Page 5 of Cascade

He shakes his head and pats the mattress next to him. “Nope. Get your ass back in here and tell me your last name.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Archer

“IT’S WHITTAKER,” OPAL says after I fuck her a second time. She’s tucked under my arm, curled against me like a parenthesis. My hands rub her breasts idly, exploring without intention. I don’t think I could get it up again.

Not after she rode me, crashing the bed against the wall until the pictures fell off their hooks. “Whittaker?”

“My last name,” she says. “But this is just sex.”

“It sure as hell was.” I chuckle.

“I mean, not that you were asking for more. But I’m not interested in that anyway. So I’ll tell you my last name to be neighborly, but like I said. This was just sex.”

She hasn’t made any effort to move out of my bed, so I continue to cup her breasts because they feel so damn nice. I love the weight of them in my hand, the velvety soft skin beneath my fingertips. “Opal Whittaker, let me fill you in on a little secret about Oak Creek,” I tell her, dropping a kiss on her forehead.

“What’s that,” she asks.

“Nobody here is going to accuse me of pushing a woman for a relationship.” She laughs, but I’m dead serious that I am not the serious Crawford kid. My siblings? All geniuses, serious about their work and their art.

Me? I’m decent at math and I get a little bit of a hard-on when I’m deep inside a pivot table, but I’m still the guy who skis around Main Street during a blizzard and fills the library fountain with bubble bath just to watch Constable Enid turn purple with frustration.

“How come you keep calling me Precious,” she asks, leaning her chin against her hands on my chest.

“You know…Opal…it’s a precious gem and all that.”

Her green eyes glint as she smiles. “Did you know Opals are formed by rain?”

I shake my head, adjusting so I can roll on my side to face her. “No, but I did know they’ve been found on Mars. My brother Hunter is an astronaut.”

“Really? That’s pretty amazing.”

“Come out for pizza with me and I’ll tell you all about it,” I say, reaching out to twirl her hair around my fingers. I liked how her thick brown hair felt when I wrapped it around my wrist. Warm and silky, yet sturdy and anchored.

She stiffens.

“No, Archer,” she says, climbing out of bed. “This is just sex.”

She starts to make her way downstairs and I follow her. “Opal, wait.”

“This has been amazing,” she says, making her way through the pile of tangled clothes on the kitchen floor, “but I have to get home.”

“It’s like three in the morning,” I protest. “At least let me walk you.”

She purses her lips, uncertain. Maybe she doesn’t want me to know where she lives. “Look,” I say, “I promise to forget your address. But I’m not letting you walk home alone in the middle of the night.”

She sighs, stooping to collect her leggings. “Wait right here,” I say, bolting upstairs to grab some sweats. She’s halfway out the door when I get back downstairs. “Christ, woman,” I say, jogging down the street after her. No time for a shirt, I guess.

“I’m really ok getting home,” she says, her demeanor totally changed from a few minutes ago. “Everyone keeps telling me how safe this town is.”

“Well, sure,” I say, “But I’m not a total dickhead.” I walk along beside her for a few steps. She sure does keep a brisk pace. “That was pretty wild…all that stuff we did back there.”

Wild nothing. Never in my life have I gone so close to feral with a woman. Pulling on her hair like that, smacking the hell out of her ass.

I don’t even know what came over me, but she seemed to be way into it. We were definitely singing from the same hymn book despite barely having talked before the music began.

Opal nods, turning down a side street past the yoga and dance studios. I follow along, trying to coax her to talk a bit, maybe fill me in on whether she’s cool. It occurs to me that she’s maybe embarrassed, so I put my hand on her shoulder and says, “You know, I really don’t mind. About all the screaming. Or the nails on my back.”

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