by A. J. Pine
As Adam cues up last night’s episode of The Vampire Diaries, I try to slide unnoticed to the opposite corner of the couch.
“Hey,” Adam says, gently grabbing my hand. “Did I say something wrong?”
Instead of answering, I tug my arm back playfully, but he doesn’t let go. Instead he pulls me toward him.
It’s a game of strength, and his overpowers mine in every sense of the word.
I rise to my knees in the hopes of gaining leverage. I pull my arm forcefully from him, and I’m free.
Burrowing into the corner, I pull my knees to my chest. The touch of our fingers last night was enough to convince me how hard it would be to resist. What was I thinking sleeping with him? Last night overwhelmed me. Despite what he learned, Adam didn’t judge me. He didn’t hate me. And as soon as he drew me into his arms outside my apartment door, I couldn’t go in without him.
Adam may be a good guy, but he is a guy after all. Zoe’s right. There is something more between us. How can he want something more but not want it all?
We can’t pretend like there isn’t a question hanging in the air, so I ask it.
“What do you want from me, Adam?” I mean to sound angry, to sound stronger than I am, but the tremble in my words says otherwise. “I knew this whole sleeping together thing had stupid written all over it.”
It’s one thing to go to sleep emotionally spent, allowing myself a few hours of the fantasy. But I’m alert now. Nothing good can come of getting any closer. Because the closer I get to Adam Carson, the further I am from denying what I want.
He sits up and sighs. His feet on the floor, he rests his elbows on his knees and presses the heels of his hands to his eyes.
When he looks up, I see everything I saw in his expression last night outside the bar—confusion, frustration, the hint of betrayal. But what I’d expected to be there—anger—wasn’t. Not until now.
“This is strange territory for me too, Jess.” He shakes his head and looks away for a moment. “Can I ask you something? One question, and I need an honest answer.”
I hesitate, and he fills in the gap.
“How did you sleep last night?”
How did I sleep? Have we moved to idle chitchat instead of dealing with what neither of us wants to deal with?
“What?” I ask, not wanting to go there with him, to admit that despite the dream, I made it through the night, slept later than I have in a year, because I knew he was there.
“I asked you how you slept. It’s a simple question, and I don’t know if there’s a simple answer. But I know something happened last night when you were asleep. I saw it, Jess. I saw what you won’t show when you’re awake. But you let me hold you. You let me help you through it, and fuck. I don’t know. It felt right. I’m not asking you what that was all about. I’m not asking why you’d sleep with an asshole like Jake but freak when I want to hold you on the goddamn couch. I’m not asking you any of that. Only if you felt the same thing I did.”
My breathing hitches, but I steady myself quickly. I want to be angry at him, to hate him for how he sees me—pathetic and weak, but how can I hate him for the truth?
“You just did it,” I say, my voice a shaky whisper. “There’s your judgment. Telling me you’re not asking Why Jake is the same as asking, and admission of what you think of me. I don’t blame you. You have every right. I only wish you didn’t fool me into thinking you’d given me the benefit of the doubt.”
I stand up from the couch, ignoring his stricken expression. It’s a few steps to my room, a few steps until I can close my door and put the barrier back up between us. I’m almost there when he says my name, and the invisible tether turns me back around.
“Dammit, Jess! That’s what you get out of what I said? Judgment? God, you only hear what you want instead of what I’m trying to say.”
He stands at the breakfast bar. One hand combs through his dark, sleep-tousled hair.
“I almost got engaged last year.” His voice quiets as the anger dissipates.
“What?”
He leans against one of the stools, not quite sitting but not quite standing.
“I had the ring picked out and everything, even put down a deposit.”
I cross my arms around my abdomen, cradling the knot in my stomach that comes with this information. Jealousy. I’m jealous of someone I’ve never met, someone Adam was with before he ever met me.
“Why are you telling me this?” I don’t want to hear any more. I don’t want to hear how he was ready to offer someone else what he and I would never have.
“I’m telling you this so you understand I’m not judging you. At least, I didn’t mean it to come out that way.” He runs his hand down the length of his face. “Things weren’t right even before they were horribly wrong. Maybe I thought proposing would get us back to where we were. I didn’t know how to fix it, and she didn’t know how to end it. So she did something she couldn’t take back, something I wouldn’t forgive.”
Shit. Don’t say it. Please don’t say it.
“She wanted me to find them. She texted me, said we needed to talk.”
He pauses, a strange laugh escaping from his lips.
I want to tell him to stop, that I understand. I don’t need to hear any more, but no words come. I’m frozen where I stand.
“I know you think I’m an idiot for staying friends with him, but there’s a history with me and Jake that goes back further than her. He was a willing participant, but she used him. It wrecked our friendship for a while, but I don’t know. It’s complicated. I guess I don’t cut people out of my life easily.”
While I cut myself out of the life I knew. Self-preservation. That’s what it’s been for me since I lost Bryan and Ashley.
“What about her?” I ask, clearing my throat.
He laughs bitterly. “She’s from back home. She came to visit the weekend it happened. I haven’t talked to her since that night.” He sighs. I guess she wasn’t as lucky as Jake.
“Where’s home?”
We’ve known each other for months, but we’re strangers. I don’t think I can handle hearing about him with someone else, but I want to know him.
“Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Far enough that I have my distance.”
But close enough that she’s a few hours away.
I lean against my closed door, gripping the handle. Escape seems like a good plan. My eyes study the floor because I can’t face him. I can’t stand him looking at me like he must have looked at her because though I didn’t know it, though it happened before we met, my night with Jake is a sort of betrayal.
“How can you look at me? You defended me to him and almost cost yourself the game tomorrow. How could you stay here with me and not tell me this?”
I turn the doorknob. Without looking back at him I say, “Just go, Adam. You never should have stayed.”
I pull the door closed behind me and collapse onto my bed face-first. Instead of tears, a scream rises from the pit of my stomach, and I let it out into the muffled safety of the pillow. This is why I don’t hear the door open, but I feel the weight of him on the edge of the bed. Breathing gets more difficult by the second, but I keep my face down.
“Last night you asked me, ‘Why you?’”
I roll to my side, the need for oxygen, and to see him, forcing me out of hiding.
“I have an answer,” he says, waiting for my reaction.
“Okay.”
“It’s because I’ve been there, Jess. I’ve been so fucking lost the only option I thought I had was to self-destruct. Tracy told me to cut back, to sit out a game or two when we were ahead, but the only thing that kept me from losing it was being on the court, even when a growing injury was the consequence. I didn’t think anything could break me more than I’d already been broken, so I kept at it until it nearly ended my career.”
I bring myself to a sitting position. His harsh laugh rises to the surface. Adam’s wounds are still fresh, and I added to them. I want to wrap my a
rms around him and be there for him like he was for me last night. When he shouldn’t have been able to stand my presence, he held me and told me he wanted to sleep with me, to sleep and wake together. All this time I thought it was Bryan I was looking for in the dark when strange arms wrapped around me while I slept. But waking always had the same, empty reality.
Until this morning.
“I was a mess the morning I walked into the hospital on my own two feet and left without the same ability. I was a mess until I walked in the lab the next day and met you. And if you were telling me the truth last night, that Jake was the last guy you brought home, then I know something changed for you that day too.”
My arms wrap tight around my knees. “Two broken people don’t add up to either one of us being fixed,” I say, wishing I was wrong.
“I’m less broken now than I was then,” he says.
But no matter how much better I get, I’ll always be damaged.
I don’t tell him this. Instead I say, “It was the best and worst I’ve slept in over a year. The answer to your question.”
His brows knit together.
“I have dreams, sometimes. Shitty dreams.”
His jaw tightens. “You had one last night.” He doesn’t ask what it was about.
I nod. “It’s hard for me to go back to sleep when it happens because I’m scared I’ll slip back into the dream.” Now for the part I don’t want to admit. “But I did go back to sleep. I felt safe because I knew you were there.”
The corners of his mouth turn up into a grin, but it doesn’t reach his eyes that wear a sadness to mirror mine.
He crawls around my cocooned form and sits beside me on the bed. His long arm wraps around my shoulder, and he pulls me into him so I lean in the nook where his arm and torso meet.
“This is all I was trying to do out there, on the couch.”
He rests his chin on top of my head.
“I respect your boundaries,” he continues, his voice low and soft. “But they’re a little confusing.”
“I know,” I admit. “I’m new to this too. Kind of making it up as I go along.”
“So . . .” He draws out the word. “Hugging, like this, is okay?”
I sigh into him.
“When it’s clearly needed, yes. Hugging is okay. But we can’t get gratuitous.”
“Noted,” he says, in a clipped, cool tone I hope is him messing with me, but I can’t see his face. “And what about the couch?”
“What about it?”
“Can I sit with you like this on the couch while we watch your horrible show?”
I can hear his smile now.
“Horrible!? You are just as addicted as I am!”
His chest vibrates with laughter against me.
“Doesn’t mean it’s a good show or that I’ll ever admit to watching it.” He pulls me tighter. “Answer the question, Jess. Television viewing arrangements?”
I breathe in deep through my nose. So many of my senses are on full alert right now—touch, smell, and though I’m not looking at him, I picture his angular cheeks, his square jaw, and his full lips. The sight of him lives behind my closed eyes as I feel our chests rise and fall in unison.
“Leaning,” I say, the only word I can get out to describe our current situation. “Leaning is good.” My voice is light and airy, like I’m drifting off to sleep. But I’m wide awake, selfishly drinking in every ounce of him I can get.
Without thinking, I reach a hand behind me and brush the side of his face where Jake took his cheap shot. My fingers skim the morning stubble on his jaw. His lungs constrict under me, and I know I shouldn’t have done it. But he leans in to my touch, and I’m the one concealing a gasp.
“How does it feel?” I ask, guilt dripping off my words.
“I’m fine,” he says.
I justify my hand lingering on his face with the thought that I owe him. He’s already been hurt because of me, twice in one night, and still he stayed. The longing hangs between us. If he wants what little I’m able to give, I can honor that request. But it’s the warmth of his skin on mine, the need to fill all of the empty spaces with his touch. Why shouldn’t I deserve this too? Maybe a tiny pocket of happiness is better than none at all.
My hand slides to the corner of his mouth, my fingertips resting on his lips.
“Jess.”
His voice is a whisper now, one that makes my body scream. I will follow his lead. I will give him what he wants, what we both need. Maybe we can seal some of the cracks for each other. Maybe the next time we break, there will be fewer pieces to pick up.
It’s almost imperceptible, the brush of his lips against my fingers. We teeter on the edge, and if I ignore it, if I don’t acknowledge the kiss, I will pull us back from the brink. The boundaries will remain.
I pull my hand away and turn so I kneel beside him. His dark eyes gaze at me with more intensity than I’ve ever seen. We both want this. No, we need this.
My fingers find their way back to his mouth, skimming his bottom lip. Adam’s eyes close, and my name is a soft moan escaping with his breath.
“Jess.”
Every part of me pulses with the nearness of him, and my lips join my fingers in quiet, longing exploration of his mouth. There is no kiss yet, only lips searching lips before we each let go of the last of our restraint.
He opens his eyes and looks at me through dark lashes. His hand reaches for mine, pulling it gently from his mouth.
“Are you sure?”
He breathes the words into my mouth, and I don’t allow myself time for rational thought.
“Yes,” I breathe back. “Yes.”
Both of his hands cradle my face, his fingers tucking strands of hair behind my ears, thumbs brushing my lashes, the whole time my lips still resting light upon his.
The only thing I hear before we cross the barrier is my own shallow inhalation, and then tentative exploration gives way to the pressure of his mouth on mine.
His kiss is halfway between tender and hungry. I straighten on my knees and run my fingers through his hair. He releases a shaky breath, and my back arches, pushing my chest against his.
My right knee slides over his outstretched leg so I’m straddling him. And this is it, the line crossed. I expect the fear and the logic that has gripped me for so long to pull me back. But instead, as my lips crush against his, everything else melts away. I am suspended in this moment for as long as time will let me.
Adam’s teeth graze my bottom lip, and I gasp with pleasure. His tongue traces the same path, and I open my mouth, inviting him in. He tastes like cinnamon, and I smile against him realizing he’s used my mouthwash.
Our tongues tangle and untangle, sweeping across teeth and lips. I’ve had first kisses before, but not like this. Even with Bryan, the boy I knew I’d fall in love with, there was never this kind of heat, this undeniable need.
Bryan. Even when I’m awake, he’s here, reminding me how stupid I am to hope, to want more than I can give. The realization is a wake-up call, and I pull away from him, panting.
I knew I wanted him. I knew we both needed this moment. But I can’t need him. Not when I know he can’t stay.
That was never an option. And my selfish longing isn’t worth what all of this will end up doing to him.
Neither of us says a word.
Adam’s smile is broad and beautiful until his eyes lock on mine. It fades as recognition blooms. He can see it on my face, the reconstruction of my walls, and I wonder if our small moment was time enough to put any of the broken pieces back together, or if all we did was make a new crack.
12
A clamor of giggling and cabinets opening and closing assaults the painful silence filling my room. I pull the door open, relieved not to have to look at Adam. I expect to find Zoe bulldozing through the kitchen like she normally does, but instead I see a half-naked guy. Thank goodness for jeans.
He’s not as tall as Adam, but he’s lean and muscular with shaggy brown hair flo
pping over his eyes while he cracks eggs into a bowl. He looks up, most likely able to feel me staring at the stranger in my kitchen, and a boyish, one-dimple grin greets me. Something is odd, though, more than half-naked-stranger-in-my-kitchen-making-eggs odd. It’s not until Zoe sneaks up behind him, throwing her hands over his eyes in an obvious game of Guess Who?, that I see it. I follow ridges of his stomach up to his toned pecs, his neck, watching her hands drop from his eyes to a new destination, the pointy tips of the ears poking through his tousled hair.
“Shit! I’m sorry. I . . . I didn’t know anyone was out here!”
I slam the door shut, banging my head gently against it. I’m trapped, unable to face Adam, equally unable to intrude on whatever it is Zoe is doing out there with a guy seemingly dressed, or undressed, as an elf.
The door rattles with Zoe’s knock, and I jump backward.
“You can come out, Jess. It’s not like we’re doing each other in the kitchen.”
I pull the door open a crack, but it’s enough for Zoe to see the person sitting on the bed behind me. Her eyebrows rise with accusation, and I shake my head lightly.
“Good morning, Vampire Boy,” Zoe says in an equally accusatory tone.
“Hey, Zoe.”
Adam’s voice is flat, and I hear the soft creak of the bed as he shifts his weight. He’s just as trapped.
“Come on out and meet Spock.”
Ahhh. Not an elf.
I pull the door the rest of the way open and see Spock happily scrambling eggs on our stove.
Zoe introduces me over the breakfast bar.
“Jess, this is Spock. Spock, Jess.”
He waves a spatula at me and then tends to his eggs.
“But his name’s not really Spock, right?”
He smiles at the eggs but lets Zoe do the talking. She doesn’t take her eyes off of him though she’s speaking to me.
“No, but the ears fit so well. Don’t you think? Actually, his name is Zach, but you can understand the confusion, right?”
“Your brother’s name? Uh . . . yes, I get it. Spock it is. But the ears?”