Carefully, I close the door, making sure to lock it again, and turn off the TV in the living room before making my way down the hall. Jonathan stalls when I stop in front of him.
“You, uh… you might wanna consider staying,” I tell him.
He raises an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“Yep.” I step toward him, flush against him, and rise up on my tiptoes as I whisper, “I think you’ve been made.”
I head to my bedroom, and he hesitates before following, stopping in the doorway. “What are you talking about?”
“The knock on the door,” I tell him as I strip, getting out of this uniform. “Seems they were looking for a certain someone they heard might be around here somewhere.”
“Fuck.”
“I didn’t tell them anything,” I say, tossing my clothes in the hamper. “It was the cashier from the store—you know, the one that went home sick tonight—and her friends. Guess someone thought they spotted you and word got back to her at work that you were in town for some reason.”
I turn to him, expecting a reaction, maybe an explanation, but he doesn’t even look at my face. No, his eyes are drifting, scanning my body, as I stand in front of him in plain white cotton, a simple bra and underwear.
I wave my hand in the direction of his face. “Are you even listening to me?”
He meets my gaze, eyebrows raised. “What?”
I shake my head, walking over to the closet to pull out a t-shirt, putting it on. When I turn back to him, he’s not looking at me again. No, this time his attention is on the top of the dresser right beside him, on the old notebook sitting there.
After a moment, he attempts to focus. “So I’ve been made, huh?”
“Seems so.”
“Pity,” he says, strolling over and sitting down on the edge of my bed. “I was enjoying anonymity.”
“Yeah, well, real world, remember? You had to know it wouldn’t last.”
“Yeah,” he mumbles, though he doesn’t seem to like that fact, his attention now on the drawings covering his cast. He traces the colorful lines with his fingertips.
Grabbing a black permanent marker from the drawer in my bedside stand, I push Jonathan back onto the mattress before climbing onto his lap, straddling him. I yank the cap off the marker with my teeth. Pinning him down, I find a spot on the cast that still has some white and carefully write the words, ‘love doesn’t know titles.’
He watches me, reading it, and smiles.
“That line is in the movie,” he says as I sign beneath it simply with a ‘K’ and put the cap back on the marker. “It wasn’t when I got the Ghosted script, but I threw a fit so they wrote it in.”
“They let you have input?”
“Of course,” he says. “It’s in my contract.”
“Well, in that case,” I say, “you ought to have them fix the ending for your daughter.”
He laughs. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I kiss him. I shouldn’t. We shouldn’t be doing any of this stuff we keep doing, but I’m having a hard time stopping myself when it comes to this man. He makes me reckless again.
He kisses me back, hands roaming, pulling at clothes, touching, caressing. I moan against his lips when he starts rubbing. Even constrained by a broken wrist, he easily works his magic.
Breaking the kiss, I gasp as his mouth finds my neck. He’s fumbling with his pants but hesitating for some reason. “You are on birth control, right?”
I pull back from him, enough to meet his gaze.
“We haven’t talked about it,” he says. “I wasn’t sure, you know, and we should be careful.”
He’s trying to have a serious conversation. A legitimate one. One we need to have. One that would probably make my father proud. But he’s still rubbing, he hasn’t yet stopped, and everything is going hazy, because I’m getting closer and closer, pleasure tingling my body.
I force words out between breaths as orgasm tears through me. “I’ve got... uh... implant... in my... uh... arm.” Oh god. “It's good… for another… year… uhhhh…”
He yanks me onto the bed beneath him, startling me, not hesitating anymore as he says, “Well, in that case…”
“No, no, no…”
The screeching of the alarm startles me awake. The bedroom is still dim and my eyes are burning as I force them open, slapping at the bedside stand to silence the noise.
“Shut that thing up,” a gruff voice grumbles, the words muffled, a pillow covering his head. I hit a button—some button, any button—to make it stop screeching, and try to sit up when arms wind around me, yanking me back down. “Hmm, stay.”
“I can’t,” I mumble. “I have to work.”
“Quit.”
“Maddie has school.”
“She can quit, too.”
Laughing, I try to break free from his grasp. “Seriously, Jonathan. I have to get up.”
“I’d rather you not.”
“Tough.”
Sighing dramatically, he loosens his grip, letting me slip out of bed. I pause and stretch, cringing, my entire body aching this morning. Even my bones seem to hurt. I’m much too young to feel so old, but real life, remember?
I glance behind me at the bed, at Jonathan, as he peeks out from beneath the pillow. It’s strange, so strange, him being here—exciting, yet terrifying. But just like his anonymity, I know this can’t last forever.
“Guess I have to get up, too,” he says, tossing the pillow onto the mattress beside him as he sits up. “Gotta go brave the public and get back to my grumpy ass landlady.”
“You could stay here,” I suggest right away—maybe too fast, based on the stunned look he gives me, but I’m just as shocked.
Did I seriously invite him to stay here?
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
He laughs.
“But you could, if you wanted to,” I continue. “You know, stay and hide out. It would make it easier for you to see Maddie.”
“Okay.”
“Just don’t snoop through my underwear drawer when I’m not home.”
“Hasn’t even crossed my mind,” he says, grinning. “Does that mean I'm allowed to look when you're here?”
Rolling my eyes, I lean over the bed and kiss him—not dwelling, not lingering, and not answering that question—before leaving the bedroom. I shower and put on my uniform for work. Jonathan’s already asleep again before I even wake Maddie up.
I’m exhausted, and the morning drags on and on and on. Maddie eats Lucky Charms before I drop her off at school, getting to work at exactly eight o’clock. Marcus is already there, bright-eyed, rambling on about schedules and vacation days and overtime pay. I barely pay him attention as I clock in until I hear the words ‘Kennedy can cover the register this weekend’. Oh, whoa, whoa… “Excuse me? I can do what?”
“You don’t mind, do you?” he asks, not even looking at me, his attention fixed on some paperwork he’s sorting through. “Bethany wants the weekend off, and we don’t have anyone to cover for her.”
“Here’s a novel idea—hire somebody,” I say. “The cashiers have been short-staffed for a while, even before Bethany started requesting all this time off.”
“I could,” he said. “I just figured you’d want the extra hours, being a single mom and all.”