She steps away from my touch and shakes her head as if clearing away the thoughts and feelings my words stirred in her.

“I kind of flaked today,” she says abruptly. “Skipped my workout, didn’t go to the office, missed a meeting. I need an early start tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I say, waiting for her to try to kick me out.

“So . . .” she looks off to the side and bites her lip “. . . so I’m gonna turn in.”

“Great idea.” I toe my shoes off and fake a yawn. “I’m beat myself.”

Her mouth gapes open with shock.

“You aren’t spending the night.” She folds her arms around her midriff, protecting herself. “We can’t . . . Jared, I can’t . . .”

“We won’t.” I tip up her chin and make sure she sees I mean it. “But I am staying. I don’t like the state you’re in right now.”

“Surely you don’t think I’ll hurt myself.”

“I think you’ll condemn yourself,” I correct. “The way you’ve been condemning yourself in this room all alone in the dark all day.”

Her seven freckles are lost in the capillaries dotting the skin around her eyes. I’m fully prepared to argue if she protests anymore, but her shoulders slump and her head falls to my chest and she sighs heavily. Exhausted.

I gently turn her toward the hall, link my arms around her middle, my front to her back, and walk us to the rear of her house. I have no idea which room is hers. She turns us to the right and into a spacious room, darkened. I have a vague impression of a large headboard and bed, a side table and a bench of some sort at the foot of her bed, but it’s all shapes. I want to turn on the light because I’ve had enough of touching her in the dark, but I don’t. I slip my thumbs in the waistband of her pants and push down. She goes completely still as they slide over her thighs.

“Jared, I told you—”

“I know. We won’t.”

I peel the T-shirt over her head and unsnap the bra at her back, tensing as her breasts spill free against my chest.

“Is there something you want to sleep in?” I ask, looking around for her closet or a dresser.

And surprising me, as Banner always manages to do, she tugs my T-shirt over my head, works silently at my belt and zipper for a few seconds, head bent, slides my jeans down, before looking back up at me.

“Yes,” she whispers, sadness and hope knotted in that one word. “I want to sleep in your arms.”

26

Banner

Like I have so many mornings before, I wake up feeling guilty. Guilty that I dreamed of Jared with Zo warm and solid at my back. Then in the gray predawn light before all the alarms clamor to kick me out of bed, my senses pick out the subtle differences. The arm around me grips tighter, higher with a large palm cupping my breast. The torso at my back is smoother to the touch, a fine line of hair arrowing down the middle instead of the thicker hair on Zo’s chest. And the scent. I smell him and see a deserted laundromat and hear the thump-thump of a spin cycle.

Pleasure sets guilt aside long enough for me to breathe Jared in, and then shame shoves its way through as the memory of yesterday’s catastrophe with Zo reminds me that all is not well. That although being in Jared’s arms feels so right, in my world now nothing is.

“You’re awake,” he sleep-slurs into my hair, giving my breast a gentle squeeze and sliding his hand down to my waist.

After all these years and in spite of all the pounds I’ve shed, I still tense when he touches my stomach under his Kerrington T-shirt, which I put on at some point during the night. The rolls of fat I worked so hard to rid myself of are back. At least in my mind and at least for an instant.

Everything jiggled when I fucked her.

It’s amazing, the power of words, cruel or kind, even from someone you don’t respect. How they stay with you, healing or haunting. Growing up a good Catholic, I heard tales of God creating the universe with nothing more than His words and His intentions.

Let there be light.

And there was light.

Life and death in the power of the tongue.

And we are made in His image, with the same life-giving, life-stealing power nestled between the rows of our teeth. So many times that power has been used against me. My imperfect body the ammunition others needed to put me in my place when I was too smart, talked too much, soared too high. Oh, they knew how to clip my wings. They aimed for my heel, the only weakness they could find, and their aim was sure.

“Ban?” Jared asks, his hands tightening at my waist. “You’re awake?”

I shake off those old foes, my insecurities, and turn over to face him.

“If I wasn’t,” I say with a voice graveled by sleep. “I would be by now.”

A strip of white flashes in the gray light, his smile chasing the last of my self-doubt away. I watch the shape of his hand approaching, feel it warm against my face. Sense him drawing closer until his lips curl in a smile he buries into the curve of my neck.

“We slept together,” he murmurs, sounding so pleased I want to reach over and turn on the lamp to see his face.

This man, this guy practically cuddling isn’t the Jared Foster I’ve come to expect over the years. He’s made his hunger, his desire clear the last few weeks, but there’s something . . . else. Something that harkens back to our days at the laundromat when we were first friends. When I looked forward to him loping through Sudz’ door with his backpack and a bag of dirty laundry. Those two people, those kids, lived a hundred years ago. Things felt so complicated that night when Prescott pulled his prank, but now, with Jared in a bed I’m used to sharing with my ex-boyfriend, with my career imperiled because of our recklessness, that night feels like what it was.

Child’s play.

“That first time,” he continues, toying with the curling hairs at my temple. “Was so quick and in the dark. And the second time was rushed and on your desk.”

He traces the bones of my face, lingering on my lips.

“When can I make love to you slowly, Banner?”

My body screams NOW while he kisses my nose.

“In a bed?” he asks.

A trail of kisses blaze my jaw line.

“With the lights on?” he whispers.

He threads his fingers into my hair and licks into my mouth, and I forget that my breath may not be the freshest and that I’d probably look a fright if he turned the light on. He moves over me, his strong forearms framing my face on the pillow, lean hips cradled between my thighs. His erection is insistent, already demanding. He moves and the tips of my breasts brush through the T-shirt against his chest. Our breaths mingle in a gasp at the feel of each other under the sheets.

“Can I make love to you?” He sprinkles kisses down my neck. “Can we turn on the light?”

When I turn my head to find the lamp with my eyes, my face presses into the pillowcase. These sheets are clean, but the faint traces of Zo’s cologne freeze me.

“I can’t, Jared.” Tears gather in my throat. “Not here. Not now. The bed. The sheets smell like him.”

He stills over me. The lighthearted, almost boyish pleasure I sensed in him from the time I woke withers. I feel it die in the air.

“What the hell did you say?” Now he sounds like the man I’m used to. Irreverent and hard. “The sheets?”

He fists a handful of Egyptian cotton.

“These sheets?

“They’ve been washed,” I say hastily. “It’s just a trace of his cologne, and I can’t.”

He rolls out of bed, reaches back, drags me out. I land unceremoniously on my rear while he strips the sheets from the bed and strides, surefooted in the near-dark, out of the bedroom with them bundled in his arms.

“Jared.” I scramble to my feet. “What are you doing?”

I check the laundry room, but he’s not there. I hear rustling under my sink, and by the time I reach the kitchen, he’s stuffing a thousand dollars of bedding into a garbage bag. I lean one shoulder on the doorjamb.

“You just tossed a fortune’s worth of sheets in the trash,” I say calmly.

“I’ll buy you new sheets.”

He strides over, grabs my jaw, and kisses me hard, pressing my teeth against my lips. I deliberately soften under him, open my mouth to his, hoping to soothe him with my compliance. At first I’m not sure it will, that I can. Brutal hunger drives him into my mouth, chasing and capturing my tongue. I whimper, reaching up and tangling my fingers in the soft hair curling at his ears and neck, and he changes. He shifts and his hands gentle on my face. He presses his forehead to mine, never breaking contact with my lips.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles into the thawing kiss. “I know I’m being ridiculous.”

“Hmmm,” I agree, kissing under his chin. “Zo is the only one entitled to outrage in this situation.”

I pull back and peer up at him in the growing sunlight breaking through my kitchen window.

“We’re in the wrong.”

“Are you telling me,” he says, sliding his hands down to the small of my back. “That it felt wrong when I was inside you?”

“No, I—”

“Have you ever felt anything like that before?” He lifts his brows, waiting in my surprised silence for a second or two before going on. “Because I haven’t. Not with anyone else.”

His unexpected confession knocks my answer right out of me, and I blink at him owlishly. He dips to push my unruly bedhead hair back.

“How did it feel for you?” His eyes never leave my face.

Perfect. Right. Finally.

Those are the words that leap to mind when I recall Jared inside of me, moving with the certainty of a thousand times when it was only our first, then only our second. Like in some time hole, behind a secret door in the cosmos, we had been making love to one another since time began.

“It was good,” I say instead, avoiding the probe of his eyes.

“Banner, give me this.” He’s as close to pleading as I’ve ever heard him. “Tell me the truth.”