Just when I think I might be able to get the toothy grin under control, the bathroom door swings back open and Hayden steps out in my clothes. I dissolve into giggles, and his white smile flashes in the dark as he stalks toward me.
“I’m glad this amuses you,” he says.
The shirt fits him all right, but the pants are capri length and tight. He looks completely absurd, and also incredibly sexy.
“Who knew you were hiding all of that behind those fancy full-length pants of yours,” I tease as he comes closer, lantern swinging in his hand.
“Is this punishment?” he deadpans. “Is it my penance for not calling sooner?”
“Don’t think of it as your punishment,” I say. “Think of it as my reward.”
Another flicker of smile, or something very like it. I reach for him and he lets me pull him toward me, ring my arms around his waist, and look up into his face.
He brushes my wet bangs from my eyes, tucking my hair behind my ear. “Why didn’t you answer?”
“My phone died,” I say. “I would’ve. I promise.”
He lowers the lantern onto the coffee table beside us and cups my face in his hands, kissing me again, once. “I’m so sorry.”
“Hayden, no,” I say, but before I can go on, he tugs me toward the couch.
“I want to tell you something,” he says.
“Okay…” Is this where he confesses something terrible? That he actually does have a girlfriend? Or that somehow this has all been to sabotage me?
My usually overactive imagination refuses to bite. I really do trust him. Still, that doesn’t totally eliminate the worry growing in my belly at his heady silence.
He runs a hand over his mouth as he considers his word choice. “No one knows this,” he begins.
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” I insist, reaching for his hand.
He knots his long fingers through mine. “I told you that when I was a kid I felt like I had to be perfect. But there’s more to it than that.”
“Like what?” I ask.
He blows out a long breath and blinks hard a few times, like he’s working himself up to something. “It wasn’t just me. My mom…she had pretty severe depression and anxiety, when we were younger. I guess my dad knew, but no one else really did. And when I was in high school…” He trails off, coughs. “It got really bad, really suddenly. Or I don’t know, maybe she just suddenly stopped hiding it from us. She almost overdosed, and she had to go get inpatient treatment for a while. My dad was in the middle of a campaign and…she asked us to lie about it. Pretend she went to help her parents for a couple of months.”
“What?” I crawl across the small gap on the couch, lifting his other hand into mine, his fingers still chilled from the cold rain. “Hayden, I’m so sorry.”
“I understood why she didn’t want strangers knowing,” he says. “If it had gotten out, it honestly would’ve been big news in my hometown, and it wouldn’t have been treated sensitively. But the thing that bothered me was that…until then, I had no idea what she was dealing with. She always acted…fine.”
I lift his hands to my lips, breathing warmth into them. “That’s not your fault,” I tell him. “You can’t tell what’s going on with a person just by looking at them.”
“I know,” he says. “But I always felt like…if she weren’t trying to be so perfect all the time, if she didn’t need to look so happy…maybe we would’ve known before it got that bad. Pretending everything’s fine only works for so long. And I don’t know. It freaks me out a little, that I could…that I could feel like this, about someone who’s good at pretending to be fine. That I could miss it, if you’re actually not. It was about me. Like you said.”
His words crack something open in me. I climb into his lap, winding my arms around his neck. “I’m sorry,” I say. “That all makes sense.”
His arms curl around my back, holding me to him. “I was rude,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
I touch his jaw, angle his face toward mine. “One of us is going to have to stop this, or we’ll be apologizing all night.”
He kisses me again, this time a little faster, rougher. He pulls back to rest his forehead against mine. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, teasing, and I laugh into him, kiss him again, soft and tender this time. His hand rises to cradle the back of my head. Both of mine skate up his jaw. I pitch my weight forward into my knees, on either side of his hips, and shift myself into him, letting the kiss deepen.
He reaches for the bottom of my sweatshirt, and I draw back to let him lift it up my torso and over my head. He drops it on the floor, whispering something under his breath when he realizes I wasn’t wearing anything under it. He lets his large hands skim up from the base of my bare stomach to my chest, and I hold my breath, anticipating the moment his palms will cup me, scared they won’t.
My head tips back on a sigh at the light contact when they finally do, chills erupting from the waistband of my pants up to the crown of my head. He leans in slowly, kisses one side of my collarbone, then the other. “Yours too,” I whisper scratchily, and his eyes tilt up to mine in the dark.
I reach for the hem of the shirt I loaned him, and he straightens, letting me slowly slide it up him, the heels of my hands tracing his warm skin as they go. My thighs go hot and liquid at the texture of his skin.
He lifts his arms and lets me push the shirt over his head, leaving his chest bare in the mix of soft candlelight and the lantern’s harsh glow. “I wish I could see you better,” I whisper, letting my hands rove down him now that the shirt’s out of the way.
“Me too.” His voice is low and hoarse. Gingerly, he pulls me back to him, our bodies melding together. The low sound that moves through him makes my blood vessels start singing. The pressure between my thighs builds into an ache. I roll myself against him, and he returns the favor, a white-hot streak of pleasure searing through me at the firm feeling of his chest pushing into mine. His hands climb down beneath my ass, angling me where he wants me. I roll my hips against him again, the friction pulling a small, breathy sound from me. He wraps me around him as he kisses the side of my neck, lets his mouth move lower.
“What about your rules?” I say hazily. “Aren’t we breaking them?”
“Bending,” he says roughly. “Not breaking.” He takes my nipple into his mouth, and I almost start crying. I slide my hand into his way-too-tight sweatpants, and to my incredible relief, he lets me. “God, Alice,” he groans against my chest, his teeth scraping over me again. “It’s not enough.”
I move myself against him harder, but he’s right: It’s not nearly enough. I want to taste him. I tell him as much and wind up on my back on the couch, him crawling down me, yanking my sweatpants down my hips as I buck up from the couch. His hands squeeze my bare thighs, and I writhe toward him as he presses his parted lips to the inside of one leg. He licks me once through my underwear, then sits back to pull my pants the rest of the way off, settling himself between my thighs. For a few seconds, we’re mindless with hunger, my thighs wrapped around his hips, our mouths colliding, his hands clutching every bare part of me and mine scratching down the wide expanse of his back.
“These pants are about to rip,” he half laughs into my mouth.
“Then take them off,” I suggest.
Instead he kisses his way down my body, lets his mouth chart a slow, purposeful path along the edge of my underwear, before finally dipping his tongue under the fabric. I press up into him, and he slides the waistband down, bringing his mouth back to me as soon as he can. My hands twist into his hair, my lungs struggling over each breath as the flat of his tongue presses against me, and colors blaze against the backs of my eyelids at the slow, sure movement of his mouth. His grip on my thighs is firm but gentle, careful, like I’m not only delicate but valuable, and it feels as if something inside me is overflowing.
I want to say his name, to tell him how good this feels, how good he is, how much I missed him in the last two days, and how easy it would be to love him, if he’d let me, but I can barely breathe as the pleasure mounts, and with it so much affection for him that it couldn’t possibly fit in my body.
And then it all peaks, breaks, and I cry out raggedly, waves of sensation rolling over and through me, dragging me under like a riptide I would gladly give myself over to.
He crawls up me as the final shock waves are settling, kisses me deep, our hands wound into each other’s hair, our skin slick with sweat between us, his heart hammering a million miles per minute against my ribs.
“I want you,” I whisper into his ear, wrapping my thighs around him as he shivers against me.
He slides off me, onto his side, his arms pulling me tight to him. “If you still feel that way in a week and a half,” he says, his voice rough, splintering from restraint.
“I will,” I insist, touching his sweat-dampened face. I can barely see his features in the dark, just a splash of light in the corner of one eye.
“You don’t know that,” he says, tenderly running his fingertips over one side of my jaw.
“What do you think is going to happen?” I ask.
Under his breath, nearly a whisper, he says, “I think if I get this job, you’re going to break my fucking heart.”
Tears sting my eyes, and my breath catches. “No,” I say softly, trying to pull him back to me, kissing his left cheek, then his right, then his forehead. “Hayden, no.”
“You can’t know,” he says softly, almost pleading. “This is a bad position to be in, Alice.”
“I don’t know,” I tease quietly. “It was working out all right for me.”
His face remains serious. “I know you think you’ll be fine, no matter what happens,” he grates out. “But I need you to be sure. I don’t want to do this and have you hate me in two weeks.”
“I won’t,” I whisper, kissing the corner of his mouth again. He lets out a slow exhale, his eyes closing and hand cupping the back of my head, relaxing a little but not completely.
I can tell he doesn’t believe me.
He clears the gravel from his throat. “Maybe I should just drop out.”
I snap up onto my elbow. “Absolutely not,” I say. “I’d never forgive you if you did that.”
He blinks up at me, runs a hand up over the back of my arm. “Okay, okay,” he says quietly. “Then what do we do? Because we have less than two weeks until one of us goes home, and there’s no winning for me here. If I get the job, you’re not going to want anything to do with me—”
“That’s not true,” I cut in.
“And if I don’t, then I’m going back to New York, and you’re here, and it doesn’t matter anyway. So what are we doing here?”
“I don’t know,” I admit.
He laugh-groans, slings one hand over his eyes. I pry it away from them, kiss the center of his palm, and he nestles closer. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I tell him.
“No, I mean…” He huffs. “I mean, we barely know each other. And I feel like—like…I don’t know.”
“Tell me.” I take his face between my hands. He sets his over them.
“All I ever want is to be around you,” he says raspingly. “It’s not just sex. I mean, I do want to have sex with you.”
My limbs warm at the suggestion, but he continues. “But that’s only a part of it. This is different. It’s…” He looks at me, hopeful or maybe expectant, like he thinks I might have the words that are evading him.
I don’t. I’m so overcome that the closest I can get is a threadbare “I know.”
He smooths my hair away from my eyes again, kisses my temple so gently I could cry, and then his stomach gurgles, volcanically loud, and I descend into laughter. “Hungry?”
“A little,” he admits. “I was in a hurry to get here, before the storm got worse.”
“Come on.” I sit up, grabbing my sweatshirt at the sudden rush of cold air that hits me from all sides. “I’ll make you a snack.”
