Living with Her One-Night Stand (The Loft, #1)

by Noelle Adams

  Just the sight of her, the sound of her, was enough to snap any remaining threads of his control. He moaned again—over and over again—as his hips bucked up into her helplessly. He couldn’t have held them still even if he’d wanted to.

  And he didn’t want to.

  He wanted to let loose completely. Just like this. He wanted to give her everything. He didn’t want to hold anything back.

  She was sobbing as she came, her body clenching and shuddering as her head fell back in pleasure. Her internal muscles squeezed around him so hard that he roared with it, his climax hitting him fast and hard.

  He rocked beneath her, wild and unrestrained, shaking the bed, shaking his whole world.

  She collapsed down on top of him when the spasms were finally spent, and he held her close.

  Just as close as he’d been holding her before.

  He needed her now just as much.

  She squirmed a few times on top of him, as if her body were still reveling in her orgasm. Then she lifted up her head and smiled down at him.

  He knew he was smiling too.

  Like a fool.

  “I knew I would like him,” she whispered, pressing a little kiss against his lips.

  “Who?” He really had no idea what she was talking about.

  “The old you. The man you used to be. I knew I would like him too.”

  The words saturated him with pleasure. Warm, bone-deep pleasure. But they also made an ache in his chest tighten until he could hardly breathe around it. He gently pried her loose from his body and rolled her over onto her side. He made a bit of a mess with the condom, but he managed to tie it off.

  Then he stood up.

  He knew Jill was watching him. He knew that what he did right now mattered.

  He knew it mattered more than anything.

  He couldn’t look at her. He grabbed his underwear and walked across the hall to the bathroom.

  It was still early on a Sunday morning. Michelle and Steve weren’t up yet.

  Jill was waiting in his bedroom, in his bed.

  And what happened next would change everything.

  He was terrified.

  He was so terrified he was breathing in loud, uneven gasps.

  He threw away the condom. Cleaned himself up. Splashed water on his face. Stared at himself in the mirror.

  He looked the way he always did. He needed to shave. He needed a haircut. He needed to put a shirt on.

  He had a long, ugly scar down his back.

  He wasn’t the man he used to think he was.

  He wasn’t a man who had it all together.

  He was going to make a mess of this and hurt Jill unforgivably in the process.

  The man she wanted was a man who had never really existed.

  He had no idea how long he stood there, staring into the mirror, but eventually he heard a light tap on the bathroom door.

  Making himself turn away from the mirror, he reached to open the door.

  It was Jill, wearing nothing but one of his Tshirts. She gazed up at him with huge blue eyes. Wary eyes. Like she knew something bad was coming.

  It was coming.

  It would slam into them without warning. The way it had slammed into Lucas two years ago.

  Knocking him off his feet.

  Ripping his body apart.

  Proving he had no power over anything that mattered.

  It was going to slam into him again. In exactly the same way.

  Jill didn’t say anything. She just took his arm and pulled him back into the bedroom. She closed the door behind them and led Lucas back to the bed.

  He sat down when his legs buckled.

  She sat down next to him.

  He stared at the old hardwood floors, worn into warm, rich color from age and use and craftsmanship. From years of supporting the weight of human lives.

  Some things were like that.

  Some things could stand the test of time and grow stronger and more beautiful because of it.

  Some things didn’t break.

  “Lucas,” Jill said, folding her legs up underneath her and leaning against him. “You need to talk to me.”

  He took a hoarse breath, and to his dismay, it sounded almost like a sob.

  Jill made a soft, little whimper. She reached an arm around his back and let her fingers trace along the line of his scar.

  It was like she was trying to make it better.

  But it couldn’t be made better.

  It would never go away. Not even when he took his final breath.

  “Lucas,” she whispered. “Please, honey. Tell me.”

  He knew he needed to do it.

  He’d spent so long telling himself that no one would really understand, but he somehow knew she would.

  She would understand.

  The truth wouldn’t change what she felt for him.

  But he didn’t know why she felt that way in the first place.

  He made another choked sound in his throat with the effort to get something—anything—said.

  After a minute, Jill drooped beside him. She was still leaning against him, still had her arm around him. But she seemed to have accepted the inevitable.

  She was crying, he realized with another slash of pain through his heart.

  “Lucas,” she said at last, wiping some of the tears away. “I know you’re going through a lot of really hard stuff. I don’t know what it is, but I think I can understand. You don’t have to tell me everything right now. You really don’t.”

  The words should have relieved the crippling burden he was carrying, but they didn’t.

  They made him feel worse, more guilty, more completely helpless.

  He reached behind him to take the arm she’d been stroking him with, pulling it back around to the front of his body so she was no longer touching his scar.

  “But…” Jill cleared her throat. “I do need to know… I need to know if there’s any hope for us. If you could ever… ever want to be in a real relationship with me. I don’t mean to give you an ultimatum or anything like that. I promise I don’t. But it feels like I’m pouring myself out here. I keep pouring myself out. And I still don’t know… I still don’t know if it’s even something you… you want.”

  He did want it.

  Desperately.

  Never in his life had he ever wanted something so much.

  But that didn’t mean it would be right to take it.

  He was still holding on to her forearm, his fingers wrapped around her delicate bones. She seemed so small. He could hurt her.

  Maybe he already had.

  He couldn’t loosen his grip.

  “Lucas,” Jill prompted when he still didn’t answer. “You can’t do this to me. It’s not… it’s not right. You don’t have to tell me everything right now. We don’t have to work everything out right away. But you need to tell me this at least. Is there even a chance?”

  He managed to turn his head and look at her instead of at the floor. She was still crying. And he was still holding her forearm in an inexorable grip.

  They stared at each other for a long time, and then he saw something change on her face.

  Resignation.

  An aching kind of acceptance.

  “Okay,” she whispered at last. “Okay. If there’s no chance, then you need to… you need to let me go. We can’t do this anymore. Not any of it. Because it’s… it’s breaking me.”

  Of course it was breaking her. It had already broken him.

  “It’s breaking my heart,” she said. “And I can’t just let it keep happening. You’ve always been a decent guy with me. You really have. You’ve treated me like a human being. You’ve respected my choices. You’ve cared about how I was feeling. You’ve been decent, Lucas. So you need to be decent one more time. You need to let me go now.” She gave a brief, helpless sob before she added, “Everything is what I want. I want a… a real home, a man who will love me forever. So if you know you’ll never be able to give me everything, then
you need to let me go.”

  An aching, needy voice deep inside Lucas was screaming, howling, begging for this not to happen. But Jill was weeping now—small and hurt and so incredibly sad—and it was all because of Lucas.

  So he used every last thread of strength he possessed, and he managed to loosen his fingers, break the grip he had on her forearm.

  He strangled on a wordless sound as his hand finally let her go.

  Jill sobbed as she pulled her arm toward her chest. She sat for a minute, gazing at Lucas with tear-filled eyes. Then she jumped up and ran out of the room.

  Lucas let her.

  That little voice inside him was still wailing its outrage to the heavens, but his body didn’t move.

  Jill was right.

  He couldn’t be the man she needed him to be.

  So he couldn’t be her man at all.

  JILL CRIED IN HER BEDROOM for more than an hour, and then she finally fell asleep in an exhausted heap. The night had been too long, and the emotional toll had been too heavy.

  This was really the end, and she knew it.

  It was almost ten in the morning when she woke up again. Her eyes ached, and she was sick to her stomach. She got up, used the bathroom, washed her face, and put a sweatshirt on over Lucas’s T-shirt, which she was still wearing.

  Then she steeled her nerve and walked out into the common room of the apartment.

  She had no idea what she would say when she saw Lucas again.

  She had no idea about anything.

  She went first for the coffee, but she recognized that the vibes in the apartment were strange, different. Michelle was working on her laptop at the counter, and Steve was lounging on the couch with a newspaper. But something was different.

  Really different.

  Really wrong.

  She met Michelle’s eyes over her coffee cup.

  Michelle’s face twisted strangely. “Are you all right?”

  Jill tried to answer, but couldn’t.

  Steve had sat up now. Both he and Michelle were watching her with heavy, anxious expressions.

  Finally Jill shrugged, trying to clear her throat so she could answer for real.

  Then something suddenly occurred to her.

  It hit her with a flash of painful insight.

  She put her coffee cup down on the counter and walked out of the kitchen. Through the main room to the hallway. Then down two doors to Lucas’s room.

  His door was open.

  She stood in the doorway.

  She saw what was inside.

  Nothing.

  The bedroom was empty—nothing but a bare mattress on a cheap twin frame. All of Lucas’s possessions were gone.

  Lucas was gone.

  She stared blindly at the empty room, and it somehow embodied exactly how her heart felt right now.

  Just… empty.

  “I’m so sorry, Jill,” Michelle said softly from behind her. “He was almost entirely packed when we woke up this morning. Then he just… he just left.”

  Jill managed to give her head a stiff nod.

  Of course he had.

  He was trying to be decent.

  He was trying to do as she’d asked.

  He was trying to let her go.

  Ten

  LUCAS HAD PACKED UP his room and left that morning, convinced he was never coming back.

  That was how it worked with him now.

  He stayed until things happened to him, and then he took off.

  Things had happened here in Blacksburg, and now it was time to leave. He’d packed his car. He’d left a check to cover more than his share of the last two months of utilities. He’d walked out the front door, gotten into the driver’s seat, and pulled out onto the road.

  He drove out of town, taking 460 to Christiansburg. Then he took the ramp to I-81 toward Roanoke. He didn’t know where he was going. He was just getting away.

  He’d made Jill cry earlier like her heart was breaking.

  He wasn’t going to do it again.

  There wasn’t much traffic this early on a Sunday morning, just a lot of tractor trailers going way too fast down the mountain. He maneuvered around most of them. He was driving fast too.

  When he got to the next exit, he pulled off the interstate without putting on his turn signal.

  He didn’t even know why.

  Responding to an unstoppable force that was controlling his actions, he turned around and drove back to Blacksburg.

  He ended up downtown, and he circled until he found a parking spot on the street from which he could see the apartment building.

  He didn’t get out.

  He didn’t go up.

  He just sat in his car and waited.

  He had no idea what he was doing, but he couldn’t seem to drive away again.

  He sat there for more than two hours, watching people stroll by, enjoying their Sundays, stopping in shops, grabbing a bite to eat, smiling and laughing and living their lives as if they couldn’t be torn away from them at any moment.

  He saw Jill’s boss and his sister walk across the street and go into Tea for Two. Jill worked with both of them. She liked both of them. She said they had really good hearts.

  That mattered to Jill—more than anything else.

  She’d thought he had a good heart too.

  He’d thought he had one too… a long time ago.

  He kept sitting, waiting, watching. Eventually he saw Chloe striding down the sidewalk like she was on a mission. She was wearing a pair of loud red leggings and a long, off-the-shoulder top. She wasn’t smiling.

  She pressed the buzzer next to the exterior door, and after a minute she walked into the apartment building.

  She was going to visit Jill.

  Jill was upstairs.

  Lucas could reach her in less than three minutes, if he just got out of his car.

  He didn’t move.

  After a while, the door to the apartment building opened again. Chloe came out first. She was obviously talking because her lips were moving and her expression was animated.

  Jill followed her, dressed in jeans and a white top. Her hair was pulled back in a low ponytail.

  It was the simplest outfit he’d ever seen her wear. It didn’t look like her at all.

  Her head was turned behind her, and she held the door for Michelle and then Steve.

  They all stood on the sidewalk for a minute, talking about something. Then Chloe went into Tea for Two, followed by Jill. After a moment, Michelle dragged Steve inside too.

  He didn’t object, although he was clearly putting up an exaggerated fuss about going into the girly little shop.

  He went in though.

  He was doing it for Jill. Lucas knew it instinctively.

  All of them were there for Jill—because they thought she was sad, because they wanted to cheer her up.

  Jill thought of them like family.

  They were home to her.

  For a while Lucas had felt part of it too.

  He wanted it.

  All of it.

  All of them.

  He wanted Jill so much it was strangling him.

  Instead, he had… nothing.

  It felt like he was drowning, like he literally couldn’t breathe.

  He fumbled in the passenger seat until he got his hand on his phone. Without thinking, he dialed the only number he could think of to dial.

  He waited as it rang.

  “Hello? Lucas? Is that you?” The familiar voice was surprised, hopeful.

  “Yeah, Mom,” he said, trying to make his voice sound natural. “It’s me.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong. I just called to say hi.”

  “Why are you lying to me?”

  Lucas sat behind the steering wheel, staring blindly at a group of college kids crossing the road in front of him. His hand was shaking, and he didn’t know why.

  “Lucas, did something happen?” his mother asked, sounding strangely gentle.


  “N-no.”

  She paused for a moment. “You can tell me about it.”

  He didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

  “I know you think we’ve never understood, but we do. We really do. You almost died. You came so close. We know things would feel different after that. We don’t think you’re overreacting. You don’t have to hide from us.”

  He had been. Hiding from everything, everyone, anyone who might make him feel too much, might threaten the artificial peace he’d created in his heart.

  He didn’t want to hide anymore. Not from his family.

  Not from Jill.

  When he didn’t respond, his mother went on, “You know you can come home any time you want. To stay or just to visit or whatever you want. Do you want to come home?”

  His throat had constricted so much his breathing was loud and hoarse. “Yes,” he managed to say in an embarrassing rasp. “I want to come home.”

  “Then come. Come right now. We miss you so much.”

  He was shaking so much now he could barely hold the phone steady. “I might…” When his voice cracked, he had to start again. “I might bring someone with me, if that’s all right.”

  “Of course it is!” Her tone had changed. She was clearly both surprised and pleased by that piece of information. “We would love that. You know we would. You bring anyone you want, anyone who’s special to you. It doesn’t matter to us who they are.”

  “I don’t know… I don’t know if she’ll come. I didn’t treat her…” He took a ragged breath as the truth hit him hard. “I didn’t treat her right.”

  His mom said, “Well, maybe she’ll forgive you if you tell her the truth. Just make sure you treat her right from now on.”

  JILL HAD A VERY BAD morning.

  Despite her friends’ attempts to comfort and encourage her, the morning dragged on and on. They went down to Tea for Two and bought almost every kind of goodie Carol had made that morning, splurging on the most expensive tea. Chloe, Michelle, and Steve were all trying to keep the mood light, to make her laugh.

  And she appreciated it. A lot.

  But she was exhausted when they went back up to the apartment, and Jill just didn’t have the energy to keep trying to be all right. So she said she needed a nap.

  She thought she would cry alone in her room, but she was too drained to even cry.

  She got under the covers and actually went to sleep.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone sound asleep at one o’clock in the afternoon, but she was totally out of it.