“Are you seriously salty with me because I lost my virginity when I was seventeen? How old were you?”
“No comment,” he says. “And just so you’re clear, if Mark hits on you at the wedding, I’m probably going to kick his ass.”
Does he realize just how much he sounds like a guy in a relationship? He has no intention of this lasting beyond tonight, but he’s jealous of someone I slept with over a decade ago?
“So you’re going to kick his ass for taking my virginity in a really poor, unsatisfying manner twelve years ago?”
“Correct. Although I’ll convince myself it’s about something else.”
This is the exact kind of shit that I shouldn’t like. Thomas never asked about my first, and he also wouldn’t care.
It seems a little unfair that Elijah’s saying it all aloud. A girl might almost assume he wants us to last.
I force myself to sit up. “I should let you get some sleep,” I tell him.
He wraps his arm around me. “Stay,” he commands. “Sleep here. We never got to do this either.”
As if he wants this just as much as I do. As I fall asleep, I’m actively reminding myself that he does not.
When I wake, his side of the bed is empty, and the clock on the nightstand says it’s noon. Outside it’s pouring rain, which means we’ve got anothertwenty-four more hours together, twenty-four hours during which I probably need to get back on stable footing.
I shower, throw on shorts and a T-shirt, and go downstairs, where he’s standing at the stove frying up the rest of the eggs.
His gaze drops over me, head to toe. Predatory, possessive. I want to ignore that look, but it goes straight to my core.
“Make the coffee,” he says.
“Bossy,” I reply, moving past him.
His hand reaches out toward my forearm. He spins me toward him. “I can be worse.”
His gaze drops to my mouth.
I should let this end. I should content myself with last night, but I’m already caving. I’m already loose-boned and eager andleaning into his touch. “You, bossier?” I reply, biting my lip. “This I’d need to see.”
He turns off the burner, then lifts me onto the counter.
“Just one more time,” he says.
“Just the once,” I agree.
It’s just once on the counter, then it’s just once on the table, and then the screened porch—he’s seated and I’m in his lap—and then it’s in the shower, and in bed.
And each time I insist that it’s the last while thinking I don’t know how I’ll stand to live without it, and waiting for him to suggest it doesn’t have to be, that he might want to see me again after I leave New Orleans.
But he never does.
32
ELIJAH
We wake to more rain the following morning, both of us bleary-eyed with fatigue. We didn’t sleep much, two nights in a row.
When she finally climbed out of my bed this morning, it was all I could do to let her go. I tried to tell myself it was done. It should be. This is already complicated, and there are these occasional moments when she looks at me and I can see her waiting. Waiting for me to say something has changed. Waiting for me to tell her I don’t want it to end.
So it needs to stop. But I don’t think I’ve got that much restraint. If the opportunity presents itself in New Orleans, I will take it. And who am I kidding? I’m going to do everything in my power to create an opportunity, too.
It’s raining in fits and starts as we load the car and drive to Paul’s for my grandmother and Betty. Not five minutes after we set out, it’s raining so hard that I have no visibility. We’re crossing a really low bridge, one where the water appears to be ten inches deep. Multiple cars have stalled out, and there are many bridges like this one ahead of us on our journey.
