Page 61 of Growing Into Love

He heads to the loo and as soon as the door closes, I slump back against my pillow. My heart races. What just happened? I pick up my phone but it’s too late to text anyone back home. I sigh and pick up the book again. In the scene where Frodo meets Strider at the Prancing Pony, Mum wrote in the margins:He must have been so scared.

The line snags in my chest and brings tears to my eyes.

I’m scared too, Mum, I think to her.I wish you could help. I wish you could tell me what to do. Was I imagining that look on his face? It was hungry, yearning. Was it for me? Or is that just wishful thinking?

Probably the latter. I’ve been wishfully thinking my whole damn life.

My tiny maybe-memory of Mum sprouts like a seedling in the back of my mind. I hear the shower turn off and quickly focus on Frodo slipping the ring on his finger. What am I so scared of? It’s not as if I’m on some quest to destroy a magical object. Jaz isn’t Mount Doom. I manage a grin at the thought. Mum would probably laugh if she heard me say that.

The bathroom door opens and I look up from the page. Suddenly, it feels like I’m freefalling down an elevator shaft, the world tilting in a disorienting way.

Jaz stands there, shirtless, with only a tiny towel around his waist and water dripping from his curls. His chest is covered in coarse black hairs, his bicep bulging where his arm curves to keep the towel up. I can’t stop my eyes tracing the lines of his pecs, running down the flat planes of his stomach to the teasing dent of muscle at his hips. My thighs clench and it takes extreme effort to haul my gaze up to his face.

I’ve seen Jaz shirtless before, from trips to the nearby lake in the summers when we were kids. But now I’m realizing how long ago that was. And we weren’t in the same bedroom, about to sleep in the same bed, with those pecs and those arms, and ohmygodstopit Cass.

“Sorry,” he says, embarrassed. “Forgot my nightclothes.”

He hurries over to his bag and bends to retrieve a tee and boxers. The hard rounds of his ass pop against the towel and I want to stop staring but I can’t. I imagine him turning around, the towel falling to the floor as he crawls across the bed toward me. I imagine running my hands through that coarse hair on his chest, feeling his damp skin against mine, his hardness pressing against my bare thigh as his mouth—

He stands and I jump, forcing my eyes back to Frodo. I stare at one word—Butterbur—until I hear the bathroom door close again. I lie back, shaking. Goddammit, I’ve got a show to win. Jaz can’t just saunter around in a towel like that.

I pick up the book and read another note from Mum.

Everybody makes mistakes. I always wonder if some of them happen for a reason. Maybe mistakes are the universe’s way of pushing us on a path we don’t think we’re ready for. Maybe they’re meant to show us what we’re capable of.

Jaz comes back into the room, and I stare at Mum’s handwriting until I feel him get under the covers beside me.

“It’s that your mum’s book?” he asks. The intensity of his gaze seems to have lessened during his shower. His eyes are softer now, his expression tender. It makes me ache in a different way.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Declan told me she wrote little notes in all her favorite books.”

“He did?”

Jaz nods.

I don’t know why that feels so private. It’s Mum’s writing, not mine. But I’ve come to feel like these books are part of me, as well. The one tether I have to her.

“Sorry,” Jaz says. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“It’s all right,” I say. I look down at the book, the faded, seventies cover, the dog-eared pages. I wish I had more of her than this. “Well,” I say. “Goodnight.”

I put the book on the nightstand and switch off the light. I’m feeling naked, even though I’ve got my tee on and I’m under a sheet and comforter. Jaz switches his light off too.

For a moment, we lie there in silence. I can hear his heart thumping. My skin feels buzzy from the inside out. He shifts and air brushes my arm with his movement.

“Cass?” Jaz says. His voice is barely a whisper, but it sounds loud in my ears.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry you never got to know her.”

A lump swells in my throat. “Me too.”

My left foot is tucked under my right calf at an odd angle but I don’t want to move in case I accidentally bump him. I think I might shatter into a million pieces if I did.

“I wish she could have seen you on Gal this afternoon,” he says. “You were magnificent on that last run.”

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