Page 41 of Blueline Baby

Then he moves, and it stops being slow.

At some point, I open my eyes and realize I’m looking straight through a wall of glass at the entire lake. The sun is streaming right in on us.

I let out a breathless, half-embarrassed laugh and twist back to look at him. “Jack, the window is right there.”

“There’s nobody for miles.” He doesn’t slow down. He folds down over my back, grinning against my ear. “And anyway, I’ve got the best view.”

He slips a hand between me and the table, finds exactly what he’s looking for, and works me up again until I’m gripping the edges of the wood and meeting him thrust for thrust. It happens almost before I’m ready. Every muscle clenches and I can’t think. I can’t remember where we are. All I can do is hold on while he works me through it, and then his fingers dig into my hip and he groans into my neck and follows me over.

For a while, neither of us moves. He stays draped over my back, pressing slow kisses to my shoulder. I lie there cheek-down on the table where, in a few days, I’m apparently going to be eating breakfast across from his mother.

“I’m never going to be able to eat here,” I say into the wood.

He kisses the nape of my neck. “For the record, that was the best meal I’ve ever had at this table.”

“Please don’t make family breakfasts weird.”

He laughs and straightens, drawing me upright and back against his chest. Both his arms wrap around me, and I can feel him grinning into my hair. “So. You want that tour now?”

I don’t answer right away. I lean back into him and look out at the lake. The water, the trees, the nothing for miles.

I think about how, months ago, I was sitting at a hockey game glaring at this man through the rink glass. Now I’m in his mother’s kitchen. In his arms. In a house I feel like I don’t belong in.

And the terrifying part isn’t meeting his parents. It’s that I already feel like I could keep this.

21

JACK

JUST THIS ONCE

I have never in my life been this bad at sitting still.

We’re on our last solo day at the lake, and I keep catching myself trying to schedule every moment with Chloe. I wake up thinking we should get the boat out by nine. Hit the water before the wind comes up. Be back in time for lunch. Then I remember there’s nothing to be on time for. There’s nowhere to be. That’s the entire point of the trip and I’m the one who can’t relax.

Chloe finds it hilarious.

“Look at you,” she says from the next chair on the dock, not bothering to open her eyes. “Vibrating.”

“I’m bored.”

“You’re planning something. I can hear it from here.”

She stretches out in the sun, her book open and forgotten on her chest, and I lose track of whatever I was scheming. I’ve spent months watching this girl treat every hour of her day like a military schedule, and up here, she doesn’t. She sleeps till ten now. Halfway through a sentence, she’ll stop talking and watch a bird out on the water.

Yesterday she fell asleep on the dock in the middle of the afternoon. I sat there like an idiot the whole time, watching her breathe and thinking, this. I want this for the rest of my life.

That’s the part that gets me. Wanting something this badly used to be a thing that happened to other guys. The only thing I’ve ever been afraid of losing is a lead in the third period. Now there’s this whole other thing, asleep and slightly sunburned, and I lie awake at night running every way I could lose her.

The old me never lost sleep over anything, because the old me never had anything worth losing.

Tonight’s the last one before the house fills up with my family. Tomorrow it’s my mom and her four hundred questions, my dad wanting to discuss my defensive gap control, my sister losing her mind because I finally brought a girl home. And it’ll be great. It’s always great. But it’ll be loud, and busy and none of it’s going to be this.

That night, after the sun goes down, I go upstairs and fill the big tub with water as hot as it’ll go, and then I come back down and pick her up off the couch before she can start negotiating.

“Jack!” She yelps. “Put me down!”

“Last night of quiet,” I tell her, already carrying her toward the stairs. “I’m not wasting it.”