Page 42 of Hold on Tight

“Sam,” she said sharply, and he looked up at her, wounded.

“Excuse us a moment,” she said to Jake. She took Sam aside. “There’s a rule I never told you about invitations,” she said. “So it’s not your fault you didn’t know, but I’m going to tell you, so now you’ll know. The rule is, you can’t invite people to things unless you ask me first in private.”

“Mom? Can I invite Jake to come with us to Bainbridge Island tomorrow?”

She almost laughed, because Sam’s cravings were as unrestrained, as transparent and vivid, as hers. Instead she kissed him in the middle of his forehead, a tenderness he probably wouldn’t allow for much longer. “Sam, we’ve just gotten to know Jake. When you’ve just gotten to know someone, you can’t see them all the time, every day.”You can’t lose your sanity, you can’t lose your sense of direction.

“How long till we can see him all the time, every day?”

He was like some kind of sea creature that hadn’t grown a shell yet, so soft and squishy and vulnerable. And she desperately wanted him to stay this way forever, but she knew that he needed to grow up or he’d get stepped on. “We have to wait and see.”

The thing was, it didn’t matter how careful you were sometimes, because while you were busy being careful, things happened, and got out of your control. Like the way that Sam was already all set to get his heart broken.

Like the way she couldn’t control the way she felt, or what she wanted so much it turned her nerve endings to sparklers.

“Grown-ups have so many rules,” Sam said. “I don’t want to grow up, because then I have to have all those rules.”

“I hear you, Sammy.” She put her hands under his armpits and counted off a silent three by wiggling him slightly. On three, he jumped into her arms, the same as he had as a two-year-old. She rarely did this anymore, because he was getting so big, but right now she needed one of his hugs where he wrapped his legs around her waist and his arms around her neck and held on like she was going to save him from drowning.

When he began to squirm in her arms, she set him down, and they walked back.

For a moment, she couldn’t locate Jake in line, and she panicked.

Then she spotted him, nearly at the front of the line. He was turned so she could see his profile, and with the light behind him, it was almost a silhouette. Strong, clean, sharp. As she got closer, her heart beat faster instead of slowing down. At how physically glorious he was, how broad across the shoulders and chest, how much space he took up in line. At the guarded expression on his face, and then, when he spotted them, at the sudden warmth that broke it down.

At the surge of relief and desire her own body answered with.

It had been only a few seconds that she’d sought him with her gaze and failed to find him, but in those few seconds, she saw so much truth about this situation. She didn’t trust that he was here, not in a way that mattered. Not in a way that fit how much she already liked him, how much Sam already counted on him.

What if he disappeared? What if he freaked out and couldn’t deal with them, with this mysterious thing that seemed to be happening too fast for anyone to process? What if she came back today, tomorrow, next week, next month, to find him gone? Because after all, that was what had happened before.

“Hey,” he said. “We’re next.”

The operator corralled them into the glass pod, along with a crowd of people behind them. Their car was full, so she sat with Sam on one side of her, his nose pressed against the glass, and Jake on the other. They rose off the ground and the world fell away beneath them, vast and blue, the city tilting vertiginously away.

“Oh, man!” Sam said, over and over again, while an older couple beamed at him.

Jake was still beside her, the length of his thigh hard against hers. It had turned her to liquid, made her soft and stupid. The air between them, the molecules that moved in the boundary between her skin and the rest of the world, were charged up like a science experiment, so that she was almost afraid to move. To lift her eyes.

He moved his shoulder incrementally closer to hers, and a wave of heat broke over her. Hisshoulder. She didn’t even know if the movement had been deliberate.

Fool.

The wharves stretched out below like tick marks, their details fading and then coming back into view.

“That’s Bainbridge,” Sam said, pointing. “That’s where Mom and I are going tomorrow. It’s going to be super fun. I bet people who don’t go with us will be sad they didn’t.”

She smiled behind her hand. You could teach a seven-year-old manners, but he would always wriggle his way out from under them to pursue his own agenda.

As the pod was touching back to earth on its final round, Jake leaned close, so Sam couldn’t hear, and murmured, “Let me take you guys to dinner.”

Say no thank you.

“Yay, Mom!” Sam had heard anyway. When it concerned him, he found a way.

Say no thank you. Say you need to get Sam home and washed up and in his PJs or he’ll fall asleep in the car on the way home and—

“Mom, please, can we?”

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