Page 110 of Between the Lines

My nerves itch all over, but I can’t tell her that.She doesn’t know.She hesitates at my demand.

“Are you sure?—”

“Positive. It’s late, and it’s a Friday night. The only drivers on the road are dangerous ones.”

In the few seconds it takes her to respond, my heart rate seems to triple in an attempt to reach over to her and tie her down. She needs to be safe. Ineedher to be safe.

“Okay. I’ll just set an alarm for early. I’m supposed to have breakfast with Penelope.”

The collapse of my chest in relief is a scary thing.

But an even scarier one is the way that Claire asks if I’ll stay on the phone until she falls asleep in my bed, and I stay on well after she’s finally fallen.

forty-four

claire

“What wouldyou say to coming out with me and my friends this week?” I ask Nathan.

It’s after school, but he had a board meeting, and Penelope said she’d be out of the house anyway, and I didn’t feel like being there alone. I’m sitting in his office while he wraps up a few things for the work day.

I can’t sayhome. I don’t have a home—not really. Although lately, whenever I think of the word, I think about begging Nathan tocome homefrom his conference.Homeis starting to look a lot less like a four letter word and a lot more like a person, and that scares the shit out of me.

“Which friends?” he says, finishing whatever he had been typing to give me his full attention.

“Oh, you know, just your subordinates.”

He grimaces at that word, and I laugh.

“Come on, old man. You can’t be more than like, what, a few years older than them?”

“Sam, Juliet, and I are the same age. I am older than the rest of your friends.”

“By like, ayear,” I scoff. “You’re nine years olderthan I am.”

I bat my lashes after dropping that bomb, tilting my head until he tugs at his tie like he’d rather not be reminded of that fact. I stare down at my manicure.The one he gave me that I’ve been doing my best to preserve.

“Does that make you uncomfortable?” I ask, the jest and strength gone from my voice, replaced with a mountain of insecurity.

I hear shuffling and then suddenly, his hand is beneath my chin. He has come around to my side of the desk to look me in the eye, to make sure that I can see the earnestness in his gaze when he says, “No.”

A man of few words. But I don’t need fluff as an answer. I nod, and when my chin dips down in his grasp, he runs the pad of his thumb over my cheek before returning to his desk.

“So, it will be Sam and Juliet, Lucy and Aaron, and Penelope?”

“Yeah, and some guy named Tony, I think? The guys met him at the conference?”

“Yes. He’s a math teacher and baseball coach at Meadow Ridge.” He pushes a few papers around to see the large desk calendar beneath the organized clutter. “What day?”

“Thursday. We’ll go straight from school. If it would make things less awkward, I could maybe hint to the guys that they should invite you like they did last time?”

Nathan tugs at his tie again, swallows, and nods.

“That might be a good idea.”

We’re avoiding the elephant in the room—we’re still sneaking around, and there is not an end goal in sight. But he’s painting my nails and I’m sleeping in his bed; we’re trading orgasms and missing each other in the meantime.

And then, in the same breath, I don’t know what to call him. I can’t invite him out with my friends in case they suspect something. We’re having some kind of illicit affair, and there’s a part of me that frets with how that cheapens what we have.

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