Dream of You (20 page)

             
Ellie brushed her arm against his, drawing his gaze. “Thank you,” she said under her breath, “for humoring her.”

             
He shrugged. “My family’s a zoo. This is nothing.”

             
But it was far from nothing to her. For Ellie, queen of caution, champion of all things boring and orderly, sleeping with her professor was a great big leap into uncharted, frivolous territory. And they weren’t even dating, didn’t even know each other that well – she’d had this sick certainty that he would leave. But here he sat, listening to Paige talk about cakes, and Ellie could have kissed him just for that reason if she didn’t already want to for a handful of others.

             
Paige returned, a slice of her newest creation on a plate, a plastic fork sprouting out of the frosting. “Here,” she set it in front of Jordan with a flourish. “El’s the only one who’s tasted it. I want to add it to my menu in the next couple of weeks.”

             
“What is it?” he asked as he carved off a bite with his fork.

             
“Chocolate Chip Explosion. It’s white cake with milk chocolate and semi-sweet chips mixed in the batter. The frosting is homemade fudge and I decorate with coconut shavings and more chocolate chips,” she explained, getting up on her knees in the chair again, blue eyes straining and wide as she waited for the verdict.

             
Ellie had to bite back a grin because Jordan ate the whole slice of cake – slowly and blank-faced – without comment.

             
“Well?” Paige demanded when he’d pushed the plate toward her. “
Well
?”

             
He gave her a deliberate, slow-blinking look.

             
Ellie clamped her lips together.

             
“Got any more?”

             
“Ass,” Paige accused with a smile. “He’s an ass, El. I forbid you to go out with him.”

             
“Forbids.” Jordan’s sideways glance gave Ellie’s heart another of those unexpected squeezes. “You hear that? She forbids you.”

             
“She also forbids the use of flour that isn’t certified organic. Guess what you just ate.”

             
Jordan’s grin was wicked.

             
Paige leapt from her chair like she’d been burned. “No!” Her mouth fell open and an index finger lifted in overdramatic outrage.

             
“Chill.”

             
“Fine.” She collapsed back into her seat, took a deep breath, and looked to Jordan like she hadn’t just made a spectacle of herself. “So it’s good?”

             
“Fantastic,” he assured and she beamed.

**

              It was quarter to midnight when the fifth and final cake was baked, covered in tin foil and ready for frosting. Ellie’s eyes felt like they were full of sand and Paige had wilted like a tropical flower, eyelids at half mast, yawning into her shoulder every fifteen seconds. Abigail’s old wall clock counted off the seconds like a metronome, reminding them that each moment they lingered in the kitchen was a moment less of sleep. It was a Wednesday night like all the others – baking, talking, and falling into bed.

             
But Jordan was still there.

             
He was leaning across the island, forearms resting on the tile, all his weight on one leg. She’d done a number on his hair, she thought with an internal smile every time she glanced his way; it was a hopeless mess he kept pushing back to no avail.

             
“I’m done,” Paige announced, chucking one of her precious orange spatulas into the dishwasher and sagging back against the counter. Her fatigued, cornflower blue eyes bounced between the two of them. “Is anyone else?”

             
Ellie gave her friend a smile that begged her to, just once in her life, stop with the questions. “Night, Paigey.”

             
“I can take a hint.” She tossed her rose and cream hair over her shoulder and departed with a flourish. “Niiiiiight, Coach Walker.”

             
“Night…you pain in the ass,” he added in an undertone that, for some reason, didn’t sound malicious.

             
Only once she’d heard the muffled click of Paige’s bedroom door closing upstairs did Ellie let the island take some of the strain off her shoulders, mirroring Jordan’s position. “I’m impressed.”

             
His brows lifted in question.

             
She meant…well, she didn’t know what she’d meant to say, but as usual, coyness abandoned her and she was left with her own melodramatic truth. “You stayed,” she said simply, and offered him a smile that was genuinely grateful. “I didn’t think you would.”

             
He shrugged. “Maybe I’m too sleepy to drive home.”

             
“Maybe,” she agreed, but her eyes were locked on his and all the glittering, unsaid things swimming in their turquoise depths. His face, she was coming to think – and all his half-hidden emotions, the deliberate glances and sudden, uncontained smiles – was nothing less than art. He was very, very difficult to read if you weren’t paying attention, and Ellie felt like congratulating herself when she predicted his push away from the counter.

             
He came to stand behind her, and this time, she didn’t jump. The only thing that licked through her was a deep, throbbing note of pleasure when he pressed his hips and stomach and chest to her back, his chin dropping over her shoulder. She straightened, leaning into him readily, a greatest hits reel of images from upstairs tumbling through her brain.

             
“I almost left,” he said, lips right against her ear, and a shiver shot down her spine.

             
“Why didn’t you?” she asked as his arms slipped around her waist.

             
“You didn’t want me to.”

             
Ellie turned her head so her temple was against his jaw. She could just see the flickering of his eyelashes from this angle and felt the slow, deep, even thumping of his heart between her shoulder blades. “I would have understood, though,” she said, hoping she sounded more sure of it than she felt.

             
His grin was a shadow in her periphery. “But you don’t date casually, remember?”

             
“I don’t.” She took a deep breath. “But you do.”

             
A beat of silence passed. “
Did
.”

             
She wanted to believe him. Needed to. She turned in his arms and passed her hands up his chest, tried to find a lie in his expression and came up with a complicated tangle behind his eyes she didn’t understand.

             
“You wanna go back to bed?”

             
“Definitely.”

             
There was no hurry this time; knowing what lay ahead made prolonging it all the sweeter. They undressed each other in the dark at the foot of her bed and in the silence of roving hands and lips, there ceased to be an age gap. Everything faded save for what she could touch and taste and feel.

             
Between the crisp white sheets, in a puddle of moonlight, Jordan was sweet to her in a way she hadn’t known before. It hadn’t been like this for her in the past: slow and precise, like dancing. His sweat-slick body slid against hers and she wondered if she’d stumbled headlong into a novel. If she had, she hoped it was a long one.

17

             
I
t was not five-thirty. Jordan didn’t know time it truly was, but when his eyes popped open and hit the heavily shadowed ceiling of a room that wasn’t his, his internal time keeper told him he’d overslept. Accidently. For the first time in memory.

             
He was on his back between sheets that smelled like soft perfume and sex, naked, languid and tired in a good way. He rolled his head to the side and his eyes fell across a bedroom bathed in predawn grayness, the pretty shadow of a girl tucked up in the window sill, laptop open, the glow of the computer highlighting her porcelain face.

             
Ellie was up, dressed in the dark leggings and sweatshirt from the night before, her hair gleaming blue thanks to the computer, pulled back at the crown and loose around her shoulders. Her eyes were quicksilver lined in black when she glanced at him – she already had her makeup on.

             
Jordan rolled over onto his stomach and stretched his arms up under the pillow, the knots in his back popping. “What time is it?” Even his voice sounded lazy, full of post-sex fog and I-don’t-care.

             
Her smile was quick, soft, and a better wakeup call than ten cups of coffee; it brought with it a hundred mental snapshots of the night before that made him want to smile too. “Just after six.”

             
“Shit.”

             
One of her perfect dark brows lifted in question, sliding up into her bangs.

             
“I always get up at five-thirty. I put in five miles before work,” he explained.

             
Her smile widened and became even more devastating. “I think you got a pretty good workout in last night.”

             
“Thanks for that, by the way.”

             
She chuckled.

             
As he eased up on his hands and knees, and then sat fully upright, legs swinging down to the cold, bare hardwood floor, his body wasn’t shy about reminding him that it had been a
while
since he’d run an eight hundred and gone two rounds with a hot-blooded girl in the same day. He felt stiff and sore as an old man, and tried to cover his grimace by raking his hands back through his hair.

             
“Why are you up this early?” he asked when his muscles had stopped protesting and began to unclench.

             
“I like being up early,” she said, eyes going back to her computer screen. “I write and start coffee and make deliveries for Paige - ”

             
“You take this whole friend thing to the next level. You know that, right?”

             
She smirked down at her laptop. “I’m good to the people who are good to me. That’s a short list most the time.”

             
The night before, as the old house had creaked and settled around them, with Ellie’s head tucked against his shoulder, her breaths deep and even across his drying chest, Jordan had made peace with sleeping over. He’d also figured he would awaken this morning with her still clinging to him. He hadn’t expected this, but seeing it – her industrial, busy little domestic self up before dawn – he wondered why he hadn’t already pegged her as an early riser.

             
He was also glad to see one night didn’t turn her into a mushy, overly optimistic puddle at his feet.

             
“Guess I better get home and catch a shower before work,” he said, and caught another of her quiet smiles.

             
“I made coffee if you want some before you leave.”

             
“’Kay.”

             
She watched him find his clothes and redress, which he found he liked; the touch of her eyes felt good. He stole a dab of toothpaste he ran along his teeth with a finger in the bathroom she shared with Paige. It was black and white and powder blue, a clawfoot tub and medicine cabinet dating it back to the era of his grandparents. And then came the awkward part: the goodbye part.

             
He padded back into her room with his shoes dangling from one hand and propped up against the wall behind her. Dawn was getting closer, the sky a twilight melting of periwinkle and rose that fell in panels across her chocolate hair.

             
“What are you writing?”

             
She closed her laptop, its light winking out, and her black nails tapped across the silver lid in a nervous gesture. “It wouldn’t be your thing,” she said, evasive.

             
“Well maybe it would.”

             
She tipped her head back, her smile patiently sweet. “You don’t have to patronize me, you know.”

             
Her felt a grin tugging. “Can I call you though?”

             
“You better.”