Chapter 30

Elle

After I get Madden to bed, I change into my rubber-duck pajamas, brush my hair and twist it into a bun, wash my face, brush my teeth, and throw myself down on the couch in the living room with a package of Oreos. My plan is to eat too many of them and feel sorry for myself.

I’m halfway through one row of cookies when the doorbell rings.

I almost don’t answer it. I’m pretty sure it’s Sawyer, and I can’t. I just can’t.

I can’t stop myself from liking him more and more. And it was pretty clear to me today at the party that I can’t stop myself from being jealous of his dead wife. And it felt so much like the way it used to feel to be with Trevor and hear him talk about Helen. Helen this. Helen that.

But I’m with you, Trevor used to say, when I called him on it. Don’t be ridiculous, he sometimes said, when I told him I was jealous of her.

Only he wasn’t with me. And I wasn’t being ridiculous.

Sawyer’s knock sounds again. He knows I’m in here.

He’s leaning casually on my railing when I open the door. His dark hair is rumpled. He’s wearing a gray T-shirt that’s a little too tight (in the best possible way) and a pair of cutoff sweats. I want to grab him, haul him inside, and run my hands over every square inch of his body.

Instead, I say, “Where’s Jonah?”

“Asleep. Brooks and my parents are with him. Can I come in?”

“I don’t think you should.”

His eyes move over my face, probing. “Why not?”

“I don’t think we should do—this—anymore.”

He doesn’t seem surprised, which shores up my conviction that I’m right.

“What if I told you I just want to talk to you? And that’s not code for anything else, I swear.”

I hesitate. I worry that if I let him in, I’ll let him kiss me, and if he kisses me, I’ll lose the resolve I forged this afternoon. If I let myself have feelings for Sawyer, I’m going to be in a world of hurt. I’m going to spend every minute I’m with him knowing that I can’t measure up.

He holds up a hand. “Five minutes.”

I hold the door open and let him walk past me. I follow him into the living room, where we sit on opposite ends of the couch with a broad stretch of upholstery between us. Even then, I don’t feel safe, not with how much I want to slide my hands under his clothes, feel the heat of his skin.

Or with how he’s looking at me.

“Brooks pointed something out to me today,” he says.

I’m silent.

“He reminded me that I don’t like very many women. Or people, period, I guess. I don’t open up easily. I don’t warm up. I don’t make friends everywhere I go.” He rubs his palm over the evening scruff riming his jaw.

I’m not sure where he’s going with this.

“He’s right. I don’t feel comfortable with most people. But I do feel comfortable with you. Like I can be my real self.”

A warm vine twines itself around in my chest (not to mention several other parts of me), but my voice, when it emerges, is still wary. “I’m—glad.”

“And there’s the sex thing. I’ve had a lot of sex.”

“Yeah. I gathered,” I say darkly.

“But I haven’t had sex twice with anyone other than Lucy.”

“How is that possible?” I demand, forgetting caution completely in my shock.

“Just never wanted to. Before you.”

Before you. I feel breathless, almost giddy, but I remind myself that all he’s said so far is that he feels comfortable with me and—which I knew—rarely goes back for seconds. Hardly a ringing endorsement of whatever is going on between us…

He leans in, face earnest, eyes serious, and reaches for my hands. “But I want to. I want to have sex with you again. I want it a lot. And it’s not just because you’re hot or good in bed, because lots of those other one-time women were those things, too. It’s because you’re you, and I like you.”

“Oh,” I say, trying not to get bowled over by the marching band blaring happy songs straight through the middle of my chest. I want to make sure he’s saying what I think he’s saying before I let myself join the celebration.

“I guess what I’m saying, not very well, is that I think we should try to make this work. You and me. A—” He squints. “Relationship.”

Despite the seriousness of the situation, despite how cautious I’m still feeling, I burst out laughing. It’s the way he says it, the way some people would say eels.

“You don’t sound enthusiastic,” I say, both eyebrows raised. At the same time, I’m wildly hopeful. Because before he said relationship like it was greasy or squirmy or furred with mold, he said you and me.

He leans in, his breath brushing my lips an instant before his mouth seals mine.

“Mmm,” I whimper, and I can feel the curve of his smile, and mine answering.

He breaks the kiss. “I’m enthusiastic about you,” he says. “I just find that word relationship hard to say. Like moist or bulbous.”

I cringe. “You just killed my sex drive. Dead. You can go home now.”

His turn to raise an eyebrow. “Really?”

“No hope for resuscitation.”

“Not even if I do this?” He brushes his lips along the line from my earlobe to the corner of my mouth, and I shiver with delight. “Or this?” He tickles around the shell of my ear with his breath, then laughs at my moan. “What about this?” He lets his fingertips trail down the side of my breast so they barely caress me through my shirt.

“Maybe,” I say, but it comes out a gasp, and we both know I’m toast. For good measure, he lowers his mouth to mine and kisses me until I make whimpering sounds at the back of my throat and wrangle handfuls of his T-shirt.

He pulls back for a moment, his eyes serious. “So? What do you think?”

“I think you give good foreplay,” I say.

“No. I mean about giving it a go.”

I extricate myself from him, slowly untangling my fingers from the soft cotton of his shirt and climbing off from where I had straddled him somewhere in the middle of the kiss.

“What would it mean?” I ask cautiously.

“Dinner with me one night this week. Going to Trevor’s wedding together as a real couple, not a fake one. Evening brain dumps—honey, I’m home, here’s what happened today. Lots of sexting. If you want.”

“I want,” I say, a little more eagerly than I mean to let him see.

But he doesn’t draw away in horror. He smiles at me, a smile so warm and so different from those early barely-there quirks of his mouth that I need to hold myself together at the seams.

Then he does something I’m not expecting at all. He pulls me close and hugs me.

He is big and warm and when he wraps me up, I feel completely at home and completely—

I was going to say safe, but the truth is, it’s really more like:

Scared. Shitless. By. How. Much. I. Like. It.