Page 41 of Hold on Tight

At twenty, he’d been a marvel of engineering, power, and beauty, every inch of him thick and hard. He’d given off the sense of something tightly leashed and barely restrained in coiled muscle, held back under the tautness of his skin. Delicious.

He was leaner now, but no less beautiful.

“I could teach you how to cook.”And my motives are totally pure. Nothing to do with wanting to watch you move around my kitchen.

“Icancook, believe it or not,” he said. “Nothing special, but I can follow a recipe. My mom was kind of a mess, so all of us cooked. I’ll cook for you sometime.”

“We don’t always eat takeout. These last couple of days—sometimes I’m too fried to cook.”

“It must be hard work, what you do,” he said.

Itwashard, tougher than she’d expected. Exhausting, working and still having something good in her left to give to Sam at the end of the day. She got up early to make Sam’s lunch and stayed up late so she could clean the house and do the laundry. And there was no one to depend on but herself.

But it was good, too, the way having a newborn was hard as hell but so, so sweet.

It had been a long time since anyone had noticed or acknowledged that about her life, and it loosened something tight in her chest. There was a gentleness to him that totally went against the man she’d seen that first day in the physical therapist’s office. That went against stereotype, for sure. Of course, she’d rejected her dad’s stereotypes years ago. He was convinced that soldiers were poor, uneducated grunts tricked into fighting unjust wars for a hawkish government. Vulnerable clods at best, hawks themselves at worst.

Mira’s parents were peaceniks, like a lot of the people she’d grown up around. They held candles during vigils to ward off U.S. intervention in other countries and slapped pithy bumper stickers on their cars. As a kid, Mira herself had held candles in the dark, flanked by her parents, in protest.

But after Jake, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to protest anymore. She’d stayed home when her parents stood on street corners and held up signs, urging cars to toot their horns, and she wouldn’t let Sam go with them, either, even though he wanted to hold a sign, a candle, anything. “It’s complicated,” she’d said, and she had thought about Jake, somewhere, risking his life for her, for Sam, for her parents, for freedom, for the world, for better or for worse.

Maybe everything worth thinking about was complicated.

Certainly, being a soldier didn’t make you cold or unfeeling. He was watching her face, waiting for her to acknowledge what he’d said.

Itishard. It was so, so hard. I missed you.

But she’d shut that weakness down in herself long ago. And how could she say that, that she’d missed him, when she’d never known him? When even now she didn’t, because, as he’d said,he didn’t know himself?

“I think it’s hard to be a parent, no matter what. It was lonely sometimes.” She tried a joke: “I could’ve used some company.”

Guilt chased regret across his face. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. You didn’t know.”

“The other kind of ‘I’m sorry.’ I wish you hadn’t had to do all that by yourself.”

She looked over at Sam, but he was dismantling his sandwich, oblivious to the fact that they were discussing him and his childhood. She wanted to ask Jake,Do you think you really would have done things differently if you’d known?But she couldn’t bring herself to do it with Sam in earshot.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer, either. What if he said no?

They drove down to the wharves and stood in line for Ferris wheel tickets, then waited their turn to go up. A fresh, salty breeze blew off Puget Sound. The sky was luminous, sparkles dancing over the surface of the water.

A ferry docked. Passengers flowed out along the walkway and into the pedestrian overpass; cars and bikes and motorcycles rolled out from the ferry’s cavernous belly.

She was hyperaware of Jake, of the disruption he caused as they moved through the crowd. People stared at his leg, murmured to their friends and family. They tried to be subtle about it, but they didn’t do a very good job. But Jake seemed not to notice. He stood beside her, big enough to loom. To make her feel petite, and she was not a teeny person. He was close enough for her to feel that ever-present hum that came off him, the sensation of her pheromones bouncing off his in the gap, as if they were two synapses about to spark.

Not supposed to notsupposedtonotsupposedto—

She wanted to throw it all skyward and reach for him. Right now. To turn her face into his chest, to grasp his T-shirt in her fists, to breathe the scent of him deep into her lungs, to rub herself all over him and go weak against him for the sheer mindless pleasure of having him hold her.

“Tomorrow I want to go to Bainbridge Island,” Sam said, startling her out of her self-destructive reverie.

Mira had read aloud to him from theSeattle Timeslast week about Bainbridge. There was a world-class playground, designed by the island’s own children. There was an ice-cream shop that specialized in blackberry and lavender and other local flavors. Right now, you could comb the island for a collection of child-sized glossy frogs painted by local artists, a scavenger hunt of sorts.

She knewexactlywhat was coming.

“Jake, do you want to—”

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