Before Reese had stepped into her path, she’d dated a few guys from the reservation, and one other guy from town. She’d lost her virginity at sixteen. She hadn’t been inexperienced. But from the moment he’d expressed an interest in her, Reese had swept her away. He was older, and that had been sexy and flattering. He was tall and strong and handsome, always a plus. He was successful and confident, already an important person in town. He had a good sense of humor and a solid sense of right and wrong. All checks in the ‘pro’ column.
What had overwhelmed her, though, was none of that. It was this, the way he was right now, the way he always was with her: open. Honest. In his pain, or in his pleasure. In his sadness or happiness, in his need, he didn’t prevaricate or hold back. It was the way he’d looked at her when she’d walked back into the Jack a few weeks ago, the way he’d kissed her at the cabin, the way he’d welcomed her into his arms at the stream last night, the way he’d led her to his bed this morning. To the rest of the world, he was wry, sometimes a little grouchy. But not to her. To her, he held out his feelings and trusted her with them.
With his every word, his every touch, he gave her everything. From the start, that had astounded her. As he lay on her now, suckling her, loving her so actively, with every molecule of his body, it wasn’t the spectacular physical sensations spiraling through her she cherished most; other men had given her those. But Reese gave her his heart as he gave her his body. She’d never be able to explain how she felt the difference, but it was acute and overwhelming. When he touched her, she knew love.
He let go of her nipple with a groan. “Jesus, baby. I missed you every fucking day. You taste like life.”
Before she could think what to say, he dove back in and kissed his way to her other breast, took that nipple between his lips. Each sucking pulse of his mouth on her sent fireworks through her blood. Gigi tried to coil herself around him, to feel him everywhere, but it wasn’t enough. She unwound an arm and tried to reach his cock, to answer the pleasure he gave her with some for him, but he was too tall and had scooted too far down; she couldn’t reach.
When he began to scoot down again, kissing her belly, she clamped her thighs against his sides and tugged on his hair. She didn’t want to be alone up here at the pillows. She’d only just gotten him back.
His head came up, and he smiled down at her. “Wiggle worm. What d’you want?”
“I want to be close. I want to see you when you fuck me.”
He went still, studying her eyes. Then, without looking away, he reached for his nightstand, opened the drawer, and drew out a condom. When he rose onto his knees between her legs, she plucked the packet from his fingers.
“I want to do it.”
His beautiful cock stood at full attention, pointing upward. Before she opened the packet, she gripped his shaft and reveled for a moment in the feel of him, the way her hand, and her eyes, still remembered it. The thick vein that swept from the underside to the left. The velvet of his glans. The whisper-soft spot on his balls, where his jeans, after years without wearing underwear, had rubbed a bare place. The change in color at the site of his circumcision. The single freckle just before his tip. She knew everything about this man. Everything.
She sat up, leaned in, and kissed his tip. She remembered the taste of him, too.
He groaned and shivered as she reclaimed this part of him. “Mac,” he sighed.
She tore open the packet, pulled the condom from it, and turned to drop the foil on the nightstand.
“Hey—what this?” His fingers traced a place on her back, at her shoulder blade, and she realized that he didn’t know everything about her body.
“Just a tattoo.”
“Can I see?”
She was holding an unwrapped condom and really preferred to use it and talk about her tattoo later, but she couldn’t deny him. She twisted more so he could see the back of her shoulder.
“’Not all those who wander are lost,’” he read.
“Yeah. It’s from Tolkien.”
“I know.”
She’d gotten it early in her travels, on a whim. “It’s kind of dumb. Like a cliché, but it felt important at the time.”
His fingers traced the words, inked as if they followed a winding path. “You were lost, Mac.”
It hurt to hear it, but she nodded. “I know. I know now.” Before the moment sank into loss and regret, she wiggled the condom. “Reese.”
His grin wasn’t as big and bright as it had been when he woke her, but it was there. He rocked his hips toward her, and she rolled the condom on. Then she lay back, tugging on his arms, and he came down with her, covered her completely with his love. She circled her legs around his hips, and he thrust gently, slowly into her.
She’d told him she wanted to see him while he fucked her. He never looked away. Their movements together were unhurried, finding a rhythm they’d known well, rising to their peaks in tandem, cresting their bliss together, staring into each other’s depths and never looking away.
Chapter Ten
While Reese was in the shower, Gigi cleaned up their breakfast dishes—they both worked afternoons and evenings, so breakfast was more like brunch, or sometimes just lunch—and tidied the kitchen. She liked this room. It was large, just about half the size of her family’s whole trailer, and airy, with a sunlight in the ceiling and wide windows showing the wooded area behind the building, beyond the back lot. The floors in the whole apartment were the original plank, stripped to their natural finish and treated to a satiny shimmer. All the gouges and divots from a century and a half of hard use added to the beauty of those floors.
The kitchen appointments weren’t stylish, it hadn’t been updated since it had been made into a kitchen almost seventy years earlier, but Gigi liked that, too—the Fifties version of country had a charm of its own. Reese had repainted the cupboards since he’d had the place to himself, but he hadn’t changed the color: barn red. The countertops were wood, and an enormous farmhouse table served as dining place and workspace. An antique hutch held modern amenities like a microwave and coffeemaker, but there was no dishwasher. The best part was the big vintage stove that worked pretty well.
Reese lived in the home he’d grown up in, which was the home his father had grown up in, too. In that way, the people of Jasper Ridge were little different from her people on the reservation. Nothing ever changed here. People stayed put. They raised their families where they had been raised. They died in the same place they’d been born.
She’d lived with Reese a little more than a week, and already that sense of stillness had encompassed her, but not throttled her. She felt settled. They’d fallen right away into a pattern of domesticity that felt snug and safe. This was the life she’d given up when she’d run from the life she’d had.
Though she felt regret every day for what she’d missed with Reese and how she’d hurt him, there was also a sense that she’d gone out and had a life. Here in Jasper Ridge, every day was the same. Snug and safe. She was happy, could feel tendrils of happiness uncoiling in the middle of her heart and stretching out to sink roots, but if she hadn’t gone out into the world, this small piece of it was all she’d ever have known.
The things she’d seen and experienced, no one she knew here could relate to any of it. Reese had barely left Idaho, and never gone farther than Spokane. When she spoke of the places she’d been, all he could say was Wow or some other variation of speechless awe. He was interested, but in the way a documentary might interest him. He had no point of connection to her stories except the pain he’d felt missing her while she made them.
She’d been home about a month. Already her memories were dwindling, locking into the images of the photos she’d taken, becoming the illustrations of a story of someone else’s life. That scared her. If she lost her connection to her own experiences, the past ten years would be nothing but waste and loss.
Reese’s laptop sat on the massive old desk in the far corner of the living room. She hadn’t checked her email sin
ce she’d been home; there hadn’t seemed to be much reason to bother. But now, while her thoughts were drifting back to her time away, the people she’d met and spent time with, who’d shared some of her experiences with her, she wondered. She’d made friends. Some had her email. Her Brooklyn friends had her phone number, and they’d texted a few times, though they were already drifting into her past. But there were others who might have written, or whom she could write to.
Gigi sat down at the desk and opened his laptop. It wasn’t password protected, so the desktop screen came up right away. His desktop photo was an old tintype image of the Jack in its early days as The Parker. He didn’t have many folders, and they were all work-related. She clicked the icon for Chrome.
When the browser opened directly to his Gmail inbox, she was surprised—and immediately guilty, though she had no intention of snooping. She moved the cursor to the top right at once, changing her mind about being on the internet at all, but this was a Mac, and there wasn’t an X on the right side. By the time she’d figured out that the red dot on the left was the same thing as an X on the right, she’d seen the list of messages in his inbox. Several unread. On the top, one from Ellen, with a subject that read simply: :).
Gigi stared at that bold-face smiley for a long time. She didn’t want to read the message, but she couldn’t seem to move on, to go to her email server or close out of Chrome altogether and give up the impulse to connect with people she’d never see again.
Everybody in town knew Gigi had moved in with Reese. Doing so had refreshed the interest in what Reese called ‘The Reese & Gigi Show.’ Ellen and Reese had broken up a month ago. So why was Ellen emailing her ex? What did that smiley mean?
She was not going to snoop. She was not. But what did it mean?
The old pipes groaned as Reese turned off the shower, and that broke her paralysis and decided the matter. She clicked the red dot and slammed the laptop closed.
When he came out of the bedroom, mostly dressed, but his plaid shirt unbuttoned and his hair still wet, Gigi went to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, under that open shirt, and set her cheek on his warm, sturdy chest.
“Hey.” He swaddled her in his arms. “What’s wrong?”
Feeling stupid and confused, she shook her head. Everything had been fine until her brain had started gnawing on its old scars, and then found a new wound to poke at.
He pushed her gently back and cupped her face in his hands. “Mac. What is it?”
What could she say? “I love you.”
“I love you.” He kissed her forehead. “Don’t get tangled up in there. If something’s botherin’ you, talk to me. That’s what happened last time, you know? You got all snarled in your worries and didn’t give me a chance to help you straighten things out.”
Though she didn’t completely agree with his assessment of the past, he was at least partly right. Maybe mostly right. So she nodded and lifted onto her toes for another kiss.
*****
Though she’d hadn’t decided to stay put until she and Reese had found their new start, Gigi had taken a job at Idahoan Outfitters within a few days of arriving home, because she always worked when she could, if she was staying anywhere more than a few days, and because Randall Jameson, the owner and manager, had been hiring and had hired her. She’d had the job now for a few weeks, and it was fine. She’d worked a whole lot of retail since she’d gotten her first real job at fifteen.
Idahoan Outfitters had first opened as a ‘dry goods’ store, selling bolt cloth and sturdy work boots, and various wares people used to call ‘sundries,’ and it was still, at its heart, a practical store, with a large stock of denim jeans and chino work pants, broadcloth and flannel shirts, leather boots and belts, and any manner of cowboys hats. But now it catered to both actual country people and to the tourists who didn’t want to leave Idaho without a bolo tie or a Stetson hat or something as a souvenir. They sold everything from fringed chaps no real cowboy would be caught dead in to the basic, board-stiff indigo Wranglers that were the uniform of every ranch hand in the West.
But that wasn’t all they sold. Jasper Ridge was a tiny town in the middle of Idaho. The closest big-box store like Walmart or Target was almost two hours away, almost all the way to the outskirts of Boise. The closest actual shopping mall was even farther. So over the generations, the Outfitters had grown to stock a wider variety of dry goods, primarily seasonal. In the summer, they stocked swimwear and picnic supplies, in the winter, ski gear. And in the fall, through October, they sold Halloween costumes and decorations.
For all the time Gigi had been working here, the back of the store, where Randall stocked the seasonal goods, had been the bane of her existence. In the whole rest of the store—and it was a big store, almost as big in square footage as the IGA—people were respectful of the displays and the merchandising. Maybe it was different in the summer, when tourists teemed through Old Town, but here in October, when the great bulk of the customers were local, the store stayed fairly tidy.
Except for the Halloween section. Good grief, kids were slovenly jackasses, and they were terrible influences on their parents, too, who just left things in clumps wherever they landed. Kids treated the section like a dress-up playland, and their parents treated it like a babysitting service. All day long, one of the employees was stationed back there, trying to keep the stock saleable, and providing a quelling presence to the tiny barbarians pillaging the costumes. Not that it mattered. Gigi could be standing right there, rehanging a bunch of discarded costumes, and kids would be tearing things up not six feet away.
The little shits didn’t even need costumes. They were monsters already.
Such were her thoughts that afternoon, as she swiped disinfectant wipes around inside the rubber masks and rehung a mountain of princess costumes three little girls had partied in while their moms tried on boots. Two of the costumes were damaged, the sparkly tulle overskirts torn from the seams. She set those aside for the clearance racks. A haunted house decoration with a motion sensor kept going off as she moved back and forth, letting loose the most annoying electronic laugh track in the history of ever.
Plus, she still hadn’t shaken off the weirdness of seeing that email from Ellen, or her unsettling thoughts about the static sameness of this world. She and Reese had been really back together for barely more than a week. It was really good, she was truly happy, but today, things seemed to be lining up to throw darts at her balloon.
Irritated by the stupid Halloween section and the inconsiderate children that the people of Jasper Ridge seemed to breed by the bushelful, stewing over dangerous thoughts about her brand-new life, she came around the end of the aisle without looking or thinking, and absolutely annihilated a little kid. She knocked him flat on his back, and as he took up a siren of a wail, she tripped and almost went sprawling, careening into a big, broad body that caught her fall.
“Whoa, whoa. Jesus!” The guy who’d caught her shoved her back and went to the little kid—really little, just a toddler—and Gigi saw that she’d mowed down Heath Cahill’s little boy and crashed into Heath himself.
“Sorry. Sorry!” she said.
Heath gave her an angry look and picked up his shrieking son. “Easy, little man. It’s okay. You’re okay.” Settling the boy’s head on his shoulder, he glared at Gigi. “What the heck, Geej?”
“I’m so sorry. I was in my head, not paying attention. Is he okay?”
“What d’ya think, Matthew? You okay?”
The boy settled to sniffles. With his head on his daddy’s shoulder, he looked at Gigi and stuck out his lip.
“I’m sorry, Matthew.”
“Bad lady.”
Gigi nodded. “Yep. That was a bad thing.”
“It was a mistake, though, little man,” Heath said, shifting his hold so he could look into his son’s eyes. “You know what a mistake is, right?”
“Don’t mean to be bad. Ass-i-dent.”
“An accident. Right. Miss Gigi’s sorry
. So can we forgive her?”
Matthew twisted in Heath’s arms and held out his pudgy little hand. Gigi realized he wanted to shake, and she took his fingers in hers and let him shake. “You fordibben.”
“Thank you, Matthew.” To Heath she asked, “How old is he?”
“Twenty months.”
Gigi’s draw dropped. Matthew Cahill was half her nephew’s age, and in these three minutes, he’d spoken twice the number of words Tyson had in his vocabulary.
“Wow—he talks really well.”
Heath grinned like the proud papa he was. “Yeah, he’s a chatterbox, aren’t ya, buddy?”
Matthew grinned back and nodded enthusiastically.
When Gigi left town, Heath had been married to his high school sweetheart, Sybil, and she’d been pregnant. Gigi had known Sybil really well; their families had been neighbors, and Sybil, several years older than her, a couple years older than Frannie, had been the Kid in Charge when they all ran loose on the reservation. The kids of their generation had kind of learned how to grow up by watching her.
But while Gigi was away, Sybil and Heath had had a little girl, and then Sybil and that little girl had been killed in a drunken car wreck. Heath was remarried, to a woman younger than Gigi, and they had two little kids, Matthew being the oldest. Somewhere in there, he’d also been charged with murder and acquitted. The murder of the man who’d let his wife and daughter die. And who’d been sleeping with his wife.
She kept thinking nothing ever changed in Jasper Ridge, but Heath Cahill alone was proof that it did. This one man had lived three wholly different lives while she was away.
Heath was one of Reese’s closest friends. Five of them had been a little posse as long as Gigi could remember, probably longer than she’d been alive, but Reese and Heath were possibly the closest of them all. And Heath had been pretty chilly to her since she’d been back, even since she’d moved in above the Jack. He was waiting for her to bail and break his friend’s heart again.
The whole town was. Her family was, too. People who’d been her friends were now politely, watchfully distant. People who hadn’t liked her now barely bothered to wait until her back was turned to talk about her behind it.
Anywhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories, #3) Page 12
