Page 61 of Hold on Tight

“I’d thought of it as a fling and then there we were and it felt like more. I was scared. And angry. At myself. For letting myself feel as much as I did.”

She felt a rush of warmth at his words.How much did you feel?she wanted to demand.As much as I did?

But she couldn’t, not without forcingthismoment in the here and now. “We were really young,” she said instead.

He nodded. His gaze was faraway. Remembering that night? Did it have as much clarity for him as it did for her? Like something carved out of marble and animated, glossy, perfectly sharp and defined?

“Jake, there’s something I should tell you.”

His eyes found her face, startled and wary.

“I tried to find you. But only at first. Then—then I didn’t. I stopped trying.”

When the phone calls to bases had dead-ended, she’d sent printed letters to every army base in the United States, addressed to “Jake Taylor.” She’d Googled him. She’d had every intention of posting to Facebook to ask if anyone knew him but at the last minute, something had stayed her hand. Once she posted his name there, even if she didn’t explicitly identify him as Sam’s father, a handful of people, maybe as many as a hundred, would know. They would link his name in their minds with Sam, and there would be no turning back.

Still, she’d made one more round of phone calls before Sam was six months old. She remembered the last with perfect clarity. It was one of the more frustrating, the JAG on the other end of the line impatient and scornful. She put her iPhone down too hard on the table and turned to see Sam rocking back and forth on his hands and knees, his round belly hanging down, his bare arms and legs dimpled. She got down on the floor with him, sticking her face close to his so he chortled and collapsed on his belly and chortled some more. She blew raspberries on his face, and then she turned him on his back and blew raspberries in his belly, and he grabbed her hair and pulled it and shrieked at the top of his lungs. It hurt her scalp and it hurt her ears, but her tears had nothing to do with the pain. The tears were because she knew—knew in her gut—that she and Sam had everything they needed.

She wasn’t going to look for Jake anymore. Because, for better or for worse, she was giving him up—shutting down the possibility that he would be part of their lives.

“You couldn’t chase after me forever,” he said. “As much as I wish I’d had that time with him, we both had things we needed to do. I needed to fight and you needed time with Sam. You can’t beat yourself up.”

Even after she’d made the decision not to search for him any longer, she’d kept having the fantasies and the cravings. At odd, vulnerable moments, she wished that he’d arrive and rescue her. That he’d vanquish the allergies, the asthma, the first-day-of-school fears, that he knew the secret formula for comforting a child heartbroken about moving across the country from his beloved grandparents.

He stared down at where her hand covered his, opened his mouth as if to say something, and closed it again. Then he said, “I should go.” He set Sam’s photo albums to the side.

She turned away, hurt. For a moment there, she’d thought things were going to be okay between them. That they’d connected some piece of the past to the present, that—

But he was going to run away. Still.

“Mira.”

“Don’t say, ‘It’s not you.’ That’s the stupidest line in all of stupid linedom. Just—if you have to go, go.”

She wasn’t looking in his direction but she could tell he hadn’t moved. He sighed. Took an audible, deep breath.

“My knee got stuck, okay? My knee got stuck between the couch cushions, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. One minute I was so into it, so into you, and the next—I don’t know. I couldn’t get back to where my head had been a minute ago. I kept thinking about how I couldn’t do what you needed me to do.”

His voice was tense, rich, almost pleading.

“You should have told me that.”

“I don’t know who you think I am, Mira. Maybe some guys can do that, say whatever’s in their heads, but I’m not that guy.”

“Well, that’s abundantly clear.”

He sighed again, but he was still there. Still sitting beside her, with her, listening, talking, despite what he’d said about himself. Maybe he was a man’s man, maybe he didn’t want to be psychoanalyzed, but everything about him right now told her he wanted to be there. Right now, despite all the times he’d walked away from the possibility of her—the notion of Sam—right now, he wanted to stay. And even though she was terrified it wouldn’t last, she wanted to do whatever she could to keep him there.

“So you lost your erection because you started thinking about your knee, and how you couldn’t do what you thought I needed you to do. You know you were doing exactly what I needed you to do, right? God,” she said, and let it all into her voice—all the heat, all the lust, all the built-up longing he’d infused her with—“exactly. What. I. Needed. You. To. Do.”

“I wanted to …”

“You wanted to what?”

“I wanted to fuck you into next week.”

She felt the words, hot and explicit, as laden with desire as hers had been, a surge to her core. She felt the expression on his face, raw and real and male.

“I could see that on your face,” he said, with awe evident in his voice. “I just watched you get turned on.”

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