Reawakening (26 page)

She wondered what a lie would look like on his face. Like this smiling thing? It seemed sincere enough, and he put one casual hand behind his head, too, just to give it a little back up. It was easy enough to believe, even if it left her frustrated and unsure. He’d put something heavy down on the deck, and now the boat was rolling.

“Okay. Okay, I guess I will,” she said, then regretted it. It sounded resentful in some way, though she couldn’t understand why. Was that how she felt? Resentful? Rejected? It seemed stupid to feel anything like that when maybe he really was just tired. Maybe telling her to go had nothing to do with some kind of sudden distaste for her, and everything to do with embarrassment over a sore back or something similarly old-man-ish.

For all she knew she’d popped his trick knee out without being aware of it. And now he just wanted to lay there, half-dead, while two people who hadn’t broken every bone in their bodies went for a run.

Not that she knew for sure about the broken bones. And she didn’t particularly want to think about masked insurgents snapping his fingers while brushing her teeth and watching Blake moisturize his elbows.

Just go back in
, she thought.
Go back in and talk to him like yesterday, and ask him about his bones and about why he just cut you off like that. Then eventually it will lead to the hottest sex of your life, and hey presto. Two birds with one stone.

Only when she came out of the bathroom, his face was in the crook of his arm. He’d started looking like he was dead—she could tell even from across the room. Hell—maybe he really was tired. It wasn’t as though the day before had been calm and non-trying. He’d watched her almost get killed then fucked her until she begged for mercy.

Better people had been worn out by less.

“You ready?” Blake asked, and once she’d traded pajamas and her jersey for a t-shirt and sweatpants, she was. She was also made very aware of how far she’d come, because it didn’t seem to matter at all that Blake watched her strip down to nothing with a brightly amused look on his face.

“You look even better than I remember,” he said, and she swatted him on the way out the door.

Of course, she didn’t quite mean it in any kind of sexual way, and yet somehow the swat landed on his ass just the same. And he looked at her with the same kind of eyes Jamie had, briefly, so that the humming feeling returned between her legs.

In truth, she wasn’t really sure it had ever gone. It ate up the feel of his too-firm butt and reminded her that she wanted to do something other than run, then suddenly her mind was on things that could be done outdoors.

Maybe they could see how the vegetable patch felt about people fucking in the middle of it. Did he have the same thing in mind? She couldn’t tell by looking at him, though looking at him sure did prompt some deeper, hotter tingles in her still tight nipples and the heated bloom of her sex.

He’d decided to do some stretches on the porch before they set off, and it was fairly obvious that he knew how he looked while doing them. It wasn’t really a surprise that she’d swatted his ass when it curved that way beneath material too tight for it. Was he aware how clingy those sweatpants were?

Probably. Probably.

“You not going to limber up, honey?” he asked, and he sounded sincere. He really did. There was no hint of sex in his voice and, in all honesty, it was kind of weird that her mind kept going there.

“Uh, no. No, I just want to get going,” she said, and that was true. Even if she chose that moment to realize the hairband she usually wrapped around her wrist wasn’t there. She’d left it on the sink, and now her hair was going to be all out and in her face and ready to catch on zombie fingers.

“Shit.”

“Hair thing?”

Christ, they practically had a routine. When had that happened?

“I came this close to handing it to you.”

“I gotta go back and get it,” she said, but unfortunately flashed on Jamie, all sprawled out in bed when she did so. God, he’d looked good like that. Face pressed into the crook of his arm, body all lean and long and oh, she hoped she could resist suddenly going down on him when she got back to the bedroom.

“Catch up, okay,” Blake said, and for a moment she contemplated suddenly going down on
him
. He ran backwards down the steps as he spoke, which somehow only made him look hotter. Probably a competency thing. A running competency thing.

Not to mention the fact that he hadn’t turned her down.

“I will,” she said, then turned for the entryway. Took the stairs two at a time. Found herself standing by the barely open bedroom door, unable to go in.

Of course, the bathroom had two entrances. She could have just taken the one to her left and bypassed the bedroom altogether. But there was something almost impossible about that when she could see Jamie jerking off through the little gap she’d left as she’d exited.

And it wasn’t as though it could be denied. He hadn’t decided to halfheartedly do the job, oh no, no, no. He was fisting his cock roughly, and if that hadn’t been enough on its own, she could see the way he’d pushed his face into the pillow. Head turned to one side, mouth open, eyes closed.

Lord, it was a sight. She was only thankful that she’d caught him now and not during that long low drought when all she’d done was dream about them and pray for them to make a move. Though seeing him do it like this—right after claiming to be too tired—wasn’t exactly the delight of her life.

Or it was, just in a slightly different way to the delight she’d hoped for.

He looked so lost in it. He hadn’t even heard her come up the stairs and he definitely wasn’t sensible of her presence—though usually she knew he would have been. No, he thought she was out running with Blake and so he’d decided to put on a show for absolutely no one.

What a fucker! Did he not even get that she’d have been happy to watch him do this, if this was all he wanted? Surely he could have still thought of someone else while jerking off in front of her.

And that way, she could have been a legitimate witness to his hand running up and down his gorgeous cock. There’d have been nothing furtive or weird about it. She could have just laid there and watched him buck into his slick grip—and oh, it
was
slick. Like maybe he’d climbed out of bed and got some of that moisturizer Blake used on his fucking elbows to give himself a little extra sensation while masturbating.

Jesus, even the word made her wet. Even the idea of him doing this while no one else was around. Somehow she’d imagined that they didn’t—that they hadn’t, in all the time she’d been here—but now she could see thinking something like that was insane.

They probably did it all the time. In the shower, in the bed, on the couch. They were probably licking their palms—oh God just like that, yes baby, just like that—and stroking their cocks left, right, and center.

Before saying her name, right when she least expected them to.

He didn’t say it loudly, but she knew that’s what he’d said. And his hips jerked upwards when he said it, too, as though just the sound of that syllable got him going.

Other things apparently got him going, too. Like saying other words, lots of words, all of which made her very confused about the whole “I’m tired” thing. Why had he said that, if he just wanted to come in her tight pussy?

Because that was definitely amongst the horny things he was saying. As was—

“That’s it, baby. Fuck yourself on me.”

Though she suspected she might have translated wrong from horny to English. The huge sweep of arousal that went through her—that always went through her whenever he talked dirty—kind of knocked out her ability to comprehend words.

He was going to come pretty soon—she felt sure he was. He’d started biting his lip, and that bead of liquid at the tip—it wasn’t anything he’d rubbed all over himself. She could see it clearly and watched it, mesmerized, as it welled and finally slipped in a thin strand down over his working fist.

It was almost too hot to bear. She could feel her clit, as hard and swollen as his cock looked, and it didn’t seem like too much of a stretch to just maybe…slip a hand under the waistband of her sweatpants. It was unlikely that he’d notice—he was holding his breath in sporadic starts, and that definitely meant he was going to come—and even if he did, so what?

She’d only be doing as much wrong as he was. Not that he was doing wrong, exactly. In fact, it looked really right when he thrust into that tight grip and moaned about how good she felt. It just didn’t
feel
right, when he could have been sliding into the very thing he seemed to want to praise so much.

Though she found she couldn’t think on it too hard when he suddenly groaned out an
ohhh yeah, yeah, I’m coming.

He wasn’t lying, either. She watched him spurt all over himself, thick jets of come spilling down over his fist and belly. It looked so good she almost went to him right there and then, thoughts of licking all of that sticky liquid up in her probably addled mind.

But it was done with, now, and besides. She had to take a few steps back in order to let out the breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. She had to breathe for a second and compose herself, though doing both things told her clearly how she felt about what had just happened.

He hadn’t wanted her to see. And apparently, neither did she.

Chapter Fourteen

There were several things she wanted to say to him after the run with Blake had cleared her head. But all of them fell short of the mark.
Do you just not want me
sounded too pathetic and self-absorbed
, is this something to do with overhearing me and Blake
sounded somehow insane. What kind of person turned down a roll in the hay because of some love conversation they’d overheard?

She couldn’t even be sure he’d heard it, anyway. And even if he had, there’d been those words at the start. The ones that contained things like
you and Jamie have something special
and
Jamie puts great big giant love hearts in my eyes.

Which just left the idea that maybe he didn’t think they had something special, at all. Could be that the whole thing just freaked him out, and those words he’d said—they weighed heavy on him, now. Just because it was the end of the world, didn’t mean that love stopped having such heavy connotations.

Such as—what if you loved somebody, then said somebody went and got themselves killed? Yeah, that seemed pretty heavy to her. Like when she went to see where he was and found him in the storeroom, clanging on the generator. And he told her not to worry, because there were four backups but even if there hadn’t been—he’d made her a friendly little How To manual. Just a friendly little thing with cartoons and funny quote bubbles, about how to fix the solar paneling or make sure the water purifier was working correctly.

Only all she could think once he’d given it to her was—
you made this in case something happens to you. You made this in case you die and leave me on my own out here.

And oh, that weighed her down almost through the floor. It weighed her right down to the center of the earth, where the idea of him not wanting to have sex with her seemed like the least of her concerns.

“You okay, bug?”

So it was just bug, now. No June at the front—though when she really started thinking about it she had no idea why there’d been a June at the front, anyway. It always made her think of the movie starring Amy Adams, but she knew for a fact she was nothing like Amy Adams and even if she had have been, there was probably a far more random reason for the nickname.

For God’s sake, it was Jamie she was talking about. He probably thought her toes looked liked insects, or something similarly weird.

“Yeah. Sure.”

No, I’m not. Please don’t die. And also—if you could not jerk off secretly as though that’s just what you have to do, that would be great. We’ll call it an added bonus.

“It’s just in case we come down with a searing case of man flu or something like that. No cause for alarm,” he said, but she doubted he was even convincing himself. After all, anything could happen at any given moment. He could get cancer—a weird and hidden cancer that killed you without showing up on any of the equipment they absolutely didn’t have. Hell, he could get appendicitis and die with her standing by just as helplessly. It didn’t have to be something huge or horrible, like a sudden reoccurrence of bubonic plague.

A rusty nail could kill him. An infected splinter.

“Want me to show you where the gas goes?” he asked, and she appreciated his attempts at distracting her, she really did. But in all honesty, it was too late for anything like that. She’d already seen him die because of a splinter, behind her eyes.

“Come on over here,” he said, which worked better. Mainly because he pulled on her arm as he said it, and his touch was always a good grounding sort of thing. It almost immediately sent her back to when he pushed his fingers through her hair—or even better, him getting a handful of her left breast.

It wasn’t as though it was a stretch to remember the sensation. The whole thing had only happened a few hours ago, and when he had a hand on her like that she could remember it almost exactly. Firm pressure, not too hard, not too soft. Then that little tug on her—