“Yes. THAT.”
“You wouldn’t have a single doubt in your mind if I really was trying to fuck you tonight.”
“Oh,” I said, both relieved and disappointed. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” Finn said, his breath warm against my neck.
My nipples were hardened due to the curious sensations coursing through my body.
“Is there a difference between beautiful and attractive?”
Finn didn’t answer at first. I’d finally resolved that he’d decided to stop talking to me when he spoke. “Yes. But it can also be the same.”
“How is that?” I asked, feeling his heartbeat speed up against my back.
“There are two kinds of beauty. At least to me there are. The other day I saw an old woman on the side of the road selling mangos. She had silver hair and no teeth, but the biggest smile on her face. Her eyes were bright blue and lit up any time a customer stopped to buy a mango. I thought she was beautiful.”
He traced slow lazy circles on my lower stomach and I shivered.
Fin pulled the blanket up higher. “Better?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, although my shiver wasn’t from being cold.
“So what’s the second kind of beauty?”
“The kind you can’t stop looking at no matter how hard you try.” Finn lowered his mouth so his lips moved against the tip of my ear when he spoke. “The kind you want to fuck.”
I swallowed. “What does that kind of beauty look like?” I asked, breathlessly.
Finn’s hand rose on my stomach until his fingers lightly grazed the underside of one of my breasts. “Right now it looks like freckled skin and gold flecked eyes.”
I gasped.
“Now it’s my turn to ask you a question,” Finn started. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Where did you…”
A bolt of lightning chose that moment to light up the window followed by thunder so loud it might as well have come from inside. I flinched and started to shake all over again.
“I’m…I’m afraid of storms,” I admitted. “I guess after what happened tonight I should be.”
Finn held me tighter. “It’s called Astraphobia,” he said, out of nowhere.
“Wha…what?” I asked, opening my eyes and blinking rapidly when I realized he was shaking me. I must have drifted off.
“Stay with me,” Finn said, his voice smoothing over my body like a healing salve. “Astraphobia is the fear of thunder and lightning. That’s what it’s called.”
“How do you know that?”
“Someone I used to know had it pretty bad,” Finn’s breath tickled my neck. “I used to tease her about it relentlessly, thinking she was just being a baby until I looked it up at the library and realized it was a real thing.”
Another particularly brutal series of lightning strikes flashed like machine gun fire. Possessed by fear, I tried to leap from the bed, but Finn pulled me down and pinned me to the mattress.
With a grunt, Finn flipped me around so I was facing him, and when I tried to pull away again he did the last thing I ever expected him to do.
He kissed me.
Chapter 19
Finn
I am so fucked.
Chapter 20
Sawyer
Kissing was something I was told I would only ever do with my future husband once we were married. When I heard this the first time, I was a young child, and being married seemed like something so far off in the future that I filed both marriage and kissing away in my mind under a category called: THINGS SO FAR OFF IN THE FUTURE THEY AREN’T EVEN WORTH THINKING ABOUT NOW.
Somehow, as I’d gotten older, I’d never quite retrieved it from the archives.
Until Finn.
So, there I was. Lying in his bed.
Naked. Exposed.
Vulnerable.
It was almost as freeing as when I changed out of my modest clothes except a thousand times more frightening. More intriguing.
More everything.
Surrounded by the most delicious humming sensation. My heart pounding. My palms sweating. My brain not quite able to believe what was happening as his lips pressed against mine, then slightly parted before pressing again.
Finn’s lips were soft and full, the scruff on his chin lightly scraped against my face. But that wasn’t all I was feeling. All sorts of new and confusing sparks were igniting everywhere inside me. Jolts of pleasure coursed to places around my body he wasn’t even touching, making me aware of those places, and then aware that I might want him to be touching them.
Kissing before marriage was a sin punishable by eternal hellfire.
On that day, with Finn’s lips on mine, I realized there was no truth to that lesson. It didn’t feel like hell. It felt magical and wondrous and beautiful.
It was pure heaven.
However, if I was wrong, and it turned out that kissing was punishable by an eternity at the devil’s side, then kissing Finn might just be worth the risk.
It was as if the lightning had come inside the house and was buzzing between us. Connecting us. Pulling us closer.
At one point, Finn’s fingers dug into my hips, holding me in place as if to prevent me from coming any closer. We were both breathing heavily. Thunder boomed all around us, shaking the walls. I was still in shock from the kiss to react to the fear of the storm that was no match for this new kind of fear taking hold.
“Why did you…?” I asked when he pulled back.
“Distraction,” he explained, clearing his throat.
“Distraction,” I repeated slowly. “Did you use that technique with your friend too?”
“A lot of dogs have the fear of storms,” Finn explained, trying his first method of distraction again. Talking. “They sense them coming before people do and the pressure in the air makes some of them go nuts. They even sell these jackets on late night TV that you wrap around them so that they feel like they’re being hugged and comforted, although if that works then why not just give the dog a hug?”
Finn’s hands left my hips and wrapped around my back, pressing my chest to his but keeping the lower half of our bodies separated.
“Are you hugging me like a dog?” I asked curiously.
Finn chuckled. “No. And just so you know, I don’t kiss dogs like that either.” Finn smelled like the rain and sweat and I inhaled deeply before being shaken awake again.
“Did you know that Nascar racing started because drivers running moonshine needed to soup up their cars to run from the police through the mountains?”
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
“Finn?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s Nascar?”
Finn brushed a wet hair from my forehead. His lips turned upward into a small smile that made my stomach flip. I could tell that he wanted to ask me how I didn’t know what it was, but he refrained. “Car racing,” he answered.
“Oh, that makes sense.”
A palm frond was slapped up against the window by the wind, once again sending my fear into overdrive and between the possible concussion and my fear of the storm I felt myself dipping back into that dark place.
I closed my eyes tightly. Finn’s voice sounded like it was far off in the distance until he pushed me onto my back, covered my body with his and kissed me again.
This time the kiss was anything but brief. It was slow, methodical, deep. Instead of being lost in the storm, I was lost in Finn’s kiss.
And then I realized why he’d kept holding me at a distance from the waist down when something smooth, hard, and hot jutted up against my leg.
He was completely naked.
“Why are you kissing me again?” I asked, feeling a surge of sensations rushing between my legs. I felt the overwhelming need to part them but Finn’s thighs were around mine, keeping them together.
“Distraction,” he groaned against my lips, repeating his answer from earlier. His tongue parted my lips
and when it connected with mine it opened up an entirely new level of kissing. I heard myself moan into his mouth.
Finn responded by rocking his hardness against my thigh. I didn’t know what was happening, all I knew was what I felt and what I felt was confused and flustered and like I needed something.
Finn.
I needed more Finn.
I lifted my hand and was about to feel Finn’s backside when there was a loud noise from the other room. A door slammed. “Finn, you in here?”
I recognized the voice as Miller.
Finn reached to the nightstand and grabbed a pair of sweatpants that he put on under the covers before getting off the bed and hopping up onto the small dresser on the other side of the small room.
He placed a t-shirt over his lap to hide his arousal.
His arousal…because of me.
If I’d felt empowered from buying new clothes, I felt downright sinfully happy knowing I had that effect on Finn.
By the time Miller appeared in the doorway wearing a dark blue EMT jacket, Finn looked completely unaffected. While I, on the other hand, was sure my face was red, my hair was mussed, and my painfully hardened nipples were so erect the blanket I was holding in front of my chest couldn’t cover them.
“Hey, Sawyer, how goes it?” Miller asked, crouching next to me and unzipping his medical looking tote bag. “Storm finally let up a bit. Just a little rain now.”
“Hey, Miller.” I returned his smile. “I didn’t know you were an EMT.”
“I wear a lot of hats.”
“You’re not wearing a hat,” I pointed out.
He touched his bare head. “Touché, oh freckled one. Touché.”
“You two know each other?” Finn asked, sounding irritated.
“Yeah, we sure do. Didn’t you know? We’re in love,” Miller said, winking at me while he fitted my arm with a blood pressure cuff. “If Josh never comes to her senses and has all my babies, this one here is next in line,” he tapped the tip of my nose. “Now be a good girl and tell me where it hurts,” he wagged his eyebrows suggestively.
Finn growled and Miller mashed his lips together, making a face Finn couldn’t see.
I couldn’t help but giggle, but when I did a pain exploded in my head. I rubbed my eyes.
“Careful now,” Miller warned, checking my pulse.
Miller took out a small flashlight and shined it in my eye. “I teach a pottery class on Wednesdays too if you’re interested plus, I am a professional medicinal herb distributor,” he said proudly.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“He sells weed,” Finn chimed in.
After a few more minutes of checking me over Miller announced that he had both good news and bad news.
“What?” Finn stood from the dresser.
“The good news is,” Miller looked up to me. “You’ll be fine. Your pulse is a little high. My guess is that you have a mild concussion at the most. You can get your head scanned at the ER in Bellville if you want a second opinion.”
“I think I’ll be all right,” I said, already feeling better.
“What’s the bad news?” Finn came around to stand on the other side of the bed.
Miller kept his eyes on me. “The bad news is that you’re in Finn Hollis’s bed when you should be in mine.”
We both chuckled. I couldn’t say the same for Finn.
Miller packed up and Finn walked him out, leaving the door open. They were talking in hushed tones by the door. Finn periodically glanced up and over to me and I found myself staring at his lips.
The lips that had been on mine.
I wondered if everyone’s first kiss felt that way. Like they were going to jump out of their skin because suddenly a simple touch wasn’t a touch anymore, but something that penetrated deep down beyond the surface.
No wonder kissing was such a big deal.
Because IT FELT like a big deal.
Finn was a lot of things. Highly irritable. Exasperating. A complete storm of negativity. But he was also selfless when it came to rescuing me and great at distraction.
So great in fact, that while he was kissing me, I’d almost forgotten that he hated me.
Chapter 21
Finn
I’ve met lot of girls in my life.
A. Lot.
Yet there was something so different, so distinctive about Sawyer.
I hadn’t slept. I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about her body and the way it fit perfectly against mine. She smelled like the lavender fields my grandfather used to own.
She was fragile but strong as nails all at the same time. There was a strength in her fear. A determination I admired.
And I’d kissed her.
Twice.
I’d wanted to do a lot more.
Her lips. Fuck. Her beautiful pink lips against mine made me ache to taste more of her. All of her.
Her slight hesitation and obvious inexperience only made me want to teach her.
Show her things.
The first time I kissed her, I told myself it was just supposed to be a distraction to ease her shaking. To keep her awake. The second time was for no other reason than because I couldn’t NOT kiss her again. When her body softened against mine, a caveman style surge of triumphant desire pumped through my veins.
I had to resist this overwhelming need to claim her. Mark her.
Make her mine.
She’s not yours. She can never be yours.
And it wasn’t just a need to take her body that I was fighting. It was a different kind of desire that made me pause.
The desire to want to live.
The connection between Sawyer and I was like this tangible thing around us. I’d never felt anything like it.
Not even with Jackie.
Jackie.
Then came the inevitable guilt that usually twisted my gut until I felt real physical pain at the thought of moving on without her.
Most of the time it was paralyzing, but in bed with Sawyer it wasn’t screaming in my ear as it usually did. Instead, it was merely a whisper in the background.
Josh had said Sawyer had been through a lot. I didn’t know what, but the way she acted like I was going to hurt her in her camper that first night gave me a good idea.
Yet, Sawyer was still out there doing all she could to have a life. In a strange town. With strange people. All alone.
And then there was me. Doing all I could to throw my life away and forget I ever had one.
Chapter 22
Sawyer
When I woke up in Finn’s bed the morning’s first light had yet to make an appearance.
I’m alone?
My lips were still swollen from Finn’s kisses. It was the only way I knew what had happened was real.
My stomach flipped. My mind raced.
I sat up slowly, holding the sheet over my breasts, tucking it under my arms.
Finn’s room was small, just large enough for the simple queen-sized bed and a tiny dresser. The sheets were navy blue and soft and so was the matching blanket.
There was no closet, just a stack of folded clothes, mostly jeans and undershirts on the floor next to the dresser.
Thin strips of white slatted wood made up the walls, running horizontally around the room. Some of the strips were broken in places. Some were missing completely exposing the sheets of wood separating the inside of the house from the outside.
I got up slowly, taking the sheet with me, waiting for a moment before attempting to take a step.
No pain.
No dizziness.
I grabbed one of his shirts from the pile and tugged it on. It was huge, covering my thighs completely.
The coffee table had an empty whiskey bottle laying on its side. The walls were the same slatted wood as in the bedroom which was the only bedroom from what I could see.
A small three cushion sofa sat in the middle of the room. There was no TV, but in the corner, was a stack of well-read paperbacks right next to
a shotgun and a tall fishing pole leaning up against the wall.
There wasn’t a single picture or knick-knack to be found. Nothing personal at all. The old hard wood floors were stain and polish free. They creaked as I stepped over them through the tiny kitchen that could barely be classified as a kitchen with only a two-burner stove and a mini fridge on top of a base of cabinets with no doors and a few drawers. A single shelf lined the wall above and the only thing it held was dust.
Unlike my camper which was…
My camper!
I sprinted to the front door and ripped it open. The sun had just peeked above the tops of the trees, a big beam of its first rays illuminated the pile of twisted metal that used to be my home.
“No!” I darted across the lawn and slid to a stop before I crashed right into it.
All around the camper was everything I owned. My new clothes which I hastily gathered in my arms. My mother’s box which was now empty. I scanned the surrounding area. Most of the contents were floating in puddles.
My heart sank. I dropped to my knees and lifted the note my mother had given me. The ink dripped down the page along with the last words my mother ever had for me.
My necklace! I’d taken off the sunflower pendant she’d given me. I crawled around the grass and mud on my hands and knees until something in the corner of my eye caught my attention.
I got to my feet and picked it up. It was a picture. One I’d never seen before. I stumbled over to Rusty, my glorified lawn ornament, and got inside. I shut the door and held the picture in front of me.
The photo was of my mother when she was about my age. She was standing in front of Rusty and Blue with a big smile on her face wearing jeans and a mid-riff bearing yellow tank top. 1995 was written on the back of the picture, the year before I was born. Underneath it was a repetitive watermark for OUTSKIRTS PHOTO-MAT.
Mother HAD been in Outskirts after all. Before I was born.
How was all this possible?
The picture was also proof that Rusty and Blue weren’t just bought for me recently and stored away in secret. She’d owned them for over twenty years.
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