Page 39 of Hold on Tight

He hazarded a glance in her direction. She was watching him with genuine admiration. It made his gut glow.

God. Simple had receded far into the background, like a dream he’d had but had almost forgotten by the time his eyes were fully open. There was nothing simple about this, not about any of it. Not about the pleasure of pitching pinecones to hisson, not about how the glow in his gut had lit him up hard, not about the conversation they’d had before Sam had barreled into him. It was all complication, and he didn’t hate it half as much as he wanted to.

He didn’t hate it at all.

He liked it, too fucking much.

He hatedthat.

Chapter 11

Sam and Jake played pinecone baseball while she sat at a nearby picnic table and watched them. Watched the rough contours of Jake’s body under the gray T-shirt he wore, watched how even when he was dispatching a pinecone, she could see muscle flirt with fabric. He had a funny half-straddle he did to pick up the pinecones, and even that was sexy, because he made it into a graceful performance. His hair was mussed, as it always was, and he needed to shave. He looked haunted, the bones in his face rough and high under the skin, darkness under his eyes that even sunlight didn’t chase away, a grim set around his mouth that only occasionally gave way to something you might call a smile, when Sam did something particularly charming or funny.

This was a moment she had fantasized about when Sam was little, but it was different from the fantasy. In the fantasy, Jake had been light, joyful. He romped with Sam, his mind not on his physical limitations but on the adventures that he and his son could have together, how high they could go in the tree, how far and how fast they could run. In the fantasy, he crouched down to show Sam something at eye level. In the fantasy, he swept her off her feet and carried her, both of them laughing, while Sam demanded to be included in the embrace.

She didn’t want that fantasy anymore. She didn’t want to be with the Jake she had imagined, who now seemed frivolous. The Jake she’d dreamed up was a party Jake, a celebration Jake, a fair-weather Jake. Her life was hard edges: Sam’s health issues, the brutish reality of working to support herself and her son, the immutable fact of waking up every day to do all of it again, dishes and dust, crumpled homework papers left too long at the bottom of a backpack, a bed that never got warm even when you curled up and wrapped the covers tight.

This Jake knew a day could be an uphill climb.

She wasn’t supposed to want either Jake. Any Jake.

She closed her eyes, because when her eyes were open, she saw a new detail every minute, a connected chain of them. The way sunlight angled through pine needles to find the brightest spots in Jake’s hair, the ones that were more golden than brown. The angle of Jake’s eyebrows, its echo on Sam’s face. The gusts of pain that moved across Jake’s face and vanished again. The way he and Sam looked at each other, when they thought the other wasn’t looking back, with fascination and hunger.

With her eyes closed, she could think about consequences, about potential disasters. About the person she wanted to be, who wasn’t someone concerned with consequences or potential disasters. She wanted to be someone who would seize joy and hang on tight, someone who would even, occasionally, laugh at worry. But she hadn’t been that person, not since she’d gotten pregnant with Sam.

“Mom? Can we ride the Ferris wheel?”

She’d been promising Sam a ride on the ten-story Seattle Ferris wheel since it was installed last summer. But so far the timing had sucked. The timing sucked now, too. She didn’t think either she or Jake would benefit from being shut up in close proximity to each other.

“Please, Mom? Please?”

On the other hand, it was a beautiful afternoon. Warm, but not hot.

The sky blazed blue, as clear as it ever got. They’d be able to see for miles. Driving here, they’d seen the mountains, Cascades to the east, Olympics to the west, framing her world in a way she’d missed in Florida. It would be hard to imagine a more gorgeous day to be ten stories above Puget Sound, gazing across to Kitsap Peninsula, the city in relief behind them.

“Okay. You don’t have to come with us,” she told Jake hastily, and then, not wanting to sound like she was opposed to his joining them, “You’re invited, though, if you want.” To Sam, she said, “We’re going to eat our picnic first. Then I’ll take you to the Ferris wheel.”

Jake shrugged. “If I don’t go with you, I have to do laundry.”

But his eyes caught hers, and she understood that his feelings were not unlike her own. That he was balanced at the same strange tipping point, that he also wanted to resist, that he was doing no better a job than she was.

“I’ll just need a minute before we go—I’ve got a gym bag at the visitor center, and I can swap legs and change my T-shirt.”

“Yeah, no worries.”

She pulled out the lunch she’d packed for her and Sam. She’d made too many sandwiches, because that was what she did, and she offered one to Jake.

“No, thanks,” he said.

“My mom makesreallygood chicken salad,” Sam said.

“Just eat it,” she said, pinning him with a stare.

Something opened in Jake’s face, something like, but not quite, surprise. He gave her a look. There was heat behind it, heat that sank deep and rose high and filled her fast.

“Okay, then.” He said it mildly, but his eyes were still locked on hers. Her heart clamored, sending blood rushing everywhere in her body.

Then as quickly as it had happened, it was over, the connection broken. She was left with the jazzed-up, buzzy feeling of what had passed between them, the swollen warmth between her legs, the anticipation he’d started like a thrum in her veins.

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