Authors: Lauren Gilley
“Nikki….Nikki, listen to me a min –Nikki!”
Ellie didn’t take personal calls at work. But when Nikki called for the tenth time, her manager met her at the kitchen door, her cell in hand and said, “Handle this already.”
Daylight was rapidly failing out on the sidewalk in front of Angelo’s and Nikki was coming unglued.
“No,
you
listen to
me
!” she railed on the other end of the line. “Stop stalking my boyfriend, Noelle! He’s
my
boyfriend! He doesn’t want you, so stop telling lies about him!”
There was a long wooden bench that bridged the sidewalk and the rock garden in front of the restaurant and Ellie sank onto it with a groan. “I’m not lying,” she said with a patience she didn’t feel. “I’m trying to help you - ”
“No you’re not!” Nikki shrieked. “Leave us alone! I swear to God, if you don’t - ”
“You’ll what?”
“Just…just…
stop
!”
The line went dead with a
click
.
Ellie slid her phone into her apron pocket with every intention of going back inside. Instead, she propped her elbows on her knees, dropped her chin in her hand, and stared across the rapidly filling parking lot. Her eyes were stinging, but she’d become quite adept at holding the tears at bay.
She and Nikki had never been close – Ellie would have wondered if she’d been adopted if it weren’t for the eyes – but she was never going to become dead to the rejection of her only sibling. She called herself stupid over and over for the tiny kernel of hope she carried that maybe, somehow, she and Nikki could get past their mountain of differences. But throw Kyle into the mix and it was very much like being ganged up on. It was exhausting.
“Ellie.”
Her head snapped up and, for a moment, she was convinced disorientation was making her see things that weren’t so. Because it looked a whole lot like Coach Walker was standing on the sidewalk in front of her. But then her eyes adjusted and yes, it was, in fact, Jordan Walker, his hair gelled to his head, dark jeans making his legs look miles long.
“Coach,” she said, knowing the wrinkles between her brows mirrored the confusion in her voice.
“Jordan,” he corrected. His hands were jammed in his pockets and he was staring down at her with a small half-frown. “You alright?”
“Fine,” was her automatic response. She reached to slick her palm over the crown of her head, searching for hairs come loose from her ponytail. She suddenly wished she wasn’t wearing her all-black work ensemble and didn’t smell like garlic and pepperoni. She scraped up a smile she didn’t feel. “Are you here to meet a date?”
A look she couldn’t identify flickered across his face. “Not really.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair and left it sticking up at odd angles. “I, um…” His attempted smile pulled to the side until it wasn’t even a smile anymore. “I kinda came to…see you.”
Ellie groaned again, burying her face in her palms. “This is not happening,” she muttered.
“Yeah…I probably shouldn’t have said that.”
She tipped her head back, pulse thumping double time in her ears. How could he possibly be standing in front of her, cute and disheveled and in the perfect pair of jeans, and say he’d come to see her? “You didn’t come here for me,” she said, sure of it.
He grimaced. “Well I didn’t turn down Janet Jennings for pizza.”
“What?”
“Nevermind.” He took a step back. “Forget I said anything. I’ve…gone crazy or something.”
She watched him turn, caught between the absurdity of the situation and her own sudden, fervent hope that, somehow, he was telling the truth. “Wait…Jordan.”
He was in the process of stepping off the sidewalk and his foot caught in the air, sneaker hovering over the pavement. It was the first time she’d addressed him by his first name and it left a sharp, sugar-sweet taste in her mouth. It breached the bubble of propriety she’d been struggling to maintain and smoothed away some of her nerves; left her with the sense that she was just talking to a guy, and not to her teacher.
His face was carefully blank when he turned back to her, and she wondered if maybe the sound of his name had affected him too.
“Why?” she asked, and he frowned. “Why’d you come to see me?”
His silence was incriminating. So was the way his eyes moved over her.
Paige would have told her to jump on him: she was always pushing Ellie toward casual hookups, even though she’d been with her own steady boyfriend Bobby since high school. Ellie’s instincts told her that she was made for rejection – her own family didn’t even want to claim her – and that whatever he had to offer for the night wasn’t worth the scandal.
Her instincts won out. “You don’t like me.”
A startled smile lit up his face and the laugh that followed was a sharp, quick bark. “Shit. I dunno who pissed all over your day, but I’m not gonna take the abuse for it.”
He started to turn again and Ellie felt something akin to loneliness descending over her. “No!” He faced her, brows raised:
you wanna make up your mind?
“No, I…” She sighed. “I’m sorry. I
am
having a bad day. It’s just…” She wished she was brave enough not to question his presence, to just run with it. “I don’t know what to think about this.”
He grinned; a quiet, sideways, subtle sort of grin that amped up her pulse another notch. “I’m not proposing, you know.”
Her cheeks burned. “I know.”
“I’m not asking to be another guy in the gym you want to avoid.”
She thought her face might catch fire.
“But I
do
like you.” For a guy who could be so blank-faced most of the time, the devious grin he gave her was bone-melting. He sobered quickly, but it was enough to give her the kind of full body flush she hadn’t felt in a while. “Against my better judgment. You good girl types are a lot of work.”
An indignant laugh bubbled up out of her throat before she could stop it. “Good girl?”
“It’s terribly obvious.” He came and sat down beside her on the bench, mirroring her pose with his elbows on his knees. His eyes looked almost turquoise in the last ambient glow of sunlight, full of gold flecks and deep as ocean water. His gaze wasn’t predatory; he didn’t leer at her, but watched her with an attention that made eye contact difficult to maintain.
“You’d be taking a risk,” she said, glancing out across the parking lot. She wasn’t just thinking about tonight anymore, and suspected he knew it. “You could get fired if anyone from the school found out.”
“How ‘bout we worry about that when there’s something to get fired over?”
A Red Bull can tumbled along the gutter, the aluminum rattling against the pavement. Ellie listened to car engines start and die, and breathed in air laced with exhaust.
Jordan wasn’t proposing…anything. But she felt an energy sizzling between them right there on the bench; she imagined the humidity in the air hissed as it hit the crackling charge of what-could-be he’d brought with him tonight. She wasn’t naïve – she knew men didn’t go out of their way for conversation and her brand of mild, blushing flirtation; if she lifted her eyes to meet his delicious sea foam ones and asked him what he had in mind, she’d be signing on to an escalation of his attention. To everything physical he wanted from her.
A sudden, unexpected excitement licked through her.
She had always been a straight A student. She worked, she hoarded her money, she dutifully burdened herself with her parents’ criticisms. She tried to be a sister though Nikki wouldn’t allow it. She sat across the table from Kyle on those rare family dinners and watched her mother fawn over him like he wasn’t the lowest piece of shit on the planet. She spent sleepless nights baking with Paige. She plotted stories and stared through her bedroom window, dreaming of the future she wanted.
She deserved something frivolous, didn’t she? Something fun. Something mindless. A chance to trace her nails through the stark grooves of his abs while he –
“What the hell,” she said, and felt her skin prickle with goose bumps. She faced him with a boldness that shocked her. “I get off at ten.”
11
“
M
y sister is…temperamental,” Ellie said between sips of beer, and Jordan guessed that wasn’t what she’d wanted to say.
The address she’d texted him led him to a blue Cape Cod, with dormer windows that looked like eyes, set back on a wooded lot. The trees threw eerie, distorted shadows across the lawn, but the carriage lamps on either side of the front door had been lit and the house had somehow reminded him of the girl who lived in it.
Ellie had answered the door in denim cutoffs and a clinging black t-shirt, her feet bare, toenails painted black to match her fingernails. She’d been nervous, the tremors in her hands visible as she’d raked them through her heavy mass of dark hair. But she’d offered him an uncertain smile and a tour, explaining that the house belonged to her grandmother, apologizing for faults he didn’t notice. He caught a fleeting impression of modern furniture mixed with antiques, warped floorboards and outdated light fixtures, but his focus had been her. The tight, sleek curves of her slender legs. The way her shirt kept riding up, a sliver of white, flat stomach showing above her waistband. The graceful arch of her throat as she tipped her head back and regarded him with a cool, composed sort of trepidation.
The chairs around the kitchen table were stacked with cookbooks and disassembled cake boxes, so they were sitting on the floor, a takeout pizza box from Angelo’s and the six pack of Bud Light he’d brought between them on the tile. Jordan was sitting with his back to the island, legs stretched out in front of him. Ellie was cross-legged against the cabinets beneath the sink, nibbling at her pizza and starting her third beer. He suspected she was trying to beat back her nerves, and the alcohol was slowly stripping away her shyness.
Jordan nodded. “She’s a bitch.”
She snorted. “That’s
not
what I said.”
“It’s true though.”
Ellie made a face, her nose scrunching up, gray eyes crinkling. She tossed her hair over her shoulder with a shake of her head. “I shouldn’t say it, but it kinda is. She’s…”
“A bitch.”
“She’s a bitch,” she said with a long, deep sigh, like just saying it eased some internal tension. “God, that feels good,” she murmured, staring out across the big, orange Mexican floor tiles, and Jordan’s imagination took him to a place where she said that for a very different reason.
Her eyes cut back toward him. “Do you have a sister?”
Over the last handful of years, he’d become a guy who abhorred these sorts of mundane, get-to-know-you conversations. It seemed like everyone in the dating pool worked off identical questionnaires: job, hobbies, life goals, religion, siblings, childhoods, favorite hangout spots. It was all so clinical and superficial, no better than a job interview he never felt prepared for. But somehow, a slightly tipsy girl reclined against her kitchen sink asking if he had any sisters didn’t feel like an interrogation; it felt natural, like a genuine curiosity on her part.
“Two,” he told her, “but they’re only bitches part of the time.”
She grinned. “Wow. Raised by women, huh?”
“I’ve got two brothers too. Three if you count Tam.”
Her dark, elegant brows lifted in curiosity.
“The brother-in-law who sits behind you? Yeah, he’s been around since we were all kids. And he’s been with my little sister forever.”
“That’s so sweet,” she said, and her voice was wistful, head thumping back against the cabinets. “Growing up together. Like something out of a book.” She frowned. “Not like my sister.
My sister
thinks I’m stalking her dumbass boyfriend. Like I would ever do
that
. Does she honestly think I want
anything
to do with that washed-up wannabe surfer pothead douche-face?”
Jordan bit back a grin. “Having a rant about it, are we?”
“Yes! It’s just so…so
frustrating
, you know? We’re sisters and we’re supposed to get along, you know? I’m saying ‘you know’ too much,” she said with a tired, beer-induced sigh, “but it’s true. It’s
sad
. She’s not like a sister at all.” Her shoulders slumped and Jordan realized the evening was taking a turn in a direction he hadn’t intended. “Of course,” she continued, “maybe I’m the one who isn’t like a sister. I’m the boring one after all.”
Ellie tipped her beer back and downed half of it in an unladylike gulp. When she lowered the bottle, she caught a stray drop with her fingertip, the smile behind it sheepish. “Um, sorry. Apparently beer makes me mopey, and I know you didn’t come here for that.”
Jordan watched her set aside her drink with a caution only semi-drunk people used and laughed internally that she was such a lightweight. She fluffed her hair, arranged her bangs and folded her hands in her lap. A stiff, overly bright smile cut across her face.
“Okay, so, back to eyelash batting mode.”
This time, his laugh wasn’t internal. “Eyelashes? What in the hell are you talking about?”
“You came to see me. Ergo, you intend to seduce me,” she said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. She shrugged. “I need to play the part of the coy, helpless student.” She gave him the most ridiculous, overdramatic pout, looking like she was choking on a smile. “And you get to be my
fascinating
older gentleman friend.”
“Okay…” he said as he tried to process the levels of truth and pretend in her sudden change of behavior. She was joking, but he had a feeling it was born of bitterness. “I don’t want to be an ‘older gentleman’ anything.”
“Oh, yes you do,” her face fell, fatigue and disappointment turning down the corners of her mouth in a frown. She was tipsy enough that some of her manners were being overridden. Her expression became almost pained. “You came here to get laid, so, we might as well get to it.”
Jordan put his half-eaten slice back in the box and sighed. He’d wondered if letting her drink so much would be a mistake; there was a fine line with some women between losing inhibitions and dredging up old, bad memories. “Okay, that’s enough beer for you.”
He leaned forward to retrieve her bottle and she snatched it away from him, pressing it between her breasts, her t-shirt sticking to the beads of condensation on the amber glass.
“Getting me drunk is part of the plan, isn’t it?” she asked, and lifted dark, arched brows in a challenge.
Jordan hadn’t been kidding her when he said good girls were more work. They always were. As Ellie stared at him now, her blinks slow, her breaths coming in uneven draws that swelled her chest, there was pain flickering in her gray eyes. She wasn’t turned on, she was scared, and that was a decided mood killer.
“I dunno.” He sat back against the cabinets again, a knob digging into his spine. “What sort of plan do you think I have?”
She put her beer to her lips and tipped it back, draining the rest of it. Her hands were shaking as she set the empty aside and dabbed at pink-glossed lips with her fingertips. “The same plan everyone has.” She fluffed her hair again. “You get me a little drunk, you get me relaxed. Tell me I’m beautiful.” Her voice became wistful.
Jordan watched her study the legs of the kitchen table, saw the muscles in her throat work as she swallowed. However impure his intentions of entering her home had been, he hadn’t expected to encounter this side of her. It was sobering. “And would that work?” he asked quietly.
Her eyes looked silver under the hissing fluorescent tubes when they swung over and latched onto his. “It should, shouldn’t it?” she said bitterly. “I ought to be a puddle at your feet.”
“I think,” Jordan said slowly. “That you read too many books.”
“Am I wrong?” she challenged, dead-faced. “Are you that rare, stand-up, one in a million guy who just likes a good conversation?”
Jordan was silent.
“Or did you want to do me?”
Both his sisters, but mainly Jess, had lectured him about not answering questions like the one Ellie had posed, so he sat, uneasy, feeling like he’d accidently stumbled into a nest of cobras, and watched her get up on her hands and knees.
“What are you doing?” he asked as she stalked up between his legs like a cat.
Her shirt gapped open at her chest, breasts swelling against the cups of the black satin bra she wore beneath it. Jordan had a view over them and down the smooth flat of her belly to the button snap of her cutoffs; there was a voice in the back of his head screaming for him to just shut up and let this happen as Ellie sat up on her knees in front of him. Her hair was a dark tangle around her shoulders, her lashes black down against her cheeks, eyes shadowed with grays and purples and all those dark, smoky colors he liked on women.
Ellie’s gaze flicked up to his, and for a moment, her lovely porcelain face was seized with terror. Jordan could see his own reflection in the overly large pupils of her eyes and was shocked to come face-to-face with his own unintimidating self and realize that she was so frightened of him she was shaking.
But her lashes dropped and her shaking hands landed on his chest, tentative fingers probing along his pecs and up to his collar bones through the soft cotton of his shirt.
“Isn’t this what you want?” she asked and then straddled his lap.
Every cell in his body came to instant attention. She smelled like just the right amount of flowery perfume. Her breasts were soft and full against his chest as she leaned forward, silky dark hair teasing the end of his nose. The fleeting, velvet touch of her lips against his jaw was electric; the rush of her breath across his skin lifted the fine hairs on the back of his neck. The weight of her body against his was
exactly
what he wanted, but his conscience chose to make an untimely appearance.
“Yeah,” he said, and hardly recognized the deep, throaty sound of his own voice. He knew he couldn’t touch her, that it would only make pulling away more difficult, but he did it anyway, hands sliding up her creamy thighs, over the denim of her cutoffs and up to her hips. His thumbs slipped under her shirt, her skin hot to the touch beneath it. Her heart was racing; he could feel her erratic pulse against his palms.
Jordan knew that if he unfastened her shorts and eased them down her hips, she’d let him. He could lay her out right here on her kitchen floor and she wouldn’t protest. But her face, he knew, would be turned away from him, hidden, just like it was now. And her full-body tremors would only intensify when he got her naked.
“Ellie.” He pushed her back. “Stop.”
She sat down hard on the floor between his knees, gray eyes saucer wide and startled. She reached to brush her bangs to the side and glanced away from him, the muscles in her throat working as she swallowed.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “Oh, I…I…” Jordan saw tension lock up her body. “I’m sorry.” She tried to scramble away from him.
“He.” He snagged her by the ankle, and even just touching that part of her was dangerously tempting. “Hold on, let me explain.”
She braced her hands on the floor and drew in a rattling breath. Her eyes were slick and he was really hoping she didn’t bring out the waterworks because that would make this whole thing even more awkward.
“I…” He wasn’t going to lie to her. “Really want to hook up with you. I mean, you are…wow. Yeah.
Want
.”
“But,” she said on another quivering inhale. Jordan saw her calf flex as she sought to pull away from him. All the color had bled out of her face. Her straight, white teeth tugged at her bottom lip and the tears welled up in her eyes. She was fuzzy-headed and mortified.
“But,” he said, “you’re freaked out and I’m not the kind of guy who takes advantage of that.” He let her go and she curled her legs up under her, facing away from him, head leaning against the cabinets.