Page 26 of Hold on Tight

Interesting, how pink her cheeks turned. She couldn’t meet his eye. She pushed her hair off her shoulders. He bet he could count the number of people on earth who had hair as soft as hers.

He imagined burying his face in it. Two strides would bring him close enough to do it. Would put her shoulders under his palms and her mouth under his.

He could make a muddle of the only good thing that had happened to him since his truck had been blown to bits. He could guarantee the simple pleasure he’d taken in Sam’s company today would be a much harder thing to come by.

He stayed where he was.

“I figured between you, me, and Sam, we’d manage to finish most of this,” she amended.

He was about to say he hadn’t had much of an appetite for food since coming back from Afghanistan, but then he realized he was ravenous.

“I could probably put away a good amount of pizza,” he said carefully.

“Me,too,” Sam said.

Maybe it was the running. He and Sam had found a yardstick, measured out a fifty-yard dash, and done it a whole bunch of times. Until he was in a fuckload of pain, his thigh chafed from the socket of the prosthesis.

Maybe he’d make an appointment to see one of the VA prosthetists. For the last couple of weeks, things had seemed good enough—at least for the good-enough existence he’d been living. But there were some prosthetists who were supposed to be geniuses. They’d take a mold of your residual leg and craft a socket around it that would cleave to you no matter how much you sweated, no matter how much the temperature varied. Those were the guys you saw if you were serious about being a parathlete.

He wasn’t. But maybe someone at his VA knew what they were doing and could tweak things a little. Couldn’t hurt. Might help.

They ate at the round kitchen table off paper plates, drinking beer from steins she’d popped in the freezer for a few minutes. A couple of times he caught himself watching her mouth as she ate. He could still remember the feel of her full lower lip between his teeth.

Not relevant.

“So what’d you guys do all day?” Mira asked.

Jake hadn’t told Sam not to tell his mother about the running. He didn’t think that was fair, to ask a seven-year-old who already kept too many secrets to keep one more. So he was curious to see what Sam would and wouldn’t tell Mira.

“Played games, ate lunch, bowled with your lipsticks, went to the park and played on the play structure. That was just me. Jake didn’t climb.”

Sam had chosen to leave out the running. They’d both shaved a few seconds off their times. Jake had fallen, but only once, and Sam had helped him back up. They’d clapped high-fives, and Jake could tell it had killed Sam not to sulk about losing, but the kid had done it anyway.Good man.

“That sounds like a lot of fun,” Mira said, smiling at Jake. Her teeth weren’t perfectly straight. Her eyeteeth were set forward a tiny bit, and one was crooked.

He hadnotjust contemplated the way her teeth would feel against the skin of his throat. Because that would be absurd. It would be especially absurd if that thought had actually given him yet another Mira-induced hard-on.

“Grampy called,” Sam offered.

And Jake had answered. The guy had been barely civil to him, asking point-blank what Jake’s intentions were—“to babysit your grandson, sir”—and whether he had any idea how much trouble he could cause, because Mira was “fragile” and “vulnerable” and didn’t need a “horny hooah” messing with her life. That had pissed Jake off enough that he’d said, between clenched teeth, “Sir. It doesn’t bother me if you want to call me a ‘horny hooah,’ but Mira is not fragile, and she’s not vulnerable.”

“I know what ‘fragile’ means, but what’s ‘vulnerable’?” Sam had demanded when he got off the phone. And Jake had said, “Your mom is a smart, tough woman—that’s the important thing to know.”

Mira shot him a look over the top of her beer glass. “Did you talk to him?”

“We had a brief exchange.”

“Was he …?”

“He was—curt.” Jake could handle himself; no need to give any extra power to Mira’s dad and his rudeness.

Mira sighed. “He’s a piece of work.”

“Jake’s the best babysitter,” Sam said. “Can he come back tomorrow?”

Jake tried not to be pleased by that, but damn, he was. Even if it was only the overachiever’s impulse to feel good about a job done to spec. It wasn’t as if he actually wanted to come back tomorrow.

“I got a new sitter for tomorrow,” Mira told Sam.

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