Never Let Go: Top Shelf Romance Collection 6

by Steiner, Kandi

  “Hi, Jamie.”

  He smirked down at me, his eyes too heated, too low. “Hi.”

  I cleared my throat as a sign for him to drop his hands from where they seared themselves to my skin, but he didn’t catch the cue. Or he didn’t care. So I slipped out of his grasp and plugged the blender in, reaching into the freezer for ice and searching mom’s cabinets for margarita mix. I found some, blessedly, and snatched what was left of a Jose Cuervo bottle on my way back to the blender.

  Jamie stood next to it, casually leaned up against the counter, arms crossed. His hair was longer than I remembered, curling at his ears and laying in a perfect wave across his forehead. He hadn’t changed out of his graduation clothes, but he’d loosened the tie around his neck and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, rolling the sleeves up to cuff just below his elbows. It was clean, crisp, and white, calling attention to the tan he’d clearly been working on since I’d last seen him. I wondered if he had been surfing, work keeping me from doing the same.

  “You’re wearing makeup,” he said as I sidled up beside him, dumping ice cubes into the blender and covering them in tequila.

  “And you’re wearing dress shoes.”

  He looked down, chuckling, before lifting his hazy eyes back to mine. “We should dance.”

  “Wh—”

  I didn’t have the chance to ask my question because Jamie grabbed my wrist and twirled me before pulling me flush against him, attempting some sort of drunken version of a waltz in my tiny kitchen as high schoolers weaved in and out around us, oblivious to the way he was making my heart race. I giggled, breaking free after another spin and finding my place back at the blender, topping off the tequila with margarita mix and snapping the lid in place.

  “You’re drunk, Jamie Shaw.”

  “And are you, B Kennedy?”

  I clicked the blend option and spoke over the noise of ice breaking. “I’m getting there.” I eyed him, my head tilted to the side as I tried unsuccessfully to figure out what had changed. Jamie seemed more dangerous that night. He stood too close, watched me for too long. It was unnerving, but in an oddly pleasing way. “What have you been drinking, anyway?”

  “Whiskey,” he answered easily, and a short laugh escaped my lips.

  “Of course. I should have guessed.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I shrugged, using a spoon to break up a large ice chunk before replacing the top on the blender and turning it on again. “Just makes sense. You’re practically whiskey on legs, anyway. The color of your hair, your eyes, the way you smell — it’s like your spirit drink.”

  “I remind you of whiskey?”

  “In every sense of the word,” I murmured, maybe too low for him to hear. I thought of how his skin burned mine when he touched me, how just being in his vicinity made my limbs tingle.

  I realized then that it was harder pretending like he didn’t affect me when he was no longer tied to my best friend.

  “We should do a shot.” Jamie pushed off the counter and grabbed the only bottle of Jack Daniels, filling two of my mom’s shot glasses to the rim before turning back to me. He slid the one branded with the downtown casino’s logo into my hand and lifted the other.

  “I’m making a tequila drink,” I pointed out. “Mixing will probably screw me in the long run.”

  “Nah, you’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t know, Jamie…”

  “Oh come on,” he challenged, taking a small step toward me. It was tiny, barely even an inch, but suddenly I felt the heat from him surrounding me and I picked at my tank top with my free hand, desperate for a breeze. “Don’t you want a little whiskey on your lips?”

  My eyes shot to his, because I knew as well as he did that there was more than one question beneath the one he’d voiced out loud. He cocked a brow, waiting, and though I should have pushed him back, made space, poured up a margarita and walked away from him, I lifted my glass to his instead.

  “To bad decisions.”

  His grin widened, his eyes never leaving me as I tilted my head back, letting the amber liquid coat my throat. Jamie took his slower than I did, inhaling through his teeth as the burn settled in.

  And just like that, I’d taken my first shot. I didn’t tell Jamie it was my first one, I didn’t think I needed to. I wanted to hate it, to detest it, to grimace and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and reach for a chaser. But we set the glasses back on the counter slowly, our fingers brushing, and Jamie’s eyes were on my lips where leftover whiskey remained. My tongue traced the liquid, and he inhaled stiffly, eyes snapping up to mine.

  Cat, meet mouse.

  My mom was going to murder me.

  Nearly everyone was gone now, the time on my phone reading 3:47AM. Everyone except for Jenna, who was passed out in my bed, Ali, a basketball player in my grade, who was curled around the same toilet Mom had been hugging the night she told me about Dad, and Jamie, who had stayed to help me clean what little we could once the last of the party had cleared out.

  The carpets were ruined, that much I could tell for sure. I could probably salvage the cabinets and tables with a good scrub down and I’d need to search every corner for trash. Sticky cups had been gathered and thrown away, but shot glasses still littered the kitchen and various spots in the living room. It reeked of alcohol, a smell I wasn’t exactly sure how to get rid of at the time, and I was supposed to work in seven hours.

  “I have to call out,” I finally said, blowing out a breath as I surveyed our surroundings.

  Jamie looked around, too, running a hand through his long hair. “When does your mom get home?”

  “Late tomorrow night.” I checked my phone again. “Or should I say, late tonight.”

  “You’ve got time. It’s not too bad.” I leveled my eyes and he bit back a smile. “Okay, so the carpet is shot, but everything else is fixable.”

  “My TV remote is missing.”

  “Replaceable.”

  “There’s a mustache made out of spitting tobacco on my face in one of the only family pictures we have.”

  Jamie tucked his hands into the pockets of his dress pants. “Yeah, you’re kind of screwed.”

  “I told you what would happen if I mixed alcohol,” I teased, trying to find humor in the situation while I still could.

  Jamie crossed the living room to where I was standing, his eyes bloodshot but still beautiful. “Let’s get out of here for a while.”

  “Are you crazy? I need to clean. I need to…” I waved my hands around. “Do something. About all of this.”

  “You’ve already admitted that you’re screwed, B. What you can do is only going to take you a few hours, so why not send out tonight with a bang?”

  I chewed my lip, knowing he was right and hating it all the same. “What do you have in mind?”

  Jamie thumbed through his phone as we settled in on a blanket in the sand, feet facing the waves, the beach still dark. He landed on Chad Lawson’s The Piano album, adjusting the volume before setting his phone down between us and reaching into the brown paper bag on his lap. He handed me one burrito before retrieving his and setting the brown bag aside, using his shoes to weigh it down against the wind.

  I couldn’t believe he’d convinced the cab driver to take us through the only 24-hour breakfast drive-thru in town, but I was happy he had been smart enough to realize neither of us was in shape to drive. He cracked the seal on a Vitamin Water and took a long pull before passing it to me.

  “Think this will save us from a hangover?” I asked, taking a sip before passing the bottle back to him. He replaced the lid and we both went to work unwrapping the tin foil around our breakfast burritos — mine bacon, his sausage.

  “I think it’s one of my more brilliant ideas. What cures a hangover better than greasy eggs, Vitamin Water, and the beach?”

  “So modest,” I chided, taking my first bite. The sarcasm died on my lips after that. “Homahgawd.” I groaned, taking another bite as Jamie
watched me, chuckling.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I grinned through a full mouth, but didn’t say anything else. For a while, we just listened to the smooth melodies flowing from Jamie’s phone as we ate and shared that one drink between us. Dawn was on the horizon, the beach glowing first in a cool pool of blue before taking on a soft purple hue. I was still in the thin tank top I’d stripped down to at the party and I shivered a bit against the cool breeze rolling in off the waves.

  “Here,” Jamie said, unbuttoning his shirt the rest of the way down. He yanked his tie off before shaking one arm out and then the other. I tried to argue with him, at least I thought I did, but my voice must have been just as stuck in my throat as my eyes were on his chest. His bare, beautiful chest. He draped his shirt over my shoulders, the fabric still warm from him, dripping in his scent, and I sighed with the comfort it brought.

  “Thank you.” I peeled at the foil covering my burrito, eyes on the water. “So, you excited to get out of here? Ready to cause trouble at UC San Diego?”

  He smirked, but offered a single shrug. “Yes and no. Remember our talk over Christmas break?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m still feeling a bit of all that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited for this next chapter and all that, but it’s still a little scary.”

  “It’d be weird if you weren’t scared,” I reminded him, and he gave me a small smile. I could tell he didn’t want to talk about the future anymore, and in a way I didn’t blame him. Up until that point in our lives, high school had been our biggest and best experience. It was hard to imagine a future where the things that mattered to us then would only be a distant memory.

  When we finished our burritos, we both leaned back on our palms, watching as the sun began its slow ascent. There was always so much hype around sunsets on the west coast of Florida, but I found even more beauty in the sunrises on our coast. There was something about being so close to the ocean at the dawn of a new day, filled with new possibilities.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” I said after a while, keeping my eyes on the horizon just past my toes.

  “Not just you.”

  “I know,” I clarified. “I just thought maybe you’d call me. Or want to go for a drive. Or…” I didn’t know what else to say, so I let my sentence fade on the breeze.

  “I wanted to,” Jamie said, adjusting the weight on the heels of his hands. “I don’t know. Jenna hit me at a time that was already so hard for me, you know?” A line formed between his brows. “My parents were high school sweethearts.”

  The weight of that statement hit me hard in the chest. What he meant to say was that he wanted what his parents had, and he thought Jenna was the key to that. I suddenly realized her breaking up with him was the best thing that could have happened to me. Even then, when I was still in denial about my addiction, the thought of him marrying my best friend nearly caused me to gasp out loud.

  “It’s okay that Jenna wasn’t the one.”

  “I know,” he said quickly. “I think I always knew. She was fun, we clicked, had some great times together. But there was something missing.” He turned to me then, eyes boring into the side of my face because I refused to meet that stare.

  “You’ll find someone,” I said softly, eyes still on the waves. They were bathed in a pinkish-orange glow as the sun struggled to wake up our part of the world.

  “Well,” he said loudly, sitting up straighter. “I don’t like leaving my life to chance. So, I have a proposition.” I met his eyes then, and they were playful — mischievous. “If you’re game, that is.”

  “Why do I feel like I should run right now?”

  Jamie laughed, and it was the first time I’d seen his real smile break through that night — teeth bright, skin wrinkled at the corners of his eyes. “I say we make a pact.”

  “A pact?”

  He nodded. “If neither of us are married by the time we’re thirty, we marry each other.”

  “Oh my God,” I scoffed, leaning up to mirror his new posture. “That is so stupid, Jamie. It’s also the plot line for every cheesy Rom Com ever.”

  He shrugged, wiping the sand from his hands and gazing back out at the water. “Sounds like someone is scared.”

  “I’m not scared. It’s dumb.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I’m going to be married by thirty, Jamie. And you’re definitely going to be locked down by then.”

  “So then you have nothing to worry about.” He challenged me for the second time that night, eyes sparking to life as they met mine. He extended his hand. “If we’re not married in twelve years, you become Mrs. Shaw.”

  I swallowed hard at his words. Mrs Shaw. “That’s not fair. You turn thirty before me.”

  Jamie shrugged again. “My pact, my terms. Do we have a deal?” He thrust his hand out farther, and I stared at it, brows bent as I chewed my cheek. Finally, I rolled my eyes and gripped his hand with my own, shaking it three times. “Fine. But this is dumb, and pointless.”

  Jamie just grinned.

  “You’re so weird,” I said, getting in the last word on my feelings about the stupid pact.

  “Yeah, but you love me anyway.” He winked, stealing the Vitamin Water from the space between us and draining the last of it before leaning back on his hands again.

  I didn’t think too long about the fact that he’d said I loved him, or the possibility that he might be right. I didn’t think about the pact or what would happen in twelve years, because Jamie was leaving, and I was staying.

  Mom grounded me for the first month of that summer and I had to pay to replace the carpets, but I didn’t even care. It was worth it to have that first shot of Whiskey, to eat breakfast burritos on the beach and make stupid promises we wouldn’t keep.

  That was supposed to be the last night I saw Jamie Shaw.

  I let him go, just like I was supposed to, and I did my best to never think about him again. Not that summer when I saw him around town, not that fall when he left for California and I stayed behind, not even when I applied to Alder University knowing it was in the same city as the University of California San Diego. I avoided looking at his social media, too. Eventually, as senior year kicked into gear and my focus became my own graduation, I really did start to let him go.

  But as fate would have it, that wasn’t my last night with Jamie Shaw.

  Not even close.

  Chapter 4

  Barrel Aged

  The thing about whiskey is that the longer it sits in the barrel, the more it changes — and it never stops. Whiskey aged for two years is different from whiskey aged for ten, and no matter what year you decide to throw the towel in and pour up a glass, you can’t go wrong. Whiskey at a ripe age, young and full of character, is buzz-worthy. But whiskey aged, even just a little bit? Pure bliss.

  And don’t let the fact that some of the alcohol evaporates over time fool you, because when you taste that aged whiskey, it’ll burn just as deliciously as it did when it was young.

  I was strolling the rows of tables lining the student union walkway at Alder University in San Diego, taking fliers from a few of them, passing by others, when the barrel cracked open.

  “Hi!” the blonde seated behind the Campus Housing table said excitedly. “Are you picking up your housing information?”

  I did my best impression of Ryan Atwood from The OC, channeling the lip tuck and eyebrow raise of indifference. I was in California, after all. “Indeed I am.”

  “Great!” she answered too quickly, clapping her hands together. “Last name?”

  “Kennedy.”

  She went to work searching through the various envelopes lined up on her table and I bounced on my heels, enjoying the warmth of the sun mixed with the cool breeze. It was the last week of August, a normally hellish time in South Florida, but the weather was still mild in San Diego. Sun bright, a few white clouds floating by, breeze rolling in off the coast. It couldn’t be more than eighty degrees and I smiled at the
feel of the light air, the humidity so much less stifling than that of Florida. I was officially in my new home for the next four years, and I knew immediately that I’d made the right choice choosing Alder.

  Alder University was a small, private campus, but a prestigious one. Tucked between the heart of San Diego and Imperial Beach and stocked with a plethora of options for undecided undergrads, it was the perfect college for me. I smiled again, hiking the same Jansport I’d used all through high school up higher on my back just as the perky blonde snapped her fingers.

  “Ah! Found it!” She plucked the folder out, checking its contents before looking back up to me. “Brecks, right?”

  My smile immediately fell with her question, along with my mood. I somehow forced a tight smile, but before I could even nod, another voice boomed my answer from behind me.

  “It’s B,” he said. His voice was smooth, oak infused and deeper than I remembered. I turned, words stuck in my throat, eyes wide as I drank him in. Every single inch of him, from his worn sneakers and basketball shorts to the soaked Alder t-shirt he wore, sticking to the defined ridges of his abdomen. My eyes trailed up over the faint stubble on his neck and jaw before they found honey whiskey pools. He slid up beside me then, crooked smile in place as he held my stare. “Just B.”

  Time stopped in that moment, and I couldn’t keep my eyes from tracing his features — his new, shorter hair, his biceps that had filled out considerably since the last time I’d seen them propping him up on the beach in Florida, the few inches he’d grown. His aura was different, cockier, more sure. I wish I could tell you I’d been smoother than the first time I’d met him on that running trail, but the truth was I couldn’t have been more obvious in my eye-assault, and he noticed, because when my eyes found his face again, he just cocked one brow and widened his grin.