Fix You (27 page)

             
“Yeah, I know what you thought.” He started to twist away from her but her hand darted out, settling against his chest and rooting him in place.

             
Her fingers splayed and shifted. “No, you don’t know, actually.”

             
He waited.

             
“I,” she wet her lips again, “I’ve become used to…well, to coldness. Dylan hasn’t given a damn about me for something like three years now. With him it’s so…” she studied her hand, blinking hard, “clinical. Sex is – was,” her voiced dropped, “something he’d rather do with someone else.”

             
Now, yes, he knew what she thought. And he could have kicked himself for not realizing it sooner.

             
“I’m boring,” she continued, “plain vanilla and nothing special and - ”

             
Chris swooped down and kissed her, a fast smack that left her lashes fluttering when he pulled back. “Look at me.”

             
She did.

             
“Vanilla,” he said with a half-smile, “is some amazing shit. You’re not boring. You make me mad as hell”-  she grinned – “but ‘boring’ isn’t an issue, sweetheart.” Under the covers, he reached out and his hand found her breasts, closed over one; he watched her eyelids lower to half-mast at the contact, her reaction immediate and not even a little bit boring. “Am
I
?”

             
“Are you what?” she asked, distracted. He felt her toes slide down his shin.

             
“Boring?”

             
A startled chuckle left her lips.

             
“Do only rich guys get you hot?”

             
“I don’t know.” She swam up close to him through the sheets, and her hand found his, pulled it from her pretty tits and down her stomach, down between her thighs. “You tell me,” she prompted.

             
He did.

**

              She was home. Jess rose slowly up through the layers of sleep with a sense of elation. Finally, after a prolonged nightmare that wouldn’t end, she was home.

             
She saw sunlight on the other side of her eyelids and cracked them, registered warm panels falling in through a window. But she was not, she noted, in her bedroom in the Buckhead house; she wasn’t home. So how could she explain her limp, sore body and the heavy arm draped across her waist, the unmistakable weight of a man pressed up against her side. The soft sound of snoring. She was on her stomach, arms beneath the pillow, head turned to the side, hair falling across her face. And the sheets were cool against her naked skin. But how…?

             
She remembered.

             
Jess pushed up on her elbows and faced the slamming reality of Dylan’s betrayal and all that had transpired since, the crazy upside down twist of her life. Then she remembered last night, and she swung her head around to regard the man stretched out beside her.

Chris was on his side, face half-buried in the pillow, mouth open slightly, snoring. His arm was flung across her, holding her tight against his chest, possessive and restraining. She liked it there, she realized.

              A shiver went streaking through her as she thought about their conversation: his tactless, little boy whining because he’d thought she didn’t like him, that she hadn’t been satisfied and had been using him. She thought about after, about the mattress beneath her knees and the pillow under her cheek and his hands on her hips, riding up to cup her breasts every so often; the way he’d filled her up and driven into her until she’d shattered apart. The kisses on the back of her neck afterward.
Beautiful
, he’d called her. Falling asleep while he still reflexively groped her.

             
Jesus, it had been good. And, she admitted to herself in the newborn morning sunlight, she wanted more of it.

             
He came awake with a snort while she watched him, dark eyes flipping open.

             
“Morning.”

             
His arm withdrew and he rubbed a fist in his eyes. “What time is it?”

             
Disappointment at his greeting swelled inside her. “Don’t know. Early.” She waited for a reaction, but got none. “I was gonna make breakfast.”

             
At that, he nodded. “Mind if I grab a shower?”

             
“No.”

             
She climbed out of bed, dressed in yoga pants and a clean red tank top, brushed her teeth and left him to his shower.

             
Idiot
, Jess called herself as she set a skillet on the range and began gathering supplies. It was a Saturday, and because she had no idea what to make of Chris’s indifference, she decided to plow ahead with the usual Saturday routine. She set out eggs and bread and butter and confectioner’s sugar for French toast, cranked the burner up and prepared her egg wash in a clear mixing bowl. She called herself ten kinds of foolish and was so busy berating herself she didn’t hear the water shut off beneath her feet. Nor did she hear Chris come up behind her; suddenly, there were hands on her hips, sliding around to link across the waistband of her pants.

             
“Shit.” She jumped and heard Chris chuckle right against her ear.

             
“What if I was your stalker?” he asked, still laughing. “You wouldn’a even known.”

             
She was resistant a moment, asking herself if she’d overreacted before.
Did I?
He hugged her back against him, spread a hand across her stomach and kissed the side of her neck.
Yes
, she decided, and relaxed back against him, ridiculous, happy tears stinging the backs of her eyes. It had been so, so long since she’d made breakfast for anyone who couldn’t keep his hands off her.

**

              On all the first dates of his life, Chris had never stayed the night. He’d never had the desire to fall asleep beside whatever wreck had taken him home within twenty minutes of meeting him. The Army had taught him not to fall asleep in enemy territory.

             
Last night, sleep had pulled him under just as he’d pulled Jess to him and buried his face in her honey hair. For some reason, sleeping over with her had been a given. And waking up, morning sun flirting with her golden locks, had been so sweet and so welcome…the sensation had knocked him on his ass. He cared way too much about this girl. And he wanted to shower with her green soap. And he wanted to feel her sleek curves against him while he watched her make him breakfast over her shoulder. Maybe, he thought, this was what his mother had always been talking about when she insisted that he was missing out by staying a bachelor.

             
Jess made French toast in the kitchen he’d built her and was quiet and content with him lurking around her until she saw her sister approaching through the window. “I have Saturday breakfast with Jo and Tam,” she explained, and he took the hint, retreating to the table and dropping into the chair he’d used the night before. A memory of her in his lap flashed through his mind, but he forced it away, features schooled and casual when the back door opened.

             
Little Willa came first, Jo behind her, holding onto one of the toddler’s black-brown pigtails (the kid had a headful of hair), mother and daughter dressed alike in jeans and white t-shirts. Tam looked ten years younger without his suit and tie – in jeans and an old Eagles t-shirt, his hair messy and getting a little long in front. He nodded a greeting to Chris and fell into the chair opposite, pulled Willa up into his lap.

             
“Morning,” Jo greeted brightly. She went to the upper cabinets to pull down plates.

             
“Guys, how many pieces do you want?” Jess asked from the stovetop.

             
“Four,” Tam told her, and then Chris realized that she was addressing him too.

             
“Six,” he said, and she nodded, went to the fridge for a pack of bacon and returned to add more toast to her skillet.

             
He’d spent the night all week, but he’d spent last night in Jessica’s bed, and it was his workout with her that had left him ravenous. This morning, she was making breakfast for her lover, not her contractor. This morning, his drywall skills weren’t his reason for sitting around this table with this family. This morning, he almost felt like one of them.

             
What would it be like, he wondered, to become a permanent fixture of this household? Would her family accept him? Should he even be having these thoughts? No, he shouldn’t. Jess was almost-divorced and definitely crazy for trying to turn this dump into an inn that wasn’t even guaranteed to be successful. He’d slept with her once; now wasn’t the time to start asking questions.

             
They had French toast and bacon, talking about the house, the weather, the stalker Chris had to tell Tam he still hadn’t seen. All the while, Jess’s eyes kept going to Tyler’s empty chair. An idea struck him.

             
When Jo announced that she and Tam were tackling the front yard that day, Chris said, “I thought we’d go look for bathtubs.”

             
Jess’s hair fanned around her, a golden halo, as she turned to him with surprise. Clearly, she hadn’t expected him to stick around.

             
“We can get an old claw foot or two resurfaced and they’ll be good as new,” he continued. “If you want to, that is.”

             
Her smile was small, soft, pleased, and left him feeling nothing less than victorious. “Yeah. I want to.”

20

             
“
Y
ou’re sure this can be saved?”

             
The tub had claw feet, and beyond that, it didn’t look like anything that fit the bill for her guest suites. It was more rust than porcelain, red and brown and black in places, the fixtures caked with years of lime that had hardened into concrete. It was disgusting.

             
“I’m sure.” He reached down and traced a finger along the grimy edge. “My guy does this sort of thing all the time.”

             
“Do you have a guy for everything?” she asked, suppressing another ridiculous smile. For some reason, walking around the salvage yard with him kept leading to eye contact, and significant glances, and those left her wanting to smile.

             
“Yeah,” he said, grinning at her over the ruined bathtub, and her stomach tightened.

             
Jess had expected him to skip out after breakfast; it was Saturday and he didn’t have to work – surely there was something he’d rather do than bathtub shop. But her cold, hard heart was supremely glad that he’d offered an errand, a chance to ride off together in his truck and talk about small, ordinary things while they pretended they hadn’t had raging sex the night before. It was cozy in an odd way. Sweet that he hadn’t abandoned her.

             
She was turning away from him when he cleared his throat.

             
“What?” she asked, taking in the sudden uncertainty that had crept across his face.

             
“Um…you wanna have dinner?” he asked, and for maybe the first time ever, didn’t stare at her, but glanced out across the heaps of scrap metal around them. “Like, a real dinner.”

             
She smiled again.

**

              Jo smelled like the outdoors: grass and dirt and sunshine and sweat. Her clothes were grass-stained in places and the sight left Ellie longing to be outside in the late afternoon sun. She wasn’t confined to bed, but considering she’d had one baby the regular way, and had one sliced out of her, she wasn’t exactly mobile. Two weeks after the twins were born and she was still sore and stiff, her recovery slow.

             
She had her girls, though. And out in the backyard beyond the French doors, his voice a murmur as he talked to Tam over a beer, she had her Jordie, too.

             
“I have a confession to make,” Jo said as she cradled Jane in her arms and tipped her face up so Willa, on the sofa beside her, could look at her cousin. “I don’t ever think babies look like anybody when they’re this young.”

             
“Me neither,” Ellie admitted with a chuckle. “But the fuzz on top of their heads isn’t the same color as mine, so they’re at least Walkers in that respect.”

             
They were in the rarely used den at the back of the Cape Cod, sitting in puddles of late afternoon sunlight, visiting over tea that Ellie had brewed and Jo had almost laughed at. “I never did like tea parties, but you and Delta keep forcing them on me,” she’d explained good naturedly.

             
The back doors opened and Jordan entered; Ellie didn’t just see, but felt his gaze linger over her where she sat beside the stone fireplace with Lizzy in her lap as he headed toward the kitchen.

             
“Hi, baby,” she offered, and his smile was soft and strange in return.

             
“You okay?” he asked. “You need anything?”

             
He’d been downright coddling her since they’d come home from the hospital: sitting up with her at night while she nursed the babies, bringing home dinner and calling her every five minutes. Honestly, she was sick of it; she liked doing things for herself and already felt like an invalid being his stay-at-home writer/baker’s assistant wife. She wanted to cook and clean and shuffle around as best she could. She wanted him to get plenty of rest and be fresh when he left for work every day. Even more, she wanted this strange, almost parental vibe in his care for her to disappear. They weren’t talking like they had been, joking and ribbing each other.

             
“I’m fine,” she assured.

             
He went into the kitchen for fresh beers and went back out again with another of those weird glances. When he was gone, Jo said, “He’s still a little rattled, I’m guessing?”

             
Ellie frowned. “What do you mean?”

             
Jo’s big eyes slid to the French doors and came back again. “You guys haven’t talked about what happened in the hospital?”

             
She shook her head.

             
Jo bit at her lower lip, weighing what to tell and what to keep to herself. “El, you know you came close to…”

             
“Expiring?” she suggested.

             
Jo smirked. “Show-off writer brat. Yeah, ‘expiring.’ And Jordie, well…he took it a lot harder than he’s letting you think.”

             
Ellie felt guilt wash over her, cold and grim. “He did?”

             
“He wouldn’t even see the girls. He – I guess it’s not my business – but you guys had been fighting and he was torn up about it. When they took you into surgery - ”

             
“God,” she breathed. “So that’s why he’s acting like this.” She swallowed the sudden lump in her throat, cuddling Lizzy against her chest. “Oh, Jordie.”

             
Jo and Tam stayed for another hour and Paige came home and began demolished the order in the kitchen with her typical baking chaos. Ellie settled the girls in their swings and slipped outside onto the back deck where Jordan still stood.

             
He was at the rail, his elbows resting on it, staring at the thickly wooded backyard, its sparse tufts of grass and hordes of robins pecking around for worms. The sunlight was a deep, harvest gold draped across the deck and it drew honeyed lines through the dark waves of his hair. He needed a haircut; she’d been cutting it for him the past three years, sitting in a kitchen chair with a towel draped around his neck. The sudden memory was a warm one.

             
She watched him a moment: the toe of one sneaker propped against the deck boards; the fabric of his t-shirt clinging to the long, lean contours of his back; the way his jeans framed his narrow hips. He was all lithe, shredded muscle and messy hair and big eyes and tanned, long-fingered hands around the neck of his beer bottle. She adored the man. And she’d been a lousy wife.

             
Folding the halves of her short-sleeved sweater over her still-soft stomach, she padded to him on bare feet, still not as quiet as he would have been in the same situation. His head turned a fraction when she drew up at the rail beside him.

             
“You okay?”

             
“Mmhm.” She threaded her arm through his. “Even better if you stop asking me that.”

             
One of his brows lifted in flat curiosity, like he couldn’t believe she’d said such a thing.

             
She wanted him to turn not just his head, but his body into hers, and when he didn’t, she accepted the disappointment and the knowledge that, after she’d pushed him away for so long, she’d have to be the one to reinitiate contact. Ellie tugged at his arm, and when that didn’t work, took a gentle fistful of his shirt and urged him to rotate, to face her fully.

             
“What?” he asked, voice laced with worry. The beer hit the deck rail and his hands went to her arms, just above her elbows. Her heart squeezed as his eyes traced over her face. “What’s wrong?”

             
She pressed her hands against the flat, hard stretch of his chest and smoothed them upward, her nails with their chipped black polish scratching lightly, and stretched up to kiss him. Without heels on, she was just a half inch too short, even on her toes, and she slid her hands behind his neck, reaching, terrified he would reject her. It had been so long and she’d been so cold…And here she stood with her soft, flabby, unattractive post-pregnancy belly pressed to his hard one…

             
He dropped his head and pressed a respectable peck against her lips, then pulled back.

             
Ellie fought a surge of mortification. She swallowed. “Kiss me like you mean it.”

             
He watched her a long moment, his frame tense against hers, his blue-green eyes turquoise and uncertain in the gilded light around them. She had no idea what he wrestled with behind the mask he wore: disgust? Fear? Indifference?

             
But then one of his hands lifted and he skimmed the back of a finger down her cheek. Then his arms stole around her and he lunged for her mouth, pressed her to him and kissed her like he
meant it
.

             
Ellie opened her lips against his and a sigh rippled through her whole body as she tipped her head back and welcomed his tongue into her mouth. Her fingers threaded through the hair at his nape; one of his hands swept up her spine and pushed through her long hair, took a tight grip against her skull. For a moment, all that had stood between them fell away and she let her husband kiss her until she couldn’t understand why she’d ever let them become distant. He was such a good kisser; he was eager and affectionate and always seemed to know exactly what she wanted. They fit. They were perfect complements.

             
His hand had moved around and was on her breast when they were both reminded that things couldn’t go any further. She was swollen and tender and the contact left her gasping. Jordan withdrew, eyelids heavy, and Ellie cursed her recovering body.

             
“Not for a while yet,” she reminded.

             
He rested his forehead against hers and nodded, hands going to her arms again, fingers trailing. “I know.”

             
They resumed his earlier study of the yard, side-by-side, arms linked, dissatisfied.

**

              Chris had never seen Jess eat more than a bite or two at any meal, so he took her to his favorite steakhouse and told her, after they were seated, that he’d heard that the salads were “good.” She’d smiled and asked, “How do you know? Is this where you bring your dates?”

             
He hadn’t lied – he’d brought a date or two to the place – but he’d struggled with her use of
dates
. Apparently, she didn’t see herself as such.

             
Now, she nibbled at a piece of grilled chicken and so far, their meal had been dominated by talk of her house. She was, on purpose he guessed, avoiding last night and anything that might happen in the future between them.

             
She was scared as hell.

             
“So,” he cut her off as she rambled about her ideas for antique bedframes, “tell me something about you I don’t know.”

             
Jess blinked, her smile thin and disbelieving. “What?”

             
“I know you were married. I know you have a kid. I know you bought that fu…messed up house. I know you’re great in the sack.” He grinned and she glanced away. “But what don’t I know?”

             
“Really?” She rustled lettuce leaves with her fork, watching her plate. “You’re going to give me that hokey line?”

             
“Hokey?”

             
“That sounds exactly like the bullshit some desperate loser would use to get my guard down and get in my pants.”

             
She had a way with words, this one. He made a face at his rib eye and shrugged. “I’m just trying to - ”

             
“Get to know me?”

             
“Well, yeah.”

             
“Why?”

             
“You know how we talked about you being passive-aggressive?”

             
She blew out a loud breath and was silent a beat. He snuck a glance and saw her regarding him from beneath her lashes. “What sort of things do you want to know?” she asked.

             
“How old are you?”

             
He could tell she hadn’t expected that. Her fork went back in her salad and she started picking at her dinner again. “I’ll be thirty-two next week.” She smiled humorlessly. “I couldn’t even make it to my forties before everything fell apart.”

             
Chris didn’t want to talk about her stupid ex – the topic reminded him that she was still very much out of reach. “That’s good, though,” he said. “I hear it’s hell meeting someone in your forties.”