JAKE

by Juliette Jones

  So I try not to think about Jake being naked and focus only on how enlightened I now am. How free.

  I try to close my eyes for a second but they won’t stay shut. He’s grabbed a pair of jeans and he’s… oohh, Jeesus. I’m pretty sure I’m witnessing something extraordinary. No: I’m very definitely sure I’m witnessing something … gigantic. He’s tucking that something into his jeans but he’s having trouble wrangling it into place. It doesn’t want to cooperate. It’s huge and rock-hard and heavy-looking and a dusky color that’s possibly the most fascinating thing I’ve ever seen in my life. So Jake Wolfe doesn’t just have a good heart and a good soul. He’s got a few other things going for him, too. Which I kind of already suspected. Not that I have much experience with this sort of thing and I shouldn’t even be thinking along these lines after what I’ve just been through but everything about Jake is just so different from everybody else. So magnetic and downright irresistible. He’s making my mouth water. He’s making me want to stay here with him all night long. For days, even. And talk to him. I want him to tell me everything about his life. I want him to trust me. With him. With his body and his soul and all that crazy beauty.

  “Jake?” I feel another confession coming on and my thoughts feel unusually loose but I mentally corral myself.

  He’s struggling with his button-fly. “Yeah?”

  “I feel safe with you.” Another confession straight out of left field. I’m high as a kite, I realize.

  He finally gets his button-fly done up. He walks over and stands by the side of the bed. He’s sort of looming over me with this gargantuan swell in his jeans but instead of feeling threatened I just … don’t. I feel happy. He’s reminding me of one of those Mount Olympus gods who might have spent some time in the underworld but then got called back to the blue sky where he belongs.

  “That’s good,” he says. “Because you should.”

  Not only is this night making me crazy but also philosophical. Because this is a world away from the way I used to feel around other men I’ve dated, always on-guard and wary. That place where the disappointment took up all the room in my emotions is empty when I’m with Jake, so there’s all this space for a million other emotions. Trust, and something else. Something wild and new and hungry …

  “You okay now? Feeling any better?” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “I found this tube of lotion in my medicine cabinet. It’s for bruises. I’ve had the occasional black eye and this helps. Can I put some on your face? I’ll be careful.”

  He sits on the side of the bed. He takes the little tube and smooths the cool lotion onto the bruises around my eye and my throat. His touch is so careful it doesn’t even hurt. It seems amazing that someone so big and tough-looking could touch me so gently.

  I watch his face, almost absurdly handsome but in a dark-edged, rugged sort of way. With those shadows that haunt him clearly visible. His hair is thick and mussed-up from sleep. His corded neck and his muscular chest and shoulders look strong enough to lift … extremely heavy objects. His jaw is square and manly, his stubble midnight black. And his mouth. Full lips but not too full, so perfectly-shaped I ache with longing. I wonder what it would be like to kiss lips that perfect.

  “I’ll kill that fucker,” he says quietly. It’s such a radically different sentiment to the way he’s touching me, the dark menace in his voice and his words jar me a little.

  “No,” I say. “He’s not worth it.”

  “It wasn’t the first time he hit you,” Jake says. I remember: he’d commented about the bruise I’d tried to cover up that first time I first met him.

  “No. I left after that first time. I’ve been sleeping in my office at work. Under my desk, if you can believe that. I just went back to his apartment to get my mother’s address book. So she could find my father’s house in Ireland.”

  I suddenly feel incredibly tired, but I don’t want to sleep. He might be gone when I wake up. I’m still half-convinced he’s some fantasy dreamed up by my frazzled mind. Very soon I’ll have to get back to my restaurant and my life, and I’ll need to help my mother get through yet another divorce. Just thinking about all that makes me feel even more tired, and scared. Will Butch Flint accept defeat gracefully or will he be angry? What if he hunts me and waits for me around corners and jumps out from behind doors? What if I can’t fight him off next time?

  “Hey,” Jake says softly, like he can read my thoughts. “Don’t worry about anything. I’ll help you. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  This smooth-talking god-like stranger-gypsy has to be a dream, that’s all there is to it.

  “I’m not usually the kind of girl who needs rescuing,” I tell him.

  “I’m not usually the kind of guy who does the rescuing,” he says. “But this time it’s different. This time everything’s different.”

  She’s so pretty it’s killing me softly.

  I don’t know how the hell this happened but my heart feels like a big rolling bowling ball in my chest, bursting with this need to take care of her and protect her at all costs. Every time I think of her leaving this apartment my mind turns black and my chest aches so much it stuns me.

  And if that’s not bad enough, my cock is ten inches of rock-hard, scorching agony. That tight little dress is blowing my mind. The plush, insanely full outline of her full breasts is rendering me speechless. She’s got this curvy little body that’s slim but not too slim. Healthy-looking and sweet as hell. The flare of femininity in her hips and her breasts and her thighs is like some kind of goddamn miracle.

  And her face. They say that beauty is all about symmetry. If that’s true, she must be the most symmetrical woman on earth because aside from the bruises I can’t see a single flaw. Her eyes are almost feline, watching me, wide and ocean-blue and rimmed with these long lashes that are dark copper and tipped with blond. There’s a sprinkling of sixteen tiny freckles (I counted) dotted across the bridge of her nose, which is small and delicate. Her lips are rounded with youth, flushed and soft-looking, as pink as roses.

  I know I sound like a love-drunk idiot, which I might just happen to be. Here it is: I don’t fucking care. All I care about is helping her heal. And doing whatever it takes to protect her from the maniac that brought her here in the first place. The maniac I plan on annihilating at the very first opportunity.

  The bruise has turned purple, like nasty bruises get. I’d know, I’ve had plenty. The handprint around her throat is still pink but less obvious than it was before.

  That fucking fucker. Strangling her. Slapping her face. I’ve played through the scenario in my head countless times already. It’s easy enough to guess what he was trying to do to her.

  The main thing is: she got away. She found me.

  And he’s not getting anywhere near her again. I’ll die a slow painful death before I let that happen.

  I finish putting the lotion onto her bruises.

  “Let me help you get under the covers,” I say. “You should sleep some more.”

  I adjust the duvet, trying not to notice the lush swell of her hips, the thin fabric of her mini-dress, those round, bursting breasts topped with beaded nipples. I think about peeling her clothes up over them, taking her into my mouth, sucking hard and feeding off her outrageous beauty until she’s hot and wet and crying out with her need to be taken …

  Instead I pull the duvet up, adjusting it so it covers her up to her chin.

  I can barely take it. I’m fighting for control.

  I’m not good at control.

  I can feel the monster inside me roaring to get out. To eat her and lick her and devour her. She’s so damn luscious it’s killing me.

  But this need to keep her safe from everything including myself is killing me more. This new protectiveness she’s inspiring is bigger than the darkest parts of me, than all the secrets and the pain. In fact the pain doesn’t feel quite so painful as it always used to. The effect of her soft, luminous presence is smoothing off my most
jagged edges.

  “Sleep now,” I say. “I’ll be on the couch. Just call me if you need me.”

  “Jake?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you stay here with me? Just a little longer? I don’t want to be alone.”

  Shit.

  It’s not a good idea. My restraint has its limits.

  But I can’t refuse her. I don’t have it in me to refuse her anything.

  She’s patting the bed next to where she’s laying. She wants me to lie down next to her. With this gargantuan hard-on that’s straining painfully against the button-fly of my jeans like a goddamn demon fighting to break free.

  I do it.

  Maybe she hasn’t noticed the state of me in the low light. She turns onto her side to face me. Her hair fans across the pillows like feathery silk. Fuck, she’s pretty. I can barely even look at her.

  “Thank you, Jake,” she whispers, and her eyes have gone shiny like she’s about to cry again and I can’t have that.

  I turn to face her and brush a strand of her hair back from her cheek. “No. Don’t ever thank me. It’s me who should be thanking you.”

  She’s watching my face. She sniffles, then a little smile plays at the corner of her mouth, like she finds what I’ve said funny. “I didn’t do anything to help you. Except ruin your bunch of flowers, spoil your night with all my lame drama and kick you out of your bed.”

  “Wrong,” I tell her, and it’s crazy. The old me has been replaced by a completely new version of myself that’s all about her lips and her eyes and her warm apple pies.

  Then she does something that shatters me.

  She reaches out and touches my chest with her fingers. Right where there’s a scar. One of those scars, that healed on the outside but never deep down. Small, neat knife cuts, about an inch long. I have twelve of them. “What are these?” she says, running her fingers along one. “What caused these?”

  Her fingers are like soft blades and I suppress a groan. I’ve never let anyone touch me like this before. I’ve never let anyone get close enough.

  The pain is more existential than physical. Like the wounds are deep down. Like they’re still raw and bloody on my soul even though my skin healed up years ago. It hurts, this touch. More than anything has hurt for a very long time.

  I groan, and I roll onto my back.

  Her touch slides along with my movement, lightly, but she doesn’t remove it.

  “Jake? Are you okay? What’s wrong?” She sounds concerned. Like she’s tuning in to a tiny degree of my agony.

  I don’t know why I do it. I’ve never talked about this to anyone, ever. But I do now. “My uncle made those cuts when I was eleven years old. With a knife.”

  “What? Jake. Why?”

  I look over at her and her eyes are huge. The bruise around the left one is the thing that – I don’t know why – triggers a surrender in me. I just let it pour out. “He used to abuse me. All kinds of horrible shit. Pretty much the worst kind of things you could imagine. It went on for almost a year. I was alone a lot after school and at night because my brother worked. To feed us after our parents died. I was his prey. I’d fight him. He’d beat me or sometimes – when I threatened to tell or to run - he’d use the knife to keep me still.”

  “Jake.” She doesn’t seem disgusted by me after my gruesome confession. She doesn’t take her hand away. “I’m so sorry,” she whispers, and her eyes are shiny with tears. “Do you want me to stop touching you? Am I hurting you?”

  Strangely, the thought of her pulling away from me hurts more than even the most violent memories. I take her hand in mine and I hold it to my chest, to the worst of the scars. To the very worst of myself. “No. You’re not hurting me. Keep touching me.” Fix me, I want to say. Because she is. Somehow, she is.

  So now I can begin to understand. Now I know why those haunted shadows are such a part of him. Why he reacted to my own assault the way he did. Like someone who’d lived it in the very worst way.

  “My poor Jake,” I say. I don’t mean to say it like that.

  My Jake. But he is. He already is.

  His eyes are watching mine and they’re so deep, so dark. I can tell by the raw pain there that he might never have talked about this with anyone. An overwhelming urge blooms inside me: I want to heal him. I want to save him and keep him. “Did he ever get caught, and punished?”

  The way he’s looking at me almost scares me. It’s not directed at me though, not at all. It’s deep inside him. It’s the grief and fury he carries, the scars that were once branded onto his body and his soul. “My brother caught him. Almost killed him. I had to stop him. I didn’t want my brother to go to jail. But Alexander broke his jaw and a few ribs and permanently damaged one of his arms. Threatened to kill him if he ever came after us. But, no. We never reported him. We just left. We were kids. It was in the paper a few years later that he died. Drowning accident, they said.”

  “Jake,” I whisper. My fingers are still touching his scars, feathering lightly across his skin as though trying to ease away his residual fear. It’s dark in the room but impossible not to notice the shape of his body, the size of him, the forceful beauty, the cinnamon skin inked with swirling designs.

  With Jake, even with all the angst and pain and complexities – or maybe because of them – I want to own all the possibilities scrawling out between us and make the most of everything about him.

  “And I’ve been a major fuck-up ever since,” he says. “You need to know this about me, Sugar. I’m a fuck-up.”

  “No.” I lean towards him, slowly. Maybe I’m still woozy but I don’t care. Softly, I kiss one of his scars. He tenses, like it might be more than he can take. But then I kiss another scar, carefully, with all the tenderness I possess. He groans.

  “You’re the kindest, most beautiful person I’ve ever met,” I tell him.

  “You don’t know me very well,” he says. “I have a criminal record.”

  “I already knew that. You told me.”

  “And a sordid past.” I kiss his skin again with gentle, feathery, heartfelt kisses, and his breathing is heavier now. “I use people.” Use me, I feel like saying, which is crazy, especially considering what happened to me and why I’m here. I don’t know all that much about Jake Wolfe but one thing I do know is that he’ll never use me. I just know this. By the way he’s looking at me now.

  Besides, he’s not the only one with issues.

  “I’m frigid,” I tell him. “And completely unworldly. I traveled with my mother a few times when I was young but all I ever wanted to do was to go back home to my kitchen and my rose garden and my peach orchard.” Then, because he smells so good and feels so good, I kiss his chest again. I let my fingers trace another scar. When I look up at him again, I’m surprised to see the glint of amusement behind his eyes, like he can’t believe what I’ve just said. One of his eyebrows slants upwards with his question and he’s simply the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen with his gypsy face and his wild dark hair.

  “Frigid?”

  “Yes. And totally inexperienced.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Completely.”

  He’s quiet for a second, considering this. “You mean … are you saying … you’ve never had sex?”

  “Nope. It’s because I’m awkward and indifferent, so I’ve been told. I can’t relax or just go with the flow because it never feels right. I’ve gone on dates, but that’s it. And every single one ends disastrously because I’m so picky. My dates always end up storming away because I’m too uptight. I don’t even let them kiss me. I’ve been holding out because I thought things would turn out differently and I waited. Because I’m an idiot. Because I’m – or at least I was – a hopeless and very delusional romantic. But I’m over all that now, or at least I’m working on it. So there. You’re not the only one with problems.”

  Jake laughs, softly. And it’s the most beautiful, masculine, intriguing sound I’ve ever heard. I feel triumphant. Even after everyt
hing we’ve been through and talked about and confessed, I’ve made him happy. Just a little. It feels like some remarkable accomplishment. His laughter quickly fades as the layers of his thoughts shift and I decide to make it my quest: to make him happy. I have this strangely resolute feeling that I can. Like maybe it’s something I can do better than anyone else.

  “Sweetheart,” he says, more serious now. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Not a single thing.”

  Jake turns his big, buff body towards mine so he’s lying next to me, facing me, staring into my eyes. He props his head up on his bent, muscular arm. He wears a Rolex and a black, beaded bracelet on his right wrist. The combination of the two would look strange on any other businessman but it suits Jake, adding to his artistic, pirate-like vibe. His long jean-clad leg rests against my bare skin. I love how aware of everything about him I am, like every piece of him is a work of art that demands to be admired and appreciated. His eyelashes are long and thick, blinking at me. His hand smooths a strand of my hair back from my face.

  “Sugar, honey. You are the most gorgeous, least frigid person I’ve ever met. And the smartest. And the strongest. If a man can’t thaw you out, there’s something wrong with him, not you. And if you don’t want him because he’s a loser and a selfish bastard then you’re smart to do whatever it takes to get rid of him. There is nothing wrong with anything you’ve done or any part of you. I mean that. You’re perfect. Perfect.”

  It’s as though he’s seeing me like I see him: flawless, despite all the obvious flaws. I’m not usually much of a crier but Jake’s gone a little bit blurry and I feel a warm wetness on my cheek.

  Jake wipes the tear away with his thumb.

  “Sugar?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want you to stay here with me as long as you want to. I don’t want you to sleep in your office, but here, in my bed. I’ll get you a key to my apartment, to use as you like. This room is yours until you decide you don’t want it. I sleep on my couch most nights anyway. And when you’re ready, I want to come to work with you and make sure you’re okay. And then I want to make sure that asshole Butch Flint gets what he deserves, or at the very least, knows better than to contact you or come near you and your mother ever again. We’ll keep it all nice and legal. If it takes a restraining order then we’ll get one. But a restraining order doesn’t work without a bodyguard. Okay? Will you let me help you?”