With his foot, he toed the back door shut, then marched thema few feet over to the eat-in dining table. He tugged Charleigh’s panties to one side and traced his fingers over her until she could barely breathe.
Bent over the table, they had frantic sex.
Afterward, she turned around, wrapped her arms around his neck. “What was that all about?”
“I don’t like fighting with you,” Alexander said, his slate-blue eyes spearing hers.
She slid her hands down to the tops of his shoulders, guided him into a chair. Straddled him. “I don’t like it either. Not one bit.”
“So,” he said, his voice low, “let’s not fight, then.”
His lips grazed her neck, and before she knew it, they were at it again, Alexander holding her up by her hips as she bucked against him.
Charleigh creeps from the bathroom now, down the hall to Nellie’s room.
She cracks open the door, peers inside.
The air smells like a combo of cigarettes and Jean Nate, andNellie is curled on top of her Laura Ashley comforter into a tight ball, still dressed in last night’s clothes: a black miniskirt with fishnet tights and a Bangles sweatshirt with the neck cut out.
Charleigh grins, remembering poking her head in last night, catching Nellie dancing, actually smiling.
Has to be over a boy, Charleigh thought.
She knows these things.
And that it’s probably not Dustin.
Charleigh closes the door, her mouth still curled upward.
She’ll take a happy Nellie any day. It’s a rarity.
32
Jackson
The night—heavy and panting, black as a panther—oozes into the cabin of Jackson’s car. With his windows lowered, forest-scented air swirls through his tiny Mercedes, lifting his thick hair.
Duran Duran’sSeven and the Ragged Tigercassette is still in his tape deck, and as he veers onto the highway, the very one that will take him back to Ethan’s land, he twists the volume, willing Simon Le Bon’s voice to replace the one in his own head, the voice that says,Jackson Lee Ford, what are you doing?
Because he knowsexactlywhat he’s doing, and he doesn’t want nerves, or the thought of Charleigh screeching at him if she ever finds out, to stop what he thinks is about to happen.
Exactly thirty minutes ago, he was slouching on his sofa, thumbing his clicker between the Rangers game (a bore; they were up from the first inning) andFantasy Island, the only show on Saturday night worth watching, when the sound of his telephone ringing punctured the air.
His whole body sighed at the sound of it. It could be only one of two people: Charleigh or his mother. Not that he wouldn’t want to hear from Charleigh, but at this hour on a Saturday, she’d be tipsy and bitching about something or someone, in an endless loop.
Plus, he was salty at not having been invited to wherever she most likely still is, only getting asked, plucked from his house,when it suitsher.
But after the third ring, he stripped himself off the couch to answer it and spoke in a slightly annoyed tone (because he’s never outwardly confrontational). “Hello.”
A pause.
A man chuckling?
“Hellooo—” Jackson said a third time, this time with more pointed irritation in his tone.
He was about to plunge the phone back down on the receiver when he heard Ethan’s voice, throaty and saccharine, over the line.Buzzed. “This a bad time?” Ethan asked, but not in a concerned way, more mischievous.
Jackson’s heart battered against his rib cage. He gripped the back of a chair, steadied himself. “Uh, no, not at all. I was actually just watching—”
