The logical sentinel of my brain, the guard that knows all too well that this girl is a beautiful, energetic waft of fresh air I will never be able to truly draw into my lungs, smacks a sword against my gut and tells me to back away. Slowly.
But the part of my brain that’s nothing more than a dense bog of pheromones and concentrated testosterone explodes its heady hormones all around those pesky logical forces and drowns out any rational thoughts.
My ears burn and hone on the whispery rush of her breathing, my nostrils suck in the intoxicating swirl of her scent, and my skin feels the transmission of the electrical pulse rising off her.
She pushes past me and grabs my doorknob without asking or waiting for an introduction, because the spill of crazy feelings is more than we know how to deal with and definitely much more than either one of us considers safe to navigate.
“I know, it’s, um, it’s pretty Spartan. The university covers room and board, so I sweat and starve. Not that I’m complaining.” Shut up, shut up, I order myself.
She sits on my desk chair and looks around, her sharp blue eyes flitting from my books to my calligraphy pens to my neat stacks of folded clothes and my cracked desk lamp.
“You, um…” She clears her throat delicately because her voice disrupts some kind of unspoken peace we agreed to practice after transferring those heady currents in the hall. “You weren’t kidding about the Spartan thing.”
Spartan, of course, as in clean and sparse. Not as in warrior and heroic. I’m wishing there was a piece of sporting equipment or…I’m not sure. Maybe some kind of cool weapon? Perhaps a small collection of action movies? Or a nudey magazine?
That might be pushing it.
Maybe I’m over-worrying about my lack of traditionally male accoutrements. I did just start fight in a convoluted attempt to defend her honor. And she was sorely disappointed by that.
Though she kissed me in the garden like she was on fire. And thanked me…verbally.
My head is spinning, top-like and so quickly it makes all the mental terror of ancient Greek III seem like child’s play.
“I’m a simple man.” I say it and feel an instant rage at my own stupidity.
She examines some nibs and her smile is the prelude to her laughter. At me.
“So, you do calligraphy?” Her words are innocent enough, but they’re laced through with this smug, condescending smile I wish I didn’t see on her face.
“Of course.” I try to shield the last shreds of my manhood from her disintegrating mocking. “Maybe you can use my services for your upcoming fairytale nuptials.”
My words are as innocent as hers were, but there’s a trickle of venom leaked over them, and it doesn’t go undetected. Her hands still over the nibs and her shoulders stiffen. I’m choked with equal amounts of shame and reckless desire to throw her onto my crisply made bed and erase any doubts she may have about my ability with my…pen.
Awful pun. Ugh. I’m disgusting myself on multiple levels. This girl is making my head feel like a cruelly beaten piñata. Rather than stand another second in this purgatory, I flee to the bathroom.
“I’ll be just a minute.” I say as I close the door between us.
I’m nervous leaving her alone. I’m nervous she’ll realize there are an overabundance of guys who aren’t abusive meatheads or snarky, over-educated asshats and go find one.
She should.
But I don’t want that.
I shave quickly and put on deodorant and cologne, then whip the door open and buckle with relief. She’s still in the room.
“Would you care to grab a bite?” I ask.
She has a rubber band stretched over the first knuckles of all her fingers, and she expands and retracts it, her brows low over her eyes.
“Am I an idiot?” She opens her fingers wide against the tension of the band. The question is direct and catches me off guard.
I sit on the bed, a foot or two at most away from her. “Never. The polar opposite. Though you may be an idiot magnet.”
She plucks the band off her fingers and wraps it around her thumb too many times, staring as her skin darkens to an unhealthy shade of purple. “Maybe I’ve been around idiots for so long, I can’t tell. I have no ability to read people, do I?”
I reach a careful hand out and grab the edge of the rubber band, untwisting it and letting it rest in my palm. Her finger regains its normal pinkish hue. “You like me?” I ask.
She tilts her head and nods, once, twice.
“Then, yes. You are crap at reading people, because I know for a fact I’m a huge idiot.”
She smiles and shakes her head. “No more jokes, Cormac.” Her hand reaches out, two, maybe three inches from my arm, but she stops short of touching me and draws back. “You’re amazing. And I’m definitely an idiot because I don’t want you.” She bites her bottom lip hard and shakes her head. “I mean, I do want you. I should. But I don’t…I can’t. I can’t consider you. because of these rules.” She slips that goddamn notebook out of her pocket and flicks her thumb over the pages, sending little draughts of air toward her face. “They’re idiot rules, aren’t they?”
“They’re rules worthy of an anthropological thesis. Or maybe gender studies.” I put my finger on the edge of the notebook, another short span of inches of distance between us.
“You’re making fun of me.” Her voice frowns. “You made that joke about my fairytale wedding, but you weren’t completely joking, were you?”
“Of course not. My calligraphy is in high demand for wedding invites.” The joke falls flat, and I stop hiding behind my pathetic attempts at humor. “In all seriousness, I said what I did because I’m a huge ass, Benelli. And, if you’d like to bare souls and go deep on this whole issue, then the raw truth is that I said it because…because I’m pretty damn overcome with jealousy.”
Her laugh whips out of her throat. “Jealousy? Of what?”
“Of them.” I gesture unspecifically out the window.
“Them who?” She leans forward.
I mirror her lean.
“All of them. All of the idiots who gained an entry in your book when I never can.” I slide my finger down the leather cover and graze the edge of her nail.
She swallows so hard I can see her throat work around the motion. “My father would hate you.”
“Most fathers do,” I acknowledge. My ex-fiancée’s father could barely hold back the bile when he was forced to spend five minutes alone with me.
“I think…I think my father might not be who I think he is. I might be the biggest idiot of all for believing everything when…it was all right in front of my face.” Her voice rasps to a scratchy halt before she can say all the additional words I know she wants to say.
She’s not crying, and I’m relieved. I have no idea what I’d do in the face of her tears, but it would be based on panic, and that’s never a good jumping off point for stable actions on my part. But she’s shaky, her shoulders pressed, her arms folded over her stomach, and her eyes shiny with emotion that could manifest as tears at any second.
Unless I stop it.
“Come on.” I stand up and hold my hand out to her. “It’s been a long few days, and you need a break.
“A break?” She straightens up and looks at me from the barely-opened slits of her narrowed eyes.
“A break. A real break. Let’s grab food and go into the woods. We’ll play runaways, like you do when you’re a kid and things get too overwhelming.” She twists her hands and pulls her mouth to one side, like she’s sheepish, and it clicks for me quickly. “Or, do you mean to tell me, Benelli Youngblood, that you never played runaway as a kid?” I pepper extra shock into my voice for effect, but it’s mostly gut-based real reaction. Who never wanted to run away from home as a child?
She trains her sight on me and shakes her head, a slow swing back and forth like she’s savoring my question. “No. Of course not. I loved my parents. Why would I run away?”
I’m pulling some clean handkerchi
efs from a pile by my desk. I hand her a red one, poppy bright and bursting with symbolic potential for freedom, passion, unleashed fury. I think she’ll need to tap into all those things today.
“You don’t run away because you don’t love your family.” I pull her up by her hand and breathe through my mouth a few times to avoid inhaling the honeyed smell of her and falling immediately under her spell. “You run away for freedom. You run away because you can’t be trapped by the people who love you but don’t understand you. You run away because you want to be missed, you want them to start a worried search party combing far and wide for any scrap of evidence that you’re going to be back, safe and sound. Running away is a way to play a dirty trick on the perfect fate that will suffocate you if you’re not careful.”
I’ve locked the door and we’re back on the landing, a few feet from the stairs and the door, which we’ll exit so we can fully embrace our freedom to do whatever we want with this long, empty day. Maybe there’s something about the pressure or the ions in this space, but it’s like the awkward, stilted drama of my room is extinguished, and we’re just two bodies, hearts pounding, all cells reaching and straining for one another.
I want her. I want her long, shiny hair tangled in my fingers, I want the curve of her hips fitted against the narrow line of mine. I want to drag my lips along her skin and run my tongue over every inch of her. I want my ears full of her moans and my nostrils full of the heady smell of her. I want her clothes peeled back and her legs wrapped tight around my waist, like last night, but closer, hotter, with no interruptions and no regrets.
What I get is another hypnotizing backside view of her as she trots over-quickly down the stairs, always only one misstep from tumbling down headfirst and giving me a heart attack.
I follow her for a few hundred feet, and then pass by her and lead her to a neighborhood convenience store, where we fill a sack with every fruit, cookie, cheese, bottle of wine, and cured meat that strikes our fancy. We don’t discuss and quibble, and I pay for it all, a heftier sum than my slim professor’s budget can really afford, but I’d gladly starve for the next two weeks in exchange for the feast I’ll share with Benelli this afternoon.
We exit and head to the end of the cobblestoned street, all the way to the place where their disjointed unevenness stops and the road stutters into a smooth, dusty trail, then even farther, to where the tree branches hang low and cool over the darkened path.
It’s been rapid silence as we drove to this destinations like arrows shot from a bow, and Benelli leads me down to a pebbly shore where a small river tumbles near. She kicks her shoes off and wades up to the smooth arch of her calves and onto a rock, not waiting for me to roll my pant legs and balance our bag of goodies.
She climbs the jagged edge of a large, smooth rock, and I follow, doing my best to grab on with my feet since I only have one arm at my disposal. Benelli is already sitting when I get up.
She’s drawn her knees in a tight crunch against her chest, and small bits of hair fly out of order and around her face. There’s more distance between us than I’d like when I settle the package, but this is the kind of distance edging closer won’t erase. This is distance fortified by the wall of simmering anger, upset, and confusion she’s erected.
“Were you ever the very last person to realize something? Something right in front of your face? And you feel like an idiot because it’s your own parents you were so clueless about?” She cradles her head in her hands, elbows dug into her knees.
“Everyone misses things right in front of their faces. Myopia is a common ailment in humans. And it’s especially logical in your situation, where you have parents who clearly dote on you and love you. They show love through protection, and, often, protection is based on lies. It’s a gray area of morality, but a good gray. A handsome gray.” I don’t move closer to her, but I do move the bag so it’s not between us.
She swivels her legs, her toes pointed at me instead of into the neverending distance. “A handsome gray? What the hell does that mean?”
I bite the inside of my cheek. “Nothing, necessarily. Sometimes I like the ring of a metaphor more than the mundane clang of logic. I’m only saying, in a very circular way, that your parents may have done something a little bad for a lot good. It’s important to consider their intentions.”
“What if their intentions were good…really good, even? But…but, what if what wound up happening was unquestionably bad? Like, no shadows? Just pitch black?”
When she’s angry, her eyes lose their shimmer and go flat and dark, like unpolished stone.
“I don’t know if I believe any situation is just pitch black.” I find a small bit of rock and fling it into the rushing water without making so much as a quarter ripple. “If you’d like to share more details, I’d be happy to keep you from some form of parricide.”
“I would never kill my family.” She touches her tongue to the roof of her mouth in an irritated tsk. “Could I share? Even if it’s maybe crazy?”
“I study the classics, love. A crazy family situation is pretty much what I’ve been trained to dissect. Remember, I cut my teeth on Oedipus Rex, so unless you tell me something really, really insane, I doubt I’ll be shocked. Or, at least, all that shocked.” I pause for a moment, and decide to go ahead and encourage her, even if it means means messy confessions and tears that will induce my panic. “Even if I wind up shocked out of my skull, I like a good challenge now and then. Spill.”
She scoots her feet closer and drags her bottom along the flat rock until our bodies are mirrored outlines of each other’s. I lean close and let the smell of her hair drift over me.
“My family is big. I’m one of five siblings,” she begins, then stops.
“Five,” I say for filler and because it seems like a shockingly large number to me, since I’m one of one. “Are you the eldest? You fit every type A, overachiever, fiercely loyal case study of eldest siblings I’ve ever stumbled on.”
“Oldest daughter,” she clarifies. “Remington is the oldest of the five of us. Then Winch, then me, and Ithaca and Colt are the babies. Twins.”
I’m imagining them. I wonder if they all have dark hair and piercing blue eyes like she does. I wonder if they’re all so incredibly loyal. I have a sudden urge to have a big Sunday night dinner at the Youngblood house, despite my poor track record with parents. Maybe this time I could figure it out. Maybe this time, for this girl, my brain would ease back and let my social skills have their much needed moment in the sun.
“You get along with them?” I ask, wanting her to weave this story and make it intimate for me. I don’t want to be Pan at the window, looking in on what I desire. I want to accept the thimble from my Wendy, and fly away with her on foreign adventures, then stay by her side when I bring her back home.
“Yes. I really do. Or, at least, I really did.” She pulls her legs tight and sighs. “Remy is in rehab. He was always the loudest, the most obnoxious, but I thought that was just who he was. Kind of the family clown, you know? And he had this girlfriend he really loved. They have a baby, a daughter…she’s so perfect, so gorgeous.” Her voice goes breathy and wistful. “I haven’t seen my niece in five months. It’s crazy, you know, how much a baby grows every month. Every week, really. But Remy used around her. He used a ton, and it put her in danger, so he wound up landing in rehab and losing custody, of course.” She plucks at a loose thread on her shorts and shrugs. “It’s good for him there.”
“Of course. Rehab is a good place for…users.” I’m a colossal idiot. And my avowed adherence to atheism is cemented when no giant chasm opens for me to tumble into. A loving god would have saved me from my own stupidity.
“He’s improving. And, hopefully, he’ll be able to petition for joint custody again at some point. But I don’t know if he’ll ever be who my dad needs to run his businesses. My next brother, Winchester…” She fans a hand in front of her face, swatting at the few bugs that are buzzing merrily around her. “We thought he’d take ove
r. Our father kind of groomed Winch from when he was just a kid. Made sure he could do everything, take care of everything. And he and Remy were so close, I never thought…” She wipes the corner of each eye with the bend of her wrist. “Ugh. This is stupid. I never cry in front of anyone. Ever. And here I am…crying like some drama queen.”
I tourniquet my panic.
“You can cry in front of me. I’m excellent at keeping secrets.” I close the tiny hair of a gap between us and yoke one arm over her shoulders. When she relaxes into my body, my entire system roars with approval. “Crying releases toxins. Think of it as showering, but for your eyes.”
Her chuckle shakes her body once, twice, then so hard her shoulders are bouncing up and off my chest and slamming back with the force of her gasping laughter.
“It’s not even that funny,” she insists, and this time the tears are toxin-less and laugh-based. “You make me laugh, Cormac.” She turns her eyes, bright blue and shiny with a whole variety of tears, my way. “No one’s made me laugh in forever.”
It’s an opening, an opportunity. And I have a million reasons to put my foot down and tell myself ‘no,’ but not a single one is as compelling as the curve of her lips, the way her eyelashes lower like a lacy veil over those cobalt eyes, the smooth rub of her skin against mine in tiny, clandestine amounts that are pure torture.
I punched a man for her. Multiple times. That took guts.
So why is this singular moment so much more risky?
Because she’ll bolt if it’s off, if it’s too much, if it somehow isn’t enough, and I’ll be left here, probably without another chance.
I’m methodical by nature. A thinker. A muller. A researcher. Not a guy who rushes things that need to percolate.
But Benelli jumpstarts crazy impulses in me.
I close the space between us before she’s finished laughing, so the first kiss is majority teeth, and she starts backwards for a single second, eyes popped wide.
“Cormac.” The way she says it makes it sound half like a question and half like a plea.
Perfectly Unmatched (A Youngblood Book) Page 9
