CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Hey.” Jackson’s head appeared in the hole in the attic floor and he squinted at me. “So this is where you’re hiding.”
“Hiding is such a strong word.” I looked up from where I was sitting, cross legged on the floor, a dusty picture album spread over my lap. “How’d you find me?”
“You didn’t put the door down perfectly. There was a crack of light, and I decided to explore.” He kept climbing the ladder and made his way into the attic. He looked around, presumably for something to sit on, and finally gave up with a resigned sigh. He sat down on the floor next to me, dusting off his jeans gingerly.
A plastic bag hit the ground at my feet. I stared at it curiously. “What’s that?”
“Contraband I stole from the gathering downstairs.” He snatched the bag from my reach when I tried to grab it. “Irene is making everyone play charades and you’re missing it.”
“Such a shame.” I gave him a sweet look. “I always did have the worst timing.”
“I bet. Lane asked about you. Several times. She seemed desperate for escape.”
“When it comes to charades, it’s every woman for herself.”
“Maybe she’d like to know where you are.”
“You tell anyone where I went and old pictures and Christmas decorations won’t be the only thing we store up here.”
He tsked, shaking the bag at me. “I brought snacks. You’re going to want to keep me around.”
My eyes narrowed. “What’s your price?”
“Another kiss, maybe?”
I stared down at the album sightlessly, feeling the heat of his gaze on my neck. “There’s no one here to see. I’m not sure what the point would be.”
“Wow, I really must be losing my touch.” His mouth lifted. “Contrary to your belief, AJ, I’d like to kiss you once without someone watching.”
He didn’t sound like he was joking. When I looked up at him, those hazel eyes were trained on mine, and I realized he wasn’t joking at all. And suddenly that kiss on the beach was all I could think about. His mouth on mine, so close that our very breathing meshed with one another. Feeling the softness of his skin, the lush feel of his mouth…the way his nose touched mine briefly before we parted. On some level, I’d always known that kiss hadn’t exactly been pretend.
“Wow.” He nudged my shoulder. “Speechless? You?”
I blushed, barely resisting the instinctive urge to duck my head. “I think it would make things…complicated.”
“Complicated can be good.”
“Complicated can be complicated.”
“What does that even mean?”
What did I mean by that? I bit my lip, trying to think of words that would turn the jumbled thoughts in my head into unassailable logic. “It means that I’m not looking to get into a relationship right now. It means that the last man I thought might be someone special is now somewhere loving someone else. It means that the last man my mother thought was her forever love is now marrying someone else. It means that relationships suck. It means that—”
“Okay, okay. Jesus.” He looked a little stunned by my virulent response, and it was a few seconds before he spoke again. “I wasn’t suggesting that we get married. Haven’t you ever had…you know, that kind of friend?”
That kind of…oh. I blinked, owl-eyed, trying to process that kind of relationship aligned with my life. That kind of friend? The one who you slept with whenever the two of you felt like it? Friends with benefits, right?
I racked my brain, trying to come up with something and falling short. No, I’d never had that kind of friend. It wasn’t that I didn’t have needs or wants, I just didn’t believe in wasting my time. If I didn’t see a future with that person, something real, then what was the point? Sweaty, hot, raucous, up-against-the-walls kind of sex, but who’s counting?
“This is kind of out-of-the-blue,” I managed through a throat suddenly scratchy.
“Not for me it isn’t.”
“But…you never said…” I was losing the capability to form words. That was going to make my upcoming teleconference on Thursday interesting, to say the least. “When did you…when?”
“You want the exact moment when I realized I wanted to sleep with you? Jesus, AJ. How the hell am I going to know something like that?” He looked embarrassed as he rubbed the back of his neck in a self-conscious gesture. “I just do.”
Looking at him right then, it would have been so easy to give in, give in to what he was offering, give in to myself and all the things I’d been feeling for longer than I cared to admit. He did that move that never failed to make my heart leap. He leaned forward slightly, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “Just something to think about.”
Yeah, that was kind of the problem. Now I needed to stop thinking about it. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I finally managed.
“I don’t see why not.” He shrugged. “You like me. I like you. What’s the problem?”
“Just like that, huh? I don’t think—” Wait. My brow furrowed. “Aren’t you taking some things for granted here? Who said I liked you?”
“You, mostly. Especially when you stare at me in the morning.” His mouth twitched. “Or did you think I was sleeping all that time?”
I flushed. Guessed I wasn’t quite as careful as I thought I was. “I do not watch you in your sleep,” I lied. Might as well try to pretend I wasn’t a weirdo. “I think it would be easier if we…we should just keep things…”
He laughed softly. “I get it, AJ. I don’t need a fifty-page dissertation explaining why you don’t want to sleep with me.”
If only that was true.
In true Jackson fashion, he didn’t seem particularly offended. He reached into the bag and tossed me a pack of pretzels and a Capri Sun, and I swear, I might’ve given him a kidney right then. I realized I hadn’t eaten since my smoothie at the mall, and I was starving. Despite our initial conversation that could have made things rather awkward, we sat there in companionable silence, flipping through the album on my lap. The only sounds between us were rhythmic crunching and the crinkling sound that a Capri Sun made when you sucked it as dry as humanly possible.
Jackson finally confiscated mine, and I was able to breathe properly again.
“It’s so strange looking at actual pictures. Everything is so digital now, I can’t even remember the last time I held a paper photo in my hands. My God.” He pointed at one of the birthday pics. “Tell me those aren’t parachute pants.”
I flipped the page quickly, sending him a glare. “It was a different time.”
“You can say that again,” he said.
So I did. “It was a different time,” I stressed. “A time of large plastic, colorful earrings and teased bangs. And LA Gears.”
“Dear God.”
“They lit up, you know.”
“Mmhmm.” He reached over and pulled the page closer as if to get a better look at my fashion sins. He made a sound in his throat that I can only interpret as disbelief. “Are those Jordache jeans?”
I snapped the album closed in a poof of dust that sent him into a coughing fit. Undeterred, he reached into the chest and pulled out another, and handed it to me. “This one,” he demanded, reminding me of a child who wanted to read Where the Wild Things Are for the hundredth time.
I rolled my eyes good-naturedly like a parent who’d been asked to read it for the hundredth time, and opened it anyway. These pictures were older, some yellowed and fragile with age behind the protective plastic. There was another fashion-forward picture of Lane and I, rocking Mickey Mouse t-shirts, mugging by my father’s old passenger van. We’d used that van on our yearly jaunts to Disney World, and I didn’t know what I’d loved more—the third row that I’d had all to myself or the built-in card table where we’d played card games that only us kids knew the rules to.
I saw Jackson grinning at my picture, and possibly the height of my hair, and narrowed my eyes at him. “Not a word.”
“Hard to believe that was ever the look.”
“I don’t know if it was. I was always a few years behind what was in.” I paused, thinking about it. “Still am, actually.”
“You make your own trend,” he faux-consoled me.
“You want to play charades or what?”
He held up his hands in a pacifying manner. “All right. Jesus.”
We looked at pictures in silence as I flipped slowly. I paused, one of them catching my eye. It was strange, but when I pictured my mother, it was usually as she was when she passed. Forty-five and still beautiful, with good, smooth skin that she was obsessive about keeping moisturized, and life lines around her eyes and softly bracketing her mouth. Not like this.
In this picture, she couldn’t have been over twenty-five, wearing a rainbow-colored top and blue shorts that showed off long, tan legs. Her dark hair was lush and feathered within an inch of its life. Man, she was rocking that Farrah Fawcett hair pretty damn hard. It made me feel a little better about the giant, multi-tiered bangs I’d favored in middle school. She was standing with my father in front of some classic American muscle car, that probably wasn’t a classic at the time, and they were pointing at something out of the shot. Their legs were crossed as they leaned against the car, shoulder to shoulder. My father wore a grin that said he knew exactly what he had, and they looked so damned young. Carefree.
I touched a finger to the photo. Happy.
“You look like her.” Jackson’s shoulder bumped mine and I blinked. No telling how long I’d been staring at that window to the past.
“That’s what everyone says.” I flipped the page, moving on to the next set of photos, but I didn’t see a thing. Jackson was quiet beside me. Too quiet, and finally I sighed. “You might as well say whatever’s on your mind.”
His voice was soft when he finally spoke. “Avery, why are you up here?”
“Looking at pictures. My family…” I trailed off.
“Your family is downstairs.” His gaze was truthful, but not unkind. “And you’re so stuck in the past that you’re missing the present.”
“Sometimes the present isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“And sometimes the ghosts that occupy your mind take up so much space that you there’s no room for anything else.” There he went again, tucking that hair behind my ear. “Even happiness.”
“Who said I wasn’t happy?”
He withdrew that feather-light touch and I felt the loss acutely. “Well, you certainly don’t look like you’re enjoying yourself.”
“Don’t shrink me, Jackson,” I said without heat. I knew my own issues. I’d worked very hard at nurturing all my little insecurities into crippling issues. It hadn’t been easy, but with years of hard work ignoring all the things that bothered me, I’d achieved a sort of ersatz nirvana.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” he said.
I wanted to. Didn’t that count for something? “Let me guess. You want me to move on or something else equally as healthy.” I sighed. “It’s not all that easy.”
“I know it’s not.”
The inflection in his voice made me look up. Yeah, he certainly did. The pain in his eyes was the pain of someone who had lost…lost someone so critical to your existence that you weren’t sure you’d be able to breathe right ever again. When you missed that person so much that you weren’t sure if you cared that your breathing is ragged in your chest, and each breath felt like your last. I knew that pain.
He understood that strange feeling that came over you when you went to the places you’d gone before, doing the things you’d done before, and nothing felt the same…mostly because you weren’t the same, and you never would be. Losing someone you loved did something to your soul. It changed who you were irrevocably, and I had to say, not for the better.
What were some of those lovely phrases people always loved to say? Life goes on. Move on. Everyone has to die. All helpful, true things that I had no real response to, mostly because I found it impossible to articulate why my insides felt like they were restructured differently, because it was hard to breathe. Why I took refuge in humor because sometimes reality was a little too hard. Looking at Jackson right then, I knew I didn’t have to say anything.
Because he got it.
That rat bastard.
His voice was soft enough to barely disturb the silence. “AJ, what is it you want?”
I would have told him anything at that moment. And then, because there was only one thing you could do when you’ve told someone all your secrets, I’d have to stuff his body in the trunk over there in the corner that still held the majority of Lane’s Cabbage Patch dolls.
What did I want? I wanted him, and now, it wasn’t even all sexual. And that was terrifying.
I closed the album and stuck it on top of a teetering stack with the others. I cleared my throat. “Right now? I want to get out of this stuffy attic and do something fun.” I stood, dusting off my jeans briskly, and then held out my hand to help Jackson up. “I’m supposed to be showing you a good time.”
He raised an eyebrow at my outstretched arm. “I’m fine.”
“I’m not,” I admitted, my voice a little higher than usual.
He stared at me for a moment as the silence stretched on, elastic and expressive. I saw the exact moment he realized I was done sharing for the day as his mouth quirked on one side. He accepted my outstretched hand, and I helped pull him to his feet. The simple touch of his hand in mine didn’t help dispel the tension in the air. And I couldn’t help thinking about his casual offer.
It would certainly help clear my mind. A couple hours of thinking about nothing else but the feel of his body against mine, sweaty skin sliding against sweaty skin…being held down by his weight on me, with the sound of his harsh breathing in my ear. I dropped his hand quickly, and looked away as he stretched that long, lean body.
And the flutter in my stomach was back. You will not have sex in the attic. You will not. It wasn’t quite as good a mantra as nam-myoho-renge-kyo, but maybe if I repeated it enough, I’d stop picturing it.
“So what’s next?” he asked.
“You ever been paddle boarding?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“Then that’s what we’re doing.”
“Sounds fun.” He headed for the ladder. “Should we tell the others?”
I thought about it for a minute before deciding that yes, I could be magnanimous. I would rescue the people from Irene’s charades-a-palooza. “Yeah, they might like to come.”
“Might?” He grinned. “Art was two minutes from chewing off his own arm. You want the room first or me?”
“First?” I blinked. “For what?”
“To change.”
Oh. I stood there, slightly flummoxed. I’d forgotten that paddle boarding meant seeing Jackson in swim trunks, that ode to six pack abs on display. Hmph. Suffice to say, I’d certainly had better ideas.
Realizing he was still waiting for an answer, I smiled weakly. “You go first.”
As he disappeared down the ladder, I began stacking the photo albums back in the boxes I’d pulled them from. I’d still take Mount Abs over cute, shy guy in the attic any day. Anything was better than sitting here together, knee to knee in the overheated attic, dust motes floating around our faces, surrounded by my memories and quieted by his understanding gaze. AJ, what do you want? Not that. That guy was addictive. Understanding. A destroyer.
Suddenly, Jackson’s head popped back up through the hole. “You have any sunscreen?”
“In my purse, I think.”
He gave me a thumbs up and descended again.
Oh goody. The mental image altered itself just that quickly, and now those fantastically cut abs were glistening with sunscreen. I sighed.
Fan-fucking-tastic.