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“I thought you hated me?”
“I don’t hate you,” Julie trails off, avoiding his eyes because if she looks into that stormy gray-green, she knows she won’t be able to stop there. She’ll tell him everything and she can’t, holding back is the only thing she has left to protect herself from this feeling . It’s been too long now. It hasn’t gone away. It’s not going away. No matter how hard she fights it, it’s part of who she is now. He’s part of who she is now.
“You don’t?” he asks, his brow furrowed in total confusion.
“No,” she confirms.
How could she hate him? Did he really think...he’s Reggie’s best friend, the boy who brought her brother back to life, the boy who brought her back to life too, even if he doesn’t realize it. How could he think...unless she was too good at hiding. How had he not seen right through it? Everyone else had.
“Then what the hell, Julie?” he asks, taking her hand, running his thumb over her knuckles gently. How is someone as alive as Luke Patterson, always vibrating with some emotion too big for him to contain, enthusiasm or outrage or joy or resentment this gentle? Unless...unless what he’s feeling now is gentle or...does he know that she needs him to be gentle right now?
Is she even making sense anymore? Has any of this ever made any sense?
She doesn’t want to want him. Doesn’t want to love him.
It’s too big. Too intense. She’s had a year of intense. It’s been too much.
She just wants calm.
Except that’s that problem.
Right now, he’s her calm.
The roughness of his fingertips on the back of her hand.
It centers her. Steadies her.
He steadies her.
After a year of grief and anguish and terror that she lost everything the day she lost her mom, a hurricane of terrible ripping apart her life, he’s, somehow, the calm after it, even with a storm of his own brewing in those eyes.
Shit. She looked.
“Luke.” His name falls from her lips softly and he steps closer somehow and that’s all it takes to break her resolve. She uses his grip on her hand, pushing herself up on her toes, to the very tips and she’s close enough to see the bands of silver in his eyes, when the spark of understanding finally brightens them.
“Oh,” he rasps.
“Yeah,” she says, her tongue darting out against her bottom lip and she watches as his eyes flicker to it and not a split second later, it’s caught between his lips, his hand dropping hers as his arms catch her against his chest.
It’s a simple kiss. Their mouths moving unhurriedly against each other.
Calm. Gentle.
Then he pulls away and blinks down at her. “Julie, I don’t think I could stand it if...” he wets his own lips then and she exhales sharply, “do you want this, really?”
He really doesn’t know. That’s obvious. He looks...he looks so worried with his eyes warm, but confused and his hands flexing softly against her hips and a tiny bounce on his toes that she can feel him trying to contain.
“Yes,” she whispers, lifting a hand to his cheek, her thumb brushing against the sharp cut of his jawline. She doesn’t have the words yet or maybe she does, but she can’t say them, so she’ll have to let her mouth do another kind of talking for her.
Sliding her hands into his hair, she draws him down into another kiss but this one, this one is not calm or gentle.
It’s fire. It’s everything she’s been holding back for months, her anger and grief and passion, her triumphs and even her failures. He’s been there for it all, even when she didn’t want him to be. And now...now she doesn’t want him anywhere except close to her. Always.
Her body surges up against his as one of his hands finding the nape of her neck, the other gripping her hip like a lifeline. And when she flicks her tongue against his bottom lip he groans into her mouth.
He hauls her up against him and she’s weightless, her feet leaving the floor and in just a few steps her back hits the door of the garage and it’s so easy for his hands to drift down to the backs of her thighs, lifting her against him. She takes her cue, like she does when they’re on stage, the only time she’s let this fire, this want, show. Wrapping her legs around his hips, she draws him even closer as his mouth leaves hers, trailing a slow path of what she’s pretty sure will be deep, bruising kisses across her jaw and down over her neck. She barely feels it when the back of her head knocks against the glass window of the garage door because every inch of her body is singing from his touch and she loses herself in it, the way she always knew she would if she let herself, if somehow he wanted her too
He does. Obviously. And growing more obvious by the second.
“Jules,” he rumbles when her hips, completely without her permission, circle against his. His hands slide up to hold her there, against him, but still.
“Sorry,” she manages to breathe out, but she’s not and he knows it.
He huffs out a laugh against her shoulder and then turns his head to face her and a soft laugh bubbles out from her throat too. Then he leans back and she unwinds her legs from around him, sliding down his body to the ground. He groans through a smile and shakes his head while she bites her bottom lip, containing a grin of her own.
“Okay,” he says, looking down at her, “so you don’t hate me.”
“No, definitely not hate.”
He lets out a breath of seems like disbelief. “Did you ever though? ‘Cause…”
“No,” she cuts him off. “I kind of wanted to, but...no, not even a little bit.”
“You wanted to hate me?” he asks, incredulously.
“I wanted...I wanted someone to not treat me like glass. You never did that. You challenged me. You keep challenging me.”
“ I challenge you ? Shit, Jules, you...you make me absolutely insane, but you...you make me so much better, a better writer, a better musician, you just...you make me better.”
Her hands fall to his, entwining their fingers together. “I think,” she says, squeezing gently, “I think we make each other better.”