One Reckless Summer (21 page)

But Mick raked his thumb across the sensitive nub there over and over as he continued to drive into her, and she realized her upward thrusts were becoming more pronounced, rhythmic, that her breath had gone shallow, that everything inside her was growing hot and feverish and a little bit frenzied. She kept her eyes on his the whole time, gazing up at him even as she moaned, even as she gritted her teeth, even as she heard herself whisper to him, “Oh…oh God. Almost, almost…”

She sobbed as the second orgasm exploded through her, more intense than the first, more intense than anything she’d ever experienced. She cried out over and over as the waves of pleasure buffeted her, making her feel as if she were drowning in them, being swallowed by sensation.
Oh God
,
oh God
,
oh God.

Oh wow. She truly hadn’t known she could do that. She lay beneath him, spent and astonished.

“Damn, pussycat,” Mick whispered, looking gratified and sexy as hell—just before he held her down once more and began to pound into her again, hard, hard, hard. And it was in that moment when she realized:
Oh God
,
I’m suddenly not so in control here anymore
.

When had
that
happened? But then, maybe it didn’t matter. As good as it had felt to be the one orchestrating their sex for a while, she couldn’t deny that perhaps, at some moments, control was overrated.

“Aw God, baby, I can’t hold back,” Mick said, voice heated, breathless, just before delivering the last and most powerful, punishing strokes—and as Jenny willingly absorbed them into her body, she loved knowing she’d just made Mick lose control, too.

Mick woke up with her in his arms, naked, soft,
warm
. She felt so good that he never wanted to leave—but that thought forced him to glance around the room until he found a digital clock on a bedside table. Okay, good—he’d only been here about an hour, so he could stay awhile longer. He refocused on the woman in his embrace.

He hadn’t woken up like this often—he usually ended up with women who…didn’t inspire him to sleep over. He liked his sex quick and easy—like he wished he could have kept it with Jenny. But his secrets and the need for her trust had complicated things from the start.

Of course, it wasn’t the first time sex had turned into something more. He’d dated plenty of women for a month or two, even had a couple who’d lasted longer and who he’d actually thought of as his “girlfriend.” But then, on both occasions, the woman in question had told him she loved him. And he hadn’t wanted to hear that, hadn’t felt the same way—he didn’t think he’d ever been in love and had long since decided that his screwed-up upbringing had probably made it so he just wasn’t cut out for that. So he’d ended the relationships and moved on.

As for Jenny, what they shared was…indefinable to him. She wasn’t his girlfriend. But she wasn’t just a quick lay, either. Although he hated the moments when words slipped out that might let her know that.
Wherever I am and whatever I’m doing
,
I’m wanting
more of you?
He let out a sigh. Damn it, what had he been thinking?

He wasn’t stupid—he understood how he felt for her. He felt…more needful of her than he should because she was the bright light in a world of darkness right now. He
got
that.

But he didn’t want to let it show, because it would…make her think this was something it wasn’t. By the end of the summer he’d be gone,
long
gone, and he never planned to look back. He didn’t want Jenny to get hurt by that—because she’d been nothing but good to him, better than most people in his life had been, especially people from Destiny.
So you have to cool it
,
damn it
,
on saying shit like that. You have to keep this exactly what you told her it was
:
hot sex
.

“Hey,” she whispered then, and he looked down to see her smiling sweetly up at him.

Despite his last thought, he smiled back. “Hey, pussycat.”

She bit her lip, looking like a woman who had a secret she was about to tell. “That was…the best sex I’ve ever had.”

He couldn’t lie. “Me, too.”
Aw shit—what happened to not telling her stuff like that?
She was just too open, too earnest, and ever since she’d found out about
Wayne
, he’d found her too easy to talk to.

She let her hand drift from his chest over to his arm, running her fingertips across his tattoo. “So about this—why’d you get it?”

She’d already asked him about this once. “Haven’t we already discussed—
”

“Besides wanting to be a bad-ass, I mean,” she added with a laugh. “Why else?”

At first, he laughed, too—why did anyone get a tattoo?—but then he actually thought about the answer, and about the fact that Jenny seemed to know there was more to it. “Truthfully,” he said, “I probably did it because
Wayne
got one. I was about nineteen or twenty, I guess, and
Wayne
made tattoos seem cool.”

“He has more now,” she commented quietly, a little sheepish—because she’d noticed that when peeking in the window of his house, he supposed.

“Mostly from prison.”

“But you stopped at one,” she pointed out.

He glanced down at her. “Guess I quit looking up to him so much after a while.”

“Do you smoke?”

He flinched and gave her a look. That was kinda out of the blue.

“I just wondered because that day I met you when we were teenagers, you were smoking. Now I’m not around you enough to know, so I’m curious.”

Oh. “No,” he said. “Quit a long time ago.” Another thing he’d probably started because his brother had.

“Do you drink?”

He laughed now at how inquisitive she’d suddenly gotten. “I’d take a beer if you offered me one, but…now that I think about
it,
I haven’t had anything to drink since I came back to Destiny. What’s with all the questions?”

She perched her chin atop her hands on his chest. “I don’t know. I guess I’ve just started to…wonder things about you. I mean, we have sex like crazy animals—is it awful if I want to know a few things about you?”

Well, when she put it like that…“No, not awful. Just…new.”

“Tell me more about your life in
Cincinnati
.”

He tried to sum it up. “Like I told you, I work as a bricklayer and stonemason.”

“So how’d you learn to do that?” She sounded truly interested, which for some reason caught him off guard.

He just shrugged. “When
Wayne
went to prison, I realized I needed to clean up my act, live better.” As for why he’d picked that particular trade…“And I always just kind of…admired good brickwork and nice stone walls, you know? So I thought it would be a good thing to learn, and a job people would always need done.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

He nodded against the pillow. “It makes me feel good to…build something I know is gonna be around awhile.”

“Do you…have a girlfriend or anything?”

He looked at her in response to the pointed question. “Nobody special, pussycat. If I did, I wouldn’t be here with you right now.”

“Good,” she said. “I don’t like cheaters. For obvious reasons.” Her cheating husband. When he’d first met her, he’d felt bad for her about that in a general sort of way. Now that he knew her better, he wanted to pound the guy into the ground.

“So, Miss Twenty Questions, what about
you
?”

“What
about
me?” She looked surprised he would ask, and he was surprised, too—but he could do this, talk to her like this, without saying romantic shit, so it would be okay.

What could he ask her? “You like being a teacher?”

She pursed her lips, looked undecided. “I like teaching a subject I love, like astronomy. But I never really planned on teaching middle-
schoolers
—it just worked out that way. And some of them are great—but it can be hard to hold their attention, and sometimes I feel more like a babysitter than a teacher.”

Just then, he noticed a print on the wall, illuminated by the moonlight—an artsy-looking painting of a black cat with long whiskers and a curling tail. “Did you ever get another cat after that white one?” he asked, just because it popped into his head.

She shook her head, appearing a little dismayed by the question. “No. In fact, someone actually offered me one today and I turned it down. Why?”

“I don’t know—you just seem…like a cat sort of girl.”

She smiled
softly,
clearly pleased he could figure that out. “I am, actually—I love cats.” Her smile faded just as quickly, though. “But they die.”

In that moment, he could suddenly hear the silence all around them—right before he reminded her, “Everything dies. Every
body
dies.”

Their gazes met and he knew what they were both thinking about:
Wayne
. And her mother. They both knew about death coming. “But cats die faster,” she whispered. “I couldn’t help thinking about that today, when my friend offered me the cat. Maybe…that’s why I like stars so much. They all eventually die, too, but it takes them billions of years.”

“Stars die?” He guessed he’d heard of them exploding occasionally, but he didn’t know much about what went on in space.

She nodded. “Yep. You were right when you said everything dies—even the very biggest things in the universe die sooner or later.”

“So if you love the sky so much, why aren’t you…some kind of fancy scientist or something?” He couldn’t help thinking she’d probably be good at that sort of thing since she seemed pretty much
obsessed
with stars and planets.

What he hadn’t expected was for the question to make her look…almost ashamed in some way. “I…wanted to be. I dreamed of being an astronomer, maybe even a physicist.”

It left him to ask the obvious. “Why didn’t you?”

She swallowed visibly and looked uncomfortable. “When I met Terrence, he thought being a teacher was more practical, more attainable.
He
wanted to be a teacher, so he kind of talked me into being one, too. I could kick myself for listening to him. And I feel angry at him for it sometimes. But I really have no one to blame but myself. I gave up on my dream. I let it get away from me.”

“Show me,” he said.

“Show you what?”

“Show me what’s so great up there. What you look at with that telescope of yours.” He couldn’t believe he was saying it, because he wasn’t even sure he really cared about seeing—but he’d rather be a guy who encouraged her dreams than one who took them away. And letting her show him seemed like a nice thing to do.

As for when he’d gotten to be such a nice guy—he had no idea.

“I’d love to, but I can’t—here. Too many trees—they block too much of the sky.”

“Let’s go across the lake then.”

Her eyes lit, even if a bit cautiously. “Really? Right now?”

He shrugged. “Sure, pussycat.” She already knew his secrets, after all. And it had made him feel bad to think of her wanting to do something as simple as look at the sky but having it
be
sort of…just beyond her reach. That was how he’d felt about this side of the lake his whole life.

“Holy shit,” he murmured when he spotted Saturn with its rings. He’d learned about the solar system a long time ago in grade school, of course, but…there was something about seeing it, another planet, with freaking
rings
around it, with his own eyes. It was just hard to believe he could be looking at something so far away—it was like sci-fi come to life.

“Now let’s look deeper into space,” Jenny said, stepping up to the telescope and starting to make adjustments to it, changing out the lens.

“You can look
deeper
into space?” he asked, astounded.

Her answer came matter-of-fact. “Oh
yeah. Much
deeper.”

A moment later, after she used a dim, red-
lensed
flashlight to consult what looked to Mick like some kind of star map, she peered through the telescope, made more adjustments,
then
let out a heady-sounding sigh. “Got it,” she said. Then backed away from the instrument and said, “Take a look. The Dumbbell Nebula.”

Mick put his eye back to the lens and what he saw almost made his heart skip a beat. A huge, heavenly glow surrounded a darker shape that reminded him of an hourglass. “What the hell
is
that?”

“It’s a planetary nebula.
Which is basically a big blob of gases produced when a certain kind of star explodes.
”

“Wow,” he murmured. “That’s pretty damn cool.”

“But the more common type of nebula is a big, gassy region where stars are actually
formed.
”

He pulled back from the telescope. “Formed how?”

As she explained, she took back control of the telescope and played around with it a little more, until offering it back to him again. “Here—this is the Swan Nebula, a star-maker, but there aren’t many stars visible. And you might have to use your imagination a little to see the swan.”

He looked, and was amazed. “I see…more of a check mark,” he admitted, but felt a little freaked out to think he was looking at the stuff that would turn into new stars.