Finding Allie (12 page)

Like I’ve been straddling him from behind for a long time.

I like having this kind of comfort with him. He acts like he knows me. Wants to know me better. We feel like soulmates already, and how many people in the world can say that?

When you find someone you care about and can connect with, hold on to them. Explore them. Don’t let them go.

How can I go to Los Angeles now that I’ve met Chase?

There’s only one way it will all work.

We go together.

L.A. is way off in the future, though. Right now I need to pick so much stone out of my skin I might as well be a human quarry.

Chase’s bike is a huge monster, a Yamaha that he rides like it’s part of his body. He sways and shifts, using gravity like he’s a god, and I feel like a big lump of rock on the back of the bike sometimes. As long as I cling to him when he makes turns, I seem to be doing okay.

We don’t talk. The road goes by in a blur of different shades of brown, and I feel my body relaxing. Even though I’m injured, I feel better now than I did before my fall. Chase is taking me back to his little private sanctuary, and a flurry of butterflies in my stomach starts.

His place.

Where he lives.

I’ve never been alone with Chase anywhere but outside my front door. I’ve seen his shack. He has a bed in it. It’s a futon rolled up on a simple frame, but still. A bed. A place to stretch out and be next to someone and touch and hold and taste—

“You okay, Allie?” He leans back and the words carry on the wind.

“Yes. Fine. Why?”

“Because you made a little moaning sound just then.”

My cheeks burn. So does the place between my legs. I’m so transparent. Marissa and my mom always used to tease me about being able to read my feelings on my face. Jeff’s the only person I can hide things from, and that’s because something in me can never trust him. With people I know I can trust, who I can let my guard down with, my face is like a road map of my thoughts.

So’s my voice, too now. I moaned? I moaned at the thought of Chase’s bed?

Sheesh. Maybe I had a bad head injury back there when I flipped over my bike and I don’t realize it. How can I have sex on the brain?

Chase shifts a little, making me tighten my thighs around his body. A tingle in my breasts begins. I feel a little faint.The way his jeans rub against mine, with my hands resting on his belt buckle, I could drop my hands just a little and—

And what? The guy’s driving a motorcycle at seventy miles an hour. What the heck am I supposed to do to him with my hands when he has complete control over our lives?

I am crazy. Cray cray crazy. Besides, that kiss Chase gave me under the moonlight was the first real kiss I’ve ever had. I’ve kissed David on the cheek (and he doesn’t count, because I have girl parts and he wants something else), and being groped by Chuck Jorgenson in the back alley doesn’t count either. 

Neither do the countless butt pats and occasional breast grabs in the bar. Jeff made people keep their hands off me most of the time. He kept telling them not to spoil the fresh meat. That didn’t mean men wouldn’t try, though.

Sitting on the back of this motorcycle with the heavy engine’s vibration between my thighs, cradled up against Chase’s thick, muscular body makes me think thoughts I’ve never explored before.

Except in my dreams.

So many girls in high school gave up their virginity for fun. Some of them did it back in middle school. A few ended up pregnant and dropped out. Most of them just seemed to cycle through guys the way they cycled through new wardrobes. Grab the latest fashion and then throw it away when it’s not cool anymore.

I don’t feel that way. I’m not made like that. I don’t judge the other girls (okay, maybe a little...) but for me, the first time I make love with a man needs to be just that.

Making love.

Not having my cherry popped in the back of some guy’s pick up truck out in a field with a case of cheap beer tossed around us, empty cans jangling as we bump uglies.

That’s about as romantic as having your ass grabbed while serving someone a shot of tequila.

Chase, though...Chase is different. He turns off the asphalt road and slows down, going over dirt roads now that pitch and bump. It makes me feel like a kernel of popcorn in a popcorn popper. I breathe in his scent from the back of his neck. He smells like hope and kindness. Like caring and security. The way he looks at me is so tender. I can see my future in those eyes.

He’s not the kind of man who grabs a woman against her will. Chase would never pin me up against the wall next to the garbage cans and shove his hand down my pants while I protest. He’s not Chuck, he’s not the guys at the bar who make me feel like meat—fresh or not—and he’s not Jeff.

Who acts like I’m his property to be controlled and caged.

“We’re close,” Chase calls back to me. “How are you? Pain bad?”

My pain is still here, but it receded a little as I went into my daydreams. Funny how thinking about Chase can make the pain go away like that.

“I’m okay,” I mumble into his neck. His shoulders loosen. He’s worried about me. 

Time sort of disappears for a little bit as I slump against him. I go in and out of sleep, waking from the strange dozing feeling when we hit a bump. Finally, Chase slows to a crawl, then halts the bike.

He props it up so I can climb off. My legs are screaming in searing pain as I twist and turn to finally get to the point where I’m standing on firm ground. He leaps off the bike and is by my side in seconds, offering support. I can barely stand.

“Can you walk?”

I give a tiny shrug and take a step. I inhale sharply at the pain. Everything around my knees is agony.

Chase’s arm goes under my knees and around my torso. In an instant, I’m in his arms, face pressed against his hard chest. He’s carrying me and I won’t argue. The distance between his bike and his little house feels like a million miles.

He can hold me without effort. I’m not exactly tiny, either, with a big butt and curves like my mom. He’s so tender, making sure not to jostle me. I nestle in and relax.

At the door, Chase fumbles in his front pocket for a key. He unlocks the door—all without putting me down. He’s skilled that way. As the door opens I’m relieved to find it the way it was the other day. A simple bed. A lamp. A water cooler that’s two-thirds full.

Chase sets me gently on the bed, stretching my legs out carefully. He turns his back to me and he opens a drawer.

“What are you doing?” I ask. The room is spinning. My heart is beating so fast. Everything seems to ache all at once, but my heart. Oh, my heart. 

It aches for Chase to lie down next to me and just hold me.

“I need to tend to those wounds,” Chase explains, turning around, holding a first aid kit.

I laugh. It’s the last thing I expect. Here I am, yearning for his touch as I lie before him on his bed, bleeding on his sheets, and he’s playing nurse?

“You don’t need to.” I struggle to sit up. My vision fills with white. I lie down, the back of my hand over my eyes.

“You’re dizzy. You’re really injured, Allie. You need something.” He frowns. “Maybe I should take you to a hospital. You said you didn’t bump your head, but...”

“No! No hospital!” I beg. Jeff doesn’t have insurance on us, so I know I’ll get shoved into the long line at the ER for people who can’t pay. I look over my body carefully. There are about six really bad road rash spots on my arms and legs. A bunch of smaller cuts. My split lip and my cut on my face. I think that’s it.

“Okay, okay,” he says in a soothing voice, sitting at the edge of the bed. Chase reaches for my head and smooths the hair back. He winces, his pale brown eyes filled with sympathy. “We’ll just clean you up and let you rest.” He reaches down and kisses my forehead. I lift my chin up and run the tip of my nose along his chin, up over his lips, asking him to give me more. 

He does, the brush of his soft lips against my split one both agony and ecstasy at the same time. I make a little moaning sound.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says in a ragged voice. His hand moves to cradle my cheek on the side of my face that doesn’t look like strawberry jam.

“That wasn’t a sound of pain,” I say with a sigh, trying to smile. My mouth hurts as my lips spread, though. I wince.

“I want to help you. And I also want...” His voice dies down into a low baritone, a deep sound of wanting that makes my body fill with a warm, wet sensation.

“I want you, Allie. And I’m a guy, alone out here with you all vulnerable and beautiful.” He pauses and takes a deep breath, letting it out. “First, though, we need to make sure you don’t get these cuts infected.”

“You sound like a paramedic,” I say with a laugh.

“That’s because I am an EMT,” he says, pretending to tip a hat at me.

“You are? That’s what you do for a living?” I’m surprised. I never thought about Chase as doing anything but stunts and riding a bike.

“No,” he says shaking his head, very matter of fact as he rips open some sterile gauze and gets a small bottle of disinfectant out. “I took the classes and got the certification because someone in the club has to help with medical issues. It’s a thing. Three of us are certified. Frenchie’s a registered nurse, actually.”

“Frenchie? A
nurse
?” I start laughing, the pain in my lip be damned. I couldn’t imagine that snake working in a hospital and tending to patients if my life depended on it.

Chase waggles his eyebrows as he lifts my elbow. “Yep. I’ve seen that guy set bones. He cries like a baby afterward, but he’s good in a crisis. Taught me a lot. Now,” he says, frowning. “This is going to hurt.”

For the next ten minutes Chase hurts me. A lot. The disinfectant stings like crazy as he carefully wipes all the dirt and tiny stones out of my scrapes. From elbows to knees, wrists to ankles, it turns out I have a kid’s playground worth of sand and dirt embedded in my stupid bicycle-riding skin.

When he’s done, he pulls out a small tube of cream.

“What’s that?”

“Antibiotic ointment. Now I’ll bandage everything major up with this, and you’ll be good to go. It has a little lidocaine in it, to numb the pain.”

“Can you smear it all over my lip?” I joke. “I wish it would go numb.”

“Won’t taste very good when I kiss you, Allie,” he says quietly.

Oh.

Chase lifts my arm and, before he applies the ointment, tenderly kisses my elbow, right where the softest skin is in the center. I shiver. The kiss sends electricity straight between my legs. He bandages that elbow, sets my arm down, and lifts the other.

Kiss. Zing. Bandage. He repeats this for my knees, my ankle, my wrist, each kiss more intense. Each zing builds some powerful feeling inside me, a rush of urgency I’ve never felt before.

My blood is building to a throb that makes me think I’ll explode through my panties, which are now wet.

When he’s done, he quietly throws the bandage wrappers away. He uses an alcohol wipe on his hands, and then rises them in water in a small bowl next to the water cooler. The sun is going down outside, the night sky streaked with pink and blue. A gold haze fills the sky outside Chase’s window.

And then.

Oh, and then he kicks off his boots, heel against toe, and climbs into bed with me.

Chapter Fifteen

The slide of his body against mine feels like the finest luxury the world can provide. He’s warm and strong, turned on one side and facing me. Chase props his head up, elbow on the pillow, and his eyes take me in.

“That better?” he asks. “You took on some serious scrapes. You’ll scab up soon and it’ll all hurt. And tomorrow your body will ache even more.”

Oh, I don’t think it could ache more than it does right now.

And not in the way Chase thinks.

You know that sense of fear that feels like it’s a second person living inside your body? I live with that every day. I have always thought it was just a part of me, like the critical voice in my head that tells me I’m stupid when I make a mistake. Like the other critical voice in my head that stops me from introducing myself to an interesting person, or from volunteering to try something new that might be great. That voice is a part of me.

Until now, I thought it just
was
me. That this all-consuming fear was a permanent piece of my self. Being with Chase is changing me. Spending time with him makes that fear fade away. Shuts those voices up. Shuts those voices
down
.

Those voices sound a lot like Jeff, but not only Jeff. Sometimes they sound like Chuck Jorgenson. Other times, the snotty teachers at school who labeled me trash. The popular girls’ clique back in middle school and high school chimes in sometimes. A few of the voices are the men who come to the bar to hoot and catcall, to grab and squeeze. They make me feel like all I am are tits and ass, and that’s all I can ever be in the world.

And then there’s Chase.

When his voice whispers deep inside me, it says things like:

You’re so beautiful.

I love how kind you are.

You’ll be a great actress one day.

I want to spend the rest of my life with you.

Go away with me to Los Angeles.

Let me love you, Allie.

Let me love you the way you deserve to be loved.

All those voices are hissing in my head right now as he stares at me. It’s like his eyes are planting all those wonderful thoughts in my head. His lips aren’t moving, so he’s not saying all that, though. As the light outside fades, he’s suddenly in the shadows, body smoky and chest wide. I can smell his sweat and the light scent of deodorant, something spicy. He smells like dirt and mint, spice and the outdoors, and he leans his head down for a kiss on my sore lips.

I reach back and kiss him, pulling his lip between mine, pain be damned.

Fear
be damned.

Because I am not that scared little Allie anymore.

Chase pulls in, his arm reaching around my waist, his other arm still propping up his head. His lips work so gently with mine, tongue darting out to touch mine, his mouth saying so many words I know he can’t speak. The sound of his inward sigh makes me pull my hips closer to him and I feel his arousal. He wants me. I’ve never touched a man like this. I’ve never been touched like this. All I want is to feel every part of him.