Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(68)

He’s a man who sees this huge big picture, the entire view, and takes it in.

I feel the entire promise of the holiday, actually, the fresh newness of the year as the old one goes away. How the white blanket of snow isn’t really concealing but tucking everything in to sleep, to get rest, to be made new.

I realize, too, that the only times I let myself really feel the full scope of my sadness was with Evan. He’s seen my anger, too. When I trip over chairs or bump into walls, it’s not just that he knows why, it’s that when it’s him that sees me stumble, I let myself kick the chair and the wall back and swear and otherwise lose my shit.

I dumped that smoothie on him during our third session, and he had already seen all of this, and yet he talked to his supervisor about my potential irresistibility.

Which meant he saw something that all my sadness had been concealing. The Jenny that’s always been Jenny sleeping underneath, and maybe getting stronger, or at least resting to face what was ahead.

I squeeze his hand, and he squeezes back, so certain and immediate it takes my breath away.

I hated therapy, but I never missed a session. I thought I hated Evan, but I never asked for another therapist. I couldn’t tell my mom that to keep myself from crying to sleep every night I was having a cyberaffair with the former tenant of my apartment, but Evan, while maybe he didn’t know precisely that, he knew that I cried. Knew that I spent too much time sitting alone in the dark.

Knew that what I was most afraid of was not the darkness of the whole world, but the darkness covering the small things, that it was the small things that made up my whole life.

He gets the big things.

Confronts them.

He stops at his van and lets me in, and then runs around to the other side. When he’s in his seat, and the packages dumped between us, and the door’s closed, he turns toward me.

For a moment, maybe I take a breath, but just one.

He’s looking at me, all over, not in my eyes.

I am wearing my giant green coat, but the way he’s looking at my body my coat seems to have burst into flames and I am actually naked, framed in fire.

Then he grabs my hand and pulls me to lurch after him into the bench seat directly behind the captain’s chairs. I start to settle next to him, trying not to tangle myself in my own legs, then he turns to face me, and reaches across and grabs my thigh, right by my butt, and then he freaking jerks me around with one of his long arms and big hands into his lap.

I am straddling Evan Carlisle, and he yanks on my coat until we’re chest to chest, and then he’s unsnapping my coat, watching my face.

“Okay,” he says, “just so we’re clear, I’m no longer your occupational therapist.”

“Huh, but aren’t you the best one?” He widens his thighs, and I notch close. My hotness pressed against him makes my eyes feel heavy.

He puts his hands over the tops of my thighs to adjust me on his lap, squeezing, hard, digging his fingertips in, watching his hands, and it feels so good, and unexpected, and I realize it’s been so long since I’ve felt the simple pleasure of human touch, let alone this insane agony of Evan’s unhesitating hands.

He slides off my coat.

“Tell me what you want.”

We’re both tall, so in his lap, we’re pretty much eye to eye. The bow of his top lip is swollen from my mouth, his blue eyes are bright and looking over my face. He has been so careful with me.

“I want you to do exactly what you’re thinking.”

His eyes rest in mine. I can’t breathe, hardly. “I’m thinking some pretty bad things.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He drags the heels of his hands up my thighs until he has his hands around my hips. I am not a small woman, but the way he presses his thumbs in, on either side of my fly, makes me feel like he’s determined to get his hands on every possible inch.

“How can a nice guy like you think bad things?”

“How can I not when you look like you do? When you’re so f*cking smart? The things I wanted to do to you watching you prepare that slide in your lab, God. I think I broke something.”

I have to close my eyes for a minute.

I’m in his lap, his hot hands around my hips, and I feel the burn of tears in the sides of my nose, in a painful thickness in my throat.

I open them, to look at him. It’s hard to look at him. He’s breathing hard, he’s watching me, he’s risking, for me.

So a tear falls, so what? He’s seen it all, already. It seems completely right that he should see me unsnap his coat while tears fall, while my hips rock in his hands, while my breath hitches.

He lets go so I can slide his coat from his arms.

Then I unzip his hoodie, take that away from his body.

Then I pull my sweater over my head and close my eyes again because he whispers, God, Jenny.

The van is cool, but the air just around our bodies, in our thin T-shirts, is warm.

I kiss him once over his lower lip, chaste and lingering, then I brace my hands on the seatback at his shoulders and close my eyes and kiss his neck, just under his ear.

His hands move to my back, as he takes this big breath.

“Tell me what you want to do with me,” I whisper.

“Your mouth,” he says. “I want more of that.”

I want to feel the skin of his neck against my tongue but after the undressing, I suddenly feel a teeny tiny bit shy, so I smooth my hands over his cheeks and kiss him with my eyes closed.