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He rubbed a little harder at her shoulder, pressing his thumb into the point of her collarbone. She didn’t pull away. This was going to be the longest ride home ever, but as he gave in to it, the anticipation melted into a steady, simmering buzz, one that made him feel loose and heavy in his bones.
One broken only by P.J. speaking his name.
He jerked his head up, pulling his gaze from where it had drifted—from the gather of Jo’s shirt between her breasts. P.J. had an eyebrow cocked as she tried to catch him in the rearview mirror.
“Huh?”
P.J. chuckled, and the knowing cast to it made his neck feel hot. “I said, the stores are probably still open. Do you want to stop and see if you can take care of your phone?”
His… phone. Right. How had he forgotten about his phone?
Without really thinking about it, he drew his arm back, draping it over his lap as he rubbed his other hand over his face. “Um. Yeah. Actually. That would be great.” He happened to have the shattered remains of the thing in his backpack anyway. He’d had them there for a week and a half, just in case he ever got around to reminding someone they’d promised to take him, but the moment had never seemed right.
He hadn’t been ready to find out what messages he’d missed. Or, more likely, what he hadn’t.
“If nobody else minds,” he added after a second’s thought.
“I’ve got nowhere else to be,” Jared said.
Jo and Kim both made indifferent noises, but Jo had curled into herself while they’d been talking. No more easy, barely conscious press of her knee against his leg. She wasn’t looking at him either, and her jaw had gone hard, and oh no. They weren’t doing that again.
The car started up, and Adam didn’t care if Kim or Jared or anyone could see. Eyes trained forward, breath tight, he reached out in the darkness and took her hand. She went to pull away, but he held on, intertwining their fingers and squeezing her palm, trying to say all the things he couldn’t right then. All the things he didn’t know how to put into words, about how she was beautiful and tough and interesting, and about how he wanted inside her walls. Under her clothes and inside her body and into her trust. Her mind.
But at the moment, his personal life was a mess.
His stomach was a knot as they pulled up in front of a big electronics store. Jo withdrew her hand as they got out, and once they were inside, she gestured toward the rear of the store before heading off.
“I’ll find you?” he called after her.
“If I don’t find you first.”
The others all wandered away, too, leaving Adam to go in search of the cell phone counter. Fortunately, the woman ma
In the meantime, he leaned against the glass and gazed around, trying not to think about what might or might not have come in while he’d been phoneless. He could have checked online if he’d really wanted to, but he hadn’t. There was no more putting it off now.
The lady was just handing him the new phone when Jo picked her way over to him, and the timing seemed a little too convenient. “So?” she asked, disinterested in tone, but the way she gazed off into the distance was pointed.
He braced his elbows against the counter and held the thing out to her with the boot-up screen displayed.
Mirroring his posture, she tapped the blunt, short tips of her nails against the glass. He wanted to reach out and still them. Wanted to pull that lip ring out from between her teeth with his mouth. Instead, he stared at the screen as it finished up its sequence. Searched for signal.
It buzzed in his hands, and he kept it angled so she could see as he scrolled through the list of texts he’d missed. There were a bunch from the first day or two, before everyone had gotten the message that he was e-mail-only for a little while. His brothers and his friends from school.
The last one was from just a couple of days ago, though.
“It’s from Sha
“Is that her name?”
“Yeah.” Had he really not ever told her that? He tapped the message with his thumb.
Got the day off for when you’re in Baltimore. See you soon!
The day? He’d booked out the whole weekend just to see her. Delayed his flight and extended the hotel stay. He’d explained all this, sent her an e-mail with the details, and she was… He didn’t know what she was doing.
It was like she wasn’t listening to him. Like she hadn’t been for a while.
But someone else was listening, was hearing this all loud and clear. Jo edged away from him, twisting to put her back to the counter, cracking her knuckles in front of herself and not meeting his eyes.
“That’s great. That you’ll get to see her. Right?”
A few short weeks ago, he would’ve said yes. It was fantastic.
But he wasn’t so lonely for home anymore. Not so willing to take what he could get—at least not from Sha
“I don’t know,” he said.
Her voice was tight. “When do you leave?”
“Next week.”
Finally—finally—she looked at him, but her eyes were as guarded as they had been when they’d first started this… whatever it was. “Well, I guess we’ll find out then.”
Chapter Seven
Living in the tropics without goddamn air-conditioning was for masochists.
Christ. Jo mopped her brow as she stormed into her room, tugging at the overshirt she’d just about sweated through on her walk back from the lab and dragging it over her head with a growl.
“Are we mad at the shirt now?”
Somehow managing not to have a coronary or jump five feet in the air, Jo jerked around to find Carol sitting at the head of her bed. Fuck. Jo turned and dropped her gaze, flinging her shirt onto the pile of laundry in the bottom of the closet.
“The shirt’s fine. The climate’s on notice, though.”
“Yeah, it’s rough.”
Carol was one to talk. She was in another one of her stupid, cute sundresses, her hair tied up and off her neck, the one fan in the room pointed right at her face.
Meanwhile, Jo was in a tank top and baggy shorts, sweating like a pig and feeling naked, and—
And Adam was leaving tomorrow. For almost a week. To go hang out with that bitch who wouldn’t even give him a straight answer or make time in her day for him. In air-conditioning. And Jo was going to sit here boiling alive and pretending not to care.
Whatever. God knew she had plenty of experience with that at least. Maybe not the boiling part, but the rest of it she’d been practicing her entire damn life.
If she were back in Chicago and feeling like this, she’d spend some quality time with her punching bag, but no. She was stuck here, and Adam’s send-off di
But all of those options made her feel so cowardly she wanted to scream. She wasn’t avoiding her problems, and she wasn’t going to let someone turn her into the other woman. No way.
At the sound of movement behind her, Jo sighed and tried to collect herself. She shoved the damp flop of her hair off her forehead, frowning at the way the dye was starting to fade.
Then, out of nowhere, Carol asked, “Is it your arms?”
Jo’s skin went cold. “Excuse me?”
“Or your shoulders? That you don’t want anyone to see?”
“It’s…” What the hell was Jo supposed to say to that? Her insides squirmed, and she was about to tell Carol off. What right did she have to ask? Or to notice, even? So what if Jo always wore long sleeves? There wasn’t any law against it or anything. “No, I just…”