Dream of You (31 page)

             
He grabbed a handful of ass before she smacked him away with a laugh and slipped out of the room. Then he was left alone, breathing in the smell of her shampoo off the pillow.

             
All alone save the printer that was still doing its thing. Churning out pages of whatever she wrote with nervous frowns and chewed lips.

             
Curiosity snuck out from behind the veil of his subconscious and latched on with tooth and claw, pushing him up on his forearms amid the sheets.

             
Did he dare?

             
What if she caught him?

             
So what.

             
But what if it pissed her off and all her glow-y, girlfriend-y shimmer went the way of the dodo?

             
He strained his ears and thought he heard a cabinet door down on the first floor beneath the chugging printer.

             
He took his chances.

             
Jordan slipped from beneath the covers with a symphony of crackling joints and snatched the hot sheets off the printer tray like he was afraid to get burned. Hell, he might burn anyway, might combust right there between her white Egyptian cotton sheets because there was reading a girl’s diary, and then there was
this
: reading the secret things that whispered back and forth between the folds of her imagination. If she’d wanted him to read her work, she would have shown him, and he was about to go plowing through ten different kinds of respect and propriety; but curiosity was a beast that needed feeding. He fluffed his pillow and leaned back against the dark wood of her headboard that smelled of furniture polish, got comfy, pulled the sheets up to his waist, and shuffled the pages into some kind of order.

             
Midnight
was the first word that came up off the paper and made a sound.
Start here
, that word said,
and keep going
.

             
Midnight came in on a thunderstorm
, Ellie had written, and Jordan could hear the line in her voice, a throaty lover’s whisper in the dark.
Heralded by the vicious sort of gods’ lightning that shattered the sky with the
hiss-bang
of disturbed darkness. Ava let her forehead fall against the window, her breath fogging the glass until all she saw was the featureless mist she’d created: the absolute nothing that had come out of her lungs. It was her fault he’d not come home. She knew that now.

             
“Jordan!” was a fast, startled breath at the doorway punctuated by the clatter of a fork hitting the floor.

             
His head came up, pulse leaping to have been caught, face hot with sudden shame. Ellie stood in the threshold, a plate in each hand, a fork at her feet and the other balanced precariously against a slice of rich, dark brown cake. Her eyes were big as half dollars, a dark, flinty gray, mouth drawn up in a tight, pink bow of shock. His shirt was only halfway buttoned and it threatened to slide off one of her shoulders, soft swells of her breasts teasing at the deep V where the halves of fabric came together.

             
“I…um…”

             
Her eyes were doing quick cuts from the paper in his hands to his face, unreadable.

             
“Are you mad? You can be mad.” He sighed. “Yeah, I shouldn’t have.”

             
Her face dropped, hair sweeping forward in great, curling curtains to hide her from him. She took a deep breath that jacked her shoulders and made the shirt even more precarious. Her foot slid across the hardwood until her toes touched the fork.

             
“I’m…I’m sorry I just - ”

             
“You wanted to know,” she said, head lifting, hair tossing back. She took another deep breath. “I get it.”

             
He knew her well enough to know that the breach of her little fictional bubble was jarring, but if she was angry, she was hiding it better than any female he’d ever met. “Yeah…but where are we on the whole mad front?”

             
Her gaze fell over him, eyes narrowed.

             
“Should I be getting the hell out? Like, immediately?”

             
She contemplated it a moment, he could tell, face carefully blank.
Shit
, he thought,
I’m gonna have to get out of bed all naked and kicked out and shit
. But then she sighed, a lung-emptying, defeated sort of sigh, and came over to the bed with her toes dragging like a little girl.

             
“I’m not
mad
,” she said the word like she couldn’t believe he hadn’t come up with something more adult-sounding than
mad
. She made climbing up onto the bed beside him and curling her legs up beneath her look graceful. “No one’s ever read any of it save Paige.” She set the cake plates down on top of the coverlet and braced a hand beside her foot, turned a look up at him from beneath her bangs that sent a jolt of protectiveness shooting through him.

             
“And what does Paige think about it?”

             
Ellie chewed at her lip and glanced down at the story section he still held. Twisted a hand through her hair. “She says it’s brilliant.” Another of those uncertain, wavering looks came his way. “But what’s she going to say? That it sucks? No.”

             
If she was his girlfriend – and she was one hell of a sexy, mostly-naked, cake-bearing girlfriend – then support was mandatory on his part. “You think she lied to you?”

             
Her cheeks pinked, the lock of hair getting wound tighter around her fingers. “Not intentionally, no.” Her mouth did a big sideways twitch. “She’s honest when she shouldn’t be…but I help her with the cakes and this is, well,
my
cake…”

             
“Well.” Jordan sensed he needed to tread carefully here. “What if you let me read some of it? And I promise to be totally honest.”

             
“You?” Her lip was going to be ragged if she chewed it any more. “You would want to?”

             
“Yeah.”

             
“But you don’t have to just say that. I don’t want you to feel like you
have
to - ”

             
“Ellie.”

             
She sighed like she knew she was being twitchy, but couldn’t stop it, her gaze apologetic.

             
“I want to, okay? I wouldn’t have snitched it outta your print tray if I didn’t, right?”

             
“Right,” she breathed on a smile, shaking her head a fraction like she couldn’t believe it. A deep inhale lifted her chest. “You wanted to read it now?”

             
“Just so, you know, you’re fully recovered from round one.”

             
“Yeah,” she chuckled, eyes rolling again. But she picked up her slice of cake and didn’t protest when he returned to the page.

**

              He started reading, and then just
kept
reading. He was devoid of all expression as he did so, the flicker of his eyelashes and the turning of pages all that convinced her he hadn’t fallen asleep sitting up. Ellie nibbled at her cake and then carried both slices back downstairs through all the first floor shadows that looked like men lurking in corners. She wrapped each in foil, put them in the fridge, washed the plates and forks and put them away. Back up the groaning old staircase, a pause at the landing, the sound of Paige flopping over in bed, mumbling to herself, the mattress springs protesting.

             
And he was still reading.

             
Ellie thumbed loose the buttons of his flannel shirt and it whispered down her bare skin, leaving goose bumps in its wake. She hung it on the bedpost and slid between the sheets with all the grace and long, fluid movements she could manage.

             
Still reading.

             
It wasn’t that she was embarrassed by her work, ashamed at all. But casual readers couldn’t always take the writer out of the equation. What if Jordan was thinking
what the hell goes on this girl’s head?
with every word his eyes moved over?
This is what she writes? This is absolute shit. She should consider a full-time waitressing gig.

             
She propped up on an elbow and burrowed a hand between the sheets until she made contact with the warm skin of his hip – he had sharp, bony hips; they dug tender, bruised spots along the insides of her thighs – and she flattened her palm across the stark, smooth grooves of his stomach. Teased her thumbnail along his treasure trail. Went lower…

             
“In a minute.”

             
With a sigh, she rolled away from him, faced the closet door, and pouted. She hated it – she despised pouting and sulking in all its forms – but she could find no better synonym for the frown that tugged hard at the corners of her mouth. If sex couldn’t pull him away from her manuscript, then he was invested. He was feet up in front of the hearth, an old time snifter of brandy, eyes tracing each letter with the sort of intense scrutiny that terrified her – that kind of invested.

             
She pulled the covers up to her chin in hopes the cold tremors that had stolen over her might ease – she knew she was a stress shaker and that cold had nothing to do with the way her fingers quivered against the coverlet – and told herself that she would put Jordan, his brandy snifter and scrutinizing eyes, out of her mind and drift off to sleep.

             
But of course sleep wouldn’t come. She listened to the fluttering of copy paper, the shift of his feet between the sheets, the deep, sleepy breath that punctuated his breathing pattern, and acted out a dozen scenarios in her mind in which he told her – sometimes gently, sometimes not – that she was a disgrace to the written word. She counted the passing seconds until they turned into minutes, until the little stack of manuscript she’d printed landed on her nightstand like the soft settling of dove wings and the rustle of sheets swelled up loud as the ocean crashing against her ears.

             
Jordan folded around her, the warmth she’d needed to end the shaking, his chest to her back, his arm around her waist, hand over her breasts, knees tucking up under hers. She loved it. However bad the verdict was about to be, the cuddling she appreciated.

             
“So?” she prodded when he said nothing. “How terrible was it?”

             
His chuckle was a warm rush of breath right in her ear. “It wasn’t.” His voice was different in the small, intimate spaces that existed when they were pressed together like this; it was sweet with a familiar sort of sleepiness, a voice just for her that the rest of the world didn’t get to hear. He could have read the warning label off a box of ant poison in that voice and lulled her to sleep, so it was a long, still moment before she absorbed what he’d actually said.

             
“It wasn’t?” she repeated.

             
“No.”

             
“You’re sure?”

             
“Baby.” And because it was the first time he’d called her that, even if it was just the ordinary, meaningless word that was tossed between couples all the time, she felt the startled shake of surprise ripple through both of them. “You’re great.” He tightened all around her, drawing her back even closer against him. “I think you already know that, but you don’t want to admit it. Yeah?”

             
“Being great and wanting to be great are two very different things,” she said in a small voice as she tucked her head back against his shoulder.

             
He chuckled again and it almost wasn’t even a sound. “I’m not some illiterate dumbass, you know. I can tell good writing from bad. You’re
good
. I haven’t read the whole thing, and I won’t pretend I’m into that whole romance thing…but Paige wasn’t wrong. You can
write
.”

             
Sometimes compliments were more dangerous than critique.
What do you know?
She thought.
You’re sleeping with me – of course you’ll say those things.

             
But to think that sacred, wrapped-around-her voice was lying was…unthinkable. “I can’t have a boyfriend who gives me false praise,” she meant to say with a laugh, but the laugh never formed.

             
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He kissed her neck, right behind her ear where the skin was soft, and she felt her nipples tightening into hard points. He licked the spot. Put his teeth to her throat like he meant to bite down and she tilted her head, giving him all the access he could want. Then his head lifted, her damp skin chilled without his mouth against it. “Oh, I forgot.”