Chapter Eleven
WILL
Twelve months ago
This month was the kind of clusterfuck only the military could manage.
First, I was pulled off a stateside training op to lead a last-minute overseas mission. I was fast-roping from an Apache helicopter when I was supposed to be meeting Shannon in Chicago for another weekend away.
She was already airborne when the orders came through, and spent two days alone in the city. A text with a picture of her middle finger positioned over her lace-clad breasts summed up her feelings about the change of plans. I shared those feelings.
When I was back on base and the mission was fully debriefed, I got her on the phone. She yelled at me about fucking with her meticulous schedule after everything she went through to get away that weekend. She was reasonably pissed and lonely, but I persuaded her to let me listen while she fingered herself. I hated this war, the military, and every inch of earth separating me from Shannon when she started panting and humming into my ear.
I capitalized on her post-orgasmic bliss to convince her that she wanted to spend Thanksgiving with me in New Mexico. There was a long pause punctuated only by her shuddering breath, and I imagined the rosy flush of her skin and the tiny beads of sweat drying on her chest. She put up her usual quantities of sass and swearing, and threatened to ditch me if I was even five minutes late.
Then, during a close-quarters hostage recovery simulation at an unmarked black ops facility, one of my guys blew a mannequin’s head off. If there was a good time to make his accuracy issues known, it was definitely before the dummies were replaced with live team members, but it sure as shit fucked up my day.
Any time a drill involving live rounds went off book, everything stopped. We walked the whole damn thing back, replaying every step, every move, and every decision until we isolated the error. Once that protocol was finished, I tasked my men with disassembling and cleaning every firearm in the building.
Twice.
No one was enjoying a holiday weekend—myself included—until the lesson was clear: know where your shot is going to land before you shoot it.
By the time I hit the road, I was five hours late. Five fucking hours, and if Shannon wasn’t already on a flight back to Boston, she was going to bitch up a storm until I put her mouth to work. The girl got off on tearing assholes and busting balls, but I didn’t allow myself the time to consider how much I enjoyed that.
The hotel she selected near the outskirts of Taos, in Ojo Caliente, was nestled against an ancient hot spring. The interior was all cowhide and antlers, all day. I suffered through an extensive explanation of the on-site spa services and farm-to-table dining options before the front desk attendant handed over my room key. If I’d known where Shannon was, I would have saved myself this annoyance and worked some magic on the lock.
“Just tell me which room,” I said. I was too fucking impatient for this. Once I had the key, I took off in the direction the attendant pointed.
And now, five hours late to our rescheduled weekend, she was nowhere to be found.
Her designer luggage was parked in our room’s closet, and her phone charger was plugged in beside the bed, but she was gone. I stood in the center of the room, staring at the untouched bed while I ran through the possibilities. She didn’t go into town; too sleepy and deserted at this hour. She didn’t go to the gym; she was an early bird.
That left the restaurant, and it didn’t take more than a quick glance to spot her hair when I burst through the doors.
She was seated at a rustic bar overlooking the hot springs with her back to me, her laptop to her left, and a margarita glass to her right.
And two guys standing beside her, laughing and gesturing as if they were old college pals.
Fuckers.
I stood in the doorway, watching from a distance. Her hair was tucked behind her ear, smooth and styled into precise waves, and I wanted to mess it all up. The dark purple v-neck sweater and long gold chain studded with small stones—my guess was diamonds—showed off her creamy skin. I wanted to touch her and haul her back to the room, but I also wanted to admire the way she handled those guys.
Shannon was intelligent and gorgeous and really fucking intimidating, and every fool with a pick-up line was drawn to her. They didn’t notice her patronizing nods or bright, fake smiles. They didn’t hear the poison-laced honey when she said “Oh, that sounds fascinating” or “That’s an amazing little story.”
She could handle them, of that there was no doubt. She could handle everything.
But that didn’t mean she had to, and when the fucker leaning against the bar placed his hand on her knee while he laughed at the other fucker’s comment, nothing could have stopped me from intervening.
“And this guy damn near falls off the boat trying to reel in his marlin,” The One I’d Kill First said, gesturing to The One I’d Kill Second. “And it was a small one, just a pup—”
“Excuse me, boys.” I stepped between those assholes, took Shannon’s face in my hands, and whispered, “I am so sorry I’m late, peanut.”
There was a fiery glint in her eyes before my lips met hers, a blend of anger and amusement. Her teeth sank into my tongue when it pushed past her lips.
Okay, mostly anger.
In a move only a few steps above licking her neck or pissing on her leg, I locked my eyes on Shannon, snatched her glass and drained the sweet liquid. It was clear signal for the fuckers to peddle their marlin stories elsewhere.
“If I could have gotten a flight back to Boston tonight,” she said, a whisper so soft I almost missed it. Her shoulders were stiff, and her hands still folded in her lap. “Believe me when I say I would have.”
“Did Air Traffic Control not take your call?” I asked, rubbing my knuckles down her spine. “Those bastards.”
She looked good, better than I remembered. Deployment had a strange way of eroding memories, turning some unrealistically perfect or morphing others into dim, faded artifacts. Somewhere in the last ten weeks—seventy-one days, if anyone was counting—I lost the sharp force of her. Maybe it was my mind’s way of tricking me into believing this girl wasn’t creeping her way into my everything.
“Come,” I said, holding out my hand to her.
She didn’t take my hand. Of course not. She took her precious time wishing the marlin idiots a happy holiday, signing the check, closing her laptop and placing it in her bag, and then wrapping her scarf around her neck before scooting off the chair. She didn’t reach for me once, and it was obvious she was making me work for the right to touch her.
She wasn’t high maintenance; she was complicated. It was probably a good thing. Shannon was too smart, too fearless, too much fire to let just anyone in her company. She needed to be won, and that was no easy feat.
I pointed up at the night sky. “A lot of stars out here,” I said.
“Suck my dick,” she murmured.
“Does that mean you’ll stop, breathe, and notice the stars while I’m sucking your dick? Or do I have to suck your dick first, and then you’ll be ready for stars?”
The walk to our room was silent and separate. She was working hard at staying angry, and as much as I enjoyed the game, I couldn’t relax until she did, and I wanted to fast-forward to the point where we could just be. Instead of kissing me back, she bit me. Instead of accepting my hand, she demanded I blow her. Instead of letting me hold her, she was going to shy away from me and throw a tantrum until I tied her up and fucked the fury right out of her.
And she wasn’t even furious. No, she just didn’t know how to let herself unwind.
“Stop thinking so hard,” I said as I held the door open for her.
“I realize it’s difficult for you to understand, but someone has to think around here,” she snapped. She tossed her scarf to the chair and kicked off her heels.
She liked to think of herself as grounded. She thought she had her hands wrapped around everything, but she was five hundred miles ahead and flying in her own stratosphere.
“And what would you like me to think about?” I asked. She paced the length of the room. “I know what I’d like to think about, and it involves fucking you with your pretty wrists tied behind your back.”
“Do you have any clue what I had to do to get here, Will? And for what? So you can stand there and tell me how you’re going to fuck me?”
“You love it when I tell you how I’m going to fuck you,” I said. She really did.
“My assistant knows. He totally knows. And your sister, fucking hell, nothing gets past that girl. They all know, and you’re just staring at me like you don’t care.”
I knew I wasn’t Shannon’s usual, but I couldn’t comprehend why her assistant—or my sister, for that matter—got a say in who she fucked.
“That’s probably because I don’t care,” I said. I cleared my throat. This wasn’t the night to unravel her bizarre family dynamics. “There is zero reason to worry about any of that right now. You know, you don’t have to be so tough all the time. It’s okay to not have all the answers.”
“I could say the same thing to you.” Shannon lifted her chin, her quiet little “fuck you”, and stared at me. “I’m missing important family events, you know. And I’ve been sitting here, thinking you were blowing me off because apparently that’s your thing. You know what? That’s not how this will end.”
“Ignoring the fact I did not blow you off, peanut, and you’re being an overdramatic pain in the ass, tell me how this will end.”
“I’ll blow you off,” she said, her shoulder jerking hard to punctuate her statement.
“I think you’re waiting for me to force you to drop that act.” My fingers curled around her waistband and I pulled her toward me. “Enough bullshit out of you. Get naked.”
“Don’t fucking tell me what to do,” she said. “How about ‘Thank you for flying during the busiest travel week of the year’ or ‘Thank you for coming all the way to freaking New Mexico’ or better yet, ‘Let’s get some something to eat and talk like normal people because I haven’t seen you in three months’?”
“Yeah, no,” I said. I had her hands pinned behind her back and her cheek flush against the wall in an instant, and her trousers shoved down to her knees. “Eat later. Talk later. I haven’t seen you in three months and I need to be inside you right now.”
I hiked her knee up, kicked her pants off, and took my cock in hand. Putting everything else out of my mind, I surged into her hard, drowning in the hot perfection of Shannon.
“Is that the best you can do?” she taunted.
I anchored my hand low on her abdomen, pressing my palm to the narrow space below her belly button. Her muscles flexed and squeezed under my fingertips, and she was strung tight enough to bounce quarters. “You feel how tense you are?” I asked, my hand pushing down. “Relax, baby. Just relax. Loosen up for me, right here.”
“Enough with the coaching,” she snapped. “Shut up and fuck me.”
“No,” I murmured against her neck. “No. You’re not giving me another one of those wimpy little orgasms. You’re going to come for me until you can’t stand, then I’m carrying you to the bed and doing it again, but not”—I thrust into her, slamming us hard against the door—“until”—Again—“you stop”—And again—“fighting me.”
Her fingers twined around mine as she moaned, the sound bouncing off the door and around us.
“Let me do good things to you,” I sighed as her body sagged against mine. “My cock wants to take care of you.”
“And what do you want?” she said.
My fingers slid down her tummy until they brushed her clit. “Same.”
*
It was almost a shame to wake her. Sunlight glinted off the red rocks outside, bathing her skin in a pinkish glow. But if I didn’t get her out of this bed now, we wouldn’t leave it for the next four days.
It seemed counterintuitive that, after these months since Montauk, I’d want anything more than her body in my arms, but I was struggling with this arrangement. Shannon wasn’t one of those women who blindly chased any guy with a frogman tattoo and some dog tags. They deserved the same level of respect, yeah, but it was also fair to classify them as a different breed than Ms. Walsh.
To say I wanted to see her only for sex was a shallow representation of reality. I didn’t like her thinking that, and I didn’t like operating that way. And admitting that didn’t mean I had to turn in my man card, either.
I enjoyed her company but we weren’t carrying on meaningful conversations while we were naked. No, that was limited to swearing, insults, and demands. There was plenty of that while we were clothed, too, but it wouldn’t be any fun if there was no foreplay.
“Peanut,” I said, slapping her ass. “We’re going hiking.”
“We’re what?” she groaned into the pillow.
“Shower. Breakfast. Hike,” I said, punctuating each word with firm slaps.
“If you fucking spank me again, I will punch you in the nuts so hard you’ll have to swallow around them.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen your scrawny arms,” I said, folding her beneath me to prevent fists from flying. “That’s not happening anytime soon.”
“And just for that,” she said, “I’m showering alone.”
We hit the trailhead about an hour later. She didn’t say much for the first mile, and she stayed far on her side of the path.
Her skintight running pants and matching jacket were distractingly sexy. Though it made no logical sense, I assumed she jogged in baggy sweats or old t-shirts. In my head, it was easier to deal with the idea of her sweating in non-descript clothes than looking like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model all over Boston.
I kept stealing glances at her legs, and when she noticed, she shook her head at me, smiling.
“I thought you knew how to be covert,” she said.
My hand brushed against hers, a subtle invitation. I could demand many things from Shannon, but I only got them when she was willing to give.
“Can you tell me where you’ve been since I last saw you?”
For the first time in years, most of my activities weren’t highly classified. “I’ve been training new SEALs. We did an advanced cold water excursion, then some desert survival drills, and this week we were running simulated operations.”
“You’re teaching the baby SEALs?” she asked, laughing.
I frowned and shook my head. “They go through at least a year of hardcore training. They aren’t exactly delicate when I meet them.”
“I’m sticking with baby SEAL,” she said. “So you must have gone through that hardcore training.” I nodded and she continued, “What’s that like?”
I tried to think back nearly fifteen years to when I was out of college and getting my first taste of the frogman’s life. Intense and grueling didn’t begin to describe BUD/S. My body morphed during that time, changing from fit and strong to powerful. My mind changed, too. I learned to be perceptive and calm, but ready to strike in an eye blink.
“There’s a lot of water,” I said, and she rolled her eyes at me. Fuck, I wanted to spank her in the middle of this trail. That fire really did it for me. “Seriously. Entire days are spent ocean training. Treading water for six hours. They park us in the sand, arms linked, and let the Pacific Ocean do its worst. Then there’s drown-proofing, where your ankles and wrists are tied. They throw you in a pool and hope for the best.”
“I must say, it’s nice that you survived,” she said.
“It is, yeah. Good to be alive,” I said. “The worst part—worse than the tear gas exposure drills, worse than being awake for one hundred and thirty-two hours straight, worse than blacking out at the bottom of a frigid pool—was the Underwater Demolition Team shorts. When you’re in BUD/S, the dress code is very strict, and it usually involved these awful shorts. They’re ugly beige and thin. Too thin. Awkwardly thin.”
“I get it, honey,” Shannon said. “And you should know: there aren’t many fabrics that can conceal the heat you’re packing.”
“I’m sorry. What was that? Did you say something complimentary about my cock?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she muttered. “Now, these shorts.”
“Don’t lie: you love my cock,” I said, and Shannon snorted with laughter. “These shorts are obscenely short. They’ve been around since World War II. They’ve only ever been issued to SEALs, and I think it’s just a long-running hazing ritual. You know what’s insane? I’d always see people in San Diego who were training to get into BUD/S wearing them. Like they were getting a running start on the full SEAL experience by flashing the furry side of their balls.”
“What do you miss most about home?” she asked. She knew I’d spent the majority of recent years overseas, and about a decade before that was consumed with similarly grueling cycles of deployment.
I lifted my baseball cap from my head and ran a hand through my hair. “Many things,” I said. “My life is regularly irregular, and I’m good with that but there are times when I miss consistency. I’d like to sleep in the exact same place for a month, just to remind myself what that’s all about.” I shot her a smile. “It would be even better if you were sleeping there with me.”
“Save the horseshit for another time, commando. I’m here and I’m not leaving, so stop trying to be cute.”
“You think I’m cute?” I asked.
“Let the record reflect that I never suggested you were, in fact, cute. I claimed you were attempting to be cute,” she said. “And annoying the shit out of me while doing it.”
I laughed and slapped her ass. “I mostly miss home cooking, or having a kitchen. And that isn’t to say Navy food is bad. It’s not. It’s just not home. My brother loves pickles. He’s a pickle freak, and yeah, I’ve told him that his fondness for dick probably started there. He used to make his own pickles when we were in high school, and no matter where I go, I can’t find anything like Wes’s. It’s that sort of thing I miss.”
“In other words, you miss people cooking for you,” she clarified.
“No, actually,” I said. “I can cook pretty well. I make a mean pancake.”
“I prefer my pancakes sweet,” she said. “Keep your mean pancakes to yourself.”
“Duly noted.”
“I don’t cook,” she said. “I’ve tried, but…yeah. It’s just not my thing. I never have the right ingredients either. Grocery stores annoy me. I don’t have the patience to babysit a simmering pot or turn a piece of meat at the right time. I just want it”—she waved her hands in front of her—“I just want it done. I’ve tried, but instead of making food, I summon demons.”
“I can see that,” I said.
Shannon stayed quiet until we rounded a steep bend. “There’s one thing I can make, though,” she said, almost to herself. I glanced at her, wanting to hear more. “Even when I was younger, I was a wreck in the kitchen. I was good with measuring things for recipes. My mother made butternut squash pie. She did it all from scratch, roasting the squash and rolling the dough and everything. She grew the squash, too. She had a garden in the yard. I never understood why she grew such random things like green beans and pickling cucumbers and zucchini. I never thought to ask her why she chose those, and not bell peppers or strawberries.”
We were headed toward the trail’s high point, but the incline didn’t seem to bother Shannon. She was pushing forward and barely breaking a sweat. Nothing should have surprised me about this city girl.
“Lo said she died when you were really young.”
She veered off the trail and climbed some boulders to look out at the valley below. “She did,” Shannon said, nodding. “She had undiagnosed preeclampsia. It’s a pregnancy complication. She bled to death.”
With her hands braced on her hips, she stared ahead, silent. Her words were too crisp and efficient. They weren’t real. This was the hard-ass version of Shannon, the one who liked to pretend she was too tough to let anyone else know she cared or felt.
She hopped off the boulder and marched back toward the trail, and I was right behind her.
“How old were you?” I asked.
Her shoulders tensed when those words hit her. Another mile passed without a response from her, and I was ready to shift gears into less sensitive subject matter. Sometimes I got lucky and she shared freely, but other times she closed right up.
“Nine,” she said, pulling her cap lower. “I was nine when she died. Erin was only two, and God, she was so confused. She wandered around the house for months, looking in my mother’s bedroom, her sewing room, the kitchen. Everywhere. She didn’t understand, and how do you explain death to a baby? What do you say?”
I stopped to tie my shoelace. Shannon never talked about Erin. I asked her about that situation once, and she clammed right up.
“She’s the only one who isn’t involved in the business,” I said.
“She never wanted that,” Shannon said. “She’s independent and selfish, and she took a lot of joy from flipping off my father.” She loosened her ponytail and then retied it, all with her back to me. “Not that he didn’t deserve it. So anyway…she was a baby, and she didn’t understand anything that was happening. She was convinced my mother was in the house, and all you’d hear was her crying and screaming.” She tugged at the hat again, until the brim fully shielded her eyes. “My father lost it one night. He couldn’t handle hearing ‘mama, mama, mama’ all over the house so he locked Erin in a basement closet. It was dark and freezing, and he nailed the fucking door shut. It took Matt and me almost three hours to get it open, but I guess it worked because I’ve never heard her say ‘mama’ since that night. It was like the word vanished from her vocabulary.”
She sucked in a watery breath and turned her face toward the sun. She still wouldn’t cry in front of me. I knew this wasn’t information she readily shared, and I knew there was something about getting away from her world that made her open up. I loved and hated it in equal measures. She was with me, and telling me, and that gave me a surge of victory I hadn’t known I wanted. But these stories were horrible, and I wanted to hug her, kiss her, and ask a million questions about why no one ever put an end to this shit. She shouldn’t have dealt with this then, and she shouldn’t be mothering all over her siblings to make up for it now. Someone had to end this.
“Was it always Erin and Riley?”
She wrapped her hand around her ponytail, smoothing the strands and then repeating the motion. “No, but my father was worst to the youngest ones. Well…maybe that’s not accurate.” She took a sip from her water and offered it to me. “He hated us all in different ways. Riley and Erin have scars you can see, but…it’s what you can’t see that does the most damage.”
This was the second time Shannon mentioned her father’s abusive behavior, and she didn’t have to say anything else for me to know he harmed her, too. It wasn’t simply the trauma of seeing a brother beaten or a sister trapped, and I found it hard to breathe around the weight of that knowledge. I wanted to find his remains so I could have the pleasure of killing him again.
I lived with an intimate knowledge of the unimaginably gruesome awfulness that existed in the world, and though it was easier to believe that awfulness was extraordinary, that it was exception, I knew it wasn’t exclusive to the war-torn regions I frequented. The unimaginable happened to ordinary people every day, and often, the people you least expected.
I didn’t want it to be my person.
“But he didn’t take on Matt or Patrick, and they were better at not triggering my father. Sometimes I thought Erin wanted to piss him off. When she was older, she went out of her way to do it, as if she wanted to know how far she could push him. She was willing to go all the way to the edge, and there were times when I thought she wanted to go over just to see what the fall was all about. She’s fearless like that. I mean, she’d have to be. She walks on fucking lava.”
I handed the bottle back. “What exactly does she do? Other than infiltrating the bedrock of the Italian mafia?”
“She’s a geologist now. She studies volcanoes, and travels all over the world doing research. She’s been published in journals, and even a few science magazines. She’s smart, really smart,” Shannon said, and I had to pause and study her for a second. The pride in her voice was measurable, and all of this was coming from the woman who routinely refused to speak about the sister in question. “When she told me she wanted to go to the University of Hawaii, I figured that was just her way of telling everyone to fuck off. Then she got there, and she took some geology classes, and she was a convert. It’s probably the right field for her. There aren’t many options for people like Erin. It’s either village witch or head of the Holy Roman Empire, and I think that ship has sailed. Somehow volcanologist is right in the middle.”
We continued along the trail, following the Bosque River, and even though the silence was heavy with history, it wasn’t uncomfortable. A desert cottontail rabbit charged across the dusty path and into a cluster of low juniper bushes, then scrambled over the footbridge ahead. I tracked its movements while organizing the shards of childhood Shannon just placed in my hands.
Everything inside me demanded that I wrap my arms around Shannon and hold her until those memories faded into the background, but she wouldn’t allow that. Going to her now would result in a brush-off, a brash comment, and even more ground to cover until I earned my way back.
“So I can make a pie,” she said, her voice high and shaky. “I have to get three or four squash because something always goes wrong, and Patrick and Sam give me a ton of shit about it. I only burnt one this year.” She laughed and started down a narrow path off the trail. “I hope Lauren remembers them.”
“I can guarantee you that Lo will not forget about a pie,” I said. “Pie is a major component of her world.”
“Fair point,” she murmured.
This path led toward a large, flat rock the size of a gazebo. She climbed up and stood in the center, then turned back and beckoned me to join. That was the invitation, and I was taking it. I jogged to the rock and grabbed her around the waist, turning her upside down while she laughed and shrieked.
“You’re going to drop me,” she screamed.
“I’m giving you a new perspective on the valley,” I said, my arms banded around her torso as she wiggled and kicked. I pressed my teeth against her backside and bit. “You’re supposed to be appreciating nature, peanut.”
“Are you biting my ass?” she yelled.
“It’s a nice ass,” I said, kissing the same spot before setting her on her feet.
We settled on the rock and shared the lunch we’d picked up before leaving the hotel. She tossed eighty percent of the turkey from her sandwich aside, explaining that she preferred sandwiches composed mostly of vegetables and cheese.
“If it were up to me, I’d skip the bread and stick with cheese and fruit,” she said, gesturing to me with her water bottle. “And nuts. Cheese, fruit, nuts. That’s all I need. There’s a market in Chestnut Hill that makes these perfect little cheese plates, but it’s a pain in the ass to get there from my place. Sometimes I send Tom to get me one for lunch, but I can’t really justify him spending that much time on cheese.”
I gazed at her, smiling. “When am I going to see you again?”
She capped her water and reclined back against her balled-up jacket. “When would you like to see me again?”
“Soon,” I said. I shifted to lie beside her, and wove our fingers together. There was an extended deployment on my horizon, and I wanted to steal every single moment of time between now and then with Shannon. “Really soon.”
“Why?”
I wasn’t sure what prompted the question, but it wasn’t like we spent much time defining this relationship or our feelings for each other. I only assumed she had feelings for me, and that was why she agreed to continue seeing me. “You’re so much,” I said, dragging my finger across that comet of freckles on her collarbone. “And I want all of it.”
*
Shannon was quiet on the drive to the airport. She sat beside me, her fingers laced around mine, staring at the scenery as it passed.
I hated it.
“I noticed that it’s the end of November,” I said. “And December comes next.”
“A shrewd observation,” she mumbled. “Are commandos expected to memorize the sequence of months, or is that one of your special tricks?”
I hiked up my sleeve and made an exaggerated glance at my watch. “I had you biting a pillow two hours ago. You need me to pull over and fix that attitude?”
SEALs liked to say anything worth doing was worth overdoing and this thing with Shannon—this power struggle—was definitely worth overdoing.
Shannon shook her fingers free with a snicker. “You don’t want me to hop on?”
She gestured to my crotch, and as if the mere suggestion of her silky skin against mine was enough to turn me on, an ache rolled down my dick. Four days of unrestricted access to this woman wasn’t enough, and as I caught sidelong glimpses of her now, her hair wavy and wild, a splattering of new freckles fanning out across her nose and cheekbones, her lips arched in a scowling pout, I knew there wouldn’t be a time when I wanted anyone other than Shannon.
“I want you to spend Christmas with me.”
I wanted to piss her off and fuck her hard. I wanted to laugh with her and hear all her awful stories. I wanted her vicious insults and the purring sighs she made before she came. I wanted it all.
“No,” she drawled. She huffed out a laugh and glanced at me, her brows furrowed. I knew she was searching for a caustic comeback, and when she found none, she crossed her arms over her chest. “No.”
“And by no you obviously mean yes,” I said. “We’re going to Mexico, a little place on the Baja coast.”
Shannon propped her sunglasses up and pressed her fingertips to her eyelids. She exhaled, as if this topic was inflicting pain. “You’ve omitted some critical details.”
“Like what?” I asked. My hand moved to the nape of her neck.
“You’re being obtuse,” she murmured. “Your entire family goes to Mexico for the holidays. I know this because Lauren’s told me all about it, and Matt went with her last year.” She met my blank stare, and raised me an eye roll. “And they’re going this year, too. I’m not interested in any part of that. No.”
“There will be plenty of pillow biting. Did I mention that?” Another eye roll. “Do you even have a reason? Or are you too busy glaring at me with all your hell fire?”
“I have several reasons,” she cried, knocking my hand from her neck. “First, my family is in Boston and my family has its own traditions. I took enough shit for ditching them this week—”
“And that’s exactly why you should spend a week with me in Mexico,” I interrupted, “where I’ll keep you drunk and naked.”
I fucking hated her brothers. Those lazy bastards dumped everything on Shannon. I wanted to sit each of them down and have a few words about how I expected them to treat their sister, and by words, I meant kicking the shit out of them until we reached an understanding.
“Yeah, being surrounded by your parents, Wes, Lauren, and Matt sounds like the perfect time to be drunk and naked,” she snorted. “We’re not talking about this anymore.”
“There will be moments when clothes are tolerated,” I said. “Few and far between, but they’ll exist, and you can hang with Judy, and tell her how much you love the blog. She will promote you to favorite in a fucking second. And you can give Wes shit about everything, because you can and I want to watch that.”
“What you’re talking about isn’t what we have going on,” she said, her hand circling the space between us.
“Let’s renegotiate the terms,” I said.
“You don’t want to negotiate with me,” she said.
“Maybe I do,” I said.
“Listen. I wouldn’t challenge you to a commando contest. You shouldn’t challenge me to a litigation duel.”
She continued sighing and murmuring about me losing my damn mind, and I returned my hand to her neck. She was tense, all tight, wiry muscles bunched between her shoulders, owed entirely to me messing up her universe again.
Her land mines were everywhere. Some I could spot, others were hidden, and all of them required caution. Patience.
And fuck me if patience wasn’t my middle name.
“Then let’s talk about some road head.”