Cora Carmack - Keeping Her

Above me, she sighed and said, “You’re back on track with that distracting thing.”

Suddenly impatient, I stood and pulled my shirt over my head. I was rewarded with a breathy sigh and a bitten lip that made it incredibly hard not to be cocky. And not to take her right then.

She swallowed, drawing my eyes to her neck. God, I didn’t know what it was about her neck, but it was constantly my undoing. I felt like a teenage boy, wanting to mark that pale, unblemished skin as mine again and again. I brushed a thumb over her pulse point, and she swallowed again, her eyes wide. I laced my fingers through her sleep-­addled curls, and tilted her head back.

“How about now?” I asked.

If she was even half as distracted as I was, I’d say I’d done my job. Her eyes pulled away from my bare chest and she said, “Uh . . . what?”

I laughed, but the sound stuck in my throat when her slim fingers smoothed from my chest down to the waist of my pajama bottoms. Her fingers curled around the band, and I swallowed. Looking down, I could see the way her curves reached out toward my body, and I wanted nothing more that to seal our bodies together.

Before I completely lost my train of thought, I said, “No more worrying about my mother, right?”

For either of us.

She gave me a half-­glazed glare.

I used one hand to pull her closer, and the other to cup her breast. Then I repeated, “No more worrying.”

“Do you promise to do this every time I do worry?”

I gave a quick pinch to the tip of the breast in my hand. She flinched, and then moaned. Her eyes fluttered closed and her body swayed toward mine.

She breathed, “No worrying.”

And I thought, Thank God.

Because I couldn’t wait another second.

I crushed my lips against hers, wishing for the hundredth time that I could just permanently affix our mouths together. Every part of her tasted divine, but her mouth was my favorite. It was so easy to lose myself in kissing her, mostly because I could tell she was doing the same. Her body pressed against mine, and her fingernails dug into my shoulders like she was dangling off a cliff, and that was the only thing holding her up. The harder I kissed her, the harder her nails bit into my skin. I trailed a hand from her neck down the line of her spine, and her mouth broke away from mine. She shivered in my arms, her eyes closed.

I leaned my forehead against hers, and pulled her bare chest to mine. Between the shower steam and her skin, our tiny bathroom felt like a furnace. I never would have thought I could feel such peace while my heart hammered and my skin burned, but that’s what she brought me. I’d always thought love was this complicated, messy, frankly ugly thing. Possibly because, growing up, I’d not had much of an example for what a relationship should be. I didn’t know it could be any other way. But Bliss chased away the gray and made everything seem black and white. No matter the question, she was the answer.

She was my everything—­the lungs that allowed me to breathe, the heart that had to beat, the eyes that let me see. She’d become a part of me, and all that was left was a piece of paper to tell the world we were as inseparable as I already felt we were.

It was just a piece of paper. The feeling mattered so much more, but a part of me sang with nervous energy demanding we make it official. Soon. It was the same part of me that worried about how Bliss would react to my family . . . to the way I grew up.

She stepped out of my arms, biting down on her already red and swollen bottom lip. Then she pulled back the shower curtain and stepped into the tub.

I hated the fear that chased the heels of my love for her.

Despite the fact that our relationship had begun in the most troubling and impossible situation—­between teacher and student—­things had been almost perfect since then. A rose-­tinted world.

But it couldn’t stay that way. Logic, reality, and a lifetime knowledge of my mother made me certain of that. The feeling always came out of nowhere. I’d be watching her, touching her, kissing her, and then suddenly, for one infinitesimal moment I’d feel like it was all about to come crashing down. Like we were balanced on a precipice, it felt inevitable that eventually we would fall. I didn’t know how it would happen. Her insecurities. My stubbornness. The interfering hand of fate (or family). But for a few seconds, I could feel it coming.

Then always, she would pull me back. Those seconds of inevitability and uncertainty would dissolve in the sheer magnitude of my feelings for her. The doubt would be erased by the touch of a hand or the quirk of a smile, and I would feel like we could hold off that fall for forever and a day.

She did it again, peeking one last time around the shower curtain wearing nothing but a smile. I heard the water pattern change and knew she’d stepped under the stream of the shower. So I pushed my worries away in favor of a much more pleasant use of my time.

I kicked off the last of my clothing and joined her in the steam. We weren’t in London yet, and I wasn’t going to let fear steal another second of perfection from my grasp.

As long as we both kept pulling each other back, we’d make it. We’d keep our rose-­tinted world.

Bliss

OUR MORNING IN the shower turned into a morning back in bed, and that miraculous man loved every ounce of stress from my body. Seriously. I think his tongue had some kind of special ability to melt my bones because I felt so relaxed that I was practically liquid. Just call me Alex Mack.

“That, Mr. Taylor, was a very good answer to my question.”

His fingertips tickled the back of my knee and his mouth moved lazily across my shoulder. I shivered as he said, “What was the question again?” The hand on my knee trailed up the sensitive skin on the inside of my thigh. “I got distracted.”

I swallowed.

We did distraction so well.

“I asked if you were happy.”

His hand continued farther up until his touch made my back bow and my head fall back.

“Right. That was a stupid question.”

I wanted to swat him, but I had an unsurprising lack of control over my limbs thanks to his very focused ministrations.

“It’s not stupid,” I squeezed out through clenched teeth. “I can’t read your mind. Sometimes I just need to hear it.”

He leaned over me, his hair mussed, but his eyes thoughtful. “And I’m bad at saying it.”

“Only sometimes.” Or sometimes I just needed to hear it more. I told myself that I was being stupid, but hating my insecurities didn’t make them go away.

He shifted over me and settled into the crux of my thighs. Still sensitive from our last go, I whimpered when his body pressed into mine.

“In that case, you should know that every time I do this”—­his hips shifted—­“I am incredibly happy.”

Somehow through all the sensation I managed to roll my eyes.

“We’re talking about two different kinds of happiness.”

He shook his head, and lowered his lips to my ear. “There’s only one kind. Whether I’m inside you or lying beside you or touching your hair or listening to you laugh, it all means the same thing. If I’m with you, I’m happy.”

God, he was good. At everything.

He hit a sensitive spot inside me, and the word good tumbled from my mouth by accident.

He chuckled darkly. “Are you grading me? I thought I was the teacher here.”

I pulled his mouth to mine to shut him up, and then wrapped my legs around his waist.

“I’m not grading you. Your ego is big enough already.”

He laughed and continued distracting me through the morning and a good portion of the afternoon.

It worked for a little while, okay maybe a long while. But when we boarded the flight late that night, no amount of flirting or touching or whispers in my ear could get my mind off the plethora of potential disasters that awaited me in London.

I knew almost nothing about his family. Except that his mother terrified me. She scared me by proxy, just based on the look on Garrick’s face while he talked to her on the phone and the sound of her voice leaking from the speaker. When I saw her name on the caller ID, it was like seeing the Dark Mark hovering above my apartment.

What if she took one look at me and confirmed what I already knew to be true? Garrick was too good for me.

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t awash in self-­pity about it because . . . hello, I got the guy. No complaints here. But that didn’t mean I was too stupid to know that he could have someone prettier or taller or with less frizzy hair.

But he was with me. As long as I didn’t screw it up, of course.

And God knows I was good at screwing things up.

So I sat in my seat on the plane as everyone else around me slept, including Garrick, and I drove myself crazy with worry.

If the weight of my stress were real, there was no way this plane could have stayed in the air. We’d start plummeting and spinning and then some brave soul would throw me out the side door for the good of everyone and scream, “Lighten up!” as I fell to my death.

That was another thing that could go wrong. I could fall to my death on the stairs at Garrick’s house. Wait . . . did they have stairs? I should have made him detail it all for me. Maybe I should wake him up and ask him now about the stairs. And for a description of the entire house. And backgrounds on his parents and everyone he had ever met. Maybe he could just keep talking, so that I could stop listening to my own thoughts.