, blindly sifting through all the items I have from Quinn’s line. I need to do something with my hands that does not involve throttling the nearly naked man in my living room. I grab a sports bra, capri workout pants, and a tank. I turn, only to slam into Jared’s chest.
“Should I record this for you, too?” he asks. “What are we doing? Yoga? Pilates? You’re so meticulous in all your records, other than me, of course.”
“I’m not doing this with you,” I mutter.
I try to step around him, but he grabs me and we struggle until both my wrists are cuffed in his one hand behind my back. It’s not uncomfortable, but I’m completely immobile. His handsome face is sketched in lines of grim frustration.
“Am I your bye?” he demands.
“My bye?” I shake my head, clueless. “What does that even mean?”
“On the way to the Carters for that party, you said we should all get at least one bye song. A no-judgment freebie,” he says, a muscle flexing in his jaw. “We should all get one shitty choice. Am I your shitty choice, Banner? The mistake you don’t want sullying your perfect record?”
“I’m not perfect.”
“I know you’re not,” he says sharply. “And I’m fine with you not being perfect, but apparently, it’s a problem for you.”