Not the movie so much, but the idea of relaxing beside someone else, even if it was in a shitty little motel room with no clean clothes and a fucking blizzard outside, held a strange appeal.
Vincent walked around the bed and sat beside her, both of them propped against the headboard. And he realized he was wrong. It wasn’t relaxing beside someone that appealed.
It was relaxing beside Jill.
She glanced over at him, then did a double take before bouncing off the bed and grabbing his undershirt from the chair in the corner where he’d set it.
Jill flung it at him, and he caught it just before it whacked him in the face.
“Put that on,” she ordered.
“I usually go to bed shirtless,” he said, flexing just to mess with her.
“And I usually watch TV pantless,” she shot back.
Vin lifted an eyebrow. “I’m game if you’re game.”
She pointed at him. “Get dressed, Moretti.”
He complied, but only because an annoying thought cropped up. “Did you talk to Tom?”
Jill was in the process of flinging herself on the bed, but she faltered a little at that. “You sure are concerned with the state of my relationship.”
“Just making conversation,” he muttered, turning his attention back to the TV. It was commercials.
“Since when?” she asked, pressing the issue. “Since when have you ‘just made conversation’ with anyone?”
There was a sharper-than-usual edge to her voice, and Vincent scooted down so he was lying on his side of the bed, head propped on his hand, facing her. “What’s going on, Henley? You’re testy.”
She fished out an M&M, started to lift it to her mouth, and then frowned at it.
“Everything okay?” he asked, tongue in his cheek. This disgruntled version of Jill was kind of… cute.
“I don’t like the brown ones,” she said, as though this were completely reasonable.
She held it out to him between two fingers, and Vincent surprised them both by leaning forward and nipping it out of her fingers with his mouth.
The lips-to-fingers contact was brief. A second at most, but he felt it in his gut. Heard it in her intake of breath.
Vin lifted his eyes to hers, but the second he did, she looked back at the M&M’s bag, shaking it violently until she found a blue one.
She rattled the bag again, going at it like a raccoon with a take-out bag, and he reached out, touched her hand. “Jill?”
Abruptly she dropped the bag of candy and scooted down until she was flat on her back on the bed. She flung both arms over her face, the crook of her crossed elbows hiding her eyes.
He didn’t ask her what was up. Didn’t push. Just sat and waited. She was still for several minutes, and then she rolled over onto her side to face him, propping her head on her hand, mimicking his position.
“Do you think I’m making a mistake?”
His chest clenched. Don’t ask me that.
But her gaze was level, her voice steady. She really wanted to know. Wanted his opinion.
He fished an M&M out of the bag—a brown one—to stall. “I assume that we’re talking about your shotgun wedding?”
She nodded.
“What’s going on? Trouble in paradise?”
“Not really,” she said, glancing down at the bed. “We’re not fighting. It’s just… we never see each other.”
“Which sucks,” he said slowly. “But plenty of couples make long-distance work, at least in the short term.”
“Yeah, because you know so much about couples,” she said crankily.
“It’ll get better,” he forced himself to say. “Just throw yourself into the wedding planning. Remind yourself all the reasons that these tough months are worth it.”
Jill smiled. “I think you might be the first guy in history to tell a woman to throw herself into wedding planning.”
“Yeah well… I’m not the one you’re marrying, now am I? I won’t have to deal with the worst of it.”
He intentionally kept his voice light, but her smile dimmed, just a little, before she seemed to force herself to recover. “Very true. And yet you will have to see me every day, so you just remember this little chat while I’m talking to you about chair covers and canapés and white lingerie.”
“That last one, I’m down with,” he said.
She smiled, and he smiled back. “You sure you’re okay?” he asked.
“Sure. Just been getting a lot of the jitters lately,” she said, rolling herself into a seated position and crossing her legs on the bed.
“Movie’s back,” she said, reaching for the remote and turning it up.
Okay then.
The conversation was apparently over. Usually it was him finding ways to stop talking, but tonight, he wanted to keep the conversation going. He wanted to know more about what was going on with her and Tom.
Wanted to hear more about these second thoughts she was having.
Instead, he reached for a candy bar and tore it open with his teeth as he turned his attention toward the noisy, brainless, yet fully entertaining movie.
Forty minutes later the credits started rolling and Vin waited for Jill to turn the channel.
And waited… and waited…
“Yo, Henley—”