Heart Thaw (2 page)

“You look like Ralphie’s little brother. You know, from
A Christmas Story
?”

He holds his arms out and pretends he can’t put them down. And just like that we’re two kids who’ve known each other our whole lives again.

“Shut up!” I huff. “You
just
said it was better to be overdressed.” He shrugs and laughs, and I zip the leather jacket up. “Is this Georgia’s? Because the sleeves are really short. She hates that.”

“Uh, no. Not Georgia’s.”

Trent rocks a woman’s helmet back and forth in his hands.

“The helmet?”

He shakes his head.

“Whose are they?”

I keep my fingers on the zipper pull, ready to yank the coat off if…if what? If it’s Trent’s girlfriend’s? He’s allowed to have a girlfriend. I
want
him to have one, actually.

So why is there a barbed knot of iron wedged in my throat when I think of him rolling around with some sexy, motorcycle-riding vixen?

“They belong to someone who doesn’t need them, so I brought them for you. It’s not a problem, right?”

He phrases it as a question, but the edge in his voice lets me know with no doubt that he isn’t asking.

“No problem.” I lift my bright red backpack. “Can I bring this?”

He reaches for it and the backs of our hands slide against each other. A jolt rushes up my arm, makes a right-angle turn at my shoulder, and flips my heart into a stutter. He lifts the backpack easily with one arm, even though the weight of it buckles my back at the end of most days.

“Should be okay. Wanna get going?”

When I put my backpack on, I move closer to him and notice the purple rings heavy under his eyes, the tiny reddish veins at the corners, and the sleepy, hooded droop of his eyelids. He’s finally thawed out enough to relax his shoulders, and I can read from the sag of his limbs that he’s desperate for sleep. I also know he’ll deny that he needs to rest until he crashes us both into the back of a tractor trailer.

I take the backpack off, unzip my overcoat, the leather jacket, and push up the arms of my sweater. He narrows his eyes at me.

“You know what? I need to sleep at some point tonight, Trent. I’m sorry. I’ll fall off the back of your bike if I don’t get a little more in. We can wait an hour or two, right? That way we’ll be fairly close to sunrise. That’s safer, right?”

“I thought I woke you up.” His mouth pulls to the side, suspicious of my clumsy lie.

“No! I was...listening to music. It took a while for me to hear you knock.”

I reach my hand out.

He looks across the space between our two hands and takes my fingers, threading his through them. I figure it’s pretty obvious there’s no couch, and the fact is, I only have enough blankets for my narrow bed anyway.

But we are adults.

Or, at least,
I
am. And I’m going to have to be adult enough for both of us, for safety’s sake.

He tugs me toward the wall of his chest. “Sadie, there’s only one bed in your room.”

I untangle our hands, back away from his big, warm body, even though I’m desperate for something other than the lonely cold.

That’s not true. I’m desperate for
him.
I’ve been able to ignore just how much I miss him while he was a few hours away and I was consumed with school and jobs and petty problems, but now that he’s here, tall and strong and gorgeous, riding in, my knight in a leather jacket, he’s making me feel that tipsy, head-over-heels crazy that’s dangerous.

I push all those thoughts back, clear my throat, and fumble out some words that make me sound like an uptight British nanny.

“I’ll set the alarm for five. You’ll have to lie down with me whether you’re tired or not. I can’t sleep with the lights on or any noise.”

I sprint to my room before the reality of what I’m suggesting swings in and smacks me upside my dense head.

My fingers shake as I throw laundry in the hamper, neaten up my desk, set out the pillows, nervous as hell and not wanting to think about why. After a minute, then two, I’m sure he isn’t coming in, that he’s just going to plop down in one of my hard-backed kitchen chairs, dozing while he sits up like an obstinate ass.

Then Trent clomps down the hall, toward me. My heart jumps into my throat and sticks. I wait for him, but he pauses just inside the doorway.

“Come in,” I order, bossiness a decent cover for how jittery I feel.

I climb into the bed and wave him over.

He hesitates another half a minute, then drags his feet before he gets to the side of my bed and its warm down comforter and patchwork quilt. It’s obvious how tired he is, how badly he wants to climb in. I turn the covers back and pat the spot on the bed I’ve left for him. The last thing I see before I flick off the light is his wide eyes, pure green.

I’m braver in the dim shadows of my room. I reach a hand out and it lands on his hip, where my fingers fumble until they loop through a belt buckle and tug him over.

“Kick your boots off. Hurry up. I need to sleep.”

I soften my words and throw in a fake yawn, but my blood feels carbonated and spreads in excited, buzzing waves through my body.

“Are you sure?”

His voice is a flinty and cautious in the dark.

“It’s no big deal. Right? How many times did we sleep in the same tent on camping trips?”

I hope the recollection of our most innocent memories will blot out that one hot, twined, sweet, heady—

“That was before we had sex, Sadie.”

His words ricochet through my brain, slicing questions left and right. Does he regret it? Does he think about it? Is he pissed I never returned his calls? If he ever thinks about it, does the memory make it hard to pull the breath in and out of his lungs or feel anything but a low heat deep in his gut?

Does he feel what I feel?

Was leather jacket/helmet girl before or after? Was it better or worse with her? Was sleeping with me what Trent did to blot his memory of her, or was she his attempt to blot his memory of me?

“I was wrong before, okay? We’re both adults, and this is no big deal. That one time didn’t change anything.”

The words are meant to be mature, to relax the tension that’s piled like cemented bricks since I sank onto my bed.

But they wind up being lighter fluid to the flames that keep fanning between us, no matter how hard I try to stomp them out. The thump of Trent’s boots on the floor makes me jump. I hear him pull his zipper down, and he kicks his pants to the corner. He rips his socks off and grabs his shirt by the back, yanking it over his head.

I hear the jingle of his necklace, the silver oval with St. Christopher engraved on it. The one he refuses to take off, the one his mother gave him on the day of his high school graduation.

I once ran my fingers over the silver ridges and dips, just before I pressed my mouth to his and swirled my tongue around his in a long, beer-induced kiss against the pine tree where we used to play pirate war.

That was the first night I’d seen him in months, and it was the first time I looked at Trent Toriello as something other than my best friend’s little brother. It was the first time he looked like a guy, and one whose smoky green eyes and sweet, curving mouth jerked me like a bungee cord on the recoil.

“How can you sleep in your clothes?”

His voice is husky and low in the dark. I can see his body silhouetted in the glow of the streetlight, long and lanky, his boxer briefs snug on his lean hips.

“I’m comfortable.”

And I was. Until he presented the question. Suddenly my jeans are like long, full-leg shackles and the wool of my collar chafes and gnaws at my neck.

“I won’t touch you.” He sits on the bed, and I can smell him. It’s partially chemical, like kerosene or permanent marker, with a soft bite of cologne, and something that reminds me of lying in the warm, clover-dotted grass in the summer. “Unless you want me to.”

“I said I’m
fine
.”

The words grind out through my teeth, and I refuse to let the tendrils of delicious memory vine out of control until they turn into this unfurling need I can’t seem to choke back.  As my frustration mounts, I can’t keep from clawing at my itching wrists and rolling my knees back and forth to loosen the clamp of my jeans.

He stretches out on the mattress next to me, and the clover sweet smell of him grows more intense. My nostrils are the only part of my body that don’t itch atrociously or feel like they’re encased in armor.

Trent reclines, perfectly still, hands behind his head, while I wriggle and squirm.

“You said five?” His voice reverberates under my ribcage.

“Yeah. Five.” I flip on my side and rub one knee against the other.

A long, loud sigh piggybacks on a groan, and he reaches for me. For one sparkling second I think he might kiss me, and my first instinct is to pucker my lips and nestle in his arms, despite every neuron in my brain screaming its protest.

But instead of his warm, sweet lips, there’s only the cruel scratch of wool as he tugs my sweater over my head and throws it on the floor. His hands reach to flip the button of my jeans open, and his fingers catch the pull tab on the zipper. My hand shoots down and closes over his.

I can feel the quick, hot rush of his breath against my forehead. My shoulder is pressed over his heart, which thumps hard.

“I’ve got it,” I say, pushing him away from me.

When he swallows, the bob of his Adam’s apple slides against my cheek. He rolls away from me, onto his back, and his voice is so level, if I hadn’t felt the stutter of his heart, I would have been suckered into believing he was completely calm.

“We’re wasting time. We should be sleeping,” he growls.

I lift my hips and press the fabric down until it balls at my ankles, then kick the pants off. Since I’ve gone that far, I peel off my thermals and throw them into the pile with my wool sweater. On impulse I unhook my bra and slide it under my camisole, tossing it on the pile with everything else. I’d be an idiot if I went that far for the sake of comfort but risked a popped underwire poking me all night.

For the next few minutes Trent and I are a tangle of limbs, bumping backbones, jutting knees, and colliding elbows, until he pulls me to him so I’m curved neatly against the hollowed c of his body. His chin rests on the crown of my head, his arms curl around me, and one of his legs hooks with a hairy scratch over mine.

“Lie still, Sadie.” I feel his voice rumble through my chest as much as I hear it. “We used to share a tent. We had sex. We can catch a few hours sleep in your tiny-ass bed without dislocating anything. Alright?”

His long fingers caress the side of my hip through the thin cotton of my reindeer underwear and the rhythm of his heart sinks through the silk of my cami. I imagine indecent, imprudent, irresponsibly delicious things, but before my mind can delve too far into its naughtiest depths, he goes slack and a very soft snore vibrates from his nose.

He’s sound asleep, and I’m positive I’ll lie awake for hours, but, in what feels like the space of one blink, my eyes fly open and my body tenses against the blare of my alarm clock.

The patch of sky I see out the window over the crest of Trent’s shoulder is purple as a bruise, washed out in the sickly shine of the streetlight that flickers with the encroaching dawn. Trent’s arm swings out and swats at the offending noise, but he must be trying to turn off his alarm clock from the haze of his sleep, because he’s nowhere near mine.

I roll and slide the button to ‘off,’ and his arms tighten around me. I feel the press of his hard-on on my thigh, and my brain admits that the correct reaction is to wake him up, briskly, and get started for home, where we can then avoid each other for the duration of my winter break. Instead, I run a finger over his black eyebrows, smoothing them into neat arches over his eyelids, still flickering and dancing with the mysteries of his dreams.

“Trent, wake up.” I snake one arm from his anaconda embrace and shake his shoulder back and forth. “Wake up. We have to go.”

He murmurs something about
minutes
and
sleep
and, eyes closed, dips his head to my neck, draws a long breath in, hums with contentment, and neatly flips me under his long body.

His kisses are morning-breath sour and soft-lipped sweet, and my legs spread to nestle around his, cupping him against me, heat to molten heat, hard to slippery wet. For one sweet skip of judgment, I let my entire body soak in the hot-water-and-bubbles-good feel of him, then I push him away, flattening his St. Christopher between my palm and his chest.

His eyes slither open, pure green and instantly sharp with shaken-off sleep.

“Morning.” He pushes up, arms taut, and looks down the v our jointed bodies make. “Excuse my enthusiasm.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s just a morning thing, right?”

I try not to make it too obvious when I slurp the saliva about to drool out of the side of my mouth. He pauses for a long second.

“Yeah, sure. Just a morning thing.” He sits up and a chemical clover smell rises from his still-warm imprint. “I need five minutes, and we can go.”