The Cora Carmack Box Set

by Cora Carmack

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea, too,” I said.

  He hummed, and the scruff on his chin just barely grazed my collarbone. My head fell back, and his breath roamed free across the skin of my neck. His lips brushed across my pulse point in an almost kiss, and all my muscles locked up tight. His mouth moved to hover above my ear, and my arms shook so badly I expected them to give out any second.

  He hummed again, and I could feel the vibration against my skin even though we weren’t touching.

  His mouth brushed the shell of my ear in a second almost kiss, and he said, “Not yet, sweetheart.”

  My arms gave out, and I flopped back onto his bed with a groan.

  His smile was maddening and mischievous.

  He gripped the bed frame, and pulled himself up off the bunk, leaving me lying alone on his bed.

  What a tease.

  “How do you feel about heights?”

  15

  You’re crazy,“ I said.

  “You wanted adventure, Kelsey.”

  “I thought you meant more spontaneous subway rides and playgrounds, not jumping off a bridge!” I heard the scream of the girl I’d just watched disappear over the edge, and I dug my fingers into Hunt’s arm.

  “I can’t.”

  I’d been on bridges higher than the Zvikov Bridge before, but not ones I was supposed to leap off of. My heart was about to bust out of my chest, and Hunt was grinning like a madman.

  I turned to flee, and Hunt pulled me back, his hand settling at the base of my spine. It was almost as if he knew that that’s where I felt him most intensely. When he was near, my spine became a live wire, sending shockwaves down to every last nerve ending.

  His touch only amplified that.

  “You’re going to love it.”

  “Do you have a death wish?” I asked.

  “I promise it’s going to be fine. We’re not going to die. We can jump together if that will make you feel better.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean the jumping was going to kill you. I meant I was.”

  “You can kill me after the jump.”

  “What if I’m too dead to kill you?” I was a little embarrassed at how hysterical I sounded.

  He laced his fingers with mine, and squeezed my hand as he pulled me forward.

  “Trust me.”

  I did. But that only made me more scared. Trust was a key that gave him access to places far more breakable than my body.

  It took all of my concentration to keep from crying or throwing up or both as the instructor began hooking us up to the same bungee cord. We were harnessed and strapped and lectured, and the only thing that kept me from having a complete mental breakdown was the fact that Hunt and I were chest to chest as they hooked us together. His proximity and his warm breath fanning across my forehead were enough to distract me from my impending death.

  They had us move closer to the ledge, and I let out an involuntary squeak of fear when I saw the river winding away from us so far below.

  Jackson slipped a hand around my neck and tilted my head up toward his. He placed a sweet kiss on my forehead that made my heart beat faster rather than calming me down. My heart scampered up and hid at the back of my neck, pulsing where Hunt’s hand still rested.

  All I could think was . . . that better not count as my kiss.

  He said, “Just try it for me. I’ll try something for you later. Whatever you want.”

  I took a slow, deep breath and nodded.

  Once we were all attached, the instructor began adjusting our hands and our bodies to match the appropriate form. My head was tucked into the crook of his shoulder, and his into mine. His skin smelled like the forest around us, but sweeter. We both had one arm wrapped around each other. We laced our fingers and pointed our other hands out toward where we would jump.

  “It’s like we’re dancing,” Hunt said, his mumbled words drumming against the sensitive skin of my collarbone.

  “Then why didn’t you just take me dancing? At least the tango wouldn’t kill me.”

  His chest bounced with laughter below my cheek, and then they were counting down.

  “Jackson . . .” I couldn’t get out anything but his name.

  Then, like he could read my mind, Hunt quoted the Kerouac quote that had been at our hostel. “Mad to live, Kelsey. This is living.”

  He pressed another kiss to my shoulder, and his lips were still there burning against my skin when we went over.

  The world paused for one brief second, and my eyes took in the architecture of the land below us. Hunt’s arm squeezed around me, and then the peace ended. The wind slammed into me, the ground rushed forward, and my heart got left behind somewhere up above me.

  Then I shrieked. A glass-breaking, eardrum-shattering kind of shriek that echoed off the canyon, reverberating back at me from all sides. The cord pulled tight, my insides seemed to resist and pull in the other direction. Despite the tug, we kept falling and falling, and the river rushed up at me, dark and unforgiving. I released Jackson’s hand to wrap a second arm around his body. I squeezed as tightly as I could, but it was only half as tight as I wanted. I opened my mouth to cry out, and then suddenly we jerked to a halt and were moving back up again.

  I thought maybe the ascension wouldn’t be so bad, but then our bodies twisted and flipped, and I might have lost a few other vital organs to the same place my heart disappeared to.

  We started dropping again, and Hunt shouted in excitement.

  “Oh my God!” I screamed. I couldn’t believe I was doing this.

  This time I squeezed my arms around him not because I was scared, but because a feeling bubbled up inside me, potent and wild, and I just wanted to hold it all inside.

  When we started up again my scream turned into a laughing cackle that would have made Ursula or Maleficent proud.

  Hunt was right. It was fun.

  I screamed some more just because I could, and because hearing the sound ricochet around the canyon felt like Hunt and I were the only two people in the world. It felt unreal— like I was two parts soul, one part body.

  We bounced around a few more times, and I got the courage to let go of Hunt, to stretch my arms down toward the earth below us. I twisted away from him and looked around us and back up to where we’d jumped from.

  “You dead?” Hunt asked.

  “No.” Not by a long shot. In fact, I’d never felt so alive.

  I smiled widely, and Hunt smiled back, and I knew my heart was back in place because it thumped so hard it was almost painful.

  And then I didn’t have to ask if the time was right, and he didn’t have to tell me. Our lips pulled together like they’d been replaced by magnets. And all that energy that had sparked inside me began to unspool. I could feel it unwinding around my ribs, pulling from my fingertips, pushing into him.

  His hands dove into my hair, and he kissed me like we were still falling, like this is how we were meant to spend our very last moments. His lips pressed hard against mine, and blood pounded in my ears in time with the thrust of his tongue.

  I wrapped my arms around his neck, pulling myself as close as possible. But still I wanted closer. I wanted to hook my legs around his waist and feel the skin beneath his clothes. The air pushed against us, soft and sweet, and completely at odds with the frenzy occurring underneath my skin.

  Something tugged at our ankles, and we started to rise. I whimpered into his mouth, not ready for the moment to end.

  His mouth answered with a faster pace, breath escaping as we shifted and tasted and savored every last second. We didn’t pull apart until we had to, until it was time to set foot in the real world again.

  Maybe it was the fall or the blood rushing to my head or the reverberations of my universe finally snapping into place, but I had to grip the instructor’s arm to keep from falling as he unhooked me.

  We didn’t talk as we were set free from harnesses and cords. But his gaze was like a touch—tender and aching and possessive.

  We walk
ed away that day. We took a bus back to the city. My feet hit the hard cobblestones step after step, but when I climbed into the bed opposite Hunt’s that night, I was still falling. My head hit the pillow, but I swore I could feel the rush of wind past my body, could hear it in my ears.

  Hunt said something about my inner ear, said it would go away in a day or two, but I wasn’t so sure. In the quiet night, I wondered if it was only the beginning of something bigger. One long, exhilarating, terrifying fall. One without the safety of harnesses and cords and a plan. One with no guarantee that I wouldn’t hit rock bottom.

  I woke up angry the next day.

  I wasn’t PMSing, and no one had done anything to piss me off (yet). I was just sour. And it was only made worse when I hopped on one of the hostel’s complimentary computers to check my e-mail.

  Bliss had arrived in Philadelphia, and there was a full novel in my in-box gushing about her apartment and the neighborhood and her perfect boyfriend.

  I felt like a complete bitch when I closed the message without replying, but anything I would have written then would have caused problems anyway.

  And then because I was a masochist, I decided to read the e-mails from Dad. Or his secretary anyway. I skimmed through the dozen or so messages in my in-box, most of which were an account of my whereabouts and my spending habits.

  There was no need to worry about Big Brother with a father like mine. I imagined he had assigned his secretary to monitor all of my actions through my bank account.

  It was so fucked up.

  Not the money part. I was used to that. My only brothers and sisters were bank accounts, and I always came in last.

  It was fucked up that he thought he could control everything. He thought himself the great puppeteer, managing and enacting it all.

  It was fucked up because I was all too familiar with the fact that he couldn’t control everything, but he was still pretending like he could.

  I wondered what he would do if I told him I’d been drugged. He’d blame me, say it was my fault for being a moral degenerate and spending all my time in places where people got drugged. That much, I knew. But I wondered what he would do after that. Would he care? Would he want me to come home? Or would he sweep it under the rug, smudge it with an eraser, tell me I was being overdramatic again?

  While I was sitting at the computer another e-mail came in.

  Secretary Cindy, who I had never met and was probably the same age as me, wrote:

  Your father thinks it’s time you start making arrangements to come home. Your mother has a charity party coming up the week after next, and he’s trying to land a new account with a very family-focused company. He’d like you to be there to make a good impression. Follow the usual dress code, he said. I’ve attached a document with a couple of options for flights home. Please look it over and let me know which works best for you.

  Unbelievable.

  That answered my question about him caring. I knew Mom was just a prop to him. That was why he let her drink herself stupid every day. He let her buy whatever she wanted. They ignored it when one or both of them cheated.

  Because in my family all that matters is what people see.

  They didn’t see Dad’s business partner touch me when I was twelve. There was no mark on my hand from when he made me touch him. The only mark from something like that rests under the skin.

  So, of course, it didn’t count.

  When Jackson called my name and stepped into the computer room, I closed the window without replying. Not that the “Fuck off” I’d been planning was much of a reply anyway.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Grab your things. We’re heading out.”

  “Heading out where?”

  “Out of the country.”

  I slid off my stool, but when I tried to move closer, he kept a careful distance between us. Frustration fizzled on my tongue.

  “We just got to Prague yesterday.”

  “And now we’re leaving Prague today. You only gave me a week, and there’s a lot I want to do.”

  There was a lot I wanted to do too, but he’d barely looked in my direction for more than two seconds since our kiss.

  Not even bothering to muffle my grumbling, I shoved my things into my backpack and left behind the Madhouse hostel. If only I could have left behind my shitty mood, too.

  At the train station, I asked, “Will you tell me where we’re going now?”

  Hunt just smiled. I loved and hated that smile.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  He said, “Wow, you really don’t do well with surprises, do you?”

  I rolled my eyes, and crossed my arms over my chest.

  “I mean all of this. Why do you care?”

  Normally, I never would have asked a question like that, not from guy that I was trying to hook up with. Especially not when the answer could be that he didn’t care, not really. He certainly didn’t have any qualms about rejecting me.

  But I’d spent days with him, and almost everything I knew about him was from observation alone. I mean, it was like pulling teeth just to get him to tell me his first name.

  “Because I wanted you to come with me. Do I need another reason?”

  “Do you have one?”

  He shrugged. “No one likes traveling alone.”

  And that was the Hunt one-two punch. Pull you in and then plow right over you. Give you the most intense kiss of your life, and then pretend like it never happened and let you fester in your sexual frustration.

  I stayed quiet on our way to the station and as we boarded a train to somewhere in Germany. As soon as we were moving, I folded my arms over the top of my backpack, and used them as a pillow.

  Just for once, I wanted to know where I stood with him. I wanted to shake him until some actual answers popped out, rather than his charming, sweet noncommittal words.

  We changed trains that afternoon in Munich, and even though the train was fairly empty, Hunt sat beside me.

  I tried not to react, because any reaction I had was going to be bitchy. Instead, I fished my phone out of my bag and stood to place my backpack in the luggage rack above our heads. I sat back down beside him and slipped one earbud in. I was searching for a song when he said, “You’re mad at me.”

  I glanced at him briefly, then pressed play.

  “No, I’m not.”

  I’d just put in my second earbud when he tugged them both out.

  “Yes, you are. I might have spent the last few years in various deserts with mostly men, but I’m not so far removed that I don’t know that ‘No, I’m not,’ means ‘I most definitely am.’”

  I sighed. “Jackson, I’m not mad. I promise. I’m just tired.”

  “But you slept on the last train.”

  “I didn’t mean that kind of tired.”

  “You’re tired of me?”

  I groaned and ran my hands across my face.

  “I’m frustrated. I don’t know what you want from me.”

  The look in his eyes reminded me of an ache, the kind you ignore for as long as you can, until you wake up in the middle of the night, short of breath, sweating, and unable to deny it any longer.

  He didn’t know what he wanted from me either.

  “I want several things from you, Kelsey. But at the moment, I just want a friend and to travel.”

  I didn’t even hear the second part of his sentence. I was still hung up on the “several things” he wanted from me, and imagining what they all might be. Maybe I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted from him either.

  He wasn’t a hookup. He wasn’t the kind of guy I could walk away from the morning after. But I also wasn’t sure I wanted the kind of thing I couldn’t walk away from. Because I was good at walking away.

  I nodded. “Friends. Got it.”

  A few hours later, he tugged out my earbuds once more and said, “We’re here.”

  “And where is here?”

  “Heidelberg.”

  I looked at
him. “Again, I say, where is here?”

  “Still in Germany.”

  “Okay, then. And what are we doing here?”

  He pulled my pack down from the luggage rack for me and said, “There’s something I want to show you. Now, enough questions.”

  I followed him off the train. I waited while he asked someone for directions, and then left the train station with him.

  Heidelberg was small and quaint, though not that different from several other cities I’d already seen in Europe. There were cathedrals and narrow roads and a river. It was almost sundown, and the city was quiet and almost deserted. Hunt paused and turned in a circle, searching for something. When he found it, he smiled. I followed his gaze to a castle that sat perched on a hill overlooking the city.

  It was both decadent and decaying, emerging out of the dense forest, seemingly untouched by modern society.

  “You’re taking me to a castle?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Come on, princess.”

  I stared at him, unsure whether I should be frustrated by even more mixed messages or whether I should just be glad to have someone like him trying to make me happy. I could do worse than a friend like Jackson Hunt.

  But he could be even better as something more than friends.

  I knew how badly things could turn out when one friend was attracted to another. I’d had a front-row seat for the epic disaster that was my friends Bliss and Cade.

  But there was a difference with Hunt. I knew he was attracted to me. I might have been drunk that first night, and I might have forgotten most of the evening at the baths, but I could never forget that. And that kiss . . . damn.

  He wanted me. But there was something holding him back.

  And not knowing pissed me off to no end.

  We were on day two of our weeklong trip, which left me five and a half days to figure out what was holding him back and get rid of it.

  Sure, it could backfire in any number of ways, most likely to my detriment. But if I had to get my heart shredded into confetti, he certainly wouldn’t be a bad way to go.

  I looked back at the castle, and then at Hunt. I placed a hand on his shoulder and raised up on my tiptoes to place a quick kiss on his cheek.