Chapter Twenty

ETHAN

I pull into the parking lot at Lara’s apartment building, still tense from my dinner with my parents. By the time I got home, about an hour before, she’d sent me another text, saying that her dad was apparently trying some kind of legal shenanigans. We definitely need to talk about that, and about my parents too.

I find a guest parking spot and get out of my car, heading up to Lara’s unit as quickly as I can. When I get to the door she answers almost as soon as I’m done knocking, looking flushed and almost flustered.

“What happened?” I follow Lara into the apartment and close the door behind me, locking it automatically. Lara goes into the kitchen and pours herself a glass of wine.

“Dad is off his rocker,” she says shortly. “Do you want some? Or a beer?”

“How much wine have you had?”

Lara rolls her eyes. “This is my first glass,” she says. She raises an eyebrow, silently repeating her first invitation.

“I’ll have a beer, thanks.”

She gets me one out of the fridge and hands it to me before taking a big sip of her glass of wine.

“Dad is still blaming you for the accident, first of all,” she says, walking in the direction of the living room. Lara sits down heavily and shakes her head in disbelief.

“I’d kind of gotten that impression,” I say. If I’m honest, I blame myself too, even if there’s no possible way I can think of to have avoided the accident, and Alexis’ death from it. The fact that I was driving haunts me still.

“And he’s apparently been talking to some kind of lawyer who thinks he has a case for me to get full custody of Riley, which, by the way, I still don’t even want,” she says, adding the second part quickly with a hasty look in my direction.

“I know you don’t,” I say, sitting down on the couch about a foot away from her. Lara sighs and half-throws herself backwards on the couch, looking for a moment exactly like she did when we were in high school together. In spite of being the good kid who got the great grades, Lara locked horns with her parents more than once, and seeing her in the middle of a fit of temper like the one she’s in right now is pretty damn familiar.

“I told him that if he can’t manage to keep his mouth shut about you, I’m going to keep Riley out of his life, and I’m going to be out of his life too,” Lara tells me. She sighs and takes another sip of her wine.

“That’s a pretty damn bold stance to take,” I say appreciatively. I think about my parents pressing me about Lara and Nathan and what they might be up to, what scheme they might have come up with, and I almost feel ashamed of them for thinking that Lara’s even capable of meditating a scheme like that.

“It’s the only stance I feel like I could take,” Lara says.

“I still appreciate it,” I tell her, raising my beer to her and taking a sip.

“There’s no reason for you to be out of Riley’s life,” Lara points out.

“I’m sure your dad just… he’s trying to work out how to feel about everything, you know?”

Lara raises an eyebrow at me and sips her wine. “How ironic is it that you’re the one arguing in his favor when he apparently hates you right now?”

I laugh. “I just guess I can see a little bit of what it’s like for him. He’s lost his wife, who died with her daughters still not speaking. Now he’s lost his elder daughter, too, and he’s alone, you know?”

Lara sighs. “I’ve been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt for that reason,” she says. She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “After tonight though, I think I need to be firm with him.”

“You really think he’s serious?” I hadn’t even really believed that, not when my parents brought it up and not even when Lara began texting me about her father going off the rails.

“He’s talking to lawyers. That’s serious enough,” Lara says firmly.

“As long as you’re not going along with it, it’s probably not going to go all that far,” I point out. We both sit there silently for a few moments, and I can almost visibly see Lara calming down.

“It’s just frustrating,” she says quietly.

“That I can totally get. I have to say I wouldn’t have expected you to call me, though.” Lara smiles wryly and looks down into her glass of wine, half of it gone already.

“I couldn’t think of anyone else I could talk to about it, honestly,” she says, sighing.

“Still feeling lonely?” The idea that a woman as gorgeous as Lara could be lonely for any amount of time, when I know for a fact that all she’d have to do is crook her finger and give someone a little look and any straight single man with sense and the ability to see would come running, is almost hilarious to me.

“A little,” she admits. She takes another sip of her wine.

I take a longer pull of my beer. Just being around Lara like this, with both of us alone, is enough to remind me of not just what we were like as teenagers dating, but also of what kissing her recently had been like. In spite of her saying before that we can’t make good decisions for Riley together if things get physical between us, I haven’t been able to shake how exciting it had felt to kiss her, and how much I want to kiss her again.

“It’s lonely for me, too,” I say. I can’t quite look at Lara when I say it. It feels so pathetic to admit it. I know it’s not wrong for me to miss Alexis, and I do. I miss her at least some part of every hour of every day since she’s been gone. But more than that, in particular, I miss being with someone.

“We talked about this. We can’t get physical,” Lara says, as if she’s reading my mind.

I smile at her. “Why not? I mean, being serious, really thinking about it. Why not? What is getting physical going to really make happen?” I set down my beer and force myself to meet her gaze right on.

“It’s going to make everything complicated, and you know it,” Lara says.

“Why does it have to?” I shrug off that idea.

“Because we have history. And Alexis has only been dead for, like, five months. You’re not thinking straight.”

“All I know is that we’ve both had a frustrating night, and for once neither of us is taking care of Riley,” I point out.

“That doesn’t mean we should do anything,” Lara insists.

“You’re lonely and so am I. We’re both tense. Why not?” I lean in closer to her, and I see Lara tense up a little bit, but I can also see that she’s not exactly, at least on a purely physical level, against what’s happening between us.

“Because we shouldn’t,” Lara says, but she doesn’t sound convinced.

“If you can tell me right now, in all honesty, that you don’t want to, I’ll finish my beer, wish you a good night and go home,” I tell her.

The silence drags out between us for a long few seconds, and I start to think she’s actually going to tell me that she doesn’t want it, that I’ve misread all the cues I’ve gotten from her.

“It’s wrong and I shouldn’t,” Lara says quietly. “It’s wrong, but I want to.”

I don’t say anything. Instead I finish leaning in and kiss her, full on the lips. For just an instant Lara tenses, and the next second, when she begins kissing me back, I realize that it was in surprise, not because she’s going to tell me to stop. I feel her move on the couch slightly and open my eyes a crack to see she’s putting her wine glass aside so it doesn’t spill. After that we’re both involved, kissing each other more and more heavily.

I try to take it a little bit slow, to give Lara a chance to tell me to stop, or that she doesn’t want to go any further. I start with my hands on her waist, feeling the tension in her body, and then work up to her breasts gradually, over the top of her shirt. When Lara doesn’t stop me, I cup her breasts a little more obviously, giving them a quick squeeze.

It’s almost weird in a way. Memories flood back into my brain about what it had been like with Lara before, versus the subtle little changes that have happened to her body since, the little ways she’s more confident in kissing me or touching me. Her hands move over me in quick little movements, sliding down my chest and hesitating just a bit at my abdomen before dipping down to the front of my jeans. My cock has already started to throb, hardening from just kissing her and knowing that she might want more.

I get my hands up under her shirt, and Lara reaches down to tug my T-shirt free of my jeans. I can feel the heat of her body getting more and more turned on by the moment, even as she moans against my lips. After a few moments I get brave again and slip my hands around to Lara’s back, to unhook her bra under her shirt. She breaks away from my lips and I think she’s going to tell me to stop, but instead she pulls my T-shirt up along my body, and I realize she’s taking it off me altogether.

I make my own move, tugging Lara’s shirt up along her ribs, over her head. We both stop for just a second, looking at each other. I am almost certain that Lara is going to tell me we can’t go ahead, that we need to stop.

“Do you want me to stop, Lara?”

Lara thinks about this for a moment and then shakes her head.

“No, I want you,” she says.