by Linda Seed
“Let’s go, then.”
15
Since neither of them had anything planned, they grabbed some takeout Mexican from Medusa’s on Main Street and took it to Jake’s place, which was much more private than the always teeming Delaney Ranch.
Sam met them at the door in ecstasy, thrilled both that Jake hadn’t abandoned him forever and that the scent of enchiladas and tacos was wafting from the bag in Jake’s hand.
“Whoa, now,” Jake said to the dog, holding the bag of food over his head as Sam planted his paws on Jake’s shoulders and licked his face.
Breanna peered around Jake and into the living room, where a flurry of something white blanketed the sofa, the armchair, and the floor.
“Looks like he’s been busy,” she said.
Jake disentangled himself from Sam and looked into the room with trepidation. He walked over to the sofa, picked up a handful of white fluff, and exhaled. “Just a roll of paper towels,” he said with some relief. “I was afraid he’d pulled the stuffing out of my favorite chair.”
Breanna ran a hand through Sam’s fur, the dog trembling happily. “Some training might not be a bad idea.”
“I know, I know.” Jake set the bag on the kitchen counter and started scooping bits of paper towel up with his hands. “I’ve been busy.”
Breanna helped him clean up the paper towels while Sam watched innocently, his tongue lolling out and his tail wagging.
“Hang on. He’s gonna eat our food if I don’t put him away.” Jake rummaged around in a kitchen cupboard for a chew toy—a piece of beef-flavored rawhide as big as Breanna’s forearm—then put the dog and the toy into the bedroom and closed the door.
“You’ve got your hands full with him,” Breanna said, amused.
“Yeah, well.”
He told her the story of how he’d gotten Sam as a puppy without realizing the realities of the dog’s breed.
“So, you had no idea he was going to be the size of a small ox,” she summarized when he was finished.
“Live and learn,” Jake said.
With Sam comfortably ensconced in the bedroom, Jake set out the food on the kitchen table and grabbed a couple of beers from the refrigerator. They ate and drank and talked, and when they were done with that and the trash was thrown away, they made out on Jake’s sofa like a couple of teenagers.
The kissing was nice. Breanna sat wrapped around Jake, her mouth on his, their bodies pressed together. She liked the feel of Jake’s strong arms around her and the sensation of his hands tangled in her hair.
When he slid his hands down to her ass, she liked having them there. She hadn’t had a man put his hands on her with this kind of confidence, this kind of mastery, in so long. But when those hands started to move under her shirt, she backed up a little and gave him an apologetic smile.
“Let’s maybe … take a minute,” she said.
“Okay.” He ran his fingers through his hair, his breathing a little ragged. “Sorry if I overstepped.”
“You didn’t.” She straightened her clothes a little. Her skin felt hot, and her heart was pounding. “I wanted to do that. I just think we should maybe slow it down a little.”
“Yeah. Okay.” She could see him mentally changing gears, adjusting to the fact that sex wasn’t imminent. “You want to maybe watch some TV?”
“That would be nice.”
They found a movie on Netflix—a comedy with just enough raunch to make Jake guffaw, but not enough to make Breanna wince—and they watched it on the sofa, his arm around her, Breanna leaning into the warm and comforting presence of his body.
Since they were done with dinner, they let Sam out of the bedroom, and he jumped up next to Breanna, taking up fully half of the sofa.
Breanna thought it was a nearly perfect date.
* * *
The next day, both Gen and Aria showed up at the house early, wanting to know what happened.
“So? Did you do the deed?” Aria asked as the three of them gathered around the kitchen table with thick white mugs of coffee. In the center of the table was a basket of banana muffins Sandra had baked that morning.
“No, we did not do the deed,” Breanna said, a hint of scorn in her voice.
“But why not?” Gen asked.
“Because it was our third date.” Breanna spent a lot of time getting the cream and sugar ratio in her coffee just right, partly because it allowed her to avoid looking at the other women.
“I read somewhere that a new couple starts having sex on the fourth date, on average,” Gen said thoughtfully. “Though I have to think the one-nighters and the wait-until-marriage crowd skew the statistics.”
“Well, then we have one more date before we should even be thinking about it,” Breanna said, as though having empirical evidence on her side decided the matter.
“She didn’t say that,” Aria put in. “If they were to study when people start thinking about it …”
“It’s probably in the first five minutes,” Gen concluded for her.
“I’m thinking about it,” Breanna admitted. “A lot.”
Aria picked a muffin out of the basket, broke off a piece, and popped it into her mouth. “So what did you two do last night, if you weren’t getting busy?”
Breanna told them about how she and Jake had eaten takeout Mexican at his house and then had watched a movie.
“You were at his house,” Gen said. “And nothing happened?”
“Well …” Breanna fidgeted with a muffin. “I didn’t say nothing happened.”
She filled them in about how things had started getting intense on the sofa before she’d stopped.
“I just don’t want to make a mistake,” Breanna said.
“That kind of mistake is the best kind,” Aria said.
Gen nodded wordlessly.
“I’m not nineteen anymore,” Breanna told them, feeling a little sorry for herself because of the burden of responsibility. “I have kids. I have obligations. I have to think ahead, and I have to act like a mature adult.”
“I get that,” Gen said thoughtfully. “I mean, I haven’t been a mother for long, but it changes you. Everything I do now, everything I think, is all viewed through the lens of J.R. How’s it going to affect him? Is it good for him, or is it going to ruin his emotional development forever?”
“Exactly,” Breanna said. “And your kid has two parents to worry about his emotional development. Mine only have me.”
“You know, the whole making out on the sofa thing, only going to first base? That’s kind of sweet.” Gen’s muffin, only half-eaten, sat on a plate in front of her. She broke off a small piece and held it between two fingers. “There’s something to be said for taking it slow.”
“Yeah, now that you mention it,” Aria agreed. “By the time you two get around to doing it, the anticipation is going to be intense.” She raised her eyebrows significantly.
If and when Breanna and Jake got together—and she was certain it would be when rather than if—she suspected it would make the wait worthwhile.
* * *
Jake woke up the next morning feeling perkier than he had any right to be, given the fact that his sexual tension had gone unreleased.
Well, mostly unreleased. Once Breanna went home, what he might have done in private was nobody’s business.
The general wisdom among men was that getting all amped up for sex and then not getting it was a torture on par with having your fingernails ripped out one by one. But Jake was finding that he didn’t much mind the pain. The flirtatious dance that led up to sex was nice, and the idea of prolonging it was surprisingly appealing.
And why shouldn’t she take some time to decide whether she really liked him? Why shouldn’t he take the same time to decide about her? That kind of thing tended to get lost these days. Why not ease into things and enjoy the process?
He thought about all of that as he sipped his morning coffee on the back porch of his house in the Happy Hill neighborhood overlooking downtown and Moonstone Beach.
The sun was bright, but there was a hint of nip in the February air. A group of three deer had wandered past a few minutes ago, and now the golden grass and the pine trees swishing in the breeze were the only movement.
He had a big, free Sunday stretching out in front of him, and he considered what to do with it.
He wouldn’t have minded working—he liked working—but his guys had families and lives to attend to, and most of them wouldn’t have looked as favorably on a weekend spent swinging a hammer as he did.
He had a few guys he could call to go see a movie or take a hike up at Big Sur, so that was a possibility. He could do some work around the house—the front porch had a floorboard that looked to have some wood rot.
Yeah, he could do any of those things. But whenever he considered a scenario for his day, his thoughts went back to Breanna.
At first, the thoughts were about sex. Would they do it? When would they do it? Would it be as good as he expected? What would happen between them afterward?
But soon, he started to think about the bigger picture. Where would things go between them if they kept seeing each other? She had kids, and he wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. He liked kids, but he’d never had any of his own, so he figured he was about as qualified to parent one as he was to build a jumbo jet out of spare parts.
Thinking about kids, and about the fact that he’d never had any, made him start to think about his ex-wife.
Usually, thinking about his ex was an unpleasant experience, one he tried to avoid whenever possible. But now, it seemed like thinking about her might be helpful, even necessary.
The split had not been especially acrimonious, as far as these things went. Even so, it was about as much fun as an unmedicated root canal—one that lasted eighteen months.
Beth had been the one who’d decided to leave. Jake never would have done it on his own. In retrospect, that was only because he was too much of a pussy to take care of business, the way Beth had.
She’d always been the kind to just dig in and do what had to be done, and the divorce had been no different.
There had been a lot of arguing—there had always been a lot of arguing—and then, suddenly, there wasn’t. That should have been his first red flag. Once she’d made her decision to go, she hadn’t even cared enough to get into it with him anymore.
The leaving part hadn’t been a big, emotional scene. He’d come home from work one day and she’d had some boxes packed and stacked up in the front hallway. She’d been businesslike. She’d given him the phone number and address where she’d be staying, and said she’d send someone to pick up the boxes. Then she’d simply walked out the door.
He wasn’t really surprised—that was the thing. Even a day earlier, if someone had asked him, he’d have said they were fine. But when it actually came to her packing up her things and leaving, he’d thought, there it is, as though he’d been expecting just this for some time.
The issues between them didn’t look like much on paper. He didn’t like LA, but she loved the busy vibe of the city. She wanted to go to graduate school, but he didn’t think they could afford it. He wanted kids, but she wanted to focus on her education and the career that would result.
Yes, they were substantial issues, but nothing that couldn’t be worked out, surely. They were the kinds of things couples negotiated every day. Except Jake and Beth didn’t negotiate. They argued, and then they didn’t. And then she left.
He’d learned to cope with the fact of the breakup, and he’d made peace with the idea that if things had blown up the way they had, then they weren’t right together in the first place.
But the thing that still nagged at him was the question of what he’d done wrong and whether he would do it again if he got into another serious relationship. He wasn’t enough of an asshole to think everything had been Beth’s fault. But if it wasn’t hers, then it had to be at least partly his. And he still didn’t have a handle on what he should have done differently, if anything.
Maybe they just weren’t a match.
If that was the case, then at the very least, it meant he was crap at choosing a mate for himself. What made him think he’d do any better the next time around?
Sam, apparently sensing a certain amount of angst, came over to where Jake was sitting and rested his big head on Jake’s leg.
Jake scratched him behind his ears as the sun rose higher in the sky, glinting through a copse of pine trees.
Jake didn’t have any answers, but he knew he wanted to see Breanna again, soon and as often as possible.
As he sat there petting his dog, Jake thought about Breanna, and about her sons, and about how he could see her again, and often, without being obvious about it.
A tiny kernel of an idea came to him, and he rolled it around in his head a little, looking at it from different angles to see if it would hold up.
He remembered what Breanna had told him about her oldest boy and how he was developing an attitude about school, about hard work, and about the impending move.
Jake wanted something. Michael needed something. Breanna was caught in the middle.
Maybe there was a way to help everybody.
16
Breanna was thinking about Jake while trying not to think about him. That was working about as well as could be expected—you could go your whole life without thinking about purple pigs, but as soon as you told yourself not to think about them, they started dancing through your imagination in shades of lavender, plum, and lilac.
The only thing to do was dig into her usual routine, focusing on her day-to-day tasks instead of on the question of when she might be able to kiss him again.
Midday Sunday, she helped her mother make lunch for the family, which included Orin, Ryan and Gen, Liam and Aria, and both of the boys. Afterward, there was the cleanup to attend to.
Then she put in a load of laundry for herself and the boys; instructed Michael and Lucas to clean their rooms, and scolded them when they didn’t do it the first time she asked; weeded the vegetable garden and harvested some leeks and kale; and, with that done, went over to the Whispering Pines to put in a couple of hours helping Mrs. Granfield.
The idea, she supposed, was that tiring herself out would make her forget about Jake, and about the possibility of sex.
But that goal got shot utterly to hell around four p.m., when Jake sent her a text message.
I’ve got an idea I want to run by you. Can we get together?
Breanna stood behind the reception desk at the Whispering Pines and stared at her phone. What kind of idea was he talking about? White cabinetry in the kitchen at the Moonstone Beach house instead of cherry? Another date? A naked sex romp at his place?
The sheer number of possible directions this could go had her mind spinning.
She wrote back: What kind of idea?
The answer came just seconds later, but it did nothing to satisfy her curiosity.
I’ll tell you when we talk, he wrote. Pizza at JJ’s? 6:00?
That would, in fact, be another date. But the idea he’d spoken of couldn’t have been the date itself, because he wanted to spend the date talking about the idea.
Thinking about it was beginning to make her head hurt, so she typed back: I’ll meet you there.
This was doing nothing to get her mind off possible sex.
And that thought reminded her that she needed to take a bottle of champagne and a vase of roses up to one of the guest rooms. At least someone was going to get their frustrations relieved.
* * *
J.J.’s Pizza was popular with the locals but it wasn’t much of a tourist draw, tucked off to one end of Main Street away from the boutiques and the more upscale restaurants that attracted the weekend crowds.
Breanna slid into a booth across from Jake at five after six. The extra five minutes had been spent greeting several people she knew who were out on the patio with sandwiches and beer.
“Sorry,” she said as she settled in. “It’s
hard to do anything around here without stopping to chat with people along the way.”
“I can see that,” he said. “LA was the opposite. I could go days at a time without talking to anyone but my Starbucks barista. And even she got my name wrong.”
Breanna laughed. “How did she mess up Jake?”
“She wrote it as Jack so many times that I considered changing my name just to make things easier.”
They consulted on their food and drink options, then Jake got up to order for both of them at the counter. Breanna couldn’t help noticing how good he looked from the rear in a pair of jeans.
When Jake turned back toward her and noticed her looking, she blushed and then scolded herself. She was an adult woman acting like a giddy, lovesick girl, for God’s sake.
Have a little dignity, she told herself.
Then again, where did it say that a dignified, adult woman couldn’t appreciate a nicely formed male behind? She had eyes, after all. Was she not supposed to use them?
The little grin on Jake’s face when he came back to the table suggested that he hadn’t minded being ogled, and had possibly enjoyed it. He slid into the booth across from Breanna and folded his arms on the table.
“So, what did you want to talk about?” Breanna fervently hoped that getting down to business would restore some of her equilibrium. If it didn’t work, it might still get both of their minds off of his ass.
“How are your kids doing?” he asked.
She waved a hand airily. “Oh, the same. Lucas is fun and happy and talkative, and Michael is sullen and withdrawn. Whenever I bring up the move, he makes some kind of remark about how I’m tearing him away from his home. He asked if he could keep living at the ranch. Without me! He’s my son. Of course he’s going to live with me.”
The subject was making her feel upset and agitated, and she didn’t want to feel those things. So she took a deep breath to calm her mind, then gave him a bright smile. “You didn’t invite me here to talk about that,” she said.
