Sweet Forty-Two (29 page)

“You’ve gone mad. And that’s not a title I dole out to just anyone.” I laughed and pointed to the recipe on the page. He dutifully began gathering flours as I pulled out the wet ingredients.

“I just mean,
Georgia,
” he teased, “people generally take the few basic and bare things afforded to us in this world and make them as complicated as possible. Us, though? We complicate it in beautiful ways.
We
have fun with it. Basically, we’re awesome.”

He grinned. To call it a grin wouldn’t do it justice, really. It was like one side of his face was sneaking up on the other side. Waiting to jump out and say
Surprise!
Both of his eyes lit up. He really was quite ... I have to say it ... beautiful. He was rugged and elegant. Traits that I’d been hard pressed to find on the men in my life anywhere. The way Regan carried himself made you think he could just as easily fall over as he could sweep you into a ballroom dance. Long, lanky limbs that moved in tempo with the earth on a frequency shared between him and Mother Nature alone.

Still, it was sexy. There, I said that, too. Regan was sexy and beautiful and he was helping me bake and I listened to him play his violin and we just spent time with each other. Few questions and fewer answers. I still didn’t even have an idea what Rae said to him in that letter he carried around with him in his back pocket every day.

“How’s your mom doing?” Regan asked so nonchalantly you’d think he was looking at me as I read the thermometer on the window, waiting for news on the weather.

We hadn’t set rules on what we would and would not talk about with each other, but this was the first time he’d mentioned her. I panicked a little, thinking maybe he’d found out about the shock therapy and was preparing for a grand sprint out of my life.

“She’s fine. Why?”

He shrugged. “I care about the people in your life. I haven’t seen her around since the first time I, uh, met her. I feel bad about the way I hand—”

“Don’t apologize.” I held up my hand. “She and I talked that day. She knows you didn’t mean any harm.”

“Was she mad about me thinking she was dead?” He winced like a child trying out a swear word for the first time.

I smiled. “No. She wasn’t even mad at me for making you think that. She’s very forgiving.”

“Is she excited about you opening the bakery?”

No, because she doesn
’
t know.

“She’s wanted me to open it for a long time. That whole binder there is filled with family recipes. Most of them I modify on the fly for this bakery, but they’re all hers and my grandmother’s.”

She
had
wanted me to open it for a long time. I was trying really hard not to lie to Regan, as had become customary for me in nearly every close relationship over the last decade. Still, the full truth was too new, too infantile in its resilience to the rejection I knew would chase after it.

“Well, let me know when she’s coming in again. I’d like to meet her, like, for real.”

“Will do.” I nodded. The fatigue of the last week and my mother pressed on me like a brick between my shoulder blades.

Tomorrow was another treatment. Another lie I’d have to tell Regan. Another reminder why I couldn’t feel about him the way I was feeling. Because the last thing I wanted was to watch his smile fade as he drove me to my own ECT appointments.

To watch the brassy sheen in his hair turn white with the stress of watching his girlfriend, or wife, or whatever I could possibly become, have her brain rewired over and over. His wife, because that’s what Regan would want, being the all-the-way romantic he is. His wife would forget little things at first. What she had for breakfast that morning, what movie they saw a few days ago. But, how long until she forgot about the way they met? The reasons they fell in love. How long before he looked for my eyes and found two empty wells? The deep kind. Not the wishing well kind.

There aren’t enough pennies in the world to cover the cost of that wish ... the wish that things would go differently for me.

“Georgia?” Regan ducked his head into my line of vision, grinning cautiously.

My face had grown hot, my breathing unsure. Coming out in the broken sounds of someone tripping in tap shoes.

“Are you okay? You look...” Regan’s forehead bunched up as he walked toward me.

“Hey,” he tried again, softer, touching my shoulder.

I looked up at him. Those eyes. The ones that watched me move around the kitchen and when he thought I wasn’t looking. The ones that promised me, without his words, that he was genuine.

“I...” I trailed off, looking around the room for a reason not to. There were hundreds.

I ignored them.

I jumped.

I kissed him.

Holy shit, I kissed him.

I stood on my tiptoes, put my hands on his cheeks like every cliché I hate, and pressed my mouth hard onto his. My height made me fully commit to the kiss. I couldn’t just give him a peck in passing. I had to get all the way up on my toes.

Then he moaned a little. Louder at the beginning than the end, like he hadn’t intended on me hearing it in the first place. But I did. And it made me kiss him harder.

He slid a hand down my side and around to my lower back, the tremble of his nerves giving themselves away against my heated skin. A second later I was lifted onto the counter, Regan seemingly impatient with our ridiculous height difference. He wanted my mouth as much as I wanted his and needed to be closer.

Our mouths didn’t separate as we ran fingers through each other’s hair. Heavy breaths surged through our nostrils as our tongues took up all the available space in each other’s mouths. I let out a shrill noise from the back of my throat. Excitement. Muffled by the fullness of his tongue, it rang through as desire. Need.

I did need. More.

God it felt good. Amazing. His hands felt in my hair exactly how I wanted them to feel. His rough, tight hands over the back of my neck and up through my hair.

No. I had to stop.

Now.

“Shit,” I whispered as I pulled away from his mouth. Hard and breathless.

Regan’s lips remained parted, at the ready as his eyes opened.

“Shit,” I said again, sliding off the counter and walking to the far side of it. “Sorry.”

Regan looked around. Back and forth on the floor, to each window, the ceiling and the floor, and back to me. I bit my lip to take away from what the intensity of his gaze did to my insides. He looked fantastically deranged in his post-kiss glory. His hair a mess, half out of the elastic holding it away from his face.

“Sorry?
Sorry?
”
He was as breathless as I felt, though my own breathing was remarkably measured.

My voice, though, shook from my error. Premeditated, maybe. But lots of premeditated things are errors. “I ... I’m sorry for ... I didn’t mean to just ... I got carried away.” My words spilled out like marbles on a tile floor.

“Georgia...” The seductive Celtic caramel of his voice preceded him as he walked toward me in a hurry. His hands were on my face this time, and damn it if it didn’t look like he was going to kiss me.

“What?” I said it inside of an exhale. A sigh and a prayer rolled into one.

“What do you want?”

You.

“I ... I don’t ... what do you mean?”

“I think you want to kiss me again.”

I nodded. I’d completely lost any sense I had.

He reached for my hands. His were clammy but strong. I let them hold mine.

“But for some reason, you don’t want to kiss me again right now, right? Not yet?”

It was like he was singing me a lullaby as he reached up and stroked my cheek with his thumb.

I nodded again, undone were my defenses against him getting inside my head. He’d found an underground tunnel, the bastard. Probably through my tongue.

“I want to kiss you again, too. I don’t know when, either. But you’re going to be the next girl I kiss. That ... that I do know.” He moved his thumb to my mouth, gliding the pad of it across my lips as if storing the address in his body’s GPS system.

And, as if nothing happened at all, he turned and went back to the flours. To the chocolate chip cookies.

And me? I was racing full speed away from the Red Queen. Screaming at myself to wake up.

She tasted exactly like I thought she would. Sugar. That’s not meant to be some cute sort of mental tie-in my brain made because we were standing in her bakery. Her lips were actually sweet. Dipped in nectar and pressing against mine.

The look in her eyes before she kissed me did not lead me to believe that wrapping her arms around my neck was going to be her next move. Her nostrils flared and eyes widened like there was a giant spider crawling on my shoulder and she was about to brush it away. Instead ... the kiss.

I hadn’t stopped thinking about what it might be like to kiss her since the day I almost had, several weeks ago. It was over so fast tonight that the only solution was to do it again. Not yet, though. It wouldn’t be fair to her or Rae if I went ahead kissing the hell out of Georgia the way I badly craved without first truly addressing the card from Rae. Making sure that what I was doing was kissing Georgia. Not Rae’s ghost.

I finished in the bakery as quickly as possible, lying to Georgia that I’d received a 9-1-1 text from Ember and needed to get over there. The only 9-1-1 text was from me
to
Ember. Georgia didn’t question it, or seem weird about it, even though it was encroaching on five o’clock in the morning. She seemed just as desperate as I was to get into her corner and reassess what the hell it was that had just happened between us.

We mumbled agreement to meet again the next night. I assumed she spent a lot of time with her mom during the day, though I knew talking about it was still really hard for her, so I didn’t push it. I had to record with The Six tomorrow, but wasn’t about to be a girl with Ember in front of everyone. I could do that just fine in private.

“It’s been a while, Kane,” Ember mused as I let myself into her house. She was pulling a whistling kettle away from the stove. Two mugs were ready to go.

“I just saw you today.” I hopped onto the barstool across from her.

“Yesterday.” She yawned, which reminded me that for Ember it was a new day. For me, it was a continuation of the last few hours.

She looked up, a smartass grin bringing lightness to her face. “But, I mean since a 9-1-1 text. Or call, for that matter. You didn’t even send me one when, you know, you got
mail
.” Her eyebrow twitched like a period at the end of her sentence.

I sighed. “Sorry. I didn’t know if I wanted to tell Bo ... and I didn’t want you to have to keep secrets from him, then you all showed up—”

“At
Georgia
’
s
.” She poured boiling water over loose tea leaves. “You’re a grownup, Regan, but you didn’t have to hide that. If you’re hanging out with Georgia...” She shrugged like she couldn’t commit to the unspoken second half of her sentence.

“It’s not like that. Well, it wasn’t. Wait ... back up.” I put up my hands then grabbed the steaming hot mug of tea. “How are you and Bo doing after ... the letter?”

She smiled. The kind of smile she had while looking through little kid pictures of Rae before her funeral. A syrupy melancholy. “We’re fine. You’re adorable. How are
you?
I read the words, Regan. I remember you telling me you wished you’d said them to her.”

She stood next to me and leaned onto the counter, our forearms touching and both of us looking at an imaginary spot on the counter. Ember had been excelling in her training in the art of talking about heavy things with guys. Eye contact is discouraged. Makes us feel naked. Which is only okay if naked is what we want to be at that moment.

“It was like ringing the doorbell to hell, reading that card, Em. I couldn’t
fucking
believe I was staring at the words I’d forced myself
not
to say to her. I...” I put my chin in my hand and took a deep breath.

Ember took a hand and ran it up and down my back, not saying anything for a moment. When she spoke, finally, her tone was thoughtful. “I’d ask if we could talk about Georgia later, but I feel like this is all kind of muddled together...”

“Hell fucking yes, it’s muddled!” I stood with the growl of a tantrum-throwing teenager. Taking my tea to prove to myself I was well past those days.

“Sorry...” Ember shrugged, facing me without leaving the counter.

I paced the short length of the living room. “I was kind of liking Georgia, you know? She’s fun to be around and she’s also aggravatingly complicated, but she’s so ... raw. So real you couldn’t fictionalize her if you tried. She even tries, but it’s not ... she can’t...” I stopped to take a breath, feeling the sticky sweet wisp of her kiss on my lips.

“Was?” Ember turned to face me, leaning against the counter.

“Huh?”

“You said you
were
kind of liking Georgia. What is it now?”

I pursed my lips, looking at Ember and realizing I had to say it out loud. To someone. Before I exploded.

“I really,
really
like her. I trust her. She’s trusted me with some really heavy shit, too. And then she said she wanted to open her bakery, and I said I’d help her, and then we kissed.”

Ember’s eyes widened, a peacock-green billboard screaming,
What the fuck did you just say?
as her mouth formed a perfect “O.”

“Say something.” I huffed and sat down, setting my mug on the dark wood of the coffee table.

“Well ... I’m trying to read your reaction to see if I should formulate my supportive response or my rescue response. How was it? The kiss, I mean.”

“How was it?” I curled my lip, having not signed on for this level of girl talk.

“I mean, pervert, how did it feel? Emotionally.”

I shrugged noncommittally as I formed the exact opposite sentiment with my words. “Awesome. Seriously. It felt so good to have my lips on someone else’s ... to have someone’s hands in my hair and on my shoulders. Then she pulled away and it felt like a cold gust of
Rae
ripped across the back of my neck.”