And it’s going to ache like my heart’s been torn from my chest, still beating.
I can see in his face that he’s holding back, slowing down, closing up. Like always, Winch and I are at opposite poles.
And, like always, we push each other to stand and face the one thing we always run from.
I free-fell, but now I’ll also cling to him, no matter how much this will hurt later.
He held on, and now he needs to let go.
“Let go,” I whisper, my hand running over his back, down to the curve of his perfect ass. I smile at him, nervous to be this close, this unsexily open during something this intimate.
The sexy mask of lust is gone, and it’s just me and him, too close and too connected for what’s probably going to be too short a time. His eyes are wild, panicked, and he’s lost any sense of rhythm. I adjust under him, fit my arms on his shoulders, and draw long, smooth strokes down from the rounded muscles of his shoulders to his tensed wrists, leading his body back to the pattern it needs to be in so he can fling himself open and let it all wash over him.
“It’s okay. I’m here. Let go.”
His eyes are wide. His breathing is ragged. His arms snake around me, so tight they almost crush me, and I only hesitate a single beat before I wind my arms around him and crush back. I wrap myself in him, drape him over me, let him closer than I’ve ever let anyone before. My body shakes, not from lust this time, but from a feeling that wells deep in me. I feel the hot slide of tears dripping out of my clamped eyes. His heartbeat is wild against my chest.
I feel like my heart is tearing to get out of my body. I take a long drag of air, inhaling the smell of the two of us, his skin and mine, our sweat. I press my lips to his neck, his mouth, and my hands reach to the back of his head and pull him hard against me.
The pace is frantic now, and we’re both lost in this crazed, strange, scary, wonderful moment that’s getting bigger and stronger than either one of us can safely manage, like a deep, powerful wave about to pound a previously untouched shore.
A gasp and a groan stutter out of his throat, and then he gathers my body tight and fits it to his, pulls his mouth just a fraction of an inch from mine, and the strangled words he grits out pulverize any sense of disconnect I could have hidden behind.
“Evan, I love you. I love you. Evan.”
Then our world eclipses, dark and and strangely new, frightening except for that fact that he’s here, with me, protecting my heart, and he loves me.
He loves me.
I hold him close and let the tears course out without any shame.
He loves me.
Winch 11
The sex…
Sex with her…
Being with Evan…
My mind is like a strobe, pulsing with a thousand different thoughts and ideas. Her body, naked, hot, sticky with sweat, is pressed along mine, and her breath is panting in quick bursts against my neck, which is moist from her tears. I have no idea why she’s crying, but I feel…I feel the overwhelming urge to…? To do something slightly stupid, without analyzing or hyper-focusing.
I pull her up by the hand. “Let’s go.”
Her face is streaked with smudged makeup and leftover tears. And she looks so goddamn beautiful, it grabs at me and shakes me hard.
“Where?” she asks, blinking uncertainly.
I’ve never been big on parading around naked. My parents raised us to be modest, and, if anyone in our family was going to streak, it’s Remy, who would feel comfortable enough just letting it all hang out no matter where he was or who he was around.
Not me. I’m sensible fucking Winchester, the guy who cleans up after everyone else’s messes, the guy who keeps his emotions under control and his damn clothes on.
Except that’s not me tonight.
I roll the condom off and throw it out, not even minding that Evan sees me do it. For the first time in my life, I’m with someone who accepts everything about me, even the things I have to hide from all the other people in my life. She’s opened something deep in me, and I’m not ready to put a lid back on it.
“C’mon, gorgeous.” I reach my hand out and she scoots off the bed and takes it. “Feel like a swim?”
I know this stretch of road her grandparents’ house is on pretty well. All older people, vacation homes. It’s late on a Sunday night. No one’s gonna be out now. Not that I’d care at this minute if there was an entire stadium of people watching.
“In the ocean?” The look on her face is a mixture of amusement and surprise.
I love that I’m surprising her. Hell, I’m surprising myself.
“Are you worried?”
I pull her close, and the feel of her in my arms makes me want to push her back on the bed and start again, building her up from cool and calm to panting and begging for me.
“The tide will be strong right now.” She trails her finger down my chest, from the center of my collarbones all the way down until I feel the beginnings of a hard-on starting again. “And my grandparents have a really killer pool. And a hot-tub.”
She arches one eyebrow, and, somehow, even with all her naked glory right in front of my face, that eyebrow is what turns me on hardcore.
It takes every fucking ounce of my self-control to say the next three words.
“Lead the way.”
My phone is on the floor, in the pocket of my pants, unchecked. My family is probably gathering to watch a movie. The guys are all around the television with beer and pretzels, the women will drift in and out of the kitchen with their glasses of wine and, later, coffee. It’s the same thing that’s happened in my family’s house on a Sunday night for as long as I can remember.
And I’m not there.
I don’t want to be there. I chose not to be there. I chose this night, alone, private and doing whatever the hell I feel like doing with a girl who drives me wild and makes me question every damn thing I ever thought I knew.
A girl I love.
I love her.
I check out the sweet sway of her ass, shaped exactly like a plump little upside-down heart. I follow it until she dives, clean and smooth, off the side of the deck and into the pool, not even checking the temperature of the water.
Usually I’d be the guy standing on the side, fully dressed, arms crossed, attention focused on keeping everything calm. Tonight that guy is put away, and someone careless and wild is standing in his place.
I dive in, the cold bite of the water such a shock, I come up sputtering. “Damn, girl! You could have warned me it’s Arctic temperatures in here.”
I notice now that Evan’s teeth are chattering just slightly. “Live a little. And come here to me. I’ll keep you warm.”
I swim over to her and hook an arm around her waist, pulling her to me for a damp kiss. Her skin bobs next to mine, like velvet under the water, brushing and rubbing against me in a way that makes my dick stand at attention.
I’ve never been a slacker in bed. I’ve always kept the girls I was with satisfied. But it usually took me longer than ten minutes after sex to go rock hard again and feel this kind of complete, total need to get a girl back in bed.
The sex was amazing.
For me.
I kiss Evan and taste the salty brine of the pool water on her lips, and it occurs to me that maybe I’m the only one who found it all so damn amazing. Maybe she wasn’t as turned on, wasn’t as impressed.
I told her before that it didn’t matter to me how many guys she’d been with before me, and that stands. But I never considered the fact that I might not measure up.
It occurs to me that I said the forbidden fucking word when we were done. The one I never got around to saying to Lala. The one I was pretty convinced I’d only truly feel for my family and maybe my wife after years and kids and all the things that grow that feeling in you for someone.
Evan sure as hell didn’t say it back.
“You had a good time?” I fish.
Evan’s smile is impish. “Beyond
good.”
She wraps her long legs around me and I hold her, weightless in the water, her dark hair wet and tangled on my skin and hers.
“As good as you’ve had with anyone else you’ve been with?”
The question buzzes quietly in the night air between us. She unwinds her legs from around my body and swims away from me, her feet kicking together under the water like a mermaid’s tail. I watch her dive, and when she comes back up, she’s smiling.
But it’s not a smile I completely believe in.
“Do you want to race me? I bet you’re slow in the water. Like a manatee.” She winks at me.
I am a slow swimmer. I learned to swim in the ocean where it made sense to always take my time, do things at a speed that ensured I wouldn’t wind up in the middle of a rip-tide, half-drowned with no way back to shore.
“You wanna answer my question?”
“Don’t.”
The one word weighs heavily between us.
I try to let it go. It’s just that this one night we have right now rocked me to my core, and even though we’ve made a silent pact to live in this moment, I want to know there are going to be more. Many more.
I shouldn’t be asking for anything more from her. But it doesn’t stop me from wanting more than I deserve and more than I have a right to. I want it all with Evan.
“Why not?”
I swim after her, slow and steady, and manage to catch up even though she darts around fast, because Evan ricochets in seven different directions while I keep one focused course.
“You said you wouldn’t. This isn’t the time. I don’t want to talk about it. You said it didn’t matter, and if it doesn’t, seriously, you wouldn’t be asking.”
All her reasons tumble out as she trails her fingers through the water, leaving ripples that will eventually touch me.
“Are we doing this all wrong?”
My words make her lift her eyes, wide and light with shock.
“Are we?” She leans back, and her naked, wet body stops every thought that was previously making the rounds in my head. She cranes her neck to look at the smattering of stars in the night sky. “When I was in middle school, I used to play this game with myself. It was called Never, Always, Sometimes.”
She tilts her head back, and her dark, silky hair pools on top of the water in twisted circles.
I let my body float closer to hers.
“Did this game have rules?”
“Yep. I would choose three things I really wanted. And then I would force myself to put each thing into one category.” She dips her face down until the water is right underneath her nose, and her eyes reflect the lights shining from the walls of the pool. She pulls back up. “Wanna play?”
“Probably not.” I reach out for her, but she backs away. “Alright. How do we play?”
“We’ll each pick three things for each other. Then we just put them in the right slot. Ready?”
I nod, but I’m so far from ready, it’s unreal. I have a feeling this is going to end very badly. The expression on her face is apologetic for a flash, then it goes hard with grim determination.
“Three things you love.” She holds up three fingers, then folds down her middle and ring finger, leaving up her index finger. “Your family.” My heart picks up its pace. She’s playing with fire and she knows it. She raises her middle finger. “Church.” I wonder if that one’s my freebie, and hold my breath, waiting for the next option. Her ring finger goes up. She opens her mouth, blinks slowly and says, “Friends.”
I know it’s just a reprieve, and I know the point of giving me these three options is to prove just how hard it is even when it’s down to three relatively easy choices.
“Family is my ‘always,’” I say, and I catch the tight jerk of her head as she nods, lies on her back, and floats in the water. The way the little droplets run from her nipples down the heavy swell of her tits makes my mouth water. “Uh, friends is my ‘sometimes.’ And, don’t you dare tell my grandmother, but, church would be my ‘never.’”
I run one finger from the top of her big toe, down the bottom of her heel, and she gives a shiver.
“You just give up on God like that?” She pulls her foot back with a splash, bobs to a vertical position, and swims a few feet away from me, asking over her wet shoulder, “Never? You would never set foot in church again? This game only works if you really think hard about what never means. Could you go your whole life never going to church? Christmas, Easter, nothing. Not when someone you love dies and there’s a big funeral, not for your daughter’s wedding. Never.”
I watch her curves under the clear blue water and try to think about, really think about…church. Right. Thinking about church. I swallow hard and swim after her.
Church is a big part of my life, despite the fact that I’m not necessarily the most devout guy. I believe in fate. I believe in a higher power. And, even when I’m sweating my ass off, I like those hours of quiet in the shadowy interior of the church. Plus, I’d be excommunicated if my family even caught me thinking I could skip a mass, let alone a funeral. It would never happen.
“You thought this game up when you were in middle school? This is a pretty depressing game for a middle school kid.”
She doesn’t seem to mind that I skirted her church point, I know because she’s probably packing something heavier in her bag of tricks.
Her shrug lifts one slim, tan shoulder out of the water, then back down into it. She bobs by the pool ladder.
“I was a troubled kid. Lousy parents, lousy supervision, into things no kid my age should have been into. You can fill in the blanks.”
Her jaw is stuck out far, the way it gets when she’s making a point that she’ll claw your eyes out to defend. I’m not about to be on the receiving end of her temper.
“Do you want me to give you three?” I ask to change the direction of this conversation.
She dips her face low in the water again and nods slightly. She’s drifting away, away from the hot, close place we were locked in when our arms were around each other, when I was deep inside of her, when she was wrapped around me and moaning my name. I want that back, but I don’t know if I can have it.
“Okay.” I squint at her, willing a smile, a laugh, anything, but she gives me nothing. “Outfits.”
A frown tugs down on her lips and she paddles a tiny bit closer. “Outfits? Like clothes?”
“Yeah.” I can feel the wicked grin on my face. “So the first option is clothes. If ‘clothes’ is your ‘never,’ you gotta make do with one outfit, clean and all, but no changing. Ever.”
“What about for my wedding?” She narrows her eyes at me, her dark hair stuck to her cheeks.
I wish she’d let me closer, but she keeps a constant two foot radius around herself at all times, circling me out.
“Weddings, parties, community service, school. One outfit.”
The smile I crack her way is meant to loosen whatever went tight between us, but she repels from me, despite smiling back.
I don’t know if we’re going forward or backward.
“What if it means I’d get kicked out of school? You can’t just show up without a uniform at my school.”
She bites at the side of her mouth, willing a second smile away, and I get my first surge of pure hope for better.
I shrug. “Sorry. A year’s worth of detentions for you. One outfit only.”
I float a little, trying to focus on being happy to just hang out in a pool with the girl I love, no matter how complicated it might be, and I let the worries about my family life take a welcome backseat in my brain for once.
She takes a deep breath and lets out a sigh. “What are my other two?”
“Hamburgers.” I watch her lips pull tight. “Your parents.”
Her eyebrows press down, dark and furious over her light eyes, and I feel a grip in my chest. She looks like she might pull herself up out of the pool
“It’s fair,” she finally gripes. “Except mine don’t
exist without each other.”
“No one’s choices exist without each other. That’s the point.” We’re still lobbing softballs at each other. We haven’t even moved on to hardball, and this whole thing already stings. I open the escape hatch. “It’s a game, Evan.”
“It is,” she agrees. “And it isn’t.” She starts to dip her face down into the cool liquid of the pool water, then lifts it back out, the defiant line of her jaw dotted with droplets of water. “My parents? Never. Hamburgers? Sometimes. Outfits? Always.”
“If you never had your father to worry about, you wouldn’t need hamburgers, right?” I don’t respond to the obviously shocking anti-parental aspect of her list.
She leans back, her hair billowing behind her. Stretched long, her foot reaches out and brushes against my leg. That single second of touch shocks her vertical.
“That night we went out for hamburgers? I needed one because of you.”
I shut up. I shut up and will this stupid game to stop with my cool, carefully-managed disinterest. We’re at the point where anything we say is just another barb in the wire going up fast between us. I’m not even positive why we’re at a point where we’re fenced off from each other, but it brings all my defense mechanisms to the forefront. I go icy.
“Fair enough. At least hamburgers is a ‘sometimes’ for you. So that means I get to hang around you once in a while, right? I mean, I’m cool with not being an ‘always’ in your life.”
Evan’s eyes go wide for a split second with a quick stab of hurt before she shrugs. “‘Sometimes’ is all we really have anyway, right? Nothing is ‘always.’”
She looks up at me, smiling with her mouth, but jabbing at my heart with her eyes.
She brought this on. She pushed me away and asked me to play a game that amounts to emotional Russian roulette, she asked me not to talk to her about her history or our present. I refuse to accept the blame for this crash and burn.
“You’re right,” I agree, even though I don’t agree at all. “That’s why we should enjoy tonight. Right? Cause maybe that’s all we’re gonna have.”
Fall Guy Page 21
