I gaze up at him. “Is that a good thing or bad?”
His gaze flickers over the low V of my top, catches there for a moment, and he flinches. “Both,” he says, wrapping an arm around my waist as we walk toward the hostess stand. “I got us one of the private areas.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about but at the moment I’m pretty content just to be plastered to his side. He speaks to the hostess and she leads us through a door at the north side of the bar, and onto a terrace with a vine-covered trellis on either side and an amazing, unimpeded view of D.C. from the front.
She takes our orders and points to a button on the table. “If you need anything else, just hit this,” she tells us, and then she leaves, shutting the door behind her.
My eyebrows go nearly to my hairline. “What is this?”
He gives me a sheepish smile, complete with dimple. I want to eat him alive because of that smile alone. “It’s just one of those bullshit VIP things so we don’t have to fight for space out there.” His hand wraps around my hip and he pulls me closer. “Which enables me to do this.” He leans down, grazing my lips with his, holding them there a moment. My eyes flutter closed. I don’t want him to stop. Please, please don’t stop.
His hand releases my waist and his fingers twine with mine. “Let’s sit.”
Restraining a sigh, I follow him to the couch, curling up in one corner of the loveseat while he sits beside me. Off to the west I see the Pentagon and feel something sink inside my chest, the way it always does. 9/11 was one of those days, one of those days I knew what would happen before it did. When I saw footage of the first plane hitting, I knew. I knew more planes would hit. It was on the tip of my tongue to say it aloud, but I took one look at my mother and closed my mouth. I was all too familiar with the way she would look at me for weeks if I was proven correct…as if she was scared of me. And while no one would have listened to the premonitions of a ten-year-old, the fact that I stayed silent has always made me feel complicit somehow.
“Everything okay?” he asks.
I’m tempted to tell him the story, but that old fear creeps into my throat. I never want him to look at me the way my mother did. I smile. “Of course.”
He rubs the back of his neck, a gesture I find unbelievably hot for some unknown reason. “Why did you insist on meeting me here instead of letting me pick you up?” he asks.
I hold my breath for a moment, trying to come up with a plausible excuse. I can’t claim I didn’t want him to go out of his way…he only lives a few blocks from Caroline. My breath releases. I don’t want to lie. “I went to get a bagel this morning. Jeff was waiting in the lobby this morning when I got in. I was worried he’d come back.”
His eyes widen. “And you really thought the solution was to not have me there if it happened?”
The waitress taps on the door at that moment and delivers our drinks. I wait until she’s gone before I answer. “I don’t want you to get into trouble for this. Jeff’s…hurt. And angry. And he’s not being rational. He’s saying things on my voicemail I never imagined he was capable of saying. There’s not a doubt in my mind he would try to create problems for you if he had a shred of proof.”
He runs his hands through his hair, tugging at it. “I don’t give a shit if Jeff creates problems. But I don’t want you dealing with him by yourself.”
I sort of love that Nick wants to protect me, but I’m not letting him get fired over this. “He’s not violent,” I reply. “He’s just upset.”
Nick’s expression sours. “The last two times I saw him it nearly turned into a fist fight. So don’t pretend he’s not violent.”
I smile and squeeze his hand. “And you were just as eager to fight him. Doesn’t that make you violent by definition too?”
He laughs reluctantly. “No comment. But I want the truth about this stuff from now on, okay? And maybe you ought to share some of it with your mom, since she’s still so convinced Jeff is perfect for you.”
My mother’s adoration of Jeff brings out the sullen teenager in Nick, which has me fighting a smile. “She just hasn’t met you yet. Maybe she won’t think my judgment is so impaired when she does.” I wish I’d never asked her about time travel. Even when I left yesterday morning she was on the cusp of tears. “But that reminds me—I asked my mom if there were pictures of my aunt, the one who ran away when she was a teenager, and my mom said she doubted there were many because apparently Sarah was weird about having photos taken.”
His brow furrows. “I’m not sure I’m following you. Lots of people don’t want their photos taken. My mom will only get in front of a camera if she’s got a full face of makeup and her hair is done.”
“But remember Rose? I mean, didn’t it strike you as weird…this 15-year old girl is hanging out with her favorite band but refuses to be photographed?”
“She was a total delinquent, Quinn,” he argues. “She probably just didn’t want her dad coming across it.”
I lean forward. In the process of trying to convince him, I’m beginning to convince myself. “Think about it, though: why would a time traveler make a point of refusing to be in any photos? Because she doesn’t want anyone finding her picture on two dates that are a hundred years apart. The safest thing to do would be to make sure you never leave a trail.”
He takes a sip of his scotch, but I can tell he’s pondering what I’ve said. “You might be right,” he finally says, setting his drink down. “And if your aunt can actually time travel, then we need to find her. She might be able to tell us what to do. At least how to make the tumor stop growing.”
I sigh heavily. “My mom’s got no address for her, and I’m not sure looking up Sarah Stewart and France is going to yield a lot of useful results. I don’t even know what city she’s in.”
“Your dad must have an address for her somewhere. Do you guys still have his old files?”
My father had tons of files. Are we really going to be able to find her address in all of that mess? It seems unlikely, but we can’t just not try. “Most of them are in storage. Everything’s in storage, actually.”
“Then we should go up there this weekend and take a look. I have to play in this fucking basketball game on Friday, but we could go up on Saturday morning and spend the night at the lake on the way home.” He hesitates. “You’d have your own room,” he adds.
I frown. Any other guy would be capitalizing on the situation, and he’s doing the opposite. He sure didn’t seem this reluctant Sunday night in the back of his car. “We don’t need separate rooms,” I say quietly. I’m blushing, unable to meet his eye, as I utter the words.
“Yeah,” he says, his voice hard. “I think we do.”
I’m humiliated and annoyed at the same time. We’re adults. I shouldn’t feel like a slut for suggesting we stay in the same room. I slap a palm to my face in frustration. “What the hell is going on, Nick?” I ask. “You apologize for kissing me last night like it was a mistake and now you’re acting like we’re just…buddies.”
He laughs unhappily, which just frustrates me even more. “You think I don’t want more? I want more so badly I’d cut off a limb to get it.”
Then take it! I want to scream. Even if we don’t have sex there are plenty of other options. “So what exactly is the problem?” I ask.
He sighs and clasps his hands in front of him. “Look, the truth is I’m worried I’m going to take it too far.”
My brow furrows. “Take what too far?”
“You cannot get pregnant right now, Quinn. We can’t risk anything exacerbating the tumor.”
I’m blushing all the way to my ears but desperation drives me to persist. “There are lots of things besides intercourse.”
I hear a groan stifled low in his chest. “I’m aware. But when I kiss you, I want so much more I stop thinking rationally. And if we’re doing all the other things you’re referencing, my guess is I’ll stop thinking at all. At some point, it’s going to lead to sex. It just is. We…need a plan.”
“A plan?” I ask with a small smile. “I could put a note on my forehead that says ‘don’t fuck Quinn’?”
His teeth slide over his lower lip and he blows out a breath. “Even hearing you say the word fuck sends my mind down a bad path. Where I start rationalizing things. It feels predatory.”
“Nick,” I say, my eyes slowly raising to his. “I’m okay with predatory.”
He inhales sharply, leaning his head against the back of the loveseat and squeezing his eyes shut.
“What—”
Before I can finish the sentence, he is pulling me over him, my legs on either side of his. His hands grip my hips, pull me down so that I’m flush against him. “Do you feel that?”
I nod. I couldn’t miss that. It feels like he’s got an extra limb pulsing between my legs.
The fingers of one hand slide through my hair, gripping it at the root. He does nothing more, but his eyes are on my mouth, dark and hungry in a way they weren’t a moment before. His other hand curves around the side of my neck, his palm rough against the soft skin, drawing goose bumps to the surface. “You have no idea what you’re saying when you tell me to be predatory, Quinn. Every bone in my body tells me to take from you until there’s nothing left. So we need a plan.”
I stop holding my weight and sink against him, leaving him pressed right where I want him, with no distance between us. A shudder begins in my center, radiating outward, and he pulls my mouth to his in a way that turns me wet and loose and desperate. I want more but before I can demand it of him, he demands it of me, groaning as his mouth opens, as his free hand cups my ass, squeezing it tight until he is all I can feel.
That hand moves straight to the bare skin on the side of the jumpsuit, as if it’s a destination he’s been thinking of for a very long time.
“Jesus Christ, this thing nearly killed me when you walked in,” he grunts, his mouth moving over my neck. His index finger slides under the side, the tape there giving way easily, as if it were made of air. That finger brushes against the soft skin at the base of my breast then moves up, up, finding my nipple, which immediately grows so hard it hurts.
“Fuck,” he groans. His hand slides free only to push the straps of the jumpsuit down, leaving me bare all the way to my rib cage. “You have no idea how badly I’ve wanted—”
His words are cut off by a quick tap at the door. There’s only a moment for me to jump off his lap and pull at my jumpsuit before the waitress pokes her head in. Since our lower halves are blocked by the back of the couch, she can’t see Nick’s skyscraper-sized erection, but her eyes flicker to the one strap of my outfit that still hangs off my shoulder. “You hit the buzzer?” she asks.
“We did?” I glance at the table, realizing even as I ask that when his hand slid inside my top, my toes curled right along the table’s edge. “Sorry. I think it was an accident.”
“Do you want another round?”
I shake my head, thinking I need her gone as soon as possible, and also permanently, but Nick says yes.
When she leaves, he presses the base of each palm over his eyes. “Jesus Christ. We need a fucking chaperone.”
My stomach sinks a little. That is not the direction I thought he’d go once we got rid of the waitress. “We apparently have very different views of what just happened.”
“I just tried to undress you in a public place, Quinn.” He waves his hand at buildings in the distance. “Anyone could have seen you.”
I shrug. “They’d need binoculars to get a good view. If anyone wants to work that hard to see me half-naked, they’ve earned it.”
He gives me a dark look. “No one but me gets to see what’s under that outfit. No one.” His bossy tone makes the blood in my veins hum, plucks that sharp note of desire at the base of my abdomen. I want to scale him like a rock wall.
I press my lips together. They feel raw, swollen from his kiss, and our eyes catch. “Don’t look at me like that,” he pleads.
“Why not?”
“First of all because I need this hard-on to go away before the waitress returns,” he says. I glance down. The skyscraper is still standing firm. “Second, because it makes me want to do a lot more than we did, and being with you sends common sense out the window. The second we start, there’s a serious lack of restraint.”
It’s not a lack of restraint. It’s an absence of it. The minute he touched me I stopped caring about anything but shedding his clothes, feeling him push inside me, watching his teeth sink into that perfect lower lip as he tries not to come.
“We don’t need a plan,” I tell him. “You’re like someone who decides not to eat at all until he’s figured out how he wants to lose weight. There’s no way it can work because the hunger is going to build up until he snaps.”
His mouth twitches. “So you’re proposing the sexual equivalent of a healthy salad with grilled chicken, whatever that is.”
“That makes it sound way less fun than it should be. It’s more like I’m proposing we eat one piece of pizza instead of the whole pie.”
He swallows, his eyes halting on my mouth. “You think we’ll be able to stop at one piece?”
“I was thinking of many, many pieces spaced out in small increments,” I whisper.
“Fuck,” he growls, pulling me back into his lap. “Yes.”
“So you agree?” I ask.
“No,” he replies. “I’m just not good at turning down pizza.”
5
QUINN
Is it a bad idea? Of course it is. It’s the worst possible idea. If he’s right about his lack of control and it goes too far at the lake, he’ll never touch me again.
However, thanks to my own lack of control, I just want it too badly to say no.
I try to convince Nick to meet me away from Caroline’s on Saturday morning. I’ve caught Jeff following me twice since Wednesday, and though it’s unlikely he’d be waiting this early in the day, I just can’t be sure. He’s unraveling, turning into someone I don’t recognize.
I haven’t told Nick about the incidents because I suspect he’d react poorly. My suggestion to meet in a neutral location fell on deaf ears, but he’d have refused whether he knew about Jeff or not.
He’s idling outside Caroline’s building in his Jeep when I get to the street. I never dreamed I could feel so excited about going on a trip to comb through a storage unit, though if I’m being honest, most of my excitement is reserved for what will come after the storage unit.
“Holy shit,” he says. “If I haven’t mentioned it before, you look really good in shorts.”
“I’m a student now,” I remind him. “Well, almost. Time to start dressing like one.”
His eyes flicker over my legs. “I’d never have made it through college or medical school if you’d been back at my apartment dressed like that.”
Immediately, I’m picturing it, all the things he might have done to me back then if our lives had gone differently. I lean over the console to brush my mouth against his. “If I’d been back at your apartment,” I say low against his ear, “I’d probably have been naked.”
“Fuck,” he says with a heavy exhale, pulling onto the road, “you just guaranteed I will be thinking about you naked this entire drive, no matter what we’re discussing.”
“Current affairs?”
“Nope, still seeing you naked.”
“Hmmm. Small children attending their first carnival?”
“At the risk of sounding creepy, I’m still thinking about you naked.”
I eye the bulge in his shorts. “I like you thinking about me naked.”
He raises a brow. “We need to change the topic,” he says. “Or separate rooms isn’t going to be enough to keep me away from you.”
The idea of sharing a bed with him warms something inside me. Even if we never even touch. “We don’t actually have to sleep in separate rooms you know,” I tell him. “I trust you. And I trust myself, more or less.”
“You shouldn’t,” he says.
>
I turn to face him. “I shouldn’t trust myself or I shouldn’t trust you?”
He glances over quickly before his eyes return to the road. “Either. There’s something I never told you about that night in Baltimore.”
Baltimore. A night in a hotel, in separate beds. Where I woke up in his and he woke up in mine. “Tell me,” I whisper, trying to hold my dread at bay.
“We came extremely close to sleeping together,” he says quietly.
My breathing comes to a halt. “What?”
“We were both asleep,” he says hurriedly. “I was dreaming about you. It’s only because something about it didn’t make sense that I woke. And when my eyes opened you were sound asleep in my bed and we were seconds from having sex.”
The idea that I fall asleep and dream about things that happened in another life is bad enough. The idea of falling asleep and actually doing things I don’t remember—in this or any life—chills me to the bone. I dreamed about him that night. I dreamed I was the aggressor, the one who pushed him into the back seat of his parents’ car and had my way with him, sort of. Was I dreaming or was I actually acting it out in real life? I press my hands to my face. “Oh my God.”
His hand leaves the steering wheel and finds mine, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “I’m sorry. I probably should have told you, but I was just worried you’d feel guilty. And I guess if I’m being honest, I didn’t know whether you’d blame me, or avoid me afterward.”
I release a long breath, thinking of how badly that might have gone. The possibility that I could have gotten pregnant, obviously, but also…if I’d known it had happened, I’d have stayed a mile from him. There would have been no dance at the harbor, no talk in his office, no visit to the lake. I would have allowed my own guilt and shame and fear of him to lead me to all the wrong decisions. “Thank God you didn’t. I think I’d have wound up married to Jeff, solely out of guilt, if you had.”
His hand tightens around mine. “But that’s why I think we need separate rooms. It’s too out of control with us anyway, and if it can happen when we don’t even know it’s happening…” He takes another glance at my bare legs. “Yeah. You definitely need your own room.”
Intersect: The Parallel Duet, Book 2 Page 4
