“What does that mean?”
He claims the coffee. “That I can drink it however. Thank you, for this and the clean clothes. I meant to say it last night, but I passed out before you got back.”
Jax sits down on the couch. Lacking any better ideas, I perch on the coffee table. “Jerry picking you up this morning?”
“Yeah. We’re building a camp at Stunt Point, but I don’t know how far we’ll get with that weather front rolling in.”
I take a breath before I respond. Force it down to smother whatever fuckery my brain is about to gift me. “You don’t want to be caught up there in a storm,” I say carefully. “That rock isn’t stable.”
“Jerry said that too. He also mentioned you know those trails better than him. You ever seen lynx up there?”
His question shouldn’t surprise me. He’s already told me his job is to catalogue wildlife for Jerry, and it makes sense that I’ve come up in conversation between the two of them, even without Jax sleeping on my couch. But it catches me off guard all the same. I don’t think about the great outdoors anymore. My world has narrowed to staff schedules and glasses of red, white, and rosé, and I like it that way. Ineedit that way. And I can’t handle the expectation in Jax’s ocean gaze as he waits for me to answer him.
The coffee mug burns my palm. I ground myself in the pain and take a sip large enough to singe my throat too. The lump there clears a little and I force my brain to catch up with the perfectly normal conversation he’s trying to have with me.Lynx. Trails. Lynx. Trails.“Only once,” I say eventually. “And it was so fast I was never sure. I kind of wish I never told Jerry, because he’s been excited about it ever since.”
Jax’s eyes glimmer with humor. “Excited? He seems more pissed off about getting his feet wet.”
I can’t help a low chuckle. I know that side of Jerry all too well. “Don’t be fooled by his grouchy old man act. He loves the lynx, and he’s been wanting to get a good map of those trails for years.”
“Why hasn’t he, then?”
Another cinderblock fills my throat. “Because they’re too dangerous for noob hikers to take their chances on. And assholes like me keep telling him it’s bad for the environment. Think about it. If there are lynx up there, do you really want to unleash the masses on them?”
Jax sips his coffee, contemplating my pessimism as he swallows.
The subject matter is making me more jittery than the coffee, but watching his throat work and his tongue dart out to lick his lips is a welcome distraction. So is his bed head. His hair is wavy and golden, and lighter at the ends where it’s been touched by the sun. I want to run my fingers through it. Not to straighten it out, but to feel if it’s as soft as it looks. I haven’t had a dude’s head in my lap for quite some time, but good hair is still my kryptonite, perhaps more than the rest of it—the rocking bod pressed hard against me, the scruffy jaw that would scratch mine just right.
“You okay?”
“Hmm?”
Jax tilts his head sideways. “You’re even less of a morning person than me, huh?”
He’s wrong. I like mornings just fine. But I’m not about to explain to a stranger—or anyone who’s not a shrink—that his peaceful nights on my couch have made my teeth itch. “Managing a bar doesn’t leave me much time for Zs, unless I want to be a vampire. And I tried that. No daylight doesn’t work for me. I’d rather be tired.”
It’s a half-truth, but Jax accepts it. “You have amazing weather here,” he says. “It’s more real than back in Cali. It reminds me of home.”
“Your English home?”
He grins. “My Cornish home. But yeah. I mean, it’s grayer there, and we don’t see as much snow or sub-zero temperatures, but we get storms and rain and wind, even in the summer, and it keeps you alive, you know? Smaller waves mean more when they’re freezing cold.”
“Waves?”
Jax’s gaze flickers, and I feel an affinity I can’t decipher. “I was a surfer once,” he says. “Chasing waves was my whole fucking life.”
“Then what?”
“Then it wasn’t.”
Those three words make more sense to me than if he’d told me his entire life story. I absorb them, and accept his answer at face value. Because really, what more do I need to know? Except how he looks in a wetsuit, obviously. That would keep me up all night in the very best way.
I don’t ask him, though. Instead, I track his gaze as it darts to the horrible plastic clock Gabriel sent me from Texas, and figure he needs some space to get ready for work.
Taking a shower gives me an out.
When I come back, Jax is standing by the couch, his bag and my duffle slung on his back.
“You don’t have to take it all with you every time you leave,” I blurt before my brain has caught up with the fact he doesn’t actually live on my sofa.
