The woman sitting beside him, solemnly waving an empty Pringles tube in the air like it was a lighter at a concert.
“What are you doing?” he demanded, mostly because he couldn’t fucking wait to hear it. He wanted inside her confetti-strewn head every chance he got. It was the only foreign country he could remember wanting to visit.
Now, when had that happened?
Maybe on Wednesday, when he’d asked what she was muttering to herself as they walked down the hall, and she’d said she was ranking his signature scowls from 1 (Disdainful Glare) to 10 (Torturous Stare of Imminent Death).
Or maybe it had started before then. He wasn’t sure, suddenly. So it was a relief when she scattered his thoughts with her response. “I’m getting into the solemn spirit of ‘Hometown Glory.’ Great pick, by the way. Hey, do you think anyone’s ever gotten their dick stuck in a Pringles tube?”
Christ, the shit she came out with. And what a fuckup he must be, because when she said this barely sexual nonsense so matter-of-factly—when she made silly dick jokes or winked after outrageous double entendres—he always found himself shifting in his suddenly tight jeans.
Like now.
He leaned over to grab a glass of water from the side table, which had the added benefit of hiding his groin from her view. Not that he was hard. That would be ridiculous. If he could maintain his control while lying in bed with her—while the moon turned her skin silver-dark again, and her T-shirt (TOO SOUR TO BE YOUR SWEETIE) had ridden up to reveal the swell of her bare belly—then he could maintain his control over a question about Pringles.
He sipped his water, relished the cool slide down his throat, and settled beside Eve again. “I think anyone who’s big enough to get stuck in a Pringles tube has better places to put it,” he said finally.
“Jacob.” She turned sparkling eyes in his direction. “You absolute size queen.”
“Er . . . what is—?”
Eve waved an urgent hand. “Shh, shh, I like this part.” She grabbed her phone and turned up the music. A dreamy expression took over her face and all the breath trickled out of her. She’d been doing this periodically—shutting him up at the crescendo of this or that song, closing her eyes and humming along like she felt it. Like every note ran through her blood and some hit her heart harder than others. Since Jacob could be obedient, when he felt like it, he shut his mouth and watched her in the moonlight—watched her tip her head back, watched those wide, warm eyes slide shut, watched a dreamy little smile curve her lips.
What he didn’t expect was for her to sing instead of hum.
He’d heard Eve sing before. Of course he had. She sang all the time, especially when she wasn’t wearing her AirPod—repetitive snatches of this chorus or that refrain, tongue-twister lines she repeated over again, instruments she imitated with unnerving accuracy. If anyone asked him, Hey, does Eve Brown sing? he’d roll his eyes and say, Only all the fucking time.
But he would’ve been wrong. Because apparently, all those other times, she hadn’t been singing at all: she’d been playing. She’d been messing around. She’d been entertaining herself absent-mindedly, kind of like a knife-wielding assassin spinning a blade harmlessly between her fingers instead of filleting you alive in twenty seconds.
She wasn’t playing this time.
This time, Eve opened her mouth and moonlight came out. Like the silver-dark of her skin, like pearlized smoke, like the siren he’d heard that night in the garden because for God’s sake, Jacob, she’d been the voice in the garden, obviously. The voice so sweet and sharp at the edges, so husky and effortlessly strong—strong enough to easily seem fragile—that he’d assumed it was just his imagination.
She drew out the last, long note in the chorus like silk between her fingertips, and then she gave a breathless little laugh, opened her eyes, and took a bite out of her Mars Bar like nothing had happened. If Jacob was cool, he’d probably act like nothing had happened, too. Jacob was not cool.
“What the shit was that?”
She chewed chocolate and caramel and wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know. Nothing. You’re not going to be weird about it, are you?”
“Do you know who you’re talking to?”
She snorted, then slapped a hand over her mouth. “Look what you’re doing. I almost spat Mars Bar at you, and then you might have died. You might have gone into antigerm shock and died.”
He kind of wished the thought of her spit freaked him out. If it did, the idea of swapping various bodily fluids with her might stop lurking at the edge of his consciousness.
And shit, now he’d faced the thought, he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there anymore: he wanted to kiss Eve Brown. Very, very badly. In a few different places.
But not while she was eating a Mars Bar. A man had to have his limits.
You will not kiss her at all. Sensible, starched Jacob rose from the ashes of himself and corrected tonight’s giddy, contact-high, Eve-addicted Jacob with a stern look and a sharp tone. There would be no kissing. It wasn’t proper or practical and there were ten thousand issues of consent, and anyway, what would happen after the kiss? Jacob knew what he’d want to happen: when he liked a woman enough to kiss her, he liked that woman enough to keep her, too.
But there were social scripts to be observed beyond fondness > physical contact > emotional commitment, and even if those scripts had never felt natural to Jacob, he’d learned them well enough to copy. So. No kissing and claiming. It wasn’t fashionable, and if you did it too quickly, you wound up with a woman who was more interested in what you could do with your tongue than she was in your sudoku skills or your conversation. The kind of woman who left.
None of which mattered in this situation, because a man simply could not claim his chef. Aside from anything else, it would take him straight back to the ten thousand issues of consent.
“Oh dear,” Eve was saying, “you have. You have gone into shock and died.”
Jacob realized he had been silent for far too many seconds. “Stop talking rubbish. When were you going to tell me you could . . .” He trailed off for a moment, uncomfortable with every description of her voice that came to mind. They all seemed too gushing, or too distant, or too inadequate to describe a talent that felt embedded into her soul. He didn’t want to treat this as a party trick when, apparently, singing as if she should be on a stage was just Eve. In the end, he vaguely motioned to her throat and finished awkwardly, “When were you going to tell me you could do that?”
“When it became something that matters, which—oh, look, it hasn’t.”
“Eve,” he said, “everything about you matters.” And then he briefly but seriously considered ripping out his own tongue.
Chapter Thirteen
Everything about you matters.
Eve might have fainted—might have swooned into a pile of dust, kind of like she did when she reached the romantic declaration part of her favorite horny fanfics—if it weren’t for the rest of Jacob’s little speech.
“We’re friends now,” he said. “Friends share, correct?”
Ah. Yes. Friendship. That was how she’d ended up lying in bed beside him under a gorgeous night sky, her skin fizzing with the electricity of his quiet, contained nearness and her mind veering into forbidden territory every five minutes. Friendship. Obviously. Hm.