This morning, I’ve got a teenaged-Saturday-morning feeling. Hungry, hurting, and with a definite hard-on. Wishing I could go back and instant replay the night before.
But not for any of the teenaged reasons.
Only one reason, really, and I haven’t seen her since last night.
I lift my hands and scrub them over my face, suppressing a groan as memories come back to me. The good ones, first: Jess jumping on that trampoline, Jess’s laugh and smile, Jess telling me she’d trust me again, Jess telling me somuch. Jess’s lips, her tongue, her whole body on mine. Her hair tangled in my fingers, her neck bared to my open mouth.
The five or so best fooling-around minutes of my whole entire life.
Then, the not-so-good ones, or maybe just the one that’s been haunting me most.
Had I . . . had I sort of . . .yelledat her? Had I said,I want these two fucking daysand then walked off without another word into the night to calm down the thudding in my chest and the pulse down the length of my cock?
I swing my legs onto the floor and sit up, an answering pang flaring in my lower back, which either means that I am now officially too old for my favorite couch in the world or I tweaked something while I was jumping on a trampoline with a woman I can’t stop thinking about. Amazing.
I tap the screen on my phone and wince at the time. Eight goddamn thirty, on a farm. If my dad is over here helping out with chores this morning, I’m going to get dragged to hell. I can’t very well explain to him that I didn’t fall asleep until well after three a.m. because I was absolutely fixated on the idea that Jess Greene might tiptoe down the basement stairs and give me what I growled at her I wanted. I can’t very well say that once I did sleep, I dreamt of having my hands all over her body, my mouth between her legs. The sound of her panting breath in my ear, the feel of her skin damp with sweat against mine.
I make a pit stop in the small half-bath down here, brush my teeth and splash some ice-cold water on my face before pulling on a pair of jeans and a clean T-shirt. I don’t hear much going on upstairs, so maybe I’ll get a couple of minutes of blessed privacy before I find Jess and try to do a better-than-Neanderthal job of talking to her in an adult way about what we did last night.
Except when I get up to the kitchen, her sister is sitting there.
Big bowl of cereal in front of her, spoon halfway to her mouth, a smirk on her face when she sees me.
“Morning, Hawk,” she says cheerfully.
“Adam,” I say, not cheerfully. I head straight for the coffee. Mace keeps a pot on pretty much all day, which, now that I think of it, probably doesn’t help with his anxiety. Maybe I’ll mention it to him when I’m not pathetically grateful for the fact that this coffee exists.
“You just missed your dad.”
I think about opening one of the cabinet doors onto my head.
Repeatedly.
“He’srealdisappointed in you.”
I keep my grim silence until I’ve got a full cup, and then I move back over to the table, sitting across from her. “Doesn’t seem you’re an early riser, either.”
She shrugs. “I’m a guest. You like,workhere.”
“I don’t work here,” I grumble, which is honestly the same tone I would’ve used on my dad. Maybe I did wake up back in time. Another dimension.
Tegan crunches at her cereal loudly, scrolling on her phone. She acts as though we have breakfast together every morning. I am somehow both embarrassed that she’s witnessing me in this rattled state and also strangely, nonsensically accustomed to it. She doesn’t even seem like a guest.
“Where is everyone?” I say, shrugging off the weirdness of it all for the moment and simply leaning in to the familiarity.
“Your dad and Mace left to do mowing. Beth’s taking a shower before she’s gotta take the girls over to their camp.”
She takes another big bite of cereal, chews slowly. She knows who she’s leaving out.
I’m about to call her bluff and take out my own phone, fake interest in my email or the headlines, or see what new episodes Broadside has released in the past few days, when I hear noise outside—my nieces, first, loud and laughing, and then Jess’s muffled voice. I’m obviously still too tired, still too uncaffein-ated, still too in my head to stop myself from looking immediately out the window.
I want these two fucking days, my brain howls again.
I’m sure Tegan notices. Her ongoing cereal-chewing is a judgment.
Outside, Jess seems to be on some kind of backyard tour, all three of my nieces vying for her attention. Her hair is up again, a thick, loose bun near the crown of her head, and it’s so much of her neck that I have to jam the pad of my thumb into the always-sore spot at the top of my left kneecap to keep other parts of me from reacting.
She smelled sweet there, but against my tongue, she was salty.
