Dream of You (21 page)

             
He took up a handful of her rich, slick hair and leaned down for an upside-down kiss. Her lips opened against his and he felt her quick, breathless little sigh. One of her hands slid into the hair on top of his head, holding him to her.

             
“Jordan,” she said when he finally broke away, her hand still in his hair. Her eyes had become serious and earnest. “I had a really,
really
wonderful time last night.”

             
Please
, her eyes said,
don’t make me wish I’d never met you
.

             
“I’ll call you later today,” he promised, and meant it.

             
Downstairs, the first floor was rich with the smell of fresh coffee, the hardwood floors and wainscoting black in the new dawn, pockets of morning shadow giving the house an even older, almost haunted look. In the kitchen, Ellie had left the fluorescent tube on above the cooktop and set out three mugs beside the Coffee Mate. He poured himself one and left it black, propped a hip against the counter, blew steam off the top of his mug –

             
And went statue still with shock when Paige materialized from the shadows around the table. She was a punk rock zombie: black flannel pajama bottoms and skull-printed tank top, no bra to hold up her little bitty tits. Her pink-tipped blonde hair was greasy and tangled from the pillow, her eyes dark-rimmed and bloodshot.

             
“Jesus,” he breathed, recovering quickly. “What the hell are you doing? Looking for brains to eat?”

             
“Waiting for you,” she countered in a voice thick with sleep. All the obnoxious, bouncy brightness he’d seen in her before was gone now. “Set my alarm and everything.”

             
“Okay.” He took a sip of coffee and scalded the roof of his mouth. “Care to enlighten?”

             
She wiped her eyes with her fists like a child. “Yes, I would.” Her nose lifted in a haughty challenge Delta would have been proud of. “Do you like Ellie?”

             
“Duh.”

             
“Do you
like
her, though? You don’t have to give a damn about her to wanna fuck her.”

             
“I didn’t fuck her,” he corrected.

             
“Oh.” A knowing, nasty smile cut across her face. “Excuse me, you ‘made love to her,’ lover boy. But that doesn’t answer my question.”

             
He didn’t like the girl in the least – she was just begging to have his coffee splashed in her face – but she was protective of Ellie, and that he could understand. That he could get behind. “I like her,” he said.

             
Paige took a comically aggressive set of steps forward. “Good. Because lemme tell you: you – most guys – don’t deserve her. El is go home and meet your parents material. Wife material. She’s better than the kinds of chicks guys like you have hit-and-run booty calls with.”

             
“Is this a lecture” -  he sipped more scalding coffee - “or a threat?”

             
She shrugged.

             
“’Cause I’d hate to have to remind you that I’m your
teacher
.”

             
“Do not hurt my friend on purpose,” she said, ignoring his comment. “Or
I
will hurt
you
.”

             
“I’ll be sure to sleep with the light on,” he said dryly.

             
Paige nodded, gathered herself for a big inhale/exhale, and then tossed him a smile. “Well, now that that’s over, nice seein’ ya, Coach.” And she whispered out of the room on bare feet like she hadn’t just promised him bodily harm.

**

              Tam was at the breakfast bar when he got back to the house, eating Rice Chex out of the box while he stared mindlessly at the morning news on the TV that sat in the corner of the counter. His eyes darted over to the door as Jordan entered and his smile was instant and shark-like.

             
“Man, you don’t waste any time, do you?”

             
“Dunno what you’re talking about,” Jordan quipped as he closed the door and toed off his sneakers.

             
Delivering his second shock of the morning, Jo popped up from the other side of the bar, springing into sight like a dark blonde Whack-a-Mole. She’d been in the dishwasher, he guessed, her hands full of clean forks. “Waste time with what?”

             
“Jordie’s got himself a new girl,” Tam said, still with the shark smile, breaking the bro code to pieces.

             
Jo’s brows shot up her forehead. “That was fast.”

             
“Not really,” he said with a shrug, leaving his sneaks against the baseboard. Since he was already busted, he figured he might as well put some food on top of the coffee that was churning in his gut. He walked around behind Jo, pulled a bowl down out of the cabinets, and bummed some Chex from Tam at the bar.

             
“A real girl?” his sister pressed. “Or a Janet Jennings kind of girl?”

             
“A real girl.”

             
“
Every
part of her?” Tam asked. He was enjoying this too much.

             
Jordan gave him a sharp look and didn’t answer.

             
Jo pulled out the silverware drawer and began racking forks with sharp metal
clink
s. “Where did you meet her?”

             
“School,” Tam supplied.

             
Jordan glared at him so hard, it was a wonder the bastard didn’t catch fire.

             
“School?” A slight, nauseous grin lifted Jo’s pale face. “I thought you were strongly opposed to dating a colleague.”

             
“Oh,” Tam chuckled around a mouthful of cereal, “he still is.”

             
Jordan kicked him and it only made him laugh. “You’re not shutting me up on this one,” Tam said. “I’m long since done being the family scandal. Your turn, Jordie.”

             
“Scandal?” Jo lifted her head and glanced between them, blue-green eyes narrowing to suspicious slits. “What are you guys talking about?”

             
“You’re married to an eight-year-old, that’s what.”

             
“Your brother’s going out with one of his students.”

             
“Traitor,” Jordan said, but sighed, not really meaning it. There were no secrets in the family. No information was ever sacred.

             
Jo’s normal color came rushing back as her eyes threatened to pop out of her head. “You
what
? Are you…a
student
, Jordan?”

             
He made a face and stuffed his mouth with cereal. “You sound like Jess,” he grumbled. “Or
Mom
.”

             
The comparison rocked her back on her heels, but at least her eyes returned to their actual size. “I’m not judging,” she said quickly.

             
“Except that you’re going to,” Tam said under his breath.

             
“I don’t believe in putting social boundaries on relationships.”

             
“But?” Jordan asked.

             
“But…how?”

             
She could deny it if she wanted, but Jo’s frown was nothing but judgmental. And, in truth, Jordan didn’t suppose he should expect any different. He’d played the dog for years now, and his little sister assumed, as well she should, that he’d tricked some poor student into bed with him. That he’d turned on the fake charm and showered her with false promises until she gave in.

             
It hadn’t been like that with Ellie, but he wasn’t sure he could explain what it was actually like. What it was actually like freaked him out, if he was honest.

             
So he stared at the TV and ignored both of them.

18

             
“
I
’m working, I’m writing, I’m graduating from college in three years and I don’t have time for a boy in my life.”

             
Those had been Ellie’s parting words for her mother as she’d taken her final cardboard box out of her parents’ home and down to her car at the curb. It had been a day so stacked with humidity the air had pushed on her chest until it had been difficult to breathe. Or maybe that had been the stress of her mother’s disapproval, draped like a mantel around her shoulders while Natalie stared her down. Lawnmowers humming, sprinklers rattling, cars passing, and out in the open, unnoticed by all, a war had been waged between two pairs of gray eyes. Natalie Grayson didn’t read – save
People
and whatever on-trend drivel
People
said was a “literary sensation” – and she didn’t believe women should have to work. Ellie, unlike her faultless sister, was worried about all the wrong things in life. Her dreams were flawed. She should have been searching for a husband, preferably a rich one, and not been so concerned with “nonsense.”

             
Spurning boys had become an exercise in defying her mother.

             
But suddenly, here was this boy, walking around her house on silent cat’s feet, eating her cooking, sleeping in her bed.

             
Driving her deliciously, mind numbingly crazy.

             
Wednesday night turned to Friday night, turned to the next Wednesday and the next Friday. And the one after that…

             
It was a Friday, her room awash with the warm, fuzzy-around-the-edges light of her bedside lamp. Work had been grueling, her annotated bibliography for Brit lit was giving her fits, her brain was crippled by writer’s block and she had a phone full of nasty texts from Nikki. But that was all shoved into a far, forgotten corner of her mind as she tunneled her fingers through Jordan’s hair and rocked her hips in the slow, easy rhythm that was fast melting every bone in her body.

             
It wouldn’t last like this – she would end up on her back, or her knees, and she would welcome it; but for now, she loved the feel of him buried inside her, his hands around her waist, his mouth leaving suction cup kisses across her breasts.

             
They’d planned to go to dinner. He’d arrived early and she’d called from her bedroom that she’d be down in a minute. He’d come upstairs instead and found her in front of her mirror, in red satin bra and panties, fastening her grandmother’s crystal teardrop earrings.

             
Frozen in place, an instant, overwhelming heat flooding through her system, she’d watched him step up behind her in the mirror. Had watched his reflection, breath picking up, as his hands had slipped under her arms, over her breasts, and then he’d pulled down the silky red cups of her bra.

             
“You are hot as hell,” he’d said against her throat and she’d watched as he’d caressed her, his thumbs teasing her nipples into hard buds.

             
He’d slipped a hand down the flat of her belly, a cold shiver stealing over her as he reached inside the red lace waistband of her panties. His long fingers had stroked her, dipped inside her, with a precision that left her breathless and wet.

             
Staring at herself through heavy-lidded eyes, watching him touch her, stripped away all of her usual self-conscious armor. She
felt
hot. She felt wanted.

             
Dinner had been forgotten.

             
Now he sat in the middle of her bed and she was in his lap, working herself up and down his cock like she had all night to do just that, pleasure tightening deep in the pit of her belly like a spring that kept winding and winding.

             
One of his hands slipped around to her belly, and then went lower, all the way down until his thumb was brushing her clit.

             
Her hands pushed through his hair and down the taut cords at the back of his neck, her nails biting into skin.

             
“Go for it, sweetheart.” His voice was a rough murmur against the valley between her breasts.

             
Her hips rocked and fire licked through her as she dropped her face into his hair and rode him over the edge.

**

              Jordan could have lived in her bed, content to serve out the rest of his days as a sex slave. Ellie had long since dropped all pretenses of trepidation around him, and in place of the nervous, lip-biting girl who’d invited him into her house that first night, he’d discovered a hot-blooded, vibrant young woman starved of touch and deprived of compliments. As he’d watched her, naked save for the red bra with its cups pulled down, her breasts heavy, creamy orbs pushed up and together, he’d wondered how the hell Gym Guy, whoever he was, could have turned this girl down.

             
She was dressed now, in jeans and an elbow-sleeve yellow V-neck tee that hugged her curves, but she was no less alluring in his estimation. They’d showered and redressed and were now tucked away in a booth at IHOP because it was after eleven and nothing else was open. Ellie had offered to cook, but he’d promised her dinner, so here they were, him with a T-bone, her with a salad, steam fogging up the plate glass window beside them.

             
She was getting more comfortable with him, and therefore bolder – and not just in a way that led to what had transpired on her living room couch Wednesday night – so Jordan wasn’t really surprised when she took a sip of her decaf and asked, “So what’s the real story with you teaching?” over the rim of her mug.

             
“What?” he asked as he cut into his steak. “You don’t believe I do it for the children?”

             
She snorted. “If I’m one of your ‘children,’ you’re sicker than I thought you were.”

             
“That’s offensive.”

             
“You’re stalling.”

             
Guilty, he tossed her a sour face, saw the quick curve of a smile curl up from her coffee mug. “It’s like I said in class.” He shrugged. “There’s not much you can do with my major. HPS I can handle and coaching is about all I’m qualified for.” He threw in another shrug to show her just how unimpressed he was with himself.

             
She hummed a note of dissention. “I think you’re selling yourself short.”

             
He set his knife down. “Oh, I forgot.” He opened his hand on the table and gave her his best suggestive eyebrow waggle. “I have magic fingers.”

             
Her smile went all the way up to her eyes as she chuckled. “Yes you do, but that’s not what I meant.”

             
His eyebrows did curious.

             
“You miss running, don’t you?”

             
“I run every day.”

             
She gave him a pointed look.

             
Jordan sighed. “You’re too perceptive for your own good, you know that? That’s usually my thing.”

             
She kept silent.

             
“I did what I did and I can’t change it,” he told her. “No sense wishing for anything different.”

             
“Why’d you stop competing?” she asked softly. Her eyes were wide and open and she didn’t look like she was just making conversation, but like she had a true, deep curiosity. He had the sense of being a three dimensional puzzle she was trying to figure out.

             
None of your business
was poised at the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t make himself tell her that. She had invited him into her home, into her bed, shaking with uncertainty, and she’d laid her trust in his hands and begged him with a look not to treat her the way he’d treated all the disposable girls he’d known.

             
“You want the truth? Or the version that doesn’t make me sound like such a dumbass?” he asked, already knowing her answer.

             
Ellie had lost all interest in her dinner, her arms folded over the table top, sex-mussed hair pulled over one shoulder. “The truth,” she said, like
duh
.

             
He forked another bite of steak into his mouth and nodded, pulling together the words he wanted to use. “I had scholarship offers out the ass by the time I was a senior in high school,” he said when he’d swallowed. “But I also had this, um…well, this girlfriend.”

             
A pained look skittered across Ellie’s face and was gone again, her eyes filling with sympathy.

             
“She decided she couldn’t go out of state after graduation, so I decided to stay local.”

             
“Oh, Jordan,” she said and he hated it.

Of all the things he wanted from Ellie, pity wasn’t one of them. Even if he wasn’t ready to hit-it-and-quit
-it, he wasn’t searching for her to give him absolution. He wasn’t a dumb kid anymore: he didn’t for a second think some young girl would come along and get him dreaming again, fix his little snarky heart.

“Where is she now?” she asked after a long moment of silence.

“Married to a forty-five-year-old orthodontist with two rugrats and a Benz. And don’t” -  he cut into his T-bone again - “gimme the ‘oh, Jordan.’”

She nodded, but he saw her swallow, saw the muscles in her slim, pale throat work.

“What about you?” he asked and her eyes widened in question. “KSU can’t be the only school you applied to.”

Her gaze dropped to her salad and she picked up her fork, twitchy now that she was the one under the microscope. “I had the Hope,” she said of the lottery funded scholarship program, “and not much money. I loved my grandm
other’s house and, well…” She shrugged. “I guess I’m just not that adventurous.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t go out of state just to get away from Gym Guy.”

She frowned. “Maybe I should have.”

A darkness had fallen over her, her brows pulling together under her bangs.
Old wounds, he well knew, still itched even after time had lapsed and you’d told yourself you were better off.

“Hey.”

She glanced up, her expression now careful.

“He’s an idiot.”

She smiled.

**

              He had the slowest pulse she’d ever heard. In the darkness layered by moonlight, in the wake of the downstairs wall clock chiming one a.m., Ellie lay molded to Jordan’s side, her cheek resting on his chest, over his heart. The measured thump of its beating was deep and strong, and slow. It was the running, she knew, his body an efficient machine.

             
A machine she was rapidly becoming attached to.

             
“He’s an idiot,”
Jordan had told her at dinner, and yes, she knew Kyle was a literal idiot, but for a moment, over a half-eaten salad, still brimming with post-coital warmth, she’d wanted to believe he was making more than a comment on her ex. That he was implying he wouldn’t be so stupid.

             
And that was just like her, wasn’t it? Reading emotion and affection into the empty gestures of others. Like when he kissed the back of her neck, or pulled her to him while they were both still slick with sweat and breathing hard. She wanted those little things to mean big things. It was like Paige had said: she was a relationship girl, who craved monogamy and the kind of tender sweetness that didn’t exist in the world anymore.

             
She’d resisted him at first, she knew, because she was afraid of exactly what was happening now: the tight ball of emotions building at the base of her throat. Three weeks and she was daydreaming about him in painful detail. His smile and his body, his quick, sharp laugh and his secret language of facial shrugs and eyebrow lifts were stamped on her brain. Some hibernating, feminine part of her was pumping warm fuzzies through her system until she was full to bursting with a radiating good humor that was directly linked to Jordan. Her heart was putting out feelers and when that happened, she was completely unprotected. She didn’t do casual because she couldn’t separate the physical from the emotional, and as she listened to the slow beat of his heart, Ellie hated that she’d found herself in a position in which Jordan could hurt her.

             
Her eyes clouded over with tears before she could prevent them, and even as she reached to dash them away, they slipped down her cheeks.

             
Please be asleep
.

             
But his hand stirred and brushed her hair back off her face. “You alright?”