He sat down on the edge of my bed.
“So you couldn’t sleep?” I asked.
Those bare feet were flat on my carpet, his forearms resting on his knees. He cocked his head up, this pensive twist to his full lips as he drew his eyes into tight slits, studying me. I got the distinct feeling a decision was being made. Finally he spoke, honesty laced in his words. “No, I can sleep, Aly. I’d just rather not.”
As simple as it was, somehow I knew he was sharing a sliver of the secrets he kept. This was Jared’s way of opening up to me.
I brought my sketch pad back to my lap as some sort of security blanket, and tucked my knees up higher to my chest so I could open it to my last drawing and still keep it hidden. Keeping my eyes on the page, I took a chance. “Why?”
My attention flicked to his face, shot back to the pad just as fast. Instinctively my hands went to work, and the sound of my soft strokes covered the mild discomfort between us.
Jared sighed, shifted, threaded his fingers together between his knees. He stared at the floor. “Because when I close my eyes, I see things I don’t want to see.” Low, humorless laughter escaped his mouth. “They are always there, Aly, but when I close my eyes” – he released a ragged breath – “the images I see are, like… vivid.” He frowned deeply, as if shielding himself from them now. “Real. So fucking real… like it’s happening right then and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
My spirit thrashed as if I was somehow sharing in his pain. I swallowed, refusing to allow myself to speak because I knew right then what Jared really needed was someone to listen.
Lifting his chin in my direction, Jared seemed to contemplate my pencil, his head gently bobbing as if absorbing the movement of the strokes of my hand. I licked my lips and carried on as if I weren’t nailed to the bed by his penetrating gaze.
“I bet what I see is just as real to me as whatever the pictures you keep hidden in the pages of those books are to you.”
Shock stilled my hand, and my eyes snapped up to him.
Pain wrapped around his features and deepened the lines that seemed to be permanently etched between his eyebrows. I was caught in it, and couldn’t look away.
My voice was soft. “I draw and you wish you could erase.”
His lids dropped closed, stayed that way for a moment, his jaw clenching and unclenching, before he opened them to me. “You create and I destroy.”
I slowly shook my head, my words hoarse. “That’s not what I meant.”
Sighing, he turned his attention back to his feet. “It doesn’t mean it’s not the truth.”
Silence settled over us for a few minutes, and I could feel the shift, the way he’d tucked our words somewhere inside himself, as if maybe I’d earned a token of his trust.
Then he looked at me with an amused smile, gesturing to my sketch pad with his chin. “Can I see?”
Shaking my head, I buried a smile by biting my lip. “You should know better than that, Jared.”
A throaty chuckle filled my room, and he lay back on my bed. My toes were pressed into the covers just at his side. And I loved it, loved that he wanted to be here with me, loved that what I saw in him was kind.
Even if he couldn’t see it himself.
He wove his fingers together and rested them on his chest, the incongruous numbers tattooed across his knuckles meshed. He sat very still, and seemed to drift away in his thoughts.
I kept my attention on my page, until I felt the gravity of his stare burning into my forehead, like I could sense a pull. Drawn to him. I always had been.
When I turned to him, the grin on his face was something I almost didn’t recognize because it’d been so long since I’d seen it. But I had, so many times before. I’d witnessed it in the carefree boy who had meant everything to me.
His blue eyes danced as they flitted from my sketch pad to my face. “It used to drive me fucking crazy that you wouldn’t let me see what you kept hidden inside those books.”
I gasped when he suddenly moved. He twisted onto his knees in almost a crouch, his chin tucked and his gaze peeking at me from just above the top margin of my book. Predatory. As if at any second he was going to pounce and wrestle it from me. My breath caught. Tingles sped under the surface of my skin, and he hadn’t even touched me.
My hands tightened around the edges of my sketch pad like a vise.
“And you know what, Aly?” His eyes darted everywhere, absorbing, taking in the lines of my face, my mouth, my hands, the pad I clutched to my chest, before they fixed firmly on my own. “It still drives me fucking crazy.”
Strength bunched in the muscles rippling along his shoulders, but in his movements there was this playfulness, so much like I remembered. An echo of our childhood sounded in my ear, the way he’d pestered and begged me to let him see, but never forced me into anything I didn’t want to do.
At that time it was because I was embarrassed and afraid he might make fun of me. I didn’t want him to see the inexperience in my drawings. Now it was because it’d be like slicing my heart open and exposing everything I wasn’t ready for him to see.
It’d scare him as much as it scared me.
Shock stunned me when he abruptly grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me down, forcing me flat on the bed. The sketch pad slid off my lap, facedown on the sheets.
Suddenly I was staring up at Jared’s gorgeous face as he hovered over me. He straddled my waist, and I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, could only feel the blood coursing through my veins and pounding in my ears.
His nose was an inch from mine, his hands resting on both sides of my head, but he was everywhere – everywhere – sinking into my consciousness and my spirit.
Then he smirked, all cute and smug, and my eyes went wide when the realization hit me. “Oh my God, Jared Holt, don’t you even think about it. Don’t you dare,” I begged in a whisper, my voice strained with need and a little bit of old childhood fear.
He knew exactly how to get me.
“What?” he asked with feigned innocence, before his fingers began to tap at the center of my chest on my breastbone with his index fingers. His legs cinched around my sides to keep my arms pinned to the bed. This had been Christopher and Jared’s favorite form of torture.
I bucked up, trying to throw him from my body, or maybe I was trying to bring him closer; I couldn’t tell. “Jared… stop… Oh my God, you’re such an ass.”
I made an attempt at flailing my arms. His thighs held them down. Held me down.
Oh my God.
He laughed, quiet and low. “You’ve tortured me for years. Don’t you think it’s only fair I pay you back a little?”