Authors: Chantilly White
Crap.
He waited until he heard his dad enter his own room, then took his turn in the laundry room, followed by a quick shower. He hadn’t brought any clean clothes down with him earlier, so he wrapped a towel around his waist and made his way through the silent condo, up the curving stairs, and into the loft.
Eyeing Melinda’s motionless shape on the other bed, Jacob grabbed his flannel pajama bottoms and the thermal shirt he’d slept in last night from the foot of his bed. She was facing the window, away from him. As quietly as possible, he dragged the shirt over his head, then dropped the damp towel, stepped into the pajama pants, and yanked them up. He breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t turned.
Jacob grabbed the towel from the floor and flung it over the loft railing to dry, silencing his mother’s chiding voice in his head.
Climbing beneath the covers, he settled himself as comfortably as he could with his feet hanging off the end of the damn toy-sized bed. At school, he had an extra-long twin in his dorm room, and even that often seemed too short. He was used to the California-king-sized bed he had at home. This one was like sleeping in a toddler bed.
Drawing his knees up, Jacob flopped to his side with a groan, seeking comfort. Fatigue dragged at him, and he yawned widely. He closed his eyes, but his brain didn’t want to turn off, his thoughts spinning on the giant hamster wheel in his head, chasing each other around in no particular order.
It wasn’t until he deliberately slowed and deepened his breathing in preparation for quieting his mind that he heard the soft sniffles coming from the bed three feet from his own.
Uh-oh.
Jacob stilled, listening harder. Another quiet sniffle, and a hitching breath. He knew what that meant.
His heart squeezed.
Melinda was crying.
Trying hard to keep it to herself, too, but there was no quiet like snow-covered-mountain quiet for amplifying every little sound.
Tossing aside his covers, Jacob swung his legs over the side of the bed facing hers, his elbows on his knees. Contemplating.
“Mel,” he whispered. “Hey.”
She curled on her side, still facing away from him. He stretched out one hand and ran it from her shoulder down to her wrist, leaving his hand over hers. She sniffed, louder this time.
“Melinda,” he said.
“Sorry.” The whispered word sounded rough, as though her throat hurt from holding back the tears.
“Talk to me.”
“Can’t,” she said, hiccoughing. Then, “I’m so stupid.”
Screw that.
Jacob stood and nudged her up with one hand, pulling gently with the other against her mild resistance. He swung his left leg around her back until he was sitting against the headboard of her bed, dragging her up between his legs and onto his chest.
She was warm and soft and sweet-smelling, and he wanted to nuzzle. He wrapped his arms around her instead, and held her securely, one hand stroking her hair where her head settled against his shoulder, silent for now.
Waiting.
Melinda held herself stiffly for a moment, no more than that, before she melted into him, curving her body and snuggling her face into the side of his neck. She wrapped her arms around him in turn and shuddered as the tears finally escaped. They came in a hot flood, soaking his shirt.
Resting his chin on the top of her head, Jacob smoothed his hands over her back, her arms, her hair. There would be time for words later. For now, he’d provide the shoulder she needed.
He’d seen her cry before, loads of times over the years. When they were four and she skinned her knee on the playground. Hiding in her closet after school on the day Evan Wagner had called her fatty-fatty-fatterson in front of the whole class.
Then in sixth grade, after they’d had a huge fight—their first ever—over something stupid he couldn’t even remember now. And that time in college when he’d held her hair while she hurled after drinking way too much at a friend’s party.
Worst of all, through the awful days of their senior year of high school after Seth Mazer, their best friend, died in a terrible car accident.
Holding each other up through the horror and grief, the absolute wrongness of a teenager’s funeral. Of knowing they would never again see his freckled face, or answer his gap-toothed smile, or tease him over his crazy hand-painted t-shirts.
Shirts his mother had given out to his closest friends, and which they all wore in Seth’s memory, though they were starting to fade with time and many washings.
Jacob sucked in a breath, blew it out quietly, waiting for the ache to settle again, though it never faded completely. They’d cried together then. Their friend had left a constant hole in all their lives.
Even now, nearly three years later, a voice or a laugh or a song on the radio would trigger a memory, a moment out of a too-short life shared with Seth, and choke him up. But if Melinda was there, and they shared that look—the one that said
I know. I heard it, too. I remember
—then he could smile with the memory, and the ache would ache a little less.
Tears had been shed more times than he could count in a lifetime of memories spent together, both sad and happy.
Yet something about the sobs shaking her small shoulders tonight, with her warm, curvy body held tight against his, and her sugar-and-spice scent surrounding him in her narrow bed, tugged on a different part of his heart.
The part that clearly saw the tsunami wave coming, and didn’t give a damn.
Slowly, Melinda’s tears subsided. She rubbed her cheek against the roughness of his thermal shirt, her right hand brushing absently at the shoulder seam.
“Sorry,” she said again.
“Don’t be stupid.” Jacob squeezed her in his arms to take any sting from the words. “You wanna talk about it?”
Her shoulder raised in a tiny shrug.
“Mitch called,” she said, her voice trembling a bit, obviously struggling in the aftermath of tears.
Jacob mentally flicked aside the desire to smash that guy like the cockroach he was. That wasn’t what she needed now.
“He left a message.”
“What’d he say?” Jacob shifted her closer, proud of the evenness of his tone.
“I don’t know. I erased it.”
Inside, Jacob gave a little cheer.
Good girl.
He hugged her again, dropping a kiss on top of her head.
“I know he’s an ass,” she said. “Or I do now. But I believed in him for a while.”
“It’s only been a couple of days,” Jacob said, deliberately relaxing his hands. The urge to smash was growing stronger with her words. “Give it time.”
“Yeah. I just… I thought he really wanted the same things. That he wanted them with me because he loved me. You know? Now… He was nothing but a liar.”
Jacob told himself not to ask, to let it go, but listening to her, thinking of the future she’d believed she was planning with Mitch, he had to know.
Clearing his throat, he said, “Did you really want to get married now? So young?”
“It wasn’t only that. I mean, no, I didn’t want marriage right now, but…”
He swallowed the instinctive sigh of relief and tried to stay focused. “What, then?”
“I don’t know, all of it. I don’t want to get married now, but I don’t want to wait too long, either. I want to stay in Pasodoro. I want to build a life there with my family and friends, and have a bunch of kids. I want to raise them where we grew up. Sunday dinners, family trips like this one. You know. All the stuff we always do. I think he just parroted back the things I’d told him I wanted.”
“Is staying in Paso that important?”
Melinda rubbed her cheek against his chest again. “It is to me.”
Her hair twined around his fingers, and he played with the strands idly while he considered her words, a nagging pain growing inside his chest.
He loved his family, their friends, the familiarity of the home and town he’d grown up in, the traditions. But there were other memories there now.
Painful ones.
And he had dreams to pursue.
The thought of living out his life in Pasodoro…
“Do you ever think about going somewhere else?” he asked.
“Sure,” she answered, though he could hear the frown in her voice. “I mean, we did, didn’t we? For school. And I want to travel and stuff, you know that.”
“Yeah,” he persisted, “but to live.”
“Oh. No, never. I always want to live in Paso. I love it there. It’s home.”
Jacob wanted to groan with frustration. “Home is who you’re with, isn’t it? I mean, you wouldn’t want to stay there if everyone else moved, would you? Or what if you meet your dream guy and his job is in New York? What then?”
What about me?
he wanted to ask, but held the words back. He was so not going there. Why was he even pursuing this?
He should just stop.
“I guess I don’t know,” she said, and Jacob could feel the frown pulling at her brow. “I don’t know how I could really be happy that far from home. From everyone.”
“Yeah,” he said, blowing out a breath that stirred the hair on top of her head.
Drop it, man. Just drop it now.
They lay silent for a while. Melinda drew random shapes on his shoulder with her fingernail. He played with her hair. Somehow, it all seemed very natural, even though a voice in the back of his mind insisted this was the sort of thing couples did and he should go back to his own bed. Before the tsunami wave hit, and he drowned.
He was very aware of her body resting on his, but strangely, in comforting her, Jacob found himself comforted, too, rather than aroused.
The warm, solid weight of her resting between his legs and curled onto his chest heated him inside and out like a favorite blanket, quieting his mind and soothing the nerves the talk with his father had jumbled. Her hair was a river of silk beneath his stroking hand, as soft and smooth as the delicate skin of her forehead tucked beneath his chin.
This was right.
All his denials and rationalizations and skirting around the truth vanished in a puff of air.
This, Melinda, was everything he wanted.
He’d have to think about what that would mean, what to do about it, and how, and when, but he knew one thing already.
It was too late to turn back the tide. He’d have to surf the wave and hope they both survived.
He never wanted to move.
“Jake?” Melinda whispered sometime later.
Too relaxed for words, he hummed in response, his lips vibrating against the top of her head.
“Thanks.”
Jacob tightened his arms around her in answer, glad when she burrowed even more snuggly into his body. He became aware of their breathing, slow and synchronized, deepening toward sleep. Recognized the moment Melinda tumbled smoothly off that soft edge into dreams and, smiling in contentment, followed.
Melinda came awake slowly, her limbs drugged and heavy with warmth, and an impression of security she couldn’t name.
It took a solid effort to peel her eyes open and another long moment for her brain to wake enough to understand the picture her eyes and senses painted.
She was in her bed in the loft, where she belonged. The room held a touch of morning chill in the air. It stung the tip of her nose, though she was cozy as could be, and the quiet sounds of movement and tantalizing scents floating from downstairs indicated people were up and making breakfast.
But that was where normal ended.
Raising her head from the warm, homey spot where she’d nested, Melinda stared into Jacob’s sleeping face, not two inches from her own. As her senses caught up with her, her breathing increased.
She thought,
Oh, my God
. And fought an insane urge to giggle.
Melinda lay sprawled, head to toe, facedown over Jacob’s body, one hand curled into the burnished bronze hair at the nape of his neck, the other wrapped around his side. Her hair slid over him on either side of his body, a chocolate curtain. One lock wound its way over his left shoulder and curled beneath him, trapping her in place.
Her breasts flattened firmly against his muscular chest, and the rest of their bodies lined up in... interesting ways.
She sucked in a breath and let it out slowly, trying to ignore the tingling heat beginning to spread from every point of contact.
Jacob held her tightly on top of him with one arm, the other flung to the side and hanging off the bed. The blankets covered them to the level of her waist, but it was his large hand, fingers splayed across her lower back, that burned.
He breathed deeply, sound asleep, as though they slept together this way every night.
Sheer shock kept her in place.
She remembered him coming into the loft. Remembered trying to hush her crying, not wanting him to hear. Jacob climbing into bed with her to give comfort.
And then... and then, they must have fallen asleep.
Now, here they were, wrapped around each other like kittens.
Well, not exactly like kittens. Her mind traveled a not-so-innocent, very un-kittenish path of discovery, cataloguing the full-body contact sending very inappropriate sensations zinging along her nerve ends. Like bolts of electricity.
She almost expected her hair to stand on end.
Thank God no one had come upstairs looking for them yet. Being caught together this way would be extremely difficult to explain to their parents, even if it had been innocent enough to begin with.
It was only now, with those little zapping electrical flashes zipping along her pulse points, and arcing between every sensitive nerve until they formed one continuous loop of molten heat, that it occurred to her it had stopped being entirely innocent the moment she’d opened her eyes.
His body felt so
good
beneath her own, so right somehow.
He’d been such a scrawny, nerdy minnow, despite his height, until well after high school. A boy, both in looks and in personality.
Though he was still playful, and plenty geeky, there was very little of the boy left in him these days, and his body was all man.
Hard and muscular, tall and strong.
A hum of pleasure vibrated in her throat, surprising her. She had to stop herself from running her hands down his arms. Or nuzzling the velvety hollow of his throat, where he smelled, oh,
God
, so good.
This was
Jacob
, for heaven’s sake.
But...
His skin, warm and smooth and spicy, called out for her touch, and his heart beat comfortably against her own. He tantalized her senses like melted caramel sliding over her tongue.
Only two
very
thin clothing layers separated their naked bodies.
Hardly any barrier at all.
As soon as the thought popped into her head, the heat increased exponentially, until it seemed fire would flare between them, a spontaneous combustion of breasts, bellies, hips, thighs. And other places she decided not to name.
A silent snicker shook her body.
Jacob’s eyes slid halfway open, their brilliant topaz depths blurred with sleep, and suddenly she was holding her breath. He groaned low in his throat and brought his free arm up, rubbing a hand over his face and the prickly shadow of stubble darkening his cheeks.
Melinda held still as a statue, exquisitely aware of the rasp of his arm sliding across the bed’s bottom sheet. Of the flexing of his biceps beneath the dark blue fabric of his long-sleeved thermal shirt. Of the hard stretch of his chest and abdomen, and his heavily-muscled thighs beneath her own.
Squeezing his eyes shut, Jacob scrunched his face up, then opened his eyes wide until they watered, their pale golden brown clearer now. A half-smile warmed his mouth as he focused on her with his still-drowsy gaze.
“Hey, potato chip,” he said sleepily, his voice extra deep and—
confound it
—sexily rough with morning.
Melinda opened her mouth to respond, but only a croak reached her lips. He stroked his fingers from the top of her head slowly down the length of her hair, as though from long habit, as though he woke with her in his arms every day.
Halfway down her back, his hand stopped.
With her eyes locked on his, she saw the moment he came fully awake and realization dawned. His sleepy gaze went sharp, his breath halted along with his stroking hand, and every muscle in his body flexed hard.
He said, “Ah,” the single syllable cautious now.
Pressed together as they were, Melinda couldn’t miss another muscle growing firm and hard beneath her, nor the answering heat spiraling deep in her belly.
A red flush spread across the planes of Jacob’s sculptured cheekbones, and he closed his eyes again in obvious mortification, but neither of them moved.
Melinda didn’t think she
could
move, not even if her life depended on it. Which it very well could, if one of their fathers came to the top of the spiral staircase and saw them wrapped together in her bed.
After a moment, Jacob reopened his eyes, folding his full lips together as he studied her. She studied him right back, the silence dragging out as they weighed each other and the curious position they’d found themselves in. It put her in mind of the dream she’d had before leaving on the trip.
“So, good morning,” Jacob said finally.
Melinda cleared her throat. “Morning.”
“Do you—” he began.
His mother’s shout from downstairs cut him off.
“Jakey, Mel, are you two up?” Lois called as they both gasped and jerked upright, only Melinda didn’t move high enough, and they cracked foreheads with mutually pained groans. “Breakfast is ready in five!”
For a startled heartbeat, they stared into each other’s widened eyes. Blowing out a breath, Jacob placed a protective hand over Melinda’s ear and shifted to call over her shoulder. “Be right down!”
He flopped back on the bed, and his eyes met hers again as he dissolved in quiet mirth. The sound rumbled through her body, tickling and bouncing her against him until she joined in.
And just like that, they were back to normal.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered, still giggling.
“I know. That could have been...” He couldn’t seem to finish, and their laughing vibrated the bed.
“Yeah.”
Realizing her fingers still clutched Jacob’s hair at the back of his neck, Melinda moved her hand to rub the reddened spot above his left eyebrow while he rubbed the matching redness on hers where they’d whacked bone onto bone.
When their eyes met now, they grinned. The golden flecks in his topaz gaze danced. Jacob quirked his eyebrow and slapped her on her flannel-covered butt.
“Come on, bacon bits,” he said. “I’m starved.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Breakfast was rowdy, and no one seemed to notice that she and Jacob couldn’t look at each other without breaking into giggles.
Even though she’d still spend the greatest portion of her day alone, Melinda was glad it was day two of the trip, her first day on the same side of the mountain—if not the same trails—as everyone else. They’d cross paths once in a while, at least, or wave from a different lift line, and they’d all meet for lunch in the main lodge.
It was another crisp, clear day, every bit as cold as the one before, though the overnight winds had died down.
They got a bit of a late start, so by the time the rest of the group joined them and they made it to the mountain, the lifts were already running, the lines long, and the day in full swing.
As Melinda stepped into her bindings, her eyes automatically sought Jacob in the midst of the rest of the guys. He had his head thrown back, laughing over something Gabe had said, and his dark hair and coppery highlights shone in the bright sun.
Jacob’s dad, Bill, added a comment that had the whole group guffawing, practically bent double with it, Uncle Allan wiping tears from his eyes.
Melinda smiled. She loved them all so much, it made her heart ache just a little. There were no better people on earth, in her estimation, than her family and their friends.
“Where are you headed first, honey?” Karen asked as she skied to a stop next to Melinda. She tossed back her short cap of dark hair and fitted her knit hat snuggly over her ears.
“Over there, I think,” Melinda said, pointing to one of the intermediate slope’s lifts. “You?”
“I thought I’d tag along for a while, if you want some company.”
Pleasure lit inside her. “Sure,” Melinda said with a surprised smile. “That’d be great. But what about Nancy and Lois?”
Aunt Pat would be off in the backcountry with the guys again, but her mom usually stuck with the other two women.
“I’ll catch up with them at lunch. Maybe by then you’ll be ready to move up a level.”
Melinda didn’t say anything to answer her mom’s gentle prodding. She told herself she was perfectly fine sticking to the intermediate slopes, even if she did wonder every once in a while exactly how much steeper the expert lifts and runs might be. Was it time to push herself to the next level after all these years?
The idea made her hands and feet tingle with anxiety.
Still, the seed had planted, and she was tired of spending so much time alone. She’d think about it later.
For now, the day beckoned.
Following Karen toward the lift she’d indicated earlier, Melinda glanced back toward their guys in time to see them skiing en masse toward a black diamond lift, Aunt Pat in the lead.
Melinda scanned the rest of the group. Jacob must have been watching her. Their gazes met, and he grinned and waved before trailing after the rest of his group, leaving her with a smile on her face and a glowing warmth deep in her belly.
She joined her mother in line for their lift and tilted her face to the sky, soaking in the beauty of the day. They spoke comfortably about the resort, the weather, the New Year’s Eve party planned for the following night in the main lodge. Easy topics for an easy, relaxing day.
Once safely ensconced on the lift seat, her mother twisted slightly to face Melinda. “How are the heights for you this year?” she asked.
Consciously relaxing her death-grip on the bar beside her, Melinda shrugged casually. “Not bad.”
“That’s good,” Karen said, smiling supportively. “I’m proud of you, you know.”
Melinda looked at her mother in question.
“For sticking with it and pushing yourself to do the things you love despite the phobia. A lot of people wouldn’t.”
Pondering that, Melinda merely said, “Thanks,” but the planted seed sprouted a little higher.
She’d been doing essentially the same thing for years, starting with the bunny slopes and moving only as high as the intermediate. Even that had been a battle the first few years after her fall, but since then, she’d stopped pushing herself to improve any further.
If she truly wanted to conquer her fear, maybe it was time to push to that next level after all. Not for her mother or anyone else. She knew that wasn’t what her mom was suggesting. She didn’t have anything to prove to anyone but herself.
Yet for the first time in a long time, she acknowledged she’d let herself coast on her mid-level victory.
Melinda turned her gaze to the left and the expert lifts soaring even higher than her own, which already felt incredibly far from the ground, wondering if Jacob and the rest of the group were already at the top or still in line. Inside her warm ski gloves, her hands went suddenly sweaty and weak, as though she’d lost control of her muscles.
Karen remained quiet, humming under her breath while Melinda examined her feelings.
She
could
do it, if she made herself, but did she really want to? And if so, why? She had no desire to go hurtling down a snow-covered rock cliff face the way her cousins and Jacob did, after all. Though it would be nice to have company more often on the tougher runs.