He laughs. I don’t just love the sound of it. Love is too simple a word for the way the sound rolls through me, warming the cold parts of me, erasing lingering doubts, and softening the parts of me that are still somewhat wary. Not of Wilder, just of life and the world in general. I was never one of those people who were blessed enough to be naïve, not even when I was young.
I don’t want to think about all the things that could go wrong.
I just want to enjoy the few days we have together. I’ve only been in a studio one time, and just for a few minutes, so this is a brand-new experience for me. It’s just going to be us. Alone. And that is nothing short of magic.
“I really enjoyed last time too,” he murmurs.
Then, he goes silent for a few minutes, and when I hit a clear stretch of road with no one around, I crank my head back and quickly look to make sure he’s not drowning in the shitstorm that hit. If he wants to get up in his head, that’s okay. He has every right. But drowning? I’ll pull this car over and pull him out of it somehow.
He’s not drowning.
There’s no imaginary shitstorm or flood or cesspool rising higher and higher.
Jackson Wilder, a man who absolutely cannot drift off anywhere other than his bunk on a tour bus or maybe in a hotel bed if that strange medium of major exhaustion but not too much sleep deprivation is involved, is sound asleep with his face pressed right up against the window.
Chapter thirteen
Carissa
Holy shit.
Wilder makes deep sleep look like a major understatement. I’ve been parked outside the studio on the outskirts of Reno for twenty minutes, debating with myself about whether or not I should wake him up. I’ve kept the car running so we wouldn’t cook, but I’m starting to feel a little bit wasteful when it comes to letting it idle. I’m also getting major guilt vibes ogling Wilder while he’s sleeping.
It’s not a pretty position. He still has his face pressed up against the window, except now his mouth is open, and his tongue is doing its best eager dog impression. There’s also drool. It shouldn’t be hot. Itshouldn’t be.It does look peaceful, and maybe that’s the best part.
I think we’ve already established that I have a serious problem when it comes to him, open mouth sleeping or not.
I finally shut the car off. All this time, I haven’t seen a soul around here. The studio is in Reno, but when I said outskirts,I meant it. There’s nothing around but this building and scrub brush land for just about as far as I can see. The mountains and the city are definitely there in the distance, but distance is the keyword.
I take a chance and open Wilder’s door. He rights himself with a start, and his seatbelt prevents him from toppling out.
He balls his hands against his eyes like he’s a cranky toddler rudely jerked from a nap he was really enjoying, but it’s more because he’s disoriented. He shakes his head, clearing it quickly. Then he looks through the door and up at the building.
“Oh my god. You let me sleep the whole way? I’m sorry, Carissa. I didn’t mean to just clock out on you.”
I want to touch his shoulder, push back the stray, flattened, messy dark locks of hair that are all over the place, get close, and run my tongue over his neck, all the way to his earlobe. I want to kiss him until I’m drowning in it. I want to lose myself in him and have him forget everything but us.
I do realize we’re out in the middle of nowhere, utterly exposed. It raises the hair on the back of my neck. I settle for grazing the knuckles of his right hand, which he’s flung out against the car door. “You needed the sleep. I didn’t mind the drive. It was peaceful. I turned on a podcast about Ancient Rome. It’s incredible. You should listen to it sometime.”
He snaps his seatbelt off, shaking himself like a wet dog to dispel the lingering drowsiness. He unfurls himself from the car, looking so much more delicious than he has any right to be in a sweater vest and pants pulled up to his pecs. It’s the suspenders. I’m starting to have a wicked weakness for them.
“I didn’t know you were into history.”
“I didn’t know I was either. It just came up as a suggestion on the app I use to stream music. It looked good, and for once, I didn’t have anything I wanted to listen to, so I thought I’d give it a try. It’s low budget on the recording side, but the guy is soconcise. They’re half-hour episodes, but he packs a crazy amount of information into them. He should be a college prof since he’s so good at lecturing.”
“I’ll definitely give it a go.” He snaps his suspenders over the sweater vest.
My brain decides to feed me an image of Wilder sprawled out on a couch, minus shirt and vest, just those suspenders, and me straddling his waist and snapping them just like that, right over his nipples.
With that playing in my brain on a loop, I can’t help but look down. Those high pants are cupping all the right places in the front, and when he turns, also in the back. They’re giving sexy wedgies, and there’s absolutely nothing old man about them.
“I booked this studio because I know someone who knows someone, and they had a few days where it was going to be empty. I looked it up online. It’s a gorgeous space, and it isn’t too far from Sanoma, while being just far enough. It’s not what I originally thought of when I wanted to take you away. I would have loved to go to Colorado or somewhere with mountain man vibes, but instead, you get this. Me. Exhausted, stressed, sweater vest, in all my glory. While we’re here, I swear you’ll have my undivided attention. For your music, or for anything else. It’s your choice. You sort of kidnapped me, so you’re calling the shots.”
I elbow him playfully in the side, hoping he can’t see how my heart is banging all over the place and simultaneously melting, while the rest of me follows suit. “It was more of a role-playing kidnapping. If we call it anything other than that, I feel like I’m going to have to do some good deeds to make up for the bad karma I’m putting into the world.”
He tips his head back in awolf howling to the moonpose and lets out the longest, deepest, heartiest laugh. His chest swells, his shoulders rise and fall, and his throat expands and contractsthe same way it does when he’s belting out an intense part of a song.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in the past two weeks.
