Page 25 of Hold on Tight

Jake’s voice in her ear was deeper than she remembered, surprisingly intimate, and her nether regions gave an appreciative squeeze. “Sam and I will pick up dinner,” he said.

“I’m out anyway,” Mira protested.

“We need the exercise. We haven’t done anything for hours except play Ticket to Ride and bowl with your lipsticks.”

“Excuse me?”

“We needed pins. Sam said the only thing he could think of that were all the same size was your lipsticks.”

“You’re fired,” she said, but she was laughing. It was possible there’d been laughter in his voice, too, when he’d told her about the lipsticks. She couldn’t swear there hadn’t been.

“Let us get dinner,” Jake said again.

“I’m on the road. It’s ridiculous for you guys to go out. You’d have to walk, and it’s a long way.”

Would he think she was implying that he couldn’t do it, with his prosthetic leg?Oh, hell, she didn’t want to go down this road of worrying about every little thing she said to him. She had to treat him like any other guy. Hewaslike any other guy. She’d pretty much forgotten he was missing most of a leg, which was why she hadn’t thought about the implication of her words until they were out of her mouth.

“If you tell me it’s easy for you to stop, that it won’t slow you down, that’s one thing. But if you have to go out of your way, and get out of the car, and sit and wait—”

Her chest felt tight. Since the moving van had pulled away from the front of her parents’ house, she’d been on her own with Sam. When they first arrived in Seattle late at night, Sam had been sleeping so hard she’d carried him inside, warm and weighty in sleep, and she’d thought:We’re really doing this. Sam and me.

It would be so easy to let Jake and Sam get the pizza. Because it would slice half an hour off her commute, get her back with her boy sooner, remove a layer of stress from her evening.

She took a deep breath.

“Mira? You still there?”

“Yeah, still here. Just—thinking a sec.”

In the weeks after she’d first met Jake, she’d taken courage from his conviction. He’d said, “If you know what you want to do with your life, you should do it. You want to go to art school? Go to art school. Tell your father he can pay or not pay but you’re going. Find a way.” She’d gone home, stood up, told her father she was going to art school. She’d applied for financial aid, taken out loans, got a job.

And then—

And then she’d discovered she was pregnant, and the whole enterprise had been put on hold for eight years.

This project she’d undertaken, of becoming an adult, a stand-on-my-own-two-feet woman, meant learning to help herself. Even when she was tired. Even when the thought of sitting on a bench and waiting for takeout pizza made her feel like curling up in a ball.

She’d spent a good chunk of time at work today lining up a sitter for tomorrow. Penny had a friend whose sister was visiting this week. She could do the rest of the week, to give Mira more time to find someone permanent. Which she’d have to do, fast, before she lost her mind over this piecemeal, strung-together situation. The sister was coming tomorrow, 7:30 a.m., and the rest of the week, too.

Jake wouldn’t be here other nights and no babysitter would order and pick up pizza for Mira. She would have to get in the habit of drawing on her own reserves, of finding what was left after she’d exhausted all the obvious stores of patience and energy. The sooner she learned her depths, the more she trusted herself, the better off she and Sam would be.

“It’s easy for me to stop,” she told Jake. “It won’t slow me down.”

He didn’t try to argue with her. “Okay,” he said. “Sam and I will play another game and wait for you.”

And she had to try not to like that, either, the thought of the two of them playing together, biding their time until she came through the door to greet them.

Jake followed Sam into the kitchen as Mira set two large pizzas and two six-packs on the counter and slung her messenger bag over the back of a chair. She looked tired, her eye makeup slightly smudged, her hair wilder than it had been this morning. Wild the way it would be if he’d just rumpled the hell out of it kissing her. The way it had been that night at the lake, spread out on the blanket under her.

“That’s a lot of pizza and beer. You expecting someone else?”

“You’re a big guy,” Mira said. Then she blushed.

Jake’s pulse picked up.

Her gaze found points around the room, anywhere but his face.

“Guess I am,” he said mildly.

---