by Audrey Bell
“You made me.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well,” he said. “You don’t remember very much. Do you? Jack, I’ll never let go,” he mimicked.
“Oh god.”
“Never let go.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, even though I totally believed him.
“Jack!” he mimicked.
“My voice does not sound like that.” I got out of bed. His laughter followed me down the hall and into the bathroom, where I turned on the shower and stepped under the water. I was washing my hair when I heard the door open and close.
Jack stepped into the shower behind me. He smiled when he felt the water. “You would like it boiling.”
I kissed him and he gently eased me toward the wall. He pressed his hands against the tiles, close to my head, while he kissed my lips bitingly. He ducked his head and brushed his lips against my neck, his wet hair tickled my chin and the muscles in his shoulders rippled as he bent and kissed the flat ridge of my breast bone. I took a breath and felt his mouth against my fluttering heart.
He dropped to his knees and kissed me lower. My hipbone and my groin and then just a bit lower. His tongue was soft and warm and when I felt it in me, I rose up onto my toes.
I heard his hitching breath, the pleasant gurgle of water running down the drain, the quiet roar of the shower.
He sat back on his heels, his hands on my hips, his tongue driving me crazy, and I nearly lost my balance.
“Jesus, Jack.”
He laughed and the muffled vibration ran through me. I grabbed his wet hair and bit my lip to keep from crying out as he skillfully took me higher and higher.
I lifted my arm to my mouth, and bit into my wrist when I came. “Oh my god, oh my god,” I murmured when he was done.
“Hey, girl,” he said softly. He pulled me down, so we were both sitting in the shower and he washed the shampoo out of my hair as I leaned my forehead against his shoulder.
“Where’d you learn that?”
“Took a seminar,” he whispered.
Afterwards, I lay on my bed breathing deeply while he sat on the edge of my bed getting dressed. He was staring at a framed photograph of my father.
“So, what’s your deal with your dad?”
“No deal, really,” I said. I looked up at the ceiling. “Wasn’t around much for there to be a deal.” I took a breath in.
“Hm,” he said.
“What’s your family like?” I asked. I only knew the basics. His mom and his older brother. That his father had died when he was a kid and he didn’t ever talk about it.
He exhaled. “Soldiers and do-gooders, the lot of them.” He smiled.
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah, I don’t know where I came from either,” he joked.
“I didn’t say that,” I said.
He dropped the aloof grin. "“My grandfather was an Admiral in the Navy. Old-school.” He finished buttoning his soft flannel shirt and smiled. “My older brother idolized him.”
“Are you still close?”
“He died,” he said softly. “Five years ago. Heart attack.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. He was old.” Jack cleared his throat. “He’d be really proud of Alex.”
“I’m sure he’d be really proud of you too.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he smiled. “I didn’t really mean it like that. Just that Alex is so much like him.”
I nodded. “It must be hard for you knowing he’s in Afghanistan.”
“My mom worries,” he said, deflecting the question. “But doctors usually stay pretty safe.”
“You told me he was perfect, right?” I asked, remembering our first conversation in the car.
“Yeah,” he rubbed his chin. “Alex is perfect. He had to grow up kind of quick. He was always trying to get me in line.”
“How’s it been for you? Knowing he’s over there?” I asked softly, pushing a little bit.
“It sucks,” he said. He exhaled heavily. “It sucks like you wouldn’t believe.” He smiled and picked up a picture of me and my mother. “Is this your mom?”
I nodded. I didn’t know why I kept that picture on my dresser. It mostly made me sad about how I felt like I hardly knew her.
“God, she’s beautiful.”
“Mm,” I said. I’d heard that so many times. “Yeah, she is.”
“She looks just like you.”
“Not really.”
He smiled. “Just like you. Your smile is different, though.”
“How?”
He shook his head studying it. “I don’t know…when you really smile? It’s warmer. Are you close?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“She never lets her guard down,” I said. I shook my head. “Not with anyone. Not even with me.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Well, that explains a lot.”
He set the photograph back down on the dresser and then climbed onto the bed.
“I let my guard down with you.” I looked at him. “More than I probably should have.”
“Yeah, after I put up a fight,” he kissed my forehead. “So, you have no deal with your dad. And your mom doesn’t let her guard down. Divorced?”
I nodded.
“Remarried?”
“Oh, more times than I’d care to count. Both of them. My dad’s single again, but my mom’s on her sixth husband. I went home for Christmas. And I went to my house, and there was someone else living there.” I laughed. “She didn’t even tell me she had moved. Or that she had gotten remarried.”
“Seriously?”
I laughed. “Yeah.”
He let out a low whistle. “Did you say sixth husband?”
“I said sixth husband,” I said. “Are you close to your mother?”
He shrugged. “I was a handful in junior high and high school. Just an angry kid. Got kicked out of a couple schools. I told you that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyways, the third time it happened she sent me up here to live with Bobby. Which helped.” He cocked his head. “Some.”
“I didn’t know you lived with him.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Senior year. I’d have never gotten into Northwestern if he didn’t teach here.”
I looked at the mix of vulnerability and regret on his face. “Did you get less angry?”
He smiled. “I got in a few fights freshman year.”
“Really?”
“That’s how I met Xander. He kicked my ass,” he said. I rolled my eyes and he laughed at me. “Nah, I’m not angry anymore. Maybe I never actually was angry. I just think I missed my dad a lot.”
“So you fought people?”
He nodded. “When you lose someone important, not everything makes sense. Being angry was easier than being hurt. Being alone was easier than letting people get too close. I feel like you know something about that.”
“Yeah,” I said softly.
“Because of your parents?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I could never really count on them. They were always making promises they could never keep,” I breathed. “But then I met David. And he’s always been there.” I bit my lip.
“David’s a good kid,” Jack said decisively. He rolled onto his back.
“He broke up with Ben.”
“That’s good,” he said. He smiled. “That’s really good.”
“Yeah,” I said through a yawn. “I’m relieved.” I stretched my back “God, I’m so hung-over.”
He got up.
“Where are you going?”
“Gimme a sec.”
He came back with a Gatorade, kicking the door shut behind him.
“Oh, you are a good, good man.”
He smiled, handing it to me. “Wait until you hear my demands.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“We have our parents' weekend semi-formal,” he cleared his throat. “In two weeks. I’ve
never gone before,” he confessed. “But I kind of want to this year. Alex is on leave and my mom and Bobby will come. Anyways, I thought we could go together.” He shrugged. “Only if you want.”
I was startled, really, by the invitation to meet his family, more than to his formal. “Yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”
He nodded. “Good.” He grinned. “I was kind of worried you’d say no. It’s like so against the rules it’s not even funny.”
I smiled. “Well. I have to say, Jack Diamond, you’ve demonstrated a deplorable lack of respect for all of my rules.”
He chuckled. “Never met a rule I couldn’t break.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said. “At least you deliver Gatorade.” He got back under the covers and kissed my damp hair.
“I’m disappointed my shower performance was less impressive than sugar water delivery,” Jack said.
After we had breakfast on Sunday, we scarcely had a moment that wasn’t spent together. Maybe it was the hangover, but I couldn’t get enough of him.
“So, this is the library, huh?” Jack said, as we approached the building so I could work on a paper for my Arabic class. “You realize I am a library virgin, right?”
I opened the door. “You need to be quiet.”
“Thank you for that valuable bit of information, Hadley Arrington. I will treasure it all my life.”
I rolled my eyes. “Did you actually bring any work to do?”
“No, you said you were going to the library. And that means the only place I could possibly have sex with anyone is in the library.”
He said this last sentence as we stepped into the eerily quiet library. And half-a-dozen heads whipped around to look at us. He smiled and waved. I gripped his forearm tightly.
“It’s like a cave.” He announced loudly. He glanced around. “Actually, a tomb.”
“Shut up,” I whispered.
He rolled his eyes at me. “What now?” he asked in an exaggerated whisper. He followed me to the second floor, to one of the tables by the windows overlooking the lake. He smiled as I sat down.
“You do this a lot, don’t you?”
“Go to the library?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, I go to the library a lot, Jack.”
He laughed and sat down across from me. He kept his backpack on, clearly having no intention of doing anything productive, as I started up my computer and got out my notebook and Arabic textbook.
“You’re the real deal, huh?” Jack asked.
I looked up. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, with the Arabic stuff. You really just want to be a war correspondent?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“Why?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It’s just what I want to do.”
He smiled. “Not good enough.”
“What?”
“You’re the most deliberate person I know. Why war journalism?” he asked. “I mean, what made you want to do that? Did you see a movie? Read a book? Have a friend?”
I rubbed my chin and thought back to the moment I first realized it. “I think it started with Nancy Drew.”
He smiled.
“She was a detective, but it’s kind of similar work. You ask a lot of questions and figure out who’s lying and who’s telling the truth and all that jazz,” I said.
He smiled. “Okay. So, this is Nancy Drew: Mysteries of the Middle East.”
I laughed. “No,” I said. “Then, you know, I read another book.”
He nodded.
“Um, about the holocaust. Number the Stars.” I rubbed my chin. “And it just seemed like the older I got the more I realized how many terrible things had happened that nobody had bothered to notice until the destruction was basically complete.” I paused. “It’s so easy to focus on our own lives, and it’s so terrible, and…my parents focused on their own lives. It didn’t make them any happier. My dad made a lot of money, but my mom just kept looking for someone else for herself. And I thought, you know, if I was doing this kind of work, writing about what was going on so that people couldn’t ignore it, then that would be enough.” I shrugged. “It would be enough to know I was doing good work, important work. And right now, the place where people need to know what’s going on is mostly the Middle East.” I flushed. Long, earnest speech. Not my style.
He smiled.
“What?”
“I like that,” he said.
“You like what?”
“I like that your reasons for being a journalist are totally naïve and idealistic,” He grinned.
I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t say it was profound.”
“No, it is kind of.” He smiled. “And it’s good to know you’re not a complete cynic.”
I focused on not blushing.
“So, maybe you’ll come around on the dating thing.”
“I won’t,” I said.
He shrugged.
“I’m serious,” I said, slightly annoyed.
He chuckled. “Don’t get mad.”
“I’m not mad. But, I am serious that I just want to get the job at the Times and focus on that. I don’t want there to be any confusion.”
He nodded. “No, I know.”
I flipped the page of my book, feeling him watching me.
“You mind if I go?”
I shook my head. “No. Not if you want.”
He paused, seeming to reconsider for a moment. “Sorry, just…claustrophobic, you know?”
I nodded, although I didn’t know at all. And I watched him go. I watched the other girls watch him go, too. He really was handsome. And he was popular. And for a second, I wondered if he had just realized that I wasn’t that popular or that pretty and that he really didn’t need to be sitting in the library with me.
Chapter Thirty
As we’d planned, David and I wandered throughout the Chicago Institute of Art. “This is boring,” I said, much to his chagrin. I’d been going along with David’s flurry of plans, all of which I knew were, in part, to help him get over Ben, who just wouldn’t stop calling him.
David hadn’t called him back, and I trusted that he wouldn’t. But, whenever he said he needed to get off-campus, I went with him.
“Seriously,” I said. “I’m bored now.” I looked at the painting David was gazing at, trying to determine exactly what was keeping him transfixed.
“How did a San Francisco heiress end up less cultured than a South Dakota farm boy?”
“You were not a farm boy and I’m not an heiress. And I don’t live in San Francisco anymore. Remember?”
“Whatever. Look at the artwork. Stop acting like a Neanderthal.”
I yawned. “I’m not acting like a Neanderthal. I’m acting like I need a nap,” I insisted. “Which I do, because this is boring.
He snorted. “Don’t worry. We’ll go buy your prom dress next.”
“It is not a prom,” I said furiously.
“I can’t believe you’re going to a parents’ weekend formal,” he said.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Are you going to get a corsage?”
“Look, I just need to find a dress. And shoes,” I said.
“You know who you should call?”
“No.”
“Your fabulous mother.” He stopped in front of the Claude Monet wheatstacks and studied them.
“She makes everything more complicated.”
“That may be true,” he said. “But she is incredibly stylish.”
I chewed my lip. The logical thing to do would be to ask her. And it might be the easier thing, too. I wouldn’t have to go shopping. But it just seemed like I was asking for help.
We went to lunch afterwards. “I need a rebound,” David said.
“Yes,” I agreed.
“What about Justin?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Much as I love you, darling, I am not letting you use Justin as your rebo
und.”
He grumbled. “Well, that’s a shame.”
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a freshman.”
“I’d be nice to him.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Okay, fine,” he said. “I won’t ask you to help.”
“Do not pursue him if you don’t like him.”
“I don’t know if I like him yet, Hadley,” David said.
I made a face. “What happened to Nigel’s friend? Sam?”
David shrugged. “No.”
“What do you mean ‘no?’”
“Just no,” David said. “Everything was no.”
“Okay then,” I said sarcastically, “That makes a lot of sense.”
“So, is Jack, like, your boyfriend?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Not technically,” I said.
“You’re still friends with benefits?”
“I guess.”
He rolled his eyes. “Well, as long as he knows that no matter what kind of benefits he gets, I’m still the best friend, that’s fine.”
“You have nothing to worry about.”
“So, are you going to call your mother or am I going to have to deal with the horror of shopping with you in addition to the horror of breaking up with my secret ex-boyfriend?”
“I might call my mother.”
He smiled. “I think that could be a really good idea.”
My phone buzzed at the table. It was an unknown number, so I ignored the call. When it buzzed again, David gave me a look.
“Answer it, if you’re so popular.”
“Hello?” I said, with a little more attitude than I normally would have.
“Hadley Arrington?”
“Yeah, speaking.”
“This is Dale Broussards from The New York Times.”
I coughed on air. What?
“How are you?”
“I’m…great,” I said idiotically, trying not to choke.
“So, listen, we’re going to offer you the job. We’ll need you to start right after graduation and you’ll probably be based in Syria from day one. If that still sounds good, we need to know fairly quickly, because we’d like to start getting you up to speed while you wrap up schoolwork and everything.”
No. Fucking. Way.
After that, I didn’t register much of anything that he said. All I heard was the offer. My dream job. This intangible thing that I had worked and worked and worked for. It had happened.