Chapter 17

Saturday is my long day at work, and by the time I get home, Gabe is asleep in his bed and Jack is asleep on the couch in front of the television. I turn off the TV and the overhead light and throw a blanket over Jack. Asleep, his face is peaceful, his lashes absurdly long. He looks so much like Gabe that it makes my chest ache.

Maybe it’s impossible not to have feelings for the man who contributed half the genes in your perfect child? Maybe the fact that I can’t get Jack out of my blood is as much about gratitude for Gabe as anything else?

Without thinking about it, I press a quick kiss to Jack’s forehead, the way I do when I come in at night to check on Gabe.

I feel the electric thrum he gives off before my lips even touch his skin. And then there’s the smell of his skin and the ghost of his aftershave, both scents hard-wired directly between my legs. I practically jump back.

Yeah. The way Jack makes me feel? Definitely not only about his genetic contribution to my beautiful son.

I hurry down the hall, resisting the urge to look around guiltily, as if someone might have seen either the kiss or the chemical reaction it set off. I shed my work clothes, climb into bed, and crash like a ton of bricks. I don’t even remember turning off the light.

I wake to a rare, violent spring thunderstorm.

Here’s the thing. When I said that thunderstorms freaked me out, I meant thunderstorms freak me out. Like, still.

I know, I know. It’s totally juvenile. You’re supposed to get over thunderstorms when you get over volcanoes and tsunamis, but instead they ended up filed under Spiders and Snakes. Permanently stuck in my head as grounds for panic.

It’s not rational. I don’t actually think thunder is going to strike Jack’s house and sizzle through his electrical system and burn out our brains.

Still, even at age twenty-six, every time there’s a close clap of thunder, especially if it’s almost right on top of the lightning, as it is right now, I go into this hard-core adrenaline overload and get frozen and shaky.

The one thing stronger than my shock and terror is my worry for my kid, so I drag myself out of bed and creep down the hall to check on Gabe. He’s sleeping straight through the racket, sacked out with his limbs flailed. I retrieve his covers from where he’s flung them and tuck him in, and he barely stirs. I kiss his cheek and turn to head back down the hall.

Two things happen in rapid succession. Lightning flashes, illuminating a ghostly human figure in the hallway, and then, almost immediately, there is a clap of thunder.

The figure rushes toward me.

I scream, but since my throat has closed up, it’s more like a squeak.

“For fuck’s sake, Maddie!” says the ghost, “you haven’t learned anything in sixteen years, have you?”

It’s Jack, of course, and his arms are around me. I’m panting and clutching him and he’s laughing—laughing—at me.

“It’s not funny!” I cry.

But his laughter is contagious and his arms are tight and warm, and then I’m laughing too, the two of us hugging and shaking with hilarity. He sleeps in just those stupid pajama pants, so the bare skin of my arms is flush with the hot skin of his bare torso, and wow, the heat and charge pouring off him could set me on fire.

Suddenly neither of us is laughing. We cling to each other and his breath is as fast and shallow as mine. He adjusts his position to bring the whole length of my body in line with his.

He feels so good. So warm, so fiercely alive, so strong and safe.

And then his head dips and his mouth finds mine.

“Oh, fuck,” he says, almost immediately, by which I think he means Oh my God this is good, but there’s no time to ask him because he’s kissing me again, like I’m the best thing he’s ever tasted and like he’s never going to let me go, and I’m drowning in how good he tastes and feels.

He pulls away. “We can’t do this here.”

I clutch both his arms to prevent him from pulling away, which makes him laugh again.

“I didn’t say we can’t do this. I just said we can’t do it here.” He scoops me up and carries me down the hall, depositing me in my bed. I don’t know if it’s the terror or the relief or the fact that it’s the middle of the night and it might be a dream, but I let it happen. He fastens the latch on the door, and for a split second I hate what that latch implies about Jack’s extracurriculars, but then I don’t care at all. I’m just grateful it’s there.

He comes back to the bed. He hesitates, then, and I’m afraid he’s going to stop us, now that I’ve decided I don’t want him to, but he just says, “What the hell are we going to do with you, Maddie Adams?”

It’s a rhetorical question, because he seems to know exactly what he wants to do with me. He climbs over me, one knee on each side, lowers himself to his elbows, and begins kissing me again, his mouth softer now, exploring, teasing, stroking. Each touch echoes in other parts of my body so I light up all over.

The hum of his moan vibrates through my lips and my tongue, through all my nerves, and his weight settles between my legs, the length of him there, the thickness and hardness, and I can feel that he’s holding himself in check, wanting to move against me, but neither of us wants this to end too fast. So I hold still, too, under him, even though my body is aching, calling out to his. Instead, I touch him with my fingertips everywhere I can reach, all that bareness mine, the groove of his spine, the curve of his ass under the pajama pants, my hands so greedy for the heat and silk of him.

He’s worked both hands under my T-shirt, and when he finds my breasts bare, he makes a noise halfway between a grunt and a groan and catches my nipples in his fingers, then pushes the T-shirt up over my head and buries his face in my breasts. The roughness of his stubble and the hot, wet softness of his mouth wreck me. I’m all sensation, lost to the pinch and flick and swirl of his teeth and tongue. I don’t even realize that I’m tipping my hips to get more of him until he puts a hand on my hip bone and gently pushes down, scolding, “Be patient.”

“Can’t. Jack—”

He kisses me again and I’m moaning into his mouth, trying to thrust against him. One of his hands finds the waistband of my sweatpants and works them down between us, so it’s just my teeny-tiny panties, those flimsy pajamas pants, and the magic of Jack. I slide a hand under the elastic of his pants and find him. The heft, the solidity, the rare wonder of chamois-soft skin over steel, sends more slick heat to my core. “Mmmm, Jack. You’re big.”

“I’ve been told,” he says, the words a groan.

I swirl a thumb through the slickness he’s shed for me, around the sensitive head, and he bucks. He grabs my wrist in his big hand and removes my hand. “Stop that.”

“I want to touch you.”

“Well, I want to fuck you and I’m not going to last long enough if you keep that up. What do you think of that?” he murmurs against my ear, his breath lighting me up.

A few hours ago I was sure I wasn’t going to let anything like this happen. A few minutes ago I was planning to call a halt at naked groping.

Now there is no doubt at all in my mind what I want.

“I want you to.”

“You want me to what?” he demands.

I shake my head.

“Say it.”

“I want you to fuck me,” I whisper.

“Again.”

His voice is rough, a groan, and it sends a sharp, hot thrill through me. “I want you to fuck me.”

“Tell me I’m big again.”

That makes me groan. “You are. You’re big, and you’re going to feel really good inside me—”

“Oh my God, Maddie—”

“So you should probably go get a condom right now.”

He has that glazed, lost look that tells me he is in no shape for higher reasoning, so I instruct him: “There’s a box in my bottom dresser drawer.”

He stumbles over himself in his haste, which makes me laugh, and then, once he’s retrieved the prize, he stands at the side of the bed and tears the packet open.

“Gimme.” I hold my hand out.

I roll it on while he watches, his eyes narrowed to slits, teeth gritted. He throbs under my touch.

Then I reach up and he tumbles back into my arms, kissing and kissing me, slick, dark, fine. I don’t know how long we kiss for, skin sliding against skin, because I’m lost in my own hunger, in his rough breathing, in the press of his thigh between mine.

He slides a hand down my belly and slips his fingers between my legs, where he finds me swollen and eager.

“Mmm,” he says, playing a little. Trailing his fingers through the wet heat there, teasing my clit with the slightest touch, while I try to tip my hips up to get more contact, more sensation.

“Jack.”

“Yeah.”

“Please.”

That makes him grin.

“Please what?”

“Please fuck me.”

He braces himself up on those amazing sculpted arms, his chest filling my visual field with that absurd golden male beauty of his, and I guide him to me.

He stops there.

“Don’t tease.”

“I’m. Not. Teasing,” he says with difficulty. “I’m trying not to embarrass myself.”

And then he eases into me, just the head. The sensation of being penetrated by him makes me gasp, it’s so good, the pressure and the heat and the sheer, unbeatable thickness.

I whimper. “Now you’re teasing.”

He grins. “Now I’m teasing.”

It is so, so hard to hold still under him. I hope it’s as difficult for him as it is for me. I look at where we’re joined, then up at his face. His jaw is set in concentration.

“It’s just, I fucking love this part, you know?” he says reverently. “Where you’re resisting me and I’m asking you to let me in, and you’re so tight but opening to me, and getting wetter, and I can watch the whole thing on your face. First yes, please, and then, more, please, and then, come on, Jack, give it to me. Your face…”

There is something about the way he says your face that makes me know he means me. Not just a generic woman’s face, but mine.

“You show it all to me. You give it all to me. You love it, and that makes me love it. I want to do this part all day. You know?”

I nod, helpless. He eases forward another, I don’t know, millimeter, and my whole body is crying out for him. Like I’m this huge, empty space and he is the everything that’s going to rush in and make it okay. And I know that’s just the way it’s supposed to work; that’s the way sex works, right? I’m the empty vessel, he’s the thing that fills me, I’m supposed to feel this mad craving for him, but just like when he said your face he meant mine, when I say I want to be filled, I mean by him.

He takes it so slow that I feel like I’m melting around him. Like I’m this pool of molten gold and he’s the furnace, and instead of pushing against resistance now he’s just stirring and stoking the heat of me, and the orgasm begins as just this whisper of desperation and builds and builds and builds until when he finally gives me the final inch of himself and then the last fraction behind that, I don’t so much break or shatter as flow out from myself in swirl after swirl after swirl, crying his name as quietly as I can.