Hold on Tight

by Serena Bell

  Mira made a small sound behind him.

  “I am,” New Grandma said. “And do you know why?”

  “Why?” Sam asked.

  “Because I have had a very lucky year. God has seen fit not only to send me back my son, alive and whole, but also to send me a grandson.”

  “I’m lucky, too,” Sam said. “I have a new grandma and a new aunt and uncle and cousins.”

  There were tight bands wrapped around Jake’s chest.

  “And how would you feel about giving your new grandma a hug?”

  “I could do that,” Sam said, and came forward into Jake’s mother’s arms.

  Over Sam’s shoulder, Jake watched his mother’s face crumble.

  “Hello, Sam,” Jake’s mother said, through her tears. “Welcome to the family.”

  They were polite to her, but cool. And that was okay. She didn’t need them to fall all over her and welcome her with open arms. It was enough that they did that for Sam. Jake’s sister, Susannah, hugged and kissed Sam, and Jake’s brother, Pierce, shook his hand earnestly and told him they were very, very glad to have a new nephew. Then Sam’s cousins surrounded him like there were more than two of them and herded him to the guest room where, they said, there were so many Legos he wouldn’t believe it wouldn’t believe it wouldn’t believe it! The cousins were Abigail, who was nine, and Dylan, who was six and had eyes like Sam’s, although his face shape was different.

  Then it was just the adults, and Jake’s mom, Janet, set out sandwich makings. For a few minutes, Mira didn’t need to make any conversation because everyone was engaged in construction and assembly.

  The house was small, but it wasn’t a shack. It was a well-loved cottage, with a sliding glass door out to a deck that overlooked the Pacific, and a great room with a high ceiling, a galley kitchen, a long dining table, and a living area. They sat on the couches and chairs—which occupied some charming realm between beach chic and shabby—and began to eat their sandwiches. Then the grace period was over, and Susannah asked, “So, forgive my abruptness, but I think we’ve all got a few questions here.”

  Well, yes, they would.

  “How is it we have a nephew—grandson—whatever—we didn’t know existed for seven years?”

  The question was aimed at Jake, but Mira knew that ultimately, it was a question for her. That all the questions were for her.

  We have a nephew. Strange how despite Susannah’s hard tone, Mira could feel so grateful for those words. And so joyful, too, because this was a room full of people that belonged to Sam. His family.

  “We met when Jake was home on leave. We fought, and we broke up.”

  “It was my fault,” said Jake.

  She shot him a look, surprised and grateful, and he gave her a lopsided smile.

  “I probably should have called him right away, but I didn’t, because everyone said I shouldn’t tell him, that it would be unfair because he was deployed and he’d get himself killed worrying over it instead of having his head where it should be. They said I should tell him in person when he came home.”

  Susannah narrowed her eyes, but she nodded. “I can see that,” she said.

  “So I left messages, but they didn’t explain.”

  “And I didn’t get them. And I didn’t come home for almost fifteen months.”

  “God. I remember,” said Janet, exchanging glances with Susannah.

  “Okay, but at some point, right?”

  Mira nodded. “I tried. I was looking for ‘Jake’ and he was Jackson, and I—I wasn’t thinking he’d be a Ranger, so there was nothing to help me narrow down ‘Jake Taylor.’ ”

  “Taylor’s a common name,” Susannah said gently.

  It was grace, Mira understood, and she bit her lip, holding back tears.

  “And we’re unlisted,” Susannah added, her gaze moving from Mira’s face to her mother’s, then pausing and softening still more on Jake’s. “So you couldn’t find him that way. Even if you’d had anything to go on other than ‘Taylor.’ ”

  “I wish I had,” Mira said. Her heart twisted. It was their loss, too, all those years of Sam they hadn’t had. She had never let herself really imagine that they existed, this other family, these people who belonged to Sam. Who could have belonged to her.

  “Well,” Susannah said. “We’re all here now, right? That’s the important thing.”

  Mira had to close her eyes, then, and they gave her a minute to put herself back together. When she looked up again, Susannah was smiling at her. Not an all-out, full-on smile, but one Mira recognized. Sam’s tentative smile. Jake’s.

  “How did you guys find each other again?” Susannah asked.

  Jake spoke before she could. “I ran into them in the physical therapist’s office. And she told me.”

  “That must have taken a lot of courage,” Susannah said. Not warmly, not exactly, but with admiration.

  Mira shook her head. “I’d always promised myself if I ever saw him again, I’d tell him the truth.”

  “So just like that? Right in the physical therapist’s office?”

  “Right in the physical therapist’s office,” Jake confirmed.

  Put like that, so baldly, it was a little terrifying. The way she’d cracked their lives wide open on the strength of a promise she’d made to herself years before. He could have been an awful man. Deeply broken, unhealable. Years of physical violence could have made him angry, bitter—even violent himself. But something about him must have seemed essentially unchanged to her. She must have seen, felt, some core Jake reaching out to her, through the grumpiness, the unwillingness. And that Jake had become more and more present every day, until now he felt like the embodiment of everything she’d let herself love about him beside the lake.

  She reached out and took his hand, and he squeezed hers, hard.

  Susannah and her mother exchanged glances.

  “Are you two—together?”

  That was Jake’s brother, Pierce.

  She felt panicky. She didn’t know the answer, and how could she not know the answer to such an important question? Why hadn’t she used the car ride down here to talk to him about where things stood? She could have brought it up tentatively, said something like, Hey. So, I know we said we’d keep things simple, but I think we can both agree they’re not anymore. Where do we go from here?

  But she hadn’t. And if the same question had been on his mind, he hadn’t said so.

  She realized she was holding her breath. Waiting for his answer.

  “We’ve been spending a lot of time together,” Jake said cautiously.

  It wasn’t until her heart sank that she realized that she’d wanted more from him. That she’d wanted an emphatic yes. Even though she wasn’t sure she would have given an emphatic yes if their situations had been reversed. Even though she had more questions than answers in her own mind.

  “But—”

  She wanted him to stop. She wanted him to look at her and hesitate and invite her to help him answer this question. She didn’t want him to dive ahead and say, “But Mira just came off a serious relationship and she’s still trying to get her feet back under her. And I’m thinking about trying to get myself returned to active duty.”

  “No!”

  That was Jake’s mom. And Mira knew how she felt, though she’d vowed years and years ago that she’d never again say or do anything with the intention of holding him back.

  “It’s a long shot, Mom. Some AK guys, it’s just over, and that’s it. But I think I need to try. It’s just, you know, this is who I am.”

  Jake’s mother turned away, looking into a far corner. She blinked back tears. “When?” she asked.

  “Not sure,” he said. “I haven’t decided for sure.”

  Susannah went to her mother and put an arm around her, and the two women clung to each other.

  I want to be Susannah’s friend, Mira thought.

  As if Susannah had heard her thoughts, she released her mom and turned back to Mira. “So—
who are you, instant sister-in-law?”

  “I’m not—”

  “Mother of our instant nephew and grandchild, then? Tell us about yourself.”

  No punches pulled in this family, for better or for worse.

  “Mira paints these gorgeous watercolors. She’s interested in becoming a children’s book illustrator.”

  She gave Jake a look.

  “It’s true,” he said mildly.

  “It was true,” she said. “Before Sam.”

  There was a moment of silence, during which she imagined they were all individually dying to know the story of that. Well, they’d have to wait. “I do user-interface design for a website that sells shoes. I figure out how users want to use the site and I design it to make it easiest for them.”

  “Is that more like graphic design? Or more like computer programming?”

  “It’s a little of both,” she said. “It’s actually more of a business role, in some ways. I’m trying to understand customers, understand how to make them more likely to buy, more likely to finish transactions successfully, more likely to come back. It’s an interesting mix of skills.”

  “Sounds like it,” Susannah said. “And you’ve been—raising Sam on your own?”

  She nodded.

  “That must have been hard.”

  “Sometimes very hard. But rewarding, too. I had help. From my parents. I was living with them in Florida until recently.”

  “Was it a permanent move? Out here?” Janet asked.

  Mira couldn’t help smiling at the transparency of that question, and at the way all those sets of eyes anxiously pinned her. “Yes. I’m planning to stay.”

  There was something like a collective sigh of relief in the room.

  “Well,” Janet said. “We’re so glad you’re here. You and Sam. Welcome.”

  It made Mira’s tears flow again. She swiped them away with the back of her hand. “Thank you.”

  “What does it feel like? To have an instant family?”

  Mira was about to respond. To say that it was a good thing. She was surprisingly comfortable here with them, despite the inquisition. The way they’d welcomed Sam. The way they regarded her warily but without judgment.

  But before she could open her mouth, Jake spoke, and she realized the question had never been intended for her.

  “Like Christmas in July.”

  Chapter 24

  “Did you mean that? What you said to your sister? About Christmas in July?”

  “Of course I meant it.”

  She felt stripped bare, by all the anger and suspicion, all the love and grief, that had been in the room earlier.

  Holding him at bay hadn’t kept her from falling. Again. She’d told herself, told him, that she wanted things simple. That she needed space, and time, when all she needed was him.

  Him.

  Are you guys together?

  If it had been her question to answer, she would have said: Yes. And shocked the hell out of herself in the process.

  That afternoon, they’d watched the cousins play on the beach, then shared a jovial family dinner where everyone had talked up and over each other, voices weaving and mounting into a cacophony—as an only child of only children, Mira had never experienced anything like it, and it thrilled her that this was Sam’s legacy, his destiny. And all of that, the sweetness, the joy, only amped up the emotions that threatened to boil over.

  And then they’d come down here, to the brink of the Pacific, and he’d built them a beach bonfire. First he’d made a circular fire pit from the smooth round rocks that covered the upper half of the beach, then he’d refused her help at gathering driftwood from up and down the beach, even though she could see that he had trouble with his footing on those stones. But she hadn’t tried to convince him. She understood him well enough now to know that it wasn’t important to him to do things the most efficient possible way, but it was incredibly important to him to do them his way, himself.

  Now they sat under a blanket on a huge driftwood log in the glow of the fire, and the flickering flames cast his face into beautiful relief. Shadows under his brow, his cheekbones, the hard, hard line of his jaw. There had never been any man she could stare at so happily. No man whose simple physical presence started such a thrum in her body, whose gaze on her face could make her want to give herself over, throw herself open. Body and soul.

  Below them, somewhere in the dark, moonless night, the ocean gave off a steady roar that drowned the rest of the world and left them here, alone, in this circle of light.

  He tucked his fingertips into her hair and turned her head so he could capture her mouth.

  The first kiss was a tease. A nip, a slick, quick entry and retreat.

  “You’re delicious,” he said.

  She made a sound of protest.

  “More?”

  She nodded.

  “Come here.”

  He pulled her down, hitched her legs up so she was straddling him across the log. She fitted herself to him, his erection pressing hard up between her legs, hot against her lips and her clit. She rearranged the blanket around them, and he kissed her again. More a long, slow press and glide. This is what I’m going to do to you later. His hands roaming, finding all the tender, striving parts of her, waking her up, making her moan.

  She was dissolving, a peculiar trick of the heat of his body, the heat of the fire, and the flickering light that made everything not quite real. She melted, her whole groin and belly, her thighs, her breasts. Lost definition until he was the only thing holding her on the log.

  “Take your pants off,” he said.

  “Anyone could see us.”

  “We’ll be under the blanket. I want to be inside you.”

  She obeyed, shucking her pants, swinging her leg back over him. He’d unbuttoned and unzipped, and he extracted a condom from a pocket and did something swift and efficient under the blanket, between their bodies.

  It was absurd. Driftwood splintery under them, the socket of his artificial leg rubbing uncomfortably against her thigh, a reminder each and every time he thrust up into her. His jeans in the way, getting sticky and damp as she got wetter and wetter around him, as he pushed up unevenly and without any smoothness into her. It shouldn’t have been sexy at all. It should have been all the myths of sex on the beach busted wide open—sand and saltwater in tender places, the realization that you don’t like this near-stranger enough to be letting him screw you in an almost public place.

  Instead it was something else. The firelight slipping and sliding into her vision as her eyelids drooped closed, as they opened again in surprise at something unexpected he’d touched, some spot he’d awoken when she didn’t even know it was there. The orange and yellow flames a strange and perfect alchemy with her emotions, stirring them up, heating them up. Making it so the stray bits and pieces of things weren’t obstacles, they were amplifiers. The friction, the not-quite-all-the-way, uneven thrust of him, him, because no one else fucked like that, the wool blanket getting in the way, his hands moving unexpectedly, reaching to push a cold, hard button out of the way—“No,” she said. “Leave it there, I can feel it against my clit”—and he groaned, and bit her neck, so hard she knew he’d leave a mark she’d have to explain to her son and her new family, but she didn’t give a crap, because who knew that denim scraping against the damp crack of your ass could feel so good. She couldn’t move in all the ways at once that she needed to feel everything he was offering her—the hard grip of his arms around her, keeping her balanced so there was this crazy pressure in all the right places she never could have achieved if they’d planned the most perfect sex in bed ever; the sound of his breath, harsh and splintered with growls and groans, so close it hurt her ear. He was holding her too tight, and she was too hot, sweating, sweating in the wool blanket and the heat they made, the heat from the fire, and her orgasm, when it came, came from nowhere, boiled up out of the mess and the chaos, all disordered and pulled together out of threads of need into thi
s one big thorough letting go, and she gasped his name and felt him surge up into her, rigid under her, as surprised as she was, and saying her name in a broken, hungry way that hurt her chest.

  I love you.

  It beat in her ears and her head like a drum, demanding. It wanted to be freed. It wanted to be spoken out loud like a chant.

  Loveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyou.

  What would happen if she said it?

  What if, for him, it wasn’t like that? What if it was uncomfortable buttons sticking into his squishy parts and too much damp and sweat and clothes and blankets and his artificial leg getting between him and some smooth, easy version of the world? What if the words beating in his head were Wow, that hurt?

  What if by instant family, and Christmas in July, he’d only meant Sam? What if she said I love you and he didn’t say it back? What if he said, Mira, hey, I’m flattered, but we’ve talked about this?

  She might die.

  And conversely, what if she said I love you and he did say it back? What if they were an instant family?

  Naive, her father’s voice said in her head. No such thing as an instant family. You want family? You come home to Florida.

  No fucking way, she told him.

  What if they went home and Jake moved in and set up shop and started taking care of them, the way she craved and dreaded?

  Self-indulgent.

  She’d have moved all the way across the country—

  Impetuous.

  —and proved exactly nothing about her ability to survive the world on her own.

  Flaky. Foolish.

  If she said I love you, and Jake said it back, if those words rearranged her world so that she was no longer in charge of it, then her father would have been proved right about her.

  No fucking way.

  At least her father’s words had drowned out the chant in her head. It had gone silent, the insistent words, the throbbing emotion, underground again.

  The edge of his jeans button was painful against her now oversensitive clit. The damp clothes under her felt awful and sordid. And that was a relief.

  It felt safer this way.