He looms over me, his eyes heavy-lidded and hazy. He pulls my bottoms to the side and his cock rests between my legs. “Jesus, Quinn. You have no idea how hard it is not to push inside you right now.” I want to beg him to do it. The need pulls every cord of my body tight, except there’s a tiny voice in the back of my head, warning me. “We can’t.”
His mouth finds mine as he glides against me. The head of his cock bumps my entrance and I gasp—90 percent want and 10 percent fear. Our eyes lock. The strain of holding back is written in every line of his face. “We can’t,” I repeat, “but I just need…just don’t stop.”
He flinches and continues to glide against me, faster, harder. He unties the sides of my bottoms and pulls down the top before his lips fasten on one nipple, hard. “Faster,” I plead, my legs wrapping around his back. He complies and the sight of him above, his face strained and desperate, unleashes something inside me.
I shatter without warning, crying out so loudly I can hear the sound echo down the hill, over the water. He jerks away and spills across my stomach. “Fuck,” he growls. His eyes are squeezed shut, his jaw taut with the strain. We aren’t even done and I already want more.
His eyes open slowly, still in a haze. “Jesus Christ. The last time I came from dry humping someone was the day I got my learner’s permit.”
He presses his mouth to my forehead and then pulls away, preoccupied and unhappy, only now glancing toward the lake to make sure we didn’t have an audience. He hands me my bikini bottoms and pulls up his trunks, then strips off his T-shirt to wipe my stomach—all of it in complete silence. “That’s exactly what I was talking about,” he finally says, collapsing on the grass beside me. “If you’d told me to go for it, I would have. I’d halfway rationalized it before we hit the ground. If it was anything like this before, I understand how you wound up pregnant so fast.”
Except I was on the pill in London, and it’s worked without exception since I started dating Jeff. I assume Nick’s managed not to impregnate anyone either—so what is it about the two of us together that causes the problem? And the woman I always see in my nightmare—is it a coincidence that she appeared in his office mere hours after the two of us got together?
Of course it isn’t.
I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner.
“It’s not about us,” I gasp, sitting up. “It’s about the baby. In that dream I always have of us in the hospital? We’re there because I’m delivering, and that’s when she stops us. She doesn’t want us to have the baby.”
He sits up too, looking at me warily. “Why do you say that?”
“Neither of us have a single memory of me that goes past the point when I was pregnant, right? That’s where our story ends both times. I remember feeling panicked in the hospital. Scared something bad was going to happen, even before she came in, and also desperate to get through it before she could stop us.” I’m talking so fast I’m barely stopping to breathe. “She keeps changing aspects of my life so we don’t meet at all. The first time we grew up together, were children together, and so she changed it. The second time we grew up apart but found each other in London, and she ended that too. But she doesn’t care about the two of us being together. It’s only when we get pregnant that she tries to change things.”
Nick stares at the water, frowning, his expression grim. “It has to be related to the Rule of Threes, right? The baby must make the fourth in the line.”
“Yeah. And you know what this means, right?” I ask. “If this is related to the Rule of Threes, this kid we have must be a time traveler. And for that to be the case, you have to carry the mutation as well. Which means it’s just as likely to be someone in your family behind this as it is mine.”
He cocks a smile. “She’s not even your mother-in-law yet and you’re already blaming shit on my mom.” I’m so startled by that yet, as if it’s a foregone conclusion, that my mind goes blank for a moment. Fortunately, he doesn’t seem to notice. “I wondered what my role was in all this, why it’s the two of us who keep being brought together, and I guess the mutation would explain it. But I don’t have a lot of family either. I’m not seeing an obvious culprit anywhere. I can’t picture my mother having some kind of supernatural power, and I don’t have any sisters.”
I pull my lip between my teeth. “You should probably ask her, though. Your mom, I mean.”
He laughs. “You want me to ask my mom if she time travels? And I thought telling her I broke up with Meg was going to be the most awkward conversation I’d have with her anytime soon.”
My gaze flickers to his face. “I guess she liked Meg, then? Is she going to be upset?” Her son was dating a beautiful doctor who will probably lead a long and healthy life. I’m not sure what exactly he got in exchange for that. His mother will probably blame me, and I won’t be able to fault her for it.
His fingers slide through mine. “She’s going to love you. It wasn’t anything about Meg, necessarily. She just wants grandkids.” He grins. “Believe me, if she had any idea how easily you can get pregnant and how badly I seem to want to do it, she’d be sending us upstairs to a bedroom right now.”
Just the mere suggestion of it has me feeling needy and overheated. I lean back on my elbows, gazing up at him from beneath my lashes. “So, just out of curiosity, how badly do you want to do it?”
He groans. “Quinn, stop looking at me like that or I’m going to show you exactly how badly I want to, and I think we’ve both just realized how excruciatingly careful we need to be.”
My tongue slides over my lower lip in anticipation. “Baby steps.”
His eyes close and suddenly he’s on his feet. “Fuck it,” he says, grabbing my hand. “If we’re going to take baby steps, we’re going to start right fucking now.”
* * *
We get to his parents’ room. The moment he kisses me I start sinking into a darkness I don’t want to come back from. I only know his mouth, his hands, the rasp of his five o’clock shadow against my skin and the sound of his sharp inhale. My bikini bottoms and his trunks are pushed to the floor and I’m not even sure how it happened.
He winces. “I’d like this to last longer than five seconds this time.”
I would too. But there is absolutely nothing rational about us right now.
I step away from him and go to the bed, pulling down the covers before I lie on one side. “Come here.”
He turns. It’s my first real look at him completely unclothed, and the sight leaves me purring…and intimidated. He’s so beautiful, but Trevor’s guesses about the size of the package were absolutely on the mark, and something that size will be a novel experience for me if we ever get around to having sex.
He gets in on the other side of the bed and rolls to face me. My fingers tentatively press to the center of his chest and roll down an inch or two. “We were here before. Just like this,” I tell him.
“Was it good?” he asks, his voice strained.
“What do you think?” I allow my hands to slide outward, to the curves of his triceps, up to his perfect shoulders, over his clavicle. His eyes flutter closed and he swallows. There is nothing hotter to me than the way he is struggling for control. “Too much?” I ask.
He pulls me against him, where he is every bit as hard as he was earlier. “No,” he says between his teeth, pressing his mouth to mine, his body taut with restraint. I want to dig my hands into his hair, wrap my leg over his hip, but I sense there’s something so tightly coiled inside him it could snap with very little effort.
His hand skims the outside of my bikini top, which is the only shred of clothing still separating the two of us. “Too much?” he asks.
“No.”
He swallows. “You need to tell me when it is.” His fingers glide over my skin—up the curve of my hip to the dip in my waist, my body strung tight with anticipation. His hands span my rib cage. His index finger moves, drawing a smooth line up my breast until he reaches its tip, already hard, waiting for him. “I need to
see you.”
He unties the bikini. His eyes find their destination, and then he leans down, taking my nipple in his mouth—pulling with his teeth, soothing with his tongue—until I am flat on my back and gasping, arching fruitlessly for more. He moves his hand down my belly, slipping between my legs to find me slippery and ready for him, while I let my own hand wander, skimming that line of hair below his belly button. When my hand wraps around him, the air hisses between his teeth. “Jesus,” he groans.
His fingers glide against me, infuriatingly slow. My grasp on him is harder, from his base to the tip, which leaks copiously enough that my palm slides easily, and faster.
“Fuck,” he gasps, rolling me to my back, pulling at my knees so he can push between them.
“Nick,” I whisper, and at the sound of his name his eyes open, hazy and unfocused. “Don’t.”
He gives me the smallest nod, as if some distant part of him has heard what I said. The pace of his hand between my legs quickens and we begin to kiss. No longer careful, but sloppy, voraciously.
“Oh God,” I whisper. The moment I start to come he does too. And the world is still dark and full of stars but I already want more from him in a way I cannot explain. As if one orgasm was merely foreplay.
He supports his weight, still breathing heavily, before he finally flips onto his back, pulling me with him. “Jesus Christ,” he says. “I told you it was going to be slow and I lasted about twenty seconds.”
“As long as you keep your super sperm away from me, we’ll be fine.”
He grins. “You realize we were young and stupid those other times, right? God only knows what we were doing.”
I raise a brow. “We weren’t that young in London. And it sounds like someone’s making excuses to do something he wants to do.”
He laughs hard, as if relief and happiness have twined together. “There might be some of that going on.” He climbs out of bed and grabs a towel, wiping my stomach off, and then he is back under the blankets, pulling me against him.
“You okay?” he asks, pressing his mouth to the top of my head.
“I’m so much better than okay.”
“Me too,” he says. “Although I think more baby steps might be necessary.”
The mere suggestion of it is all I need. “How soon?” I ask, my hand sliding beneath the covers. Already he is coming back to life.
He groans. “Right now works.”
* * *
Hours later, the room is only illuminated by moonlight and I’m cuddled up against him. Sometime between the second orgasm and the seventh—we ordered a pizza in the hours between them—things changed between us. I’ve never felt more naked or vulnerable, but his faith in me is a solid thing at his very core. Nothing I say to him is met with fear or disdain. It feels like I don’t have to be careful around him the way I did before, as if I finally know I’m safe.
“I lied to you,” I whisper.
“You did?”
My tongue darts out, tapping my upper lip—one of a thousand nervous gestures left over from childhood. “Earlier today I told you my mom hated the farm because it was a lot of work, but that’s not why she left.” I hesitate. That old warning in my head echoes: don’t tell, don’t tell, don’t tell. But I’m tired of keeping secrets, and he is not like my mother. There is nothing conditional in his acceptance of me. My heart is tumbling and tripping in my chest and yet I know this is going to be alright.
“I told you about the murders on the farm. It was awful, obviously, but what really upset my mom was—” I stop as fear begins to crawl in, replacing my newfound bravery.
His hand cradles the nape of my neck, slides into my hair. “It’s okay, Quinn. Just tell me.”
“She thought I had something to do with it,” I whisper, raising my worried eyes to his.
He looks every bit as stunned as I imagined he would. But not scared. “What?”
My nails dig into my palms. It’s the first time I’ve ever repeated this since it happened, something my parents made me swear I’d never tell.
“The morning after Jilly died, I came downstairs and told my parents I’d gone to her house in the middle of the night and tried to stop them from being murdered. My parents had no idea what I was talking about. I was insisting it was Thursday, and that Jilly had died the day before, but they showed me the calendar and I was wrong. It was still Wednesday, and they kept telling me Jilly was fine, that it was just a bad dream. But I kept insisting. I remembered all of it. The police and the caution tape the day before, how I snuck to their house during the night and one of our dogs followed me but I was too late.”
He’s so still he barely seems alive. “Then what happened?”
“My parents told me it was just a dream. I started to believe them…”
My breath is coming in small pants now. His hand slides over my back. “And…?” he prompts.
“Our dog was missing. My dad heard him barking in Jilly’s house, and went to check. When no one answered, he unlocked the door and discovered Jilly and her parents in there, dead. My father was the primary suspect for a while, because the dog was in there and his footprints were outside.” I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from the guilt I felt when the police took him in for questioning.
“Jesus,” he whispers. “You must have been terrified. And that means…you must have entered the house and seen them yourself, right?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. It’s like I blacked a lot of it out. But I told my parents I’d had to leave really fast. That’s why I couldn’t get our dog. My mother…she never looked at me the same way again.”
I venture a glance at him, waiting to see condemnation or fear or uncertainty. But his eyes are the gentlest gray.
“You time traveled.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t know how to time travel. I still don’t. I think I just kind of knew things as a kid. I had a premonition and created a story to explain it. Maybe I remembered it happening before. From one of these other timelines I have memories of. Like 9-11. When I saw the footage of the first plane hitting I knew what would happen next. I was just remembering it from before.”
“You know you don’t need to make excuses for it to me, right?” he asks. “Your mother’s response was just…wrong. She never should have reacted like that.”
“I can’t blame her. Anyone would have been scared of me.”
“I’m not,” he says.
I glance at him and feel a small crack, a sliver of light entering that dark place inside me. “Yeah,” I reply, smiling. “You’re not.”
He presses his mouth to my forehead. “I hate that you seem so surprised by that. You deserved to spend your entire life surrounded by people who treated what you could do like a gift instead of a curse.”
My heart stumbles and falters. He’s wrong. I bury my head to his chest and try to ignore the thought. But it remains anyway, a tiny undercurrent of guilt I can never quite place. There’s the dread I feel when he mentions Ryan’s name. And in that dream about the hospital in London, my certainty I’d done something Nick wouldn’t forgive me for—it means something. At some point, in one of these lives, I think I may have done something very wrong.
* * *
“I have to pee.” I mean to whisper but it comes out loud enough for half the room to hear. “I think I’m drunk,” I add.
Nick’s eyes crinkle at the corners, his dimple coming out as he tries not to laugh. “Yeah, I think you might be,” he says. “And you’re a cute drunk, but my brother isn’t, so maybe we should find him and get out of here.”
My stomach sinks at the mere mention of Ryan. He was once my closest friend, after Nick—I still remember the kid who sat under my window when I had mono and played chess with me, moving pieces as I instructed. The little boy who brought me tulips when I broke my arm…tulips he cut from his mother’s garden without permission, a move he’d later be punished for. But now his bitterness about the situation has ruined everything, no matter how hard he tries
to restrain it.
“Hey,” says Nick, tipping my chin up. “What’s up?”
It’s something we don’t discuss, normally. But alcohol has loosened my tongue. “He hates me now,” I whisper.
Nick pulls me toward him. “No, it’s me he hates. He thinks I stole you. And maybe I did, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
He kisses me, tasting like beer and spearmint, which is oddly not an unpleasant combination, but he ends it with a reluctant sigh. “This isn’t a good idea when you’re drunk,” he says.
I step into the space he’s created between us. “I think it’s an amazing idea.”
He groans and closes his eyes. “No, it’s not, because you won’t make the same decisions you would if you were sober, and if we keep going I’ll be tempted to let you make the wrong ones.” He pushes away from me, his shoulders set in a way that means there’s no arguing with him. “You pee while I go find Ryan. I’ll pull up the car and meet you in front.”
Somewhere in the far recesses of my inebriated brain I know he’s right, even if I don’t like it. I promised my mother I’d wait until I was out of high school. It’s just getting harder and harder to keep that promise.
He leaves in search of Ryan while I move through a dark hall and into an even darker bedroom in search of an unoccupied toilet. When I’m done I stumble blindly back through the bedroom, running my hand along the dresser to find my way to the door.
“There you are,” says a familiar voice, pulling me against him. “I’ve been looking for you.”
I press my head to his chest. Now that I’ve peed all I want in the world is to go to sleep. I’m so tired I’m not sure I’ll even make it to the car. “I thought we were meeting in front,” I murmur.
“I’d rather meet right here,” he says, as his mouth lands on mine. Even inebriated I recognize it’s not his normal kiss. It’s harder, pushier, needier. He stumbles a little and my hip slams into the side of the dresser, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Something is wrong with him and I can’t quite form the words to ask. His hands are on my ass, gripping me the way they do when we’ve taken things too far and he’s desperate to come. I don’t understand what’s happening, but when he pops the button on my jeans, it triggers an alarm inside me: Nick wouldn’t. He wouldn’t be like this. He wouldn’t do this here.
Intersect: The Parallel Duet, Book 2 Page 6