Chapter 11
Destiny
“A drought usually ends with a flood.”
~ Grandma Dixie
Pulling off the third dress I’d tried on, I was getting more and more frustrated with myself by the second. Why did I actually care what I looked like to go watch fireworks? Of course I knew the answer to that question, but that just made me more upset. It didn’t matter what JJ thought if he saw me. Nothing was going to happen with JJ tonight. Nothing.
Sure, he’d said that, if I still wanted to do “this” tonight, then we would—after the fireworks. I didn’t. Okay, I did, but I wasn’t going to act on that particular desire.
As much as I wished that it could, my battered heart would likely not survive another break. Which was exactly what would happen when JJ walked out of my life again after we had sex. If we even had sex, and that was a big if. Twice now, I’d really thought things were headed in that direction, and twice, he’d put the brakes on so fast that it’d given me whiplash. Who’s to say that he wouldn’t do the very same thing tonight?
After grabbing a shirt, jeans, and a couple of dresses out of my closet, I threw them on the bed as Team Go For It and Team Play It Safe debated my activity schedule for the evening. Part of me wanted to throw caution (aka my heart!) to the wolves—um…I mean wind. And the other part of me wanted to build moats filled with alligators and eels around my heart, my body, and my soul to protect myself.
Dress or jeans and a shirt? My eyes bounced back and forth between the items of clothing like a volleyball over a net. Ugh. This was ridiculous.
What would I wear if JJ weren’t back and threatening me with all kinds of good times?
Decision made.
Once I’d pulled the baby-blue T-shirt over my head, I sat on the bed and put my jeans on. Standing up, I turned to my antique oval floor mirror and checked my reflection. I looked casual. Like I wasn’t trying. Yes, I had blown my hair out and put on mascara, a little bronzer, and lip gloss, but hey, I’d drawn the line at a dress. That was something to be proud of.
After snagging the cowboy boots I’d had since sophomore year out of the closet and stepping into them, I took one more look, flicked my light off and headed out.
As I put food for Captain Pickles down, I determined that I needed to come up with a game plan if I wanted to get through this night without getting down and dirty.
At the dance, I’d tried to ignore JJ in my sad, pathetic game of cat and mouse, which had proved to be a poorly executed plan. This afternoon, I’d taken a different approach, opting for putting pretend blinders on, which had been a big, fat fail. So, instead of trying not to notice my surroundings—JJ—at the fireworks, I planned on being hyperaware of him. I would locate and keep a twenty on him the entire night. He wasn’t going to be able to make a move without me knowing about it and responding accordingly.
I needed to think of the park, where the entire town always gathered to watch the sparklers display, as a chess board and JJ and myself as the pieces. He moved, I moved. If I didn’t pull this off, then my check was definitely going to get mated.
Before walking out the door, I paused to breathe and take a little inventory.
Keys. Check.
Game plan. Check.
Sanity…
Well, two out of three ain’t bad.
Honestly, the thing that was driving me the craziest was how in the name of God and all that was holy did JJ know that I spell-cussed in my head? No one knew that. I had never given anyone a peek into that little corner of my quirky neurosis. But he knew. No one guesses something so specific. Was he like Sookie from True Blood? Could he read minds?
Oh, dear Lord, I hoped not. I’d thought some pretty dirty things about him, and spelled even dirtier things.
Pushing that scary thought out of my mind, I opened the door as I looked down to make sure that Captain Pickles hadn’t sneaked out. And then, for the second time that day, I ran smack-dab into a solid brick wall. This time, my body knew exactly who the wall was without any visual confirmation.
“Going somewhere?” JJ’s deep voice rumbled through me like an aftershock of an earthquake.
“What are you doing here?” I asked even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer. He was here to reroute my train ride to self-preservation station—with a bow-chicka-bow-wow detour.
My gaze lifted past the contours of his chiseled, T-shirt-covered chest, over the tan skin of his delectable neck, across his perfect lips, and straight to his eyes. He was silently staring down at me. Which in and of itself would not have been disconcerting. The thing that sent me into red alert, however, was the intensity in his eyes.
Oh yeah, my check was going to be mated.
After he’d walked into my apartment like he owned the place, I retreated back. He shut the door, and when his gaze met mine again, he answered my question by simply stating, “You know why I’m here.”
“What happened to after the fireworks?”
Was I grabbing at straws? Yep. But straws were all I had at that point. Straws were my new best friends.
“We need to talk first. And I couldn’t wait till after the fireworks. I can’t stop thinking about you. Fantasizing about you. It’s driving me crazy. You’re driving me crazy.”
This new JJ, the one who talked about his feelings, was really hard to take. Knowing that I was way out of my league in this game of chess, I crossed my arms in a protective move. JJ’s nostrils flared, and his gaze grew more intense.
What the…
Looking down, I solved the mystery of his unprovoked reaction. I was spilling out of my shirt. So maybe provoked after all. As I dropped my arms to my sides, a flush ran up my cheeks. Shoot. I needed to get the upper hand, and I needed to do it fast.
Captain Pickles purred loudly, cutting into my mental escape planning. My man-hating tabby was affectionately rubbing up against JJ’s ankles. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Captain Pickles did not like people in general, but he despised the male of the species.
Traitor.
JJ bent down and rubbed Captain Pickles behind the ear, which notched up the purr volume to ten. “You have a one-eyed cat?” JJ’s big, whiskey-colored gaze lifted to mine.
I pushed down a pathetic sigh that tried to escape my lips. “Is that a question or were you just stating the obvious?”
Sarcasm—much better than swooning.
A playful smile pulled at JJ’s full lips as he turned his attention to Judas—otherwise known as Captain Pickles—and amped up his behind-the-ear petting to a full-body rub. I suddenly felt like the third wheel.
Which gave me an idea. Retreat while JJ was distracted.
“Well, there are fireworks with my name on them. I guess I’ll leave you two alone. Lock up on your way out,” I said in a rush as I made a mad dash for the door.
I hadn’t made it even one step before JJ’s tall frame was in front of me, blocking my path to freedom.
“You really want to go to the fireworks?” His tone was serious.
I could barely hear him over the pounding of my heart though. Also, I was a tad distracted by the fact that my fingers and my lips were tingling and I wasn’t sure I could feel my legs. I remembered Mr. Rogers saying that those were the exact same symptoms he’d had when he’d suffered a stroke earlier that year.
Was I having a stroke?
Was there such a thing as a lust-induced stroke?
“Yes,” I managed to whisper. Well, I thought I might need to stop by the emergency room first, but then fireworks it was.
He stared at me with so much heat that I was surprised my clothes didn’t melt right off my body.
“Okay.” He nodded.
At that one word, I let out a breath I hadn’t even known I’d been holding. At the same time a stab of disappointment hit me that he had given up so easily. Talk about split personalities.
As I started to leave, he put his arm around me.
“Let’s go.”
I stayed put. “We are not going together.”
“Yes. We are.”
There was no way I could handle that. Me and JJ watching the fireworks. The entire town seeing us together. He’d get to leave, but I’d get twenty questions from everyone asking if I’d heard from him, what was going on with us. Heck, I’d already gotten over thirty text messages and voicemails asking me about the fight at the festival.
This was ridiculous. It had to stop. I needed to stop all of this round and round and find out what this “New JJ” was all about.
“What do you want, JJ?”
“You,” he answered without skipping a beat.
“Since when?”
His eyes narrowed and I could see the wheels spinning as he was deciding what the best answer was going to be.
“No!” I put my foot down. Literally. I stomped my foot. “All the cards on the table. No more half-truths. No more games. Answer the question.”
“Since we played Spin the Bottle.”
What? That had happened, like, ten years ago. And we hadn’t even kissed with tongue. He hadn’t even technically been playing, either. He’d just happened to be sitting on the couch by us, and when my prayers had been answered and the neck of the bottle had landed on him, I’d expected him to make some joke about not being a part of our game. Not stand up, walk over, and kiss me lightly on the lips. He’d left for college after that. I’d barely seen him until he had come home right after he’d gotten called up from triple A and signed with the Waves—the weekend he’d taken me to prom.
This didn’t make any sense.
I shook my head. JJ was a lot of things, but a liar wasn’t one of them. Still, this could not possibly be true. So, why was he saying this?
JJ walked towards me, and I did the only rational thing a girl in my position would do: I backed up like the big chicken I was. When he saw that I was retreating, he stopped. His large frame loomed over me. I tilted my head up to maintain eye contact with him. My apartment had never seemed small to me before, but with JJ in my living room, it felt downright claustrophobic.
The walls were closing in, but even with that happening, all I could think was there was no way what JJ was saying could even be in the ballpark of accurate.
“It’s the truth, Destiny.”
Oh crap. Maybe he can read my mind. Wait. Did he just hear that?
“I’d always thought you were the cutest thing on two legs, but that night when I came down to the basement and saw you playing Spin the Bottle with my brothers and their friends, something happened. I knew that, if anyone else kissed you, I would want to put their heads through a plate-glass window.”
Whoa! I’d only been, like, twelve.
“But I was a kid.”
“Exactly.” JJ ran his hands through his thick, brown hair, and for the first time ever, he seemed less than confident. He looked frustrated and unsure. Lost. “I was about to be eighteen and I felt like the biggest pervert in the world.”
The room felt like it was spinning. Something still didn’t add up. “But, at prom, I was eighteen.”
He shot me a look like the lights were on but no one was home. “Barely. Your birthday was two days before I took you to prom. And I was twenty-four. That’s like, in two years, you hooking up with a senior in high school.”
Dang. When he put it like that, I saw his point.
“Plus, I’d just gotten called up. Everything in my life was changing. I knew there was no way anything could happen between us.”
“But something did happen between us.” I raised my voice. I seemed to be doing that a lot since JJ had shown up again.
“I know.” He sounded tortured as he looked at his hands while opening and closing them. “But it shouldn’t have. I’m so sorry. I just couldn’t stop myself… You were just so damn beautiful.”
When his brandy-colored eyes looked back up at me, my heart broke a little and started beating so fast that I felt like it had been stabbed with a syringe filled with adrenaline. Sure, I’d always felt something between us, but I’d never really let myself believe that there actually was something between us.
“You mean so much to me, Destiny. I know you don’t know that, but you do. And I shouldn’t have left things like they were. I’m so sorry, so fucking sorry. These past four years have been torture, but I felt so guilty about that night and I didn’t know how to… what to…” JJ scrubbed his hands over his face and blew out a breath. “My life is just so crazy.”
I tried to process this new information. He’d said he was sorry, really sorry, and that I meant something to him. But did that change anything? He was only going to be around until tomorrow, and then what? I knew what ballplayers’ lives were like on the road. Harmony had told me stories. I couldn’t sit back when dozens of gorgeous girls would be waiting at his hotel, willing and eager to do anything and everything they could just to be close to him for an hour.
There was no way I could compete with that.
“Destiny,” JJ took a step towards me, but I put my hand up. He stopped on a dime.
“I need a minute. To think.”
My mind was spinning. Team Go For It and Team Play It Safe were having a field day throwing in their two cents. I heard them out, and then, after trying to process this situation, I came up with a few facts.
Long term, this couldn’t work out. But JJ was there. In my apartment. I could make all—or at least a few—of the fantasies I’d been having since puberty come true. How many people got that opportunity?
JJ wasn’t the jerk I’d thought he was. He had tried to do the right thing, and he did care about me. I didn’t have long to make this decision. JJ would be gone tomorrow, who knew when he would be back? Sure, I would love time to process all of this, gather my thoughts, perhaps make a pros-and-cons spreadsheet, but I didn’t have that luxury at the moment. So I needed to boil this down to the nitty gritty.
Was I going to be hurt after JJ left? Yes. But that was inevitable whether or not anything physical happened with us that night. I would go through that pain with either the memory of an amazing night with JJ or not.
Team Go For It for the win!
JJ looked like he was about to come out of his skin while he waited to see what the verdict was going to be. He might not come out of his skin, but he was definitely coming out of those clothes. During the last two ‘encounters’ we’d had, he had been the one calling the shots.
My plan was to take control so that the third time was the charm.