by Lola Darling
“What is this?” I finally manage, with a weak gesture toward the dress. Though what I really mean, of course, is what the hell is he doing in Philadelphia, buying me orchestra tickets and sending me gowns.
“You told me you’d never been to the orchestra. I told you, we’d have to remedy that one day.”
“Jack . . . ” I’m not sure how to begin.
Luckily, he doesn’t let me. “Harper, please. Hear me out. I’ve been . . . lost without you. Completely, utterly lost. I know what I did is unforgivable, that I don’t deserve for you to be standing here, let alone listening to what I have to say. The way I behaved at the funeral, the things I said to you . . . I’d give anything, I’d sell my soul to undo that moment, but I can’t. All I can do is tell you now—I was wrong. You are more mature and more level-headed than I’ll ever be. Trying to blame you for the situation with my family, and . . . I was the one being insane that day, Harper, and you have every right to hate me for it.”
He gazes into my eyes the whole time, but at this part, he takes a slow, hesitant step closer, as though he’s afraid to touch me, yet unable to resist moving closer to doing it. “I just needed you to know, Harper, that I took you seriously. I still take you seriously. And even if you never see me again after tonight . . . I always will.” He takes a deep breath. “Because I love you.”
That sentence seems to throw him off balance. He closes his eyes. “I love you, and I want to be with you, and I have never felt like this before in my life and it is fucking terrifying. But I needed you to know that.”
He opens his eyes again, a determined expression in his eye. “Okay. You can now continue to hate me if you want.”
I can’t help it. I burst out with a surprised laugh, which makes him cringe. As soon as I see that, I wince too, and take a step closer, reaching for him. He lets me rest my hands on his shoulders, our bodies inches apart now. “I don’t hate you, you idiot.” I crack a small, fragile smile. “I love you, Jack Kingston.”
He rests his forehead against mine, his relieved sigh soft against my lips. “I’m not dreaming this again, am I?” he murmurs.
My smile widens. “Not this time.”
“Good.” He presses his lips to mine, and I sink into the kiss. His hands circle my waist, lifting me a few inches from the floor as he pulls me so close, I could melt right through him. The kiss sears all the way down to my toes, to the tips of my fingers. I can feel it pulsing in the back of my throat and throbbing in my chest.
When we finally break apart, he swings me around in a circle, grinning like an idiot, and I dive right back in for another long, slow kiss.
We miss the first half of the show.
Well, not miss, exactly. We hear it. But from the moment we stumble through the curtain into the private box he reserved for us, we’re too lost in each other to actually watch. We ignore the four chairs provided and I curl up in his lap, kissing his lips, his neck, his jaw, every inch of his skin I can reach.
The music swells, the bass vibrating in my chest, and we move with it, his lips closing and parting over mine, his tongue slipping in to twine around my own. His hand slides down the length of the gown, down and down and down toward the hem just past my knees, then up and up and up until his fingers slide into me, and I gasp, and someone from the box beside us hisses at us to “be quiet,” and we both dissolve into silent laughter, until finally we give up and slip out of the show at intermission.
“You really should give them another chance though,” he murmurs in the cab home, between kissing his way down my neck. “They’re really very talented.”
“Hmmm, I’ll take your word for it tonight.” I grin and pull him into another long, breathless kiss.
The taxi driver lets us off in front of his hotel with a muttered Happy Valentine’s Day, and we stumble up to his room, punch drunk on finding each other again. We don’t even make it halfway through the door before I’m tearing at his suit coat and he’s pulling the silky dress he bought me over my head, letting it fall in a puddle on the bathroom floor as we stagger to the bed and practically fall into each other.
Jack
I never in a million years would’ve seen this coming.
I’d planned this day down to the minute we saw one another in the lobby of the Kimmel Center. After that . . . Well, I never allowed myself to think beyond that moment. Because I was sure, I was so sure, that I already knew what was coming.
I am incapable of love. Real love, I mean, the kind with the potential for marriage and babies and happily-ever-afters. I always have been. My whole family knows it; they remind me every chance they get. I had one last chance for love with Hannah, and I threw it down the toilet, so I’d already decided on my future. Just me, myself, and I (and maybe an occasional fling, because hey, I’m human).
I never saw her coming.
Even while she was here, I didn’t understand, because I’d never felt like this before. I wrote it off as sparks. Passion. A flame that burned as bright as this one could never last, I told myself.
But as the days passed and I continued to fail to resist her, I should’ve noticed that something was different this time.
Sadly, it wasn’t until the funeral—the day we marked the passing of the man who constantly told me I was a failure, not good enough, not manly or living my life right—that I finally realized why things were so different with Harper, why I was so different every time I was with her.
She makes me a better man. My love for her makes me better.
Of course, that same day, I also fucked up so colossally, I figured I was doomed. I’d finally met a woman I could see myself spending the rest of my life with, and I went and pushed her away in the most definitive, dickish move possible.
My father was right. I deserved to spend the rest of my life alone.
I spent the rest of the semester moping. All the way up until we handed out the grades on the last day of the semester. That night, I finally agreed to meet Drew and Mindy at the Bird and Baby for drinks. It was cold, snow falling heavier than ever outside the pub windows. We bundled up near the fire.
“I’m buying,” Drew insisted. “It’s a special occasion. First time we’ve seen Jack’s face in . . . well, we forget how long, that’s how long it’s been.”
“Drew, be nice.” Mindy aimed a kick at him under the table. “Jack’s been mourning.”
I had. But not for the reason they assumed. “What have I missed?” I asked, and I let Mindy fill me in on all the gossip with her friends, until Drew returned with the first round, and filled me in on all the gossip he’d overheard tending bar for our colleagues as well.
“Hannah seems . . . not good,” he ventured after our third round.
“I wouldn’t know,” I reply, downing the whiskey. “One more set?” I skipped to the bar, hoping to avoid this conversation. But as I turned to bring our third set of whiskeys back from the bar, I glanced across the room and noticed a familiar face.
That punk kid who’d had his arm slung around Harper, the last time I saw her in here. He was sitting with Mary Kate and another girl I didn’t recognize. Harper’s friends. Only, no Harper this time.
I returned to our seats, swallowed half my fourth whiskey, and cleared my throat. “I’ve been sleeping with a student,” I said, just to get the worst of it over with.
Mindy gaped at me.
Drew looked torn about whether he should high-five me or scowl, for Mindy’s sake.
I just swilled the liquid remaining in my glass and stared at it so I wouldn’t have to see their expressions while I talked. “At first it was an accident. Then it became a repeated accident. Then I realized that . . . I mean, I actually started to . . . ” I closed my eyes. This was idiotic.
But I needed to tell someone, and I clearly couldn’t have told Harper, who replied to any emails I sent with a blank email, if she replied at all.
“I think I love her.”
After that, Mindy dragged the whole story from me. The trip to the Cotsw
olds, her staying over at my place. The funeral. Hannah seeing me there with Harper. Me and Hannah fighting. Me taking it out on Harper.
“But you never apologized after that?” Mindy raised an eyebrow at me.
“Of course I did. I emailed her every day afterward saying I was sorry.”
Mindy actually rolled her eyes. “That’s not apologizing, Jack. That’s an email.”
And right then, it dawned on me what I needed to do.
It took me a while to convince Harper’s friends to tell me when her plane was leaving. The next day, it turned out. From London Heathrow.
“Promise if you do this, you really mean it,” Mary Kate told me as I stood to leave their table.
“I swear,” I told her. “I really, really mean it.”
Back at my place, I sobered up in a cold shower and set my alarm for my usual break-of-dawn. It would leave me five hours to make it to the airport. Plenty of time.
I hadn’t planned on London traffic.
By the time I made it to the Heathrow security gates, I only had two hours left. Still plenty of time.
But security insisted I couldn’t go through without a ticket, not even to meet someone on an international flight who needed help speaking English (okay I may have fibbed a little). I wound up buying the cheapest flight I could find, a flight over to Cardiff on a puddle hopper, and then I joined the endless security queue.
By the time I made it through, I had half an hour left. Her flight was listed on the boards, and it still said boarding.
I ran. Really ran. Harder than I’ve ever run before. But by the time I reached the terminal, they were announcing the final boarding call, and the gate stood empty. I asked at security, begged them to let me onto the plane to see if my nephew had wandered onto it by mistake (okay maybe a lot of fibbing). No dice.
So I sat in Heathrow airport clutching a ticket to Cardiff, and I watched her plane home take off.
Then I came up with Plan B. Took a week off work, bought a much bigger plane ticket than the little puddle hopper to Cardiff, and set about researching tickets for the Philadelphia Orchestra.
I never actually expected it to work. I never expected her to speak to me again—it’s why I sent the dress and the ticket instead of showing up at her door (Mary Kate came in handy yet again—turns out the pen pals still exchange real snail mail letters on the regular, and are very useful people to know when you, say, need to take a guess at someone’s dress size).
I figured this way, Harper had an out. If she didn’t want to see me, if she didn’t want to give me another chance to explain, she wouldn’t have to. She could just tear up the ticket, sell the dress, or wear it on another date with whomever she was surely dating by now, and that would be that.
My stomach sank at the thought of her with another man. But a woman like Harper wouldn’t stay single long. Not if American men had eyeballs in their heads.
I’d all but convinced myself she wasn’t going to show, that she’d clearly turn down this invitation, because why on earth would she still want to give me the time of day, let alone a date?
That’s when the doors to the building blew open again, and her familiar auburn head appeared between them.
The moment I saw her walk inside, the rest of the world stopped. All the other people in the building seemed like statues, carved very realistically, but lifeless, meaningless. There was only Harper, as far as I could see.
And somehow, miraculously, crazily, she feels the same way about me.
I gaze down at her, asleep beside me on the spare hotel bed, after we destroyed the first one we fell onto. I run my hand through her hair and for the first time in my life, I know that I’m exactly where I belong.
Epilogue
“Come on, Harper!” Mary Kate’s voice calls from around the bend. “Keep up! Or at least stop canoodling.”
I unlock my lips from Jack’s to grin at him sideways. “What do you think? Had enough canoodles for the moment?”
His answering grin sets off a fresh wave of sparks through my nerve endings. “Never.” Before I can stop him, he swoops in to lick my cheek, and I swat his shoulders. His tongue continues on down my neck, until he’s nibbling on my earlobe, and my knees decide they’d really like to stop working, please. His knee takes advantage of this, snaking between mine, and he steps forward until my back is pressed up against the nearest rough bark tree, and his thigh rubs along the seam of my pants, just hard enough to make those nerves pool in my stomach.
“You two really are impossible,” Patrick adds as he hikes past, his hand wrapped in his new girlfriend Audrey’s grasp as they both roll their eyes at us. “More PDA than a pre-college rave party full of 13-year-olds.”
Audrey, in her defense, swats his arm immediately. “Quit being a jerk, babe.”
“I’m just being honest!” He casts a smirk in our direction. “Catch up quick, or I’m eating all the cheese.”
“Oi!” I glower after him, though it’s still not enough to tempt me to unwrap my arms from Jack’s waist. His hands curl at the small of my back, and he leans in to nuzzle at the crook of my neck.
I’ve been back in Oxford for two months, yet it already feels like a lifetime. A perfect, impossibly wonderful lifetime that I pray will never end. So far, so good. My classes started a couple weeks ago, but even with my heavy course-load at Balliol, Jack and me find plenty of time together. Long days exploring Oxford’s hidden nooks and crannies, little out-of-the-way restaurants where the proprietors already know our names, bars where our friends collect for nightcaps, and museums where we soak in long, lazy weekend afternoons admiring the art – or pretending to admire the art and sneaking way too many longing glances at one another, before we’re forced to sneak off to the nearest private corner, arm-in-arm.
And the nights? Flashbacks of last night dart through my imagination: Jack staying over at my new flat, because my roommates were out celebrating the first Friday of term, and he wanted to surprise me with a home-cooked dinner for two.
Accidentally breaking one of the dishes when we got distracted halfway through said dinner and he lifted me onto the table, pushing everything out of the way. Ignoring the crash this caused because his hands were already undoing my zipper, and before I could blink he was pounding into me, shaking the floor of the whole place until the tenant downstairs banged on the roof and shouted at us to shut up.
Then moving the party to the shower instead…
We both glance in either direction, our friends out of sight now, and he leans in again, his lips tantalizingly close, but not quite touching mine. “I can’t stop thinking about you on your knees in front of me last night,” he breathes in my ear.
“Mm, my second favorite part of the night.” I lean against his chest.
“Second?” He frowns, offended. “What was the first?”
I unloop my arms from his waist and, despite the effort it takes, peel myself away from him to continue up the trail, with only a single teasing backwards glance. “I’ll tell you tonight. When we can reenact it.”
He glares and chases me up the path.
This Saturday afternoon, “the last summer day,” Jack predicts, we’ve all left our usual haunts behind. Jack even convinced me not to bring my laptop, even though there’s an analytical essay I should really get started on. We all drove down to a miniscule coastal town (really, “town” is a lie, it’s little more than a handful of shops and houses) near Brighton, and hiked up a trail along the beach, to a small cliff overlooking the choppy September sea.
This is a day off, completely, a day for all of us to relax.
Relax, regroup, and finally meet Mary Kate’s mysterious beau, too. We’ve only had a handful of conversations with this Malcolm, but so far he strikes me as quiet, serious, and completely devoted to her. So, as her resident BFF, I suppose I provisionally approve, given his good behavior continues in this vein.
“Can I at least get a hint?” Jack catches my eye, and with the late afternoon sun flashing i
n his eyes, that shock of hair falling across his forehead again in the way that drives me crazy (in a good way), all I can think, yet again, for the hundredth time since I stepped off the plane from Philadelphia back here again a month ago, is how did I get so lucky?
“Nope.” I smirk, though I at least stop to let him catch up. When he reaches my side, his hand runs through my hair, just before he draws me into another kiss, a slow, deep kiss that melts me from the inside out. “You’re a jerk, Harper Reed. A beautiful, amazing, wonderful jerk.”
I grin at him as we join hands and trail after our friends, up the path toward the picnic I’m sure they’ve already unveiled. “You’re not so bad yourself, Professor.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
They say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, the same thing can be said about writing a book, and I’m lucky enough to have a fabulous village.
Special thanks go out to:
Heather Lynne, my friend, beta reader, filthy-mouthed soul mate. I love you, Petals. SO MUCH. Thank you for your honest opinions, your shared love of all things Outlander and your love and support of yours truly.
R, my mentor, my snuggle bunny and partner in crime. Thank you for helping make Teach Me the best it could be. And for teaching me the ropes. I love you.
To Nina and Jen at The Literary Gossip, Angie at Angie’s Dreamy Reads, Candi at The Dirty Laundry Review, Samantha at Books, Wine and Lots of Time, Hilary with The Read Report, and the countless bloggers who have given me a chance. THANK YOU. Your love for romance and the authors who write it shines through each and every day in your posts and reviews. I’m grateful to know each and every one of you and call you friends.
To the ladies at Social Butterfly PR. You guys kick so much ass it’s not even funny. Thank you for all you do to make my books sparkle and shine.
Michele Catalano for the gorgeous cover. You are amazing and I can’t thank you enough.
E, for being my shoulder to lean on, my cheerleader, my biggest fan. Love you lots.
