I liked to think she’d known my father and Aunt Momo would marry even back then. She would have been happy for them.
Jake, I think, had never really understood all that his mother had done. I hadn’t until years and dozens of late-night talks over cups of tea later where Aunt Momo had cried at the kitchen table, letting her armor drop and showing me the grief she’d kept hidden all those years.
In some ways, she and I were closer than my mother and I had been. We had the adult relationship that Mom and I had never been given the chance to have.
The guy I assumed was Jake headed towards the parking lot at a good clip. I jogged to catch up with him. “Jake,” I yelled.
He stumbled, hesitating just long enough for me to catch up to him. I grabbed his arm and wheeled him around. If I was wrong, I’d apologize, but going from the guilty look on his face, I didn’t think I was.
“Jake?” I repeated quietly. I heard heavy breathing and running footsteps from behind me. A quick glance over my shoulder showed Danny a few feet behind me. He stared at Jake with a weird expression on his face.
“I’m sorry, you must have me confused with someone else,” the man who had to be Jake said.
I ignored his words and took his hand.
“No, don’t,” he said to someone over my shoulder. “It’s okay.”
I turned his wrist over. Just as I’d suspected, a constellation of freckles crept across the soft skin of the inside of his forearm. Three in a row and then two more pointing the way to his inner elbow. His personal partial big dipper. I’d kissed my way up that path more than once. I could still feel the slightly raised skin under my lips.
Unbidden, my thumb stroked the pulse in his wrist, bumping over the sinew and veins there.
Goosebumps rose on his skin and he shivered. “Eric,” he whispered.
I dropped his arm like it was on fire, and my eyes locked on his. Something clicked inside of me, and I realized I’d been subconsciously holding my breath, waiting for this moment ever since I’d arrived back in La Crosse. Running into Jake was inevitable and unavoidable, like gravity or a tornado or the heat death of the universe.
Jake tried for a casual grin but his eyes were wide, the whites showing around the golden-brown pupils like a scared horse. “Eric. Fancy meeting you here.”
I had a thousand things I wanted to say. What came out was, “What the fuck is wrong with your face?”
7 Carson
Of all the things I’d imagined Eric saying to me during our dramatic reunion, ‘what the fuck is wrong with your face’ was not one of them.
Danny laughed and tried to cover it with a cough when I glared at him.
“It’s an allergic reaction to the strawberries in the daiquiri,” I said. That was plausible. I was slightly allergic to strawberries. Personally, I was proud of myself for being able to form a complete sentence. My brain was mostly white noise as my body replayed the feel of his finger on my wrist. No one else had ever noticed my freckles. No one else had ever known my body the way he had all those years ago.
How could it be that seeing him still affected me that way? It was ridiculous.
To make everything that much worse, Eric was even more gorgeous as an adult than he’d been as a teenager. He’d been clean-shaven then. Now blond stubble outlined his square jaw and set off his full pink lips. His shoulders were broader, his thighs thicker, and the bubble butt only hockey could give even more glorious. I should know. I’d just spend hours staring at it as I’d stalked him over the green, green grass of Onalaska’s finest golf course.
And his hands. My god. Wide and strong and callused from years of hockey, I’d been obsessed with them. I’d loved how they’d felt on my skin. The first time he’d wrapped them around my cock, I’d come almost instantly. We’d both been shocked. I was mortified. He’d laughed, said cool, and jerked me until I was hard again. I was sixteen. It hadn’t taken that long.
As the years had passed, I’d chalked my near-obsession with him up to the rush of young love. That giddy feeling of wanting to spend every moment together. The urgent heat of lust. The way my stomach had dropped every time he’d looked at me. First love. I’d never felt anything even close to it since then, so I’d assumed that’s all it had been, puppy love.
Apparently, I’d been mistaken. He still got to me in the exact same way. Goddamn it.
But. But. If I wasn’t mistaken, I wasn’t the only one unaffected by this unexpected reunion. Sure, Eric was pissed. He wanted to yell at me, I could tell. Luckily, Eric would never make a scene in public.
Underneath his annoyance, however, was stunned disbelief. And possibly desire as his eyes ran over my body from head to toe and back again.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
A perfectly logical question. Quick, brain, an answer. “I was showing some clients around.”
He looked over at Leo and Davis and then back at me. His face had switched from anger to ‘don’t start with me, Jake,’ an expression of his with which I had once been intimately familiar. I hid a smile. That meant he wasn’t truly angry.
“Let me rephrase the question,” he said. “Were you seriously planning on being in town and not telling anyone?”
“No,” I said, relieved to be able to tell the truth. Though it might sound counter-intuitive, the more truth involved, the better the con. “I was going to call my mother. This was all very quickly planned. (Another truth.) “I didn’t know what our schedule was going to be.”
“Uh-huh. And were you going to call me?”
Was that a touch of hurt I saw in his eyes? “Of course, I was.”
We were attracting quite the audience.
“You must have recognized me on the golf course. You were behind us all day. You couldn’t say hello then?”
“It’s been fifteen years,” I said as if that were an explanation.
“You had to have recognized my father, at least. And I saw your mother and Sammy pass right in front of you.”
“I did recognize you,” I admitted.
“So why didn’t you say something?”
“I didn’t want to interrupt. You and Ryan seemed very cozy.” I tried to keep the rancor out of my voice.
His eyebrows rose and fell, and a corner of his mouth quirked up. “Jealous?”
I snorted. “As if.”
“I’m sure Ryan would be thrilled to see you.”
“Excuse me for not wanting to chat with fucking Ryan Kantor,” I said not even trying to hide my rancor now.
Who’s Ryan? Breck asked over the coms.
Beats me, Ridge said.
Boyfriend, I think, Danny added. At least he acted like it. He’s kind of a dick.
You don’t know the half of it, I said sub-vocally over the coms, covering my mouth with my hand and pretending to yawn.
Oh, man, this is awesome. I should have bought popcorn, Breck said.
Leo laughed.
“I was going to call you tomorrow,” I said. I probably would have. Definitely would have.
“Sure you were,” he said. “Did you know I was golfing in this thing?”
“Not until yesterday,” I admitted. “I’d hoped I might see you.”