I’d never been so turned on and willingly ready to starve in my life.
‘Time to eat.’ Those words discharged another surge of reckless, uninhibited thoughts concerning Jacqueline’s lovely body.
Her disorientated, frustrated groan was a mind-blowing sort of music to my ears – a refrain that told me, clearly, she wanted me. What she knows of you, my brain clarified. Even possessed with lust, I couldn’t break away from my conscience.
Over dinner, I mentioned that I’d cooked for Dad and myself before leaving for college.
‘You cooked? Not your mom or dad?’ Her gaze was steady below faintly creased brows.
‘My mom died when I was thirteen.’ I tried to make light of the fact that I did the cooking after that – like I was just making sure Dad and I ate something besides toast and fish.
‘I’m sorry.’ Her genuine sympathy surfaced in the quiet concern of her voice, and I felt pulled apart by contradictory desires – follow my characteristic restraint where the subject of my mother was concerned, or tell her everything. As usual, the words roadblocked in my throat. I nodded and said nothing.
While we ate, Francis consumed his body weight in snapper and yowled to be let out after. Bolting the door behind him, I imagined he’d need a jog around the neighbourhood rather than a hunting expedition tonight.
I walked back to the table and took Jacqueline’s hand. She rose and followed me to my bed, where we lay, eyes locked, like it was old habit to do so. I reached to touch her, to confirm that she was real and not a cruel fabrication of my heart. Her skin was so soft, and her face became more beautiful every time I saw her. She scared the hell out of me, but I couldn’t stay away from her.
I unbuttoned her blouse the rest of the way, slowly, eyes on hers, ready to stop the moment she signalled me to do so, regardless of what we’d done before. She swallowed thickly, nervously, as I bared the curve of her shoulder and leaned to touch my lips to it. Her warm breath in my ear, she shoved her cool hands under my shirt, palms sliding across my abdomen and wandering higher. I couldn’t tear my shirt off fast enough.
Sliding one leg between hers, I pressed my thigh against her firmly and drove my tongue into her sweet mouth when she gasped, my need for her overriding my need for oxygen. She rewarded me with a subtle moan and arched against me, her hands sliding over my skin, stroking over the poem inscribed on my side that I finally understood fully. My brain was a riot of want and fear. I’d never been so terrified of my own desires, because they went well beyond her body. I shook to my core, my soul curving round her protectively as my mind strove to determine the logical calculation that could make her mine. I wanted to be hers as much – more – than I wanted to possess her, when I knew damned well that neither was possible.
She moved above me, her hair tumbling over her shoulders, the silky tips brushing my chin, her blouse and bra sliding away with strokes of my appreciative fingers. I shoved my reservations to the side for these surrendered, short-lived moments, worshipping her with murmured supplications and whisper-soft caresses. I felt certain my skin’s nerve endings had multiplied in the prior week, because every place she touched me with her mouth or fingertips, I burned.
Since I had no plan to push past Jacqueline’s former point of resistance, the hours we spent in my bed were hotter than I’d ever imagined making out could be, and kissing her was a luxurious, sensory indulgence all its own. As my body accepted this, I lingered over every stroke of my tongue, coaxing her along with my mouth alone and pinning her hands flat to the mattress so she couldn’t touch me. She arched and twisted beneath me, winding her legs round mine, telling me with every whimper and hum that her body was the instrument I knew how to play, and play well.
When I finally released her hands, she shoved her fingers into my hair as I kissed down her chest and across her belly, swirling my tongue into her navel while gripping her tightly between her waist and hips, as if debating whether to remove her jeans. She scraped her nails across my shoulders, and I knew if I touched the button just below my chin, she would tell me yes. Every provocative touch of her fingertips, her lips, her tongue, and every sound she made built both my craving and my contentment – which made no logical sense, but I didn’t care.
I slipped back to her lips, slowly, pressing my weight into her, attending to every part of her body that demanded my notice on the way up. She trembled and held on to me when I pulled us to our sides. ‘I should get you back.’
Tucked to my chest, her fingers were entwined with mine, and though she nodded, she tightened her grip on my hand and didn’t move an inch from her position in my arms for several minutes. I felt a compelling desire to preserve the moment, as if final grains of sand were streaming through the neck of an hourglass, and all I wanted to do was tip it on to its side for a few more precious seconds.
We dressed without speaking, and I buttoned up her blouse, lingering deliberately over each button, and then leaned to kiss her one last time.
I was about to bring the Harley to life when Charles emerged from the back of the house with a kitchen trash bag. I couldn’t move, my eyes tracing his steps from the door to the bin, and back to the door. I willed him to go inside without turning round, but I knew he wouldn’t. His hand on the doorknob, he turned and looked straight at me. Straight at Jacqueline.
‘Landon? Jacqueline?’ he asked, as if he couldn’t believe his own eyes. Or just wished to God he was wrong. He sighed and told me to meet him in the kitchen when I returned. I nodded once, and he went inside.
Jacqueline said nothing at all. I didn’t know if she’d been shocked into silence or if she’d sensed this impending finale, as I had. The ten-minute journey to her dorm seemed like ten seconds, but it was long enough for me to realize one clarifying truth about my dual persona and Jacqueline: she already knew.
19
Landon
After spring break, my truancy scaled new levels of don’t-give-a-fuck. Mr Quinn was disappointed in me – he’d told me so every time he handed back a failing or near-failing test or sent me to detention for skipping. But there were some days I just wasn’t going to sit across a table from Melody Dover.