That earned him an appreciative roar from the crowd.
He sat down, and Jessie hung onto his arm, burying her face in his bicep.
There was drunken singing, and some acrobatics from people in the show. Poker games broke out around the bonfire, and about the time it started getting really rowdy, Carson, Perry, and Cassidy excused themselves. Austin and Millie had already taken Emma home.
“This was great,” Perry said, yawning.
“Fantastic,” agreed Cassidy. “I love this place.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” Carson said, jabbing his sister on the shoulder. “You’re not doing any trick riding or anything like that.”
“You can’t tell me what to do,” Cassidy said.
“I can,” said Flynn.
“Unfair. If it’s good enough for your girlfriend, it ought to be good enough for me,” she said.
His girlfriend. Flynn’s response got lost in that label echoing in Jessie’s head.
His girlfriend. That seemed so …
Well, actually, it seemed far too tame for what they were. And it also seemed way too permanent. Way too intentional. They were just doing this thing until the election wrapped up. That was all.
Except the idea of a relationship didn’t seem quite as ridiculous as it had before. Because she knew him now.
But the idea of … of putting herself out there like that made her want to die. Because she had known so much rejection in her life. So, so much. And the idea of having any more … Especially from him.
Well, she wasn’t going to think about it. That was all. She was simply going to live in the moment. Because she had never felt quite so good living in the moment as she did now.
“Your place?” he asked when they were alone.
“I would love that,” she said.
She missed her little camper. Her little camper with all her frilly little things. Flynn looked so large and masculine in it. She couldn’t help but notice when they closed themselves inside. She moved to him and kissed him. It felt different. It felt as if things were shifting. It had been easy to define the early shifts. When she had gone from having never been kissed to having been kissed by Flynn.
From that kiss to another. From never having had sex, to having sex with him.
Now she had lost track of the number of times they had been intimate, but things still kept changing. It was just harder and harder to explain how. To herself, and especially to Flynn.
What were these feelings inside her? She didn’t have a language for it. But she could kiss him. Kiss him and know him, both physically and through conversation.
He was hurting tonight; she could feel it. He was also genuinely proud of her.
It was complicated. Just as everything was always. So she kissed him, and he kissed her back.
His arms were tight around her, and he backed her up against the trailer wall, making the whole thing shake. She pulled off his clothes, and he tore off hers.
She let him lay her on the bed, and she knew what was coming would be fast and furious. She welcomed it.
He protected them both, then thrust deep inside her, the race to completion making her dizzy.
When she finally cried out his name, he was only a few seconds behind her.
And then everything was still. Reality crept back in.
“People are just really disappointing sometimes,” she said.
And she meant his family. Wholeheartedly.
