Fletcher sighed. “Yeah. Then I realized he was doing me a big favor and knew I had to let it go.”
She nodded and turned to rest her forehead on her knees again. “I’m glad you did. The important thing is the peppermint essential oil. The exact brand doesn’t matter.”
“Good. I’m glad this will work.”
He removed his hand and she heard him uncap the bottle and then his hands rubbing together. She gave a little shiver, anticipating his touch.
His hands were back a moment later sliding up and down her back.
She sighed. “Yes.”
He gave a half-groan, half-chuckle. “Damn, I like doing anything that makes you sound like that.”
“Then just keep going.”
The scent of peppermint filled the air around them as his hands, hot and competent, stroked up and down her back in a gentle, even rhythm.
After a couple minutes of that, he said, “You have to tell me if you want me to do more.”
“Run your thumbs along the top of my shoulders,” she instructed, feeling warm contentment seep into her muscles.
He ran his hands up to her shoulders and then slid the pads of his thumbs along the tops of her shoulder blades.
“You can go a little harder,” she coached.
For the next twenty minutes or so, she guided Fletcher through massaging her neck and shoulders, pressing into the knots, soothing the tension away.
When she finally pulled in a deep breath and said, “Thank you, I feel amazing,” she felt him take a similar, contented deep breath.
She moved to pull her shirt back on, but when she started to shift away, Fletcher’s arms came around her and cuddled her back against his chest.
“Is this okay?” He asked against her ear.
“So okay. Are you comfortable?”
“With you against me? I don’t know about comfortable,” he said, his tone teasing. “But I feel really good.”
She smiled and settled against him more fully, letting her head fall back against his shoulder again. His arms folded over hers and rested on her stomach.
“Yeah, I can feel you’re not totally comfortable,” she teased.
He was partially hard, pressing against her lower back. He gave a little growl and shifted slightly. “Ignore it.”
It was reminiscent of what he’d said in Vegas.
“I don’t want to ignore your reaction to me.”
His thumb was stroking back and forth over the back of her hand. “You don’t have to ignore it. I want you to know that you affect me. Just walking into a room, just smiling, just sending me a text affects me,” he said after a moment. “Tonight’s not a good night though.”
Her heart flipped. God, she loved all of that. But he was right about tonight. “No, I’m not really in the mood for sex. But I really like being close to you like this too. Physically, without it being sexual.” She shifted slightly to look up at him. “You were right. We did skip steps. Going straight into sex without making out first did jump ahead. Now I feel closer to you. Which is weird. I’ve always felt like I couldn’t be closer to anyone than I already was to you.”
She felt his arms tighten around her in a little hug. “I know what you mean. But we do have a huge head start.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I like that.”
After a few minutes, Fletcher said, “You know how I said that I’m aware of being fond of grand gestures and really good at sweeping in at the last minute? And how I figured that out after your grandpa’s funeral?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“I…” He cleared his throat. “I’ve realized that I was hoping that Sophia was past her ‘middle’. That all I had to be was the fun teacher and I’d get her back to school and back to normal and she’d be okay. But…” He took a deep breath. “I’ve realized since you and I talked that I’m a part of the middle with her too.”
Jordan nodded. “Yeah. You are.”
“And then it occurred to me last night, with you, that maybe I have done some middles after all.”
She frowned slightly. “Of course you have.”
“I don’t know about ‘of course’. I think they’ve been accidental. But I guess I was around for some of the middle parts of your migraines without realizing it. And, while I don’t love not knowing what to do, and not being able to fix it right at that moment, I want you to know that I’m getting okay with the idea of doing middle work too.”
Jordan felt her stomach swoop. That was sweet. And she was so glad that he realized that it wasn’t the end of the world if he didn’t have a solution at the very moment something was going wrong for her. But if he thought that he was no good at anything other than grand gestures and coming in at the end to tie things up in a pretty bow, that was definitely partly her fault.
Confession time.
“You’ve been doing more than just the big endings for a long time,” she said. “And not just with the headaches.”
“I’ve actually kind of tried to stay away from the middle stuff.”
“Yeah.” She took a deep breath. “Which is why I’ve let you think that you always came in and fixed everything and that was it.”
He hesitated. “What do you mean?”
She tightened her hold on his arms and said quickly, “You didn’t actually teach me everything about geometry.”
There was a long beat. Then he said, “Go on.”
“Okay, all of the stuff you helped me with was huge. You helped me get over my test anxiety. And you definitely helped me understand a few things better. I went from a C to a B- in that class thanks to you.”
“You got an A- in geometry.”
“Right. Someone else helped me understand the rest of the stuff I didn’t quite get.”
There was a much longer pause this time. She felt the tension in his body and knew that, though geometry in high school seemed like a small thing now, this was going to be a big deal.
“Was it Jason?”
She blew out a breath. Well, at least he would be happy about one thing—it had not been Jason.
“No.”
“Then who?”
But he was going to hate this. “Zeke.”
“Zeke? My brother?”
She winced, but nodded. “He saw me after school one day after I had just done badly on another test. He grabbed my book and read through it that night and the next day told me that he could explain it to me. And he did. I don’t know why, but he was the only one who could make some of it make sense.”
“So my brother, who is two years younger than us, and hadn’t taken geometry at all, taught you geometry when I couldn’t?”
She sighed. “He’s a math geek, Fletcher. And there were just a couple of things that didn’t quite make sense. Like with driving.”
She felt him tense again.
“What about driving?”
She chewed on her bottom lip.
“Jordan.” His tone was low and full of warning. “I thought I taught you to drive. After your dad and uncle and grandpa all tried and got frustrated and quit.”
She nodded. “You did. All of that is true. And after you worked with me, I was able to do almost everything. And I was definitely more relaxed about it all and didn’t freak out.”