Hold on Tight

by Serena Bell

  “Well,” Jake said. “First lesson. I’m not Mom.”

  Chapter 7

  “What kind of pizza do you guys want?”

  Mira was stuck in traffic on 15th Avenue, talking on her hands-free to Sam. Sometime on the drive, Mira had made the snap decision that she was going to invite Jake to join them for dinner, even though earlier that morning, she’d been pretty sure she’d find a way not to. But she’d had a beast of a day. Her boss had told her, kindly but firmly, that she was out of second chances. She’d battled a programming language she barely knew, a twisted syntax that had pried its way into the smallest reaches of her mind. And right now, it just seemed easier to slap some pizza on the table than to do the active work of getting rid of Jake, since Sam inevitably wanted his friends and babysitters to stay as long as possible and would kick up a stink to get Jake invited to dinner.

  Or that’s what she was telling herself. Deciding to ask him to stay for pizza had nothing to do with the way he’d looked at her this morning, or the stirred-up, liquid feeling it had produced in the pit of her belly. It had nothing to do with the impulse she’d almost indulged, to draw her hand across his shoulders, just to see if they still felt as hard and alive with muscle as she remembered.

  She’d texted him a few times to check in on them, and she’d gotten an inappropriate thrill out of it. Not the way she normally felt when keeping tabs on a new babysitter. More the way she felt when she was engaged in text flirtation. Nothing flirtatious, though, about “How are you guys doing?” or his response, “Great.” Maybe it was “Hey. I’ve got this”—his response to her fourth text—that had spiked her pulse. Made her think about the way he’d swept her off her feet and carried her up the sandy beach at the lake.

  “Jake, what kind of pizza do you like?” That was Sam’s little voice, which always sounded younger than she expected on the phone.

  There was a rumble of male response in the background, and then Sam said, “He wants to talk to you.”

  Jake’s voice in her ear was deeper than she remembered, surprisingly intimate, and her nether regions gave an appreciative squeeze. “Sam and I will pick up dinner,” he said.

  “I’m out anyway,” Mira protested.

  “We need the exercise. We haven’t done anything for hours except play Ticket to Ride and bowl with your lipsticks.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We needed pins. Sam said the only thing he could think of that were all the same size was your lipsticks.”

  “You’re fired,” she said, but she was laughing. It was possible there’d been laughter in his voice, too, when he’d told her about the lipsticks. She couldn’t swear there hadn’t been.

  “Let us get dinner,” Jake said again.

  “I’m on the road. It’s ridiculous for you guys to go out. You’d have to walk, and it’s a long way.”

  Would he think she was implying that he couldn’t do it, with his prosthetic leg? Oh, hell, she didn’t want to go down this road of worrying about every little thing she said to him. She had to treat him like any other guy. He was like any other guy. She’d pretty much forgotten he was missing most of a leg, which was why she hadn’t thought about the implication of her words until they were out of her mouth.

  “If you tell me it’s easy for you to stop, that it won’t slow you down, that’s one thing. But if you have to go out of your way, and get out of the car, and sit and wait—”

  Her chest felt tight. Since the moving van had pulled away from the front of her parents’ house, she’d been on her own with Sam. When they first arrived in Seattle late at night, Sam had been sleeping so hard she’d carried him inside, warm and weighty in sleep, and she’d thought: We’re really doing this. Sam and me.

  It would be so easy to let Jake and Sam get the pizza. Because it would slice half an hour off her commute, get her back with her boy sooner, remove a layer of stress from her evening.

  She took a deep breath.

  “Mira? You still there?”

  “Yeah, still here. Just—thinking a sec.”

  In the weeks after she’d first met Jake, she’d taken courage from his conviction. He’d said, “If you know what you want to do with your life, you should do it. You want to go to art school? Go to art school. Tell your father he can pay or not pay but you’re going. Find a way.” She’d gone home, stood up, told her father she was going to art school. She’d applied for financial aid, taken out loans, got a job.

  And then—

  And then she’d discovered she was pregnant, and the whole enterprise had been put on hold for eight years.

  This project she’d undertaken, of becoming an adult, a stand-on-my-own-two-feet woman, meant learning to help herself. Even when she was tired. Even when the thought of sitting on a bench and waiting for takeout pizza made her feel like curling up in a ball.

  She’d spent a good chunk of time at work today lining up a sitter for tomorrow. Penny had a friend whose sister was visiting this week. She could do the rest of the week, to give Mira more time to find someone permanent. Which she’d have to do, fast, before she lost her mind over this piecemeal, strung-together situation. The sister was coming tomorrow, 7:30 a.m., and the rest of the week, too.

  Jake wouldn’t be here other nights and no babysitter would order and pick up pizza for Mira. She would have to get in the habit of drawing on her own reserves, of finding what was left after she’d exhausted all the obvious stores of patience and energy. The sooner she learned her depths, the more she trusted herself, the better off she and Sam would be.

  “It’s easy for me to stop,” she told Jake. “It won’t slow me down.”

  He didn’t try to argue with her. “Okay,” he said. “Sam and I will play another game and wait for you.”

  And she had to try not to like that, either, the thought of the two of them playing together, biding their time until she came through the door to greet them.

  Jake followed Sam into the kitchen as Mira set two large pizzas and two six-packs on the counter and slung her messenger bag over the back of a chair. She looked tired, her eye makeup slightly smudged, her hair wilder than it had been this morning. Wild the way it would be if he’d just rumpled the hell out of it kissing her. The way it had been that night at the lake, spread out on the blanket under her.

  “That’s a lot of pizza and beer. You expecting someone else?”

  “You’re a big guy,” Mira said. Then she blushed.

  Jake’s pulse picked up.

  Her gaze found points around the room, anywhere but his face.

  “Guess I am,” he said mildly.

  Interesting, how pink her cheeks turned. She couldn’t meet his eye. She pushed her hair off her shoulders. He bet he could count the number of people on earth who had hair as soft as hers.

  He imagined burying his face in it. Two strides would bring him close enough to do it. Would put her shoulders under his palms and her mouth under his.

  He could make a muddle of the only good thing that had happened to him since his truck had been blown to bits. He could guarantee the simple pleasure he’d taken in Sam’s company today would be a much harder thing to come by.

  He stayed where he was.

  “I figured between you, me, and Sam, we’d manage to finish most of this,” she amended.

  He was about to say he hadn’t had much of an appetite for food since coming back from Afghanistan, but then he realized he was ravenous.

  “I could probably put away a good amount of pizza,” he said carefully.

  “Me, too,” Sam said.

  Maybe it was the running. He and Sam had found a yardstick, measured out a fifty-yard dash, and done it a whole bunch of times. Until he was in a fuckload of pain, his thigh chafed from the socket of the prosthesis.

  Maybe he’d make an appointment to see one of the VA prosthetists. For the last couple of weeks, things had seemed good enough—at least for the good-enough existence he’d been living. But there were some prosthetists who were supposed to be
geniuses. They’d take a mold of your residual leg and craft a socket around it that would cleave to you no matter how much you sweated, no matter how much the temperature varied. Those were the guys you saw if you were serious about being a parathlete.

  He wasn’t. But maybe someone at his VA knew what they were doing and could tweak things a little. Couldn’t hurt. Might help.

  They ate at the round kitchen table off paper plates, drinking beer from steins she’d popped in the freezer for a few minutes. A couple of times he caught himself watching her mouth as she ate. He could still remember the feel of her full lower lip between his teeth.

  Not relevant.

  “So what’d you guys do all day?” Mira asked.

  Jake hadn’t told Sam not to tell his mother about the running. He didn’t think that was fair, to ask a seven-year-old who already kept too many secrets to keep one more. So he was curious to see what Sam would and wouldn’t tell Mira.

  “Played games, ate lunch, bowled with your lipsticks, went to the park and played on the play structure. That was just me. Jake didn’t climb.”

  Sam had chosen to leave out the running. They’d both shaved a few seconds off their times. Jake had fallen, but only once, and Sam had helped him back up. They’d clapped high-fives, and Jake could tell it had killed Sam not to sulk about losing, but the kid had done it anyway. Good man.

  “That sounds like a lot of fun,” Mira said, smiling at Jake. Her teeth weren’t perfectly straight. Her eyeteeth were set forward a tiny bit, and one was crooked.

  He had not just contemplated the way her teeth would feel against the skin of his throat. Because that would be absurd. It would be especially absurd if that thought had actually given him yet another Mira-induced hard-on.

  “Grampy called,” Sam offered.

  And Jake had answered. The guy had been barely civil to him, asking point-blank what Jake’s intentions were—“to babysit your grandson, sir”—and whether he had any idea how much trouble he could cause, because Mira was “fragile” and “vulnerable” and didn’t need a “horny hooah” messing with her life. That had pissed Jake off enough that he’d said, between clenched teeth, “Sir. It doesn’t bother me if you want to call me a ‘horny hooah,’ but Mira is not fragile, and she’s not vulnerable.”

  “I know what ‘fragile’ means, but what’s ‘vulnerable’?” Sam had demanded when he got off the phone. And Jake had said, “Your mom is a smart, tough woman—that’s the important thing to know.”

  Mira shot him a look over the top of her beer glass. “Did you talk to him?”

  “We had a brief exchange.”

  “Was he …?”

  “He was—curt.” Jake could handle himself; no need to give any extra power to Mira’s dad and his rudeness.

  Mira sighed. “He’s a piece of work.”

  “Jake’s the best babysitter,” Sam said. “Can he come back tomorrow?”

  Jake tried not to be pleased by that, but damn, he was. Even if it was only the overachiever’s impulse to feel good about a job done to spec. It wasn’t as if he actually wanted to come back tomorrow.

  “I got a new sitter for tomorrow,” Mira told Sam.

  Oh. Maybe that twinge of disappointment meant he had wanted to come back tomorrow. The truth was, he’d loved his time with Sam. Figuring out who he was, helping him find his way, teaching him how to give his all or lose graciously. It had made Jake feel alive. All-the-way alive, and like maybe, maybe there was a reason to be glad he was.

  “I want Jake.” Sam screwed up his face, preparing for a tantrum. Jake felt an odd twinge of camaraderie.

  “You’ll like this sitter.”

  “Who is it?” Sam demanded, through a mouthful of pizza.

  “Chew with your mouth closed, please. She’s Penny’s friend’s sister.”

  “Is she a teenager?” Sam looked intrigued.

  “No. She’s a grown-up.”

  “I don’t want her,” Sam insisted. “I want Jake.”

  Okay. Sam was fighting for him. For him. Even if he didn’t understand what he was fighting for, or why, Jake couldn’t hang him out to dry.

  Sam wasn’t looking in Jake’s direction. Jake mouthed over his son’s head, I could do it.

  She hesitated. Are you sure?

  Sam’s head swiveled back and forth between them, just short of Exorcist-child. “Jake, Jake, are you gonna do it?”

  “Until you find someone else,” Jake told Mira. “I mean, no point in having all these changes, right? You’ll find someone permanent in a couple of days.”

  “Totally. I’m sure I can find someone. But I don’t want you to feel like you’re on the hook indefinitely. We could say you’ll do the rest of the week, and then I’ll figure something out for after that.”

  Short term. That was good. Because he wanted to be useful to them, but he had to draw the line somewhere. Keep things casual. This was too crazy of a situation to let the lines get all blurry and weird. Sam didn’t even know who he was. And he probably should get himself out of the way of temptation before he did something he’d live to regret.

  Mira was relieved, he could tell. But uneasy, too. She had a nervous habit of running her thumb across her other four fingernails. He’d seen her do it in the physical therapist’s office. Well, if she was nervous about this whole setup, that made two of them.

  He grabbed another slice of pizza. That was probably more food than he’d eaten the rest of the week combined.

  “So Jake’s going to come tomorrow?”

  He looked to Mira, who nodded. “Yeah,” Jake told Sam.

  “Awesome! We can race again!”

  “You guys raced?” Mira’s eyes narrowed.

  Jake looked over at Sam, who appeared to be sinking in his chair. “It was Jake’s idea,” Sam said hastily.

  Jake would give him a lecture tomorrow on not selling out your fellow soldiers. In the meantime, fine, he was the grown-up here. He’d take the blame. “Yes, we did.”

  Mira’s jaw hardened. “Sam. Are you done?”

  Sam had begun tearing his uneaten pizza crust into tiny pieces. He nodded.

  “Clear your place and go get in your pajamas, brush your teeth, and get in bed. You remember the rule?”

  “If I stay there, you’ll come up and snuggle me for a long time. If I come down, only a hug and a kiss?”

  “That’s right. Your Dragonbreath book is on the night table. You can read till I come up.”

  Sam went.

  Mira’s anger creased the space between her brows and tightened her jaw. “I told you straight out, totally clearly, that he has asthma. That he was injured. I told you I ask him not to run flat out. I told you I ask him to take it down a notch if he’s overtaxing his system. And you decided it would be a good idea to run races with him?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to freak you out. He was fine. He said nothing hurt anymore. I kept a close eye on his breathing, and I only let him do short runs, with lots of breaks.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is that you knew I don’t let him do that, and you let him do it! The point is, he has asthma, and he could have had an asthma attack.” She got up and began clearing the table, her motions jerky with anger.

  He couldn’t sit here and watch her clean up, so he got up and helped. “We had his inhaler.”

  “That’s not your decision, Jake. You’re his babysitter. That’s it. His babysitter.” She jammed a paper plate into the trash. “And you’re not even his babysitter anymore, because I’m firing you.”

  “No. Mira, please don’t. He wanted to show off a little for me, and I wanted to let him. He seemed like he could use the confidence boost. And he wanted to see me run on this damn thing.” He gestured at the leg.

  Some of the starch went out of her posture. She took a step back and touched her fingertips to her temples. He became aware of the ticking of a clock, of the hum of the refrigerator, of the sound of a car starting on the street outside. Of her breathing, rapi
d and shallow.

  “He loved it.” He had to make her understand, that running wasn’t a danger to Sam. That he wasn’t a danger to Sam. Because he wanted this. Wanted another day with Sam, another evening with Mira.

  She put her hand over her mouth.

  “You should have seen him.” Sam, legs pumping as he powered across the finish line, the expression on his face. “God! He was so psyched. He was running as hard as he could, and loving it. Smile as big as a barn, and—he’s a tough kid, Mira. He’s a great kid. He’s a great kid, and I took good care of him, I promise.”

  Not trying to convince her anymore. Only saying it because it mattered to him. “He’s a great kid. And I want to spend more time with him. If you don’t want me to run with him, I won’t run with him.”

  She lifted her chin, and he thought maybe she was about to kick him out, but she nodded instead. “He is a great kid. And I get it. I get why you did it. It makes sense to me. But if you want to spend time with him, you have to respect my boundaries. And that means asking before you let him do stuff like that.”

  Jake nodded. “Got it.”

  “Sounds like it was good for him.”

  “It was definitely good for me. First time I’ve really run on this sucker.”

  Her eyes took him in, a slow survey of his face. The flush of anger that had risen earlier in her cheeks covered her throat and extended to the smooth fair skin above the curved neckline of that insubstantial silk shell she wore.

  He became aware that the adrenaline that had fueled him through their exchange had transmuted into a much more familiar feeling. Balls tightening, dick hard. Every soldier knew about this. You got scared or pissed, and then you were so fucking horny you had to jerk one out silently under the feeble cover of your sleeping bag, or in the shower and hope you didn’t get walked in on.

  That high-emotion arousal meant nothing. This hard-on wasn’t for her. He didn’t have to act on it.

  And yet he couldn’t stop thinking about grabbing her and pushing up her shirt and sucking her breasts and unfastening her Professional Lady Pants and getting his hand in her panties so he could see if she was ready. Somehow, years of combat, of death and destruction, hadn’t managed to eradicate the memory of her wet heat against his fingers that night by the lake. Or the sounds she’d made into his mouth when he’d kissed her.