Page 76 of Parallel

She raises up on one forearm so she can see my face, setting the wine behind her. “How exactly is this going to work?” she asks. “So you don’t get in trouble?”

I thought about it the whole way up here, without ever arriving at a perfect answer. In an ideal world we would hide this. We’d sneak around and lie to anyone who asks, but I’m not willing to do that, and I’m definitely not willing to ask it of her. “I’ll tell anyone I have to tell that I knew you before you were a patient, which doesn’t let me off the hook ethically but helps. And then, after you’re done with your degree, we could—” I stop myself with an embarrassed chuckle. “Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.”

She smiles. “You can’t leave me hanging like that.”

“I was going to say that once you got your degree we could go someplace where no one knows us. So congratulations—you’ve turned me into the creepy guy who talks about the distant future on a first date.”

Her smile widens. Even if it’s creepy, she doesn’t seem to mind. “I thought you were a commitment-phobe?”

She is leaning over me with all that hair falling around her face and that perfect peony mouth begging to be kissed and suddenly I can’t stand to keep holding back. “Not anymore,” I reply, wrapping my hand around the nape of her neck to pull her face to mine.

The kiss is gentle at first. I savor it, like the first sip of a really good wine, breathing her in and out, that smell of soap and summer. Lingering on the feel of it, memorizing that ripe, perfect mouth, and her skin, soft as rose petals.

I roll her to the side, cradling her jaw as her mouth opens under mine. That first taste of her turns the kiss into something else. Something deeper and darker. Territory I’d planned to avoid tonight but can’t resist now that it’s here.

My hands slide from her hair to her back to her hips, palming curves I’ve dreamed of touching for months. Her breasts, her waist, her perfect ass. She inhales when my mouth moves to her neck, the sound sharp and full of need. I want to drown in her response, in the way her body arches into mine, asking for more.

It continues and the world starts to narrow—to our mingled breath, to her sounds, to the need inside me that coils and grows until I can barely stand the pressure. I stop thinking of anything beyond what I want from her. Where I want my hands and mouth. Where I want hers.

Our movements become frantic. The desire for her grows vicious, swells inside me until it feels like my skin is too tight to contain me. It’s been too long. I’ve waited too fucking long for this and I can’t keep waiting.

I start to push her on her back, ready to take everything from her, heedless of my good intentions—but beneath my hand I hit the Jeep’s cold metal floor where the blanket has pushed away. My eyes open and reality comes crashing in, an unwelcome guest. We’re in the back of my car, her back pressed to bumpy metal, my toolbox an inch from her head. My body is straining for friction, my cock throbbing and wedged between her thighs, and I’ve never needed to come as badly as I do right now. But this is the woman I want to spend my entire life with, and this is not how our first time should go.

I somehow force myself to stop, rolling to my back and pulling her against my chest. “Now I’m the creepy guy who tells you we’re just going to look at some stars and then tries to molest you.”

Her mouth curves up. “I wasn’t complaining.”

Her willingness is not helpful right now. I’m still fighting with myself not to pick right back up where we left off. “I don’t want half measures,” I tell her, pressing my lips to the top of her head. “I need everything from you. And that shouldn’t happen here, no matter how badly I want to convince myself otherwise.”

“I think this is all harder because it feels like we’ve already waited forever. It’s like I’ve been missing you and craving you my entire life, at some level.”

Yes. That’s exactly what it is. Some part of me, the part that existed in another life with her, has waited all these years to get here. I’m like a man who’s been deprived of water for too long. When I finally get it, I want to drink until I drown.

“If we’re going to get through tonight successfully, some precautions are in order,” I say, grabbing a spare blanket and wrapping her in it twice.

She raises a brow. “Your precautions involve turning me into a human burrito?”

She doesn’t know about the night in Baltimore yet, but even what just happened here should be reason enough. “It’ll help make sure I don’t change my mind. Or at least it’ll slow me down if I do.”

She tucks her head into the cleft of my shoulder. She fits perfectly, as if she was made to be pressed against me like this. “You should have been right here all along,” I say quietly.

“I’m just happy I’m here now,” she says, nestling closer.

It’s the rain that wakes us.

A light mist, fortunately, but even a light mist isn’t something either of us could sleep through.

I drive her back to her mother’s house and walk her to the door. So much about this feels like high school again, but high school as it should have been: spent with a girl I can hardly stand to leave. “I think I kept you out past curfew,” I tell her. “If you get grounded, your mom won’t let me take you to prom.”

She grins. “She’ll have a bigger problem with the fact that you’re thirty.”

I kiss her one last time and then I pull her close. “Seriously, Quinn,” I say. “Don’t let your mom guilt-trip you into changing your mind.”

She goes on her toes to press soft lips to my jaw. “I somehow found you once in London, and then I found you here, when I didn’t know who you were,” she says. “And nothing can keep me away from you now that I do.”

36

NICK