Page 1 of Hold on Tight

Chapter 1

Eight years ago

He didn’t expect her to say yes. He asked on a whim, throwing the words out into the warm night as an experiment. “Let’s go in.”

They stood with their bare feet in the sand at the edge of the lake. The surface was a strip of glass—cool and mysterious, reflecting a row of spiky trees the moonlight had thrown between sky and water.

Pale light shone in her eyes. Her bottom lip was glossy and begged to be nipped. Her hair was something he wanted to get lost in, the way he wanted to get lost in her. He was out of time, and it made him brave. In a week, he’d be fighting in Afghanistan, and this—whatever it was—would be a memory.

Thiswasn’t supposed to be happening. He wasn’t the kind of guy who could meet a girl and feel things for her. He was the type who should’ve spent his leave drinking beer with his buds and longing to get the hell back to the war. Whereas this guy he’d become, this new version of himself, couldn’t spend enough moments with his face pressed against Mira’s hair, breathing peace.

She was eighteen; he was twenty. He’d picked her up in a Seattle bowling alley, where she’d come with friends, the first night of his leave. He’d been raring to burn off training testosterone. They’d made it as far as his car before she’d confessed how young she was and admitted she’d never been picked up by anyone in her life. He’d been planning to take her to a hotel room, but she was only a month past her birthday and obviously not that kind of girl, so they took a drive instead, the night air rushing by their open windows, the narrow roads hemmed in by trees. He found himself telling her everything in his head. Stories. Favorite books, childhood vacations, old friends, anxiety dreams … as if the pent-up thing in him had never been lust at all, but words, months’ worth of thoughts he’d kept locked up tight.

At the end of that first night, she’d leaned over and kissed him, and he lost his mind in the softness of her lips.

Before he’d flown home, his fire team leader had gathered them together. “We deploy in a month. Don’t get distracted. And for fuck’s sake, whatever you do,don’t get married.”

Jake leaned over and nudged Mike, his buddy, his teammate, and said, “No fucking chance.” Because if there was one thing Jake knew, it was that he was never getting married. Never having a family.

When he first got home, he’d stopped in to see his folks. They were as miserable as he remembered, drunk when he arrived, snarling and snapping at each other. There were faded bruises on his mother’s arms and circles under her eyes. It had always been that way: his father on disability since Jake’s childhood, drifting through life since he’d fallen off a roof he was demossing; his mother using cheap wine and online shopping to drown the misery of a bad marital choice made worse by circumstance.

Jake had known at age twelve that he had to get out as soon as possible. And then at fourteen, the first plane had hit the first tower and he’d known where he was goingto. He would take the fight to those assholes, wherever they were; he would rain destruction down on them like they’d rained it down on New York City. On his country.

He’d scoffed at the idea that he could be distracted. The month of post-training leave couldn’t go fast enough; deployment couldn’t come soon enough; he couldn’t wait to put a bullet through the first motherfucker’s head.

Except then there was Mira. Three weeks so far, nights strung together like shiny beads in his memory. Nights she told her parents she was with her friends, nights she stole from her life as a good girl. Movies, sitting side by side, the heat of her arm sinking into his skin and making it hard for him to sit still, a slow burn twisting in his gut. Nights at Dick’s, splitting french fries and chocolate milkshakes and passing iPods across the speckled table to share songs.

In the car afterward, Mira setting the pace, her kisses bolder every night, their mouths sliding over each other’s, slick and hungry, bodies tangled and sweaty, fighting the gearshift and the emergency brake, her kneeling over him, trying to press as close as possible.

Her hands gained confidence as they moved across his heated skin, as they unfastened the button and zipper of his jeans, as they slipped beneath the waistband of his briefs.

She’d never said she was a virgin, but he guessed she was because she’d seemed surprised when he’d flicked his thumbs over her nipples. When he’d tongued them. When he’d slid his hand down the front of her pants and worked a finger through the tangle of her curls to tap her clit. The first time, she’d come against his hand with a soft, broken cry.

That, like everything else, wasn’t supposed to have happened. Nor was the tiny ping in his chest, a seed bursting through its tough shell to germinate, at the sound of her voice.

And now there were seven days left.

Not much time for what he wanted from her, which was all of her, under him, around him, over and over.

But it couldn’t be more than that—not more than a week of sex. Because he was never getting married. Because she’d told him that first night that she’d deliberately chosen to get herself picked up by a stranger as an act of rebellion. Her father had just informed her that he wouldn’t pay for her to attend art school, but would only give her money for “a real college.” She’d been so pissed at her dad that night, she would have slept with a sixty-five-year-old hardened ex-con to get a rise out of him.

“My dad’s a total control freak,” she’d told him on their third date. She’d grown up on Bainbridge Island, college-bound before she’d popped out of the womb. Her parents were the same brand as his father, ex-hippies, but unlike his father, all whitewashed and clean living. She’d said, “My father wouldkillme. I never meant this to be anything other than a one-night thing.”

“You and me both,” he told her, but they didn’t push it any further than that.

There was onlynow. The sand under their feet, the gathering mist over the water, her mouth curving into a smile. There was no future.

This is all there is. Now.

He willed her to feel it, too.

He listened so hard to hear her answer that he almost missed it, because she didn’t give it in words. She unbuttoned the top button of her blouse instead. Long fingers fumbling with the pearl-white disk. No revelation at first, only that undoing. Then another button, and the shirt fell open, revealing her breasts mounded high in pink lace cups.

An ache bloomed at the base of his spine, the root of his dick, in his balls. His mouth ached, too. Before Mira, he hadn’t understood that sex could make you crazy. That it could take hold in your teeth and knees and chest. That you could want something so badly you’d beg for it.

He’d kept the begging inside because he hadn’t wanted to frighten her.

She undid another button and a sound came out of him he’d never heard before, something grating in his throat.

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