Say You’ll Stay

by Carrie Lomax

  Marc shuffled through the boards like an oversized deck of cards. “You’re really good.”

  Alyssa shrugged. “There’s two versions of this design. I chose colors that reminded me of your sailboat, with a serif font for a classic look. In this version, I used a sans-serif typeset. It’ll read better in digital formats.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Right. “See the little feet on the letters in the first version? That’s a serif font. Sans-serif means the letters don’t have those little feet. It’s cleaner and more modern.” A shy smile tried to creep across her lips. “I’m kind of a font geek.”

  Marc stared at the brand boards. “These are great. Thanks.”

  Her heart sank. He couldn’t be too excited about them if all he did was put them back in the bag and set it on the ground. Marc turned to her. “How’d it go with Zach last night?”

  “Fine.” Alyssa didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want to talk at all. Not with Marc. That sentiment was exactly what had gotten her into this mess.

  “I’m going to go.” She turned away.

  “How stiff is the competition?”

  There is no competition. He didn’t need to know that, though.

  “He proposed.” She’d thought nothing could top the humiliation of her almost-fiancé standing her up on Christmas Eve. She’d been wrong. So, so wrong.

  “I heard.” His expression below the shades turned impassive.

  “I turned him down.”

  A ghost of a smile. “Heard that too.”

  “Surprised Janelle told you.”

  A real smile this time. “I’ll see you tonight?”

  “Whatever you worked out with my sister.” She might’ve been a little too successful at feigning nonchalance. His jaw tightened as if she’d said something cruel.

  She reached over and took his hand. His thumb was tinged blue and the knobs of his fingers still red from punching Zach. “Looks painful.”

  “It’s not so bad.” He withdrew. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  Alyssa’s heart cracked a little watching him retreat. Zach had hardly touched it, but she was already in deep where Marc was concerned. She couldn’t tell him, though. Not now. Not ever. Not when he was leaving, and so was she.

  * * *

  Marc nearly missed the turn for his own driveway. He swerved just in time, overcorrected, and had to reverse the car. It was bad driving by any standard.

  Going on a real date with Alyssa was like stepping into an alternate reality. One where he’d already slept with her, and her sister had laid out the dating ground rules after the fact. The whole situation was upside-down.

  The porch light was on, but otherwise there was no indication anyone expected him. It wasn’t too late to bail. He could turn around, park the car in Julian’s garage, go home, and this whole mess would be finished. She'd go back to New York and date boring finance types; he’d stay here and wonder every year if she was coming home for Christmas alone or with a boyfriend. Eventually he would stop imagining Alyssa’s short-shorts over every surface. It might take a thousand years, but he was a patient guy.

  Her silhouette appeared in the door. The screen door cracked open and she stepped out, waving to someone behind her. She had dressed not to kill. Not badly; Alyssa was incapable of that. The clothes she’d chosen were casually elegant, a shimmery knee-length skirt paired with an oversized sweater that obscured any hint of curves.

  It was a perfectly nice sweater. He wondered if she’d borrowed it from her mom. All he could see were her collar bones. They were very sexy clavicles. But everything south of that, from elbow to knee, was covered in at least two layers of fabric, floating around her body like a cloud. It was a far cry from the come-hither dress she’d worn on Christmas Day.

  “Wow. Nice ride.” Alyssa’s eyes popped wide when she saw the BMW convertible parked in the driveway. She’d probably been expecting the truck.

  “Julian’s. It’s on loan for the evening.”

  Alyssa tucked herself comfortably into the passenger seat, like she belonged in an expensive car. Then again, she had a knack for fitting in anywhere. On his boat. In Florida, doing yoga in the back yard on a sunny winter morning. In the cab of his beaten-down truck. In New York City, which he knew since he’d flipped through the pictures on her social media feeds looking for pictures of her date yesterday. It was the perfect way to torture himself, both now and after she went back.

  They drove until the city fell away in the rearview mirror and the sky opened wide and dark above them.

  “Where are we going?” she finally asked as he turned down a dark country road.

  “Not to a restaurant.”

  “Then where?” He’d have had to be deaf not to hear the apprehension in her voice, even over the roar of the wind from the open car.

  “The Everglades.”

  She was silent for a minute. “Why?”

  He guided the car into an empty parking lot and killed the engine. “I’m tired of being around you in public, and there’s no place private for us to go other than my boat. The point of this exercise is to talk, so let’s talk.”

  “You’re going to get a zero rating in the Food Quality category,” she said nervously, tucking her hair behind her ear. The wind had whipped it into a tangle, like it had been on the boat. The sight drove a piling of desire right down his middle.

  She’d belonged on the boat. With him. Just the two of them. They were silent for most of the drive.

  Marc pulled a paper bag out of the back seat. “Hungry?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Too bad. There’s dessert if you want it.” He carried the bag to a nearby picnic table, wishing they could go back to the easy familiarity of two nights ago. Alyssa followed him at a distance, as though he was going to do something horrible to her instead of give her a piece of chocolate cake. “So, we started off on the wrong foot, obviously.”

  Alyssa went still and silent. “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “Don’t you?” He watched as she twitched the shimmery skirt over the picnic table bench. It settled around her legs like a cloud of stardust.

  She placed her forearms on the table and leaned forward. Her hazel eyes were as intense as they had been three nights ago, when he had first touched her hip under her skirt. In the moment when it had been blindingly clear where things were headed, and neither of them had pulled back.

  “I would not go back and change a single thing about that night, Marc. I want you to understand. I don’t regret being with you. At all. I’d do everything again, and more, in a heartbeat.” She glanced away over the sea of grass waving in the moonlight. “It’s okay to tell me that you never want to see me again. You didn’t have to bring me here.”

  What the hell was he supposed to say? His mouth was dry. His mind flashed through memories of her, like a runaway train of sensations, and images that he had been doing an excellent job of not remembering right up until she said the words everything again, and more. In a heartbeat.

  Yes, now. Please and thank you.

  Marc’s distracted brain had hardly processed the second thing she said. Alyssa thought he’d brought her here to tell her he never wanted to see her again? What the hell was wrong with men in New York?

  “That’s not what I want,” he choked out.

  “No?” The hope and skepticism in her voice almost broke something in him. “Then what do you want?”

  I want you all to myself. “To get to know you better. The way you talk about yourself, and your family talk about you, it’s like they’re describing someone completely different from the Alyssa I know. I feel like I don’t know you at all.”

  She relaxed fractionally. “Well, you know the basics. I’m curious. What’s your first memory of me?”

  “The day you moved in.”

  “Really?” Alyssa sat back and crossed her arms.

  Marc nodded, trying to remember what exactly it was that had drawn his attention. “Y
ou had a ponytail. You were cute, kind of quiet. You were…self-possessed. I don’t think I would’ve dealt with it as well if my parents moved me my senior year of high school.”

  “I was relieved to move.” She picked at the hem of her sweater.

  “Why?”

  She took a deep breath. “In Ohio I had a boyfriend. Just a high school thing. One day I caught him taking pictures of Janelle with his phone. Not okay pictures. She was thirteen years old. My dad flipped out, called his parents, and had the pictures destroyed. But the guy started harassing me at school. It got bad fast. Then Dad was offered an early retirement buyout, so he took it and we moved here. They were tired of the winters in Ohio, Janelle was starting high school the next year, and they wanted her to be able to focus without awful rumors dogging her. By the time we left, I had no friends to lose.”

  He shook his head. “That’s sick. Did they call the cops?”

  Her shoulder lifted and fell. “No. Everyone involved was a teenager. Kids, phones with cameras, and a whole lot of poor judgment didn’t make it a crime. We moved, the problem went away, and nobody shovels the driveway anymore. It all worked out. What’s your next memory?”

  “Easy. The day you got your college acceptance.”

  “There was more than one.”

  The hint of pride in her voice made the corners of his mouth tick up. “The one in New York. Didn’t you beat out hundreds of other applicants?”

  Alyssa grinned. “The school admits about sixty-five students to the art program every year, out of thirteen hundred or more applicants. Nobody was more shocked than I was.”

  “I saw you check the mail, and then I heard you screaming.” Impossible not to smile at the memory.

  “My mom was screaming.”

  “Whoever it was, half the neighborhood heard it. When I saw you later, you were practically floating.”

  Alyssa grinned. It was strange and a little disheartening to realize that she didn’t seem to know he’d witnessed the biggest turning points of her life.

  “I was eighteen years old and headed to the best art school in New York City. That lucky break almost made up for all the bad things that had happened the previous year. I hadn’t been happy like that in a long time.”

  Marc remembered it well. That was the moment when Alyssa had gone from the cute girl next door to beautiful, talented, and successful. Untouchable. Every year when she’d come home from the city, she’d been a little more polished, a bit more glamorous.

  She wasn’t untouchable now. He reached across the table and captured one manicured hand. Slim, elegant fingers curled around his. Marc ran his uninjured thumb over her palm. That simple gesture made her close her eyes with a little shiver. He wasn’t offended when she let go.

  “Was it everything you’d hoped?” he prompted.

  Alyssa took a deep breath. “New York?” she asked, her mind clearly elsewhere.

  “Yeah.”

  She shook her head. “Definitely not. I worked constantly that first year. I was so tired all the time. It was sink or swim. Which was a good thing, because otherwise I might have been totally crushed by the fact that you were off at college and having...a lot of fun with the girls. You think I didn’t know that,” she smiled, bumping his calf with her toe under the table.

  Marc immediately shifted his leg closer so they were touching. He smirked right back at her, though her knowledge of his tomcat ways made him shift in his seat.

  “I’m sure everyone knew about it. What about after college?” he asked, changing the topic back to her.

  “I graduated, got a job, and four years later got a promotion. It was approved last week,” she replied flatly.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.” The absence of enthusiasm in her voice bordered on bitterness. Weird. Alyssa was the least bitter person he knew. She had to like her work if she’d done a freebie project for him on her vacation. So, why the unhappiness?

  Marc lifted himself to sit on the table and swung his legs to her side, propping his feet on the bench beside her. He didn’t reach for her, though all he wanted to do was pull her close and make her come until she forgot all about bad jobs and bad boyfriends. Instead, he popped open the white cardboard box beside him.

  “Cake?” he asked.

  “What kind?”

  Marc reached over and dipped his finger in the frosting. “Chocolate. Try some.” He held out his hand, index finger coated with a thick layer of dark sugar almost invisible in the darkness, and watched Alyssa. Waited to see what she would do.

  11

  Marc was doing that eye fucking thing again. Watching her so intently that it was as if he had X-ray vision, only instead of seeing her bones, he saw her emotions in Technicolor.

  His finger hovered inches from her lips. “Go on. Taste it.”

  Her eyes flicked involuntarily to his. The Everglades had burst into flames around them. An invisible boa constrictor had crawled out of the swamp to squeeze her tightly around the ribs.

  Alyssa’s lips parted. A warm puff of no escaped, but it was silent and conveyed no meaning. Marc’s chocolate-laden finger touched her lower lip, the sweetly bitter scent mingling with fresh country air. Gently, he pressed his thumb into the gap between her lips until the confection touched her tongue. She moaned low in the back of her throat. Saliva flooded her mouth as she licked the frosting from his finger, sucking it deeper.

  It was really good cake.

  His entire body had gone still. Alyssa closed her eyes for a moment as his fingers brushed her cheek. She rolled her tongue over the first joint of his index finger, the frosting gone now, and tasted the salt of his skin. Alyssa tilted her chin up to graze the tip of his finger with her teeth.

  Marc released a choked breath. The spell broke. Her eyelids popped open to find him watching her as if she had turned into the cake, and he was about to devour her. This time, she held his gaze until he was the one who broke contact. It required all her strength.

  The moment passed. Then several more.

  “What’s your first memory of me?” Marc asked beside her, his knee hovering in her peripheral vision. If she’d moved him in any way with her little cake performance, it wasn’t detectable in his voice. Alyssa leaned her head against his leg and stared up at the sky. It was easier to talk when they were touching.

  “The day we moved in. Your mom came over to welcome us to the neighborhood. She mentioned you were in college, and I saw you later that evening taking out the trash. Since I was avoiding boys like the plague, I decided to work very hard at not running into you.”

  “You were the ghost next door.” He threaded his fingers through her hair.

  She smiled faintly into the dark. “There was a downside. It meant I was constantly aware of you.” Marc traced the outline of her ear with his index finger. The one she’d licked clean of chocolate a few minutes before. A shiver stole over her as he brushed the hair away, exposing the nape of her neck to the night air.

  “Maybe that explains why I sometimes felt like I was being watched. New question. What’s your favorite memory of me?”

  Alyssa sat up suddenly and shook her head. “I think you know what my favorite memory is.” She stared up at the stars, grateful the low light hid the stain covering her cheeks.

  “Before this week.”

  She just shook her head, embarrassed. “It’s ridiculous. So high school. Maybe I’ll tell you in the car.”

  “I’m holding you to it.”

  “No promises.”

  That was the problem. A few days from now she’d get back on the airplane and go back to the city, put her head down, and work her tail off. When she was home, she’d have plenty of time to sit around her minuscule apartment, reliving their night on the sailboat. In a few weeks or months, he’d leave on his great sailing adventure. Knowing Marc, he’d find a girl in every port. All they had was this week, and it was flying by.

  “Come here.” Marc tugged her hand and nodded at the picnic table. Alys
sa set one foot on the bench and stepped up to sit a few inches away from his side on the table top. He pointed up into the sky, where stars glittered like shattered glass shards. “See that bright star?”

  His bicep bunched under the short sleeve of his t-shirt. Alyssa’s eyes lingered on the line of his arm before she raised them skyward. “I see a lot of bright stars.”

  He glanced over his shoulder with an expression she couldn’t read. Amusement and wariness, and something that was still cloaked in shadow. He leaned back on his arms and scooted over to settle one leg on either side of her.

  The damned, invasive boa constrictor was back, and it had brought friends. The air went stale in her chest before she remembered to exhale.

  Marc leaned her head back against his shoulder and pointed again into the night sky. “That one. See it?”

  Suddenly, she did. One glowed more fiercely than the others. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Polaris. The North Star.”

  “I remember it.”

  “Remember it?” Marc pulled away to look sideways at her. His hand fell to her thigh and stayed there, warm and welcome.

  “There’s no stars in New York. Not the celestial kind.”

  His chest tensed and relaxed against her back as he settled back. “Maybe you can’t see them, but there are always stars.” He brushed her hair aside. Alyssa turned fractionally, her lips hovering against his.

  “No kissing,” Marc’s voice rumbled against her body, and his mouth brushed hers.

  “Not you, too.” She leaned forward to stand up. His arm snaked around her waist, pulling her back. Hard. Her heart hammered.

  “I choose to interpret the rule as ‘no kissing on the lips.’ Everything else is fair game.”

  Alyssa’s low pelvis clutched and released, sending a liquid sensation through her abdomen. His very hard erection pressed against her low back. She tilted her hips back fractionally and was rewarded with a hiss and an answering grind against her sacrum.