“You didn’t come again,” he said, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice. He knew very well what she felt like when she came, how her muscles got all tight inside, and how her whole body set off in a cascading series of quivers from head to toe. “My fault? Too fast?”
She gave a little shrug and ran light fingers across his collarbone. “I’ve turned into a clit girl. Doesn’t mean I didn’t love it.”
He narrowed his eyes and gave her a doubtful grin. “I don’t believe that.”
She laughed once, loud and sharp. “Well, believe it. I think I know what I need.”
“You didn’t used to be like that.”
“People change. People’s bodies change.”
He considered her as he widened his smile. “No, I think that’s the control talking. For some reason you turned your mind off to anything else. You think you’re only a clit girl, therefore you are.” When he scraped a nail over her firm nipple, she hissed, her pupils dilating all over again. “I want to try to get that back. Can I? Please? With a little practice, I’m sure I could do it again.”
She pushed at his chest in a feeble, adorable attempt to act pissed off. It would have helped if she wasn’t smiling. “Oh, really? We haven’t been together in ten years and you’re an expert on my body?”
His palm made a slow trail down her belly. Her far knee came up, cradling the heel of his hand as it pressed against her pubic bone. He loved this part of her, how it surpassed the softness anywhere else on her body. As he touched her where she was still slippery, she went still.
“I am.” He nosed the dark hair from her neck and said into her skin, “Remember that night when I taught you how to come? When I just kept touching you here and you exploded in the back of my da’s Cadillac?”
She let out a sound that was part indignant, part disgust, and a whole lot of remembered ecstasy. “You did not teach me that.”
“Sure I did.”
“I was doing just fine on my own, thanks.”
“Exactly. It was just a solo effort. But it’s better when someone else does it for you, isn’t it?”
“It is.” She swallowed, and he licked up her moving throat. “And you’ve gotten even better at it.”
“Well, I’ve learned a few new tricks.”
She edged away, and he removed his hand from between her legs.
“I don’t know how I feel hearing that,” she said.
He shrugged and took to lightly rubbing her arm. “Sure you do. It’s probably the exact same way I feel. Let me see if I get it right: You and I were each other’s first sex all those years ago, and it was cool and exciting, but in that awkward teenage way. We got a little better at it and we thought it was the bomb. All that intense exploration that opened up a whole new world. Then we weren’t together anymore and we slept with other people”—she winced—“and we learned what we like and how to please another person. Jen, I don’t like knowing you’ve been with others either, but guess what, neither of us can change that. I can’t get pissed about what’s happened before this, not when it was never something I could control.” Then he kissed her soundly and grinned. “I can only enjoy the benefits of a fine education.”
She looked a little stunned at that, considering, then she nodded in the way that reminded him of when her spreadsheets all balanced up and her crazy world suddenly made sense.
“So.” He ran a hand through his hair as silence settled between them. “You never answered me back in the bar. You just jumped me. It was so embarrassing.”
She looked at him like she honestly had no idea what question he was talking about. It made his throat dry up, and not in a good way. No turning back now, though. “Are we going to try this again?” he asked. “You and me?”
The gentle movement of her hand on his chest paused. She rose up on one elbow so they were eye to eye. She looked terribly worried, like she’d already made up her mind to leave him here and now. Like it was ten years ago and they were on another picnic blanket. Then she kissed him, close-lipped but sweet and long. That hadn’t happened a decade ago, and it sent his mind spinning toward hope.
“How?” she asked when she pulled away, and she looked genuinely confused. “How could we make that work?”
Tucking a piece of hair behind her ear, he replied, “We try.”
“All right, then,” she said seriously, and something sharp and sweet struck him in the heart. “We try.”
Chapter
17
“Speaking of not answering questions, you still haven’t answered mine from last night.” Jen slid into the nook between the counter and the window overlooking Bleecker Street, marveling over the fact that Leith MacDougall was sitting at her tiny kitchen table, devouring a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats.
An impish look preceded his smart-ass comment. “Which question again? Was it: ‘Do you like that?’ or ‘More?’ Because the answer is ‘yes.’ To both.”
Though she acknowledged him with a smile, she clutched her coffee mug in both hands and tried to look as earnest as possible. “No, the one about why you aren’t staying in Gleann for the games. Or competing. The real reason. I know part of it, but I think there’s more. And I’m here to listen, if you want.”
He set down the cereal spoon so carefully it didn’t make a ripple in the milk. “You do know part of it. Because I showed it to you.”
She wanted to touch him but he’d gone shuttered, and he leaned so far back in his chair she couldn’t easily reach him. “Your dad. The house. You haven’t dealt with losing him yet, and going to the games, which was such a huge part of growing up—for both of you—would be too painful a reminder.”
He coughed. “Put like that, it seems so easy to fix.” The sun coming through the window turned his eyes the color of the whiskey they’d drunk last night.
“It’s not. I know it isn’t. But it’s something you have to do on your own. No one can make you get over losing the most important person in your life.” He nodded slowly, and she leaned over her mug. “But I can make you talk about the other reason you’re not competing.”
Narrowed, challenging eyes focused on her. The corners of his mouth drooped. “And what would that be?”
She’d thought about this for several days, ever since Olsen had told her about Leith’s final games. “You won the all-around three years in a row, coming on the heels of the best high school football season the valley had ever known and two state track championships. You’ve never not won anything your whole life. You said it yourself the other night at the Stone, that you’d never really been given a challenge. But then you didn’t win those final games, and then you stopped throwing.”
She’d never seen him so still. He looked into his bowl. “That was the last time Da saw me throw.”
“And I bet he loved it. I bet he cheered you the whole time. Didn’t you see that photo he had hung in your old room? Those last games where he looked proudest of all?”
Leith squeezed his eyes shut.
“You didn’t fail him,” she said. “You didn’t fail, period. Not winning doesn’t mean failing.”
Those whiskey eyes flew open. “Who said I thought that?”
“No one. No one had to. I know you, Mr. All-Star. I also know how Gleann worships you.” He winced. “I know it bothers you, but now I know it’s deeper than that. That it pressures you to not let them down. But since no one else will say it, it’s fallen on me to tell you that no one except you expects you to win everything.”
He opened his mouth and she sensed his protest. She held up a gentle hand.
“You think people love you because of the feats you’ve accomplished, but that’s just stupid. I’m sorry, but it is. They love you because you’re Leith, you’re impossible not to love, and you’re theirs. Do you think that if you go out on that field and throw shitty, Gleann will, I don’t know, erase you from memory or take down the caber monument and that billboard—”