Stay with Me (Wait for You, #3)(35)

“What are you doing?” My voice was pitched embarrassingly high.

Jax was leaning on his hip, his hand planted into the bed near mine. “You weren’t sleeping.”

“Yes, I was.” I was a terrible liar.

“I think I’ve listened to you moving around in this bed for the last hour.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but my heart had turned into a steel drum.

“And I’ll admit, it’s pretty distracting.” In the shadowy room, he shifted closer, and I tensed.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out.

His chuckle was deep and low. “You don’t need to apologize. It was distracting in a good way.”

After I mentally repeated that, I still had no idea what that meant.

“Do you normally have this much trouble sleeping?”

“Huh?”

“Sleeping,” he repeated, and I could hear the amusement in his voice. “Do you normally have a hard time at it?”

Did I normally have this much trouble handling a conversation? I bit down on the inside of my lip and shook my head. “Not until I came back here.”

Jax didn’t respond for a moment, and then he said, “I feel ya.”

“You do?” Surprise shuttled through me.

“Yeah, when I first came home—not here, but home, I had a hell of a time falling asleep and staying asleep through the night. Too much going on up here.” He raised a hand toward where his head was.

Common sense told me I needed to tell him to get the hell out of my bed, or I needed to hightail out of it and put some space between us, but curiosity got the best of me. “Home from where?”

There was another pause, and then he shifted again—rolled onto his back, his head on the pillows next to mine. Onto his back, beside me, in a bed that I was in! What in the holy hell? My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth as my heart bounced around, and then the flutter in my stomach got all kinds of excited.

“I was overseas,” he said, and it took me a moment to remember what he was talking about.

My brain sorted that out and I only came up with a one-word response. “Overseas?”

“Why don’t you lie down and I’ll tell you?”

Lie down? In bed? With him? No way. No way, Jose. I was frozen in this position. Nope. Nope. Nope.

“Come on,” he said in a soft voice, the kind of tone that did funny things to my brain cells, melting them together like putting butter in a microwave. “Lie down, Calla. Relax.”

I don’t know what it was about the way he said it, but my left arm caved under me, and the next thing I knew, my right cheek was plastered to the pillow.

His voice was freaking magic.

“I enlisted when I was eighteen, as soon as I graduated,” he explained. “It was either that or work in a coal mine like my dad and my older brother.”

Coal mines? Holy crap. “Where are you from?”

The bed dipped again, and I imagined that he’d rolled onto his side, facing me. “Oceana, West Virginia.”

“Oceana . . .” I whispered, staring at the bare wall across from the bed. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

Jax chuckled. “Probably because it’s been nicknamed Oxyana and there was a documentary about the town. It has a little problem with the painkiller OxyContin, as in, half the damn town is on that shit.”

Yeah, now that did sound familiar.

“Working in the mines, it’s hard work, and some think it pays well, but I didn’t want that. There isn’t much else around, and I wanted out of that damn town.” A sudden hardness to his voice caused a shiver to roll down my spine. “Enlisting seemed like the only other option.”

“What . . . what branch did you enlist in?”

“Marines.”

Wow, marines were badass. They were like the ass kickers of the military. My dad’s brother had been a marine, and I remember the stories he used to tell about training and how hard-core it was. Not everyone was cut out to be a marine, but apparently Jax was, and seeing how he vaulted over the bar earlier and got right up in Mack’s face, I could see the marine in him.

Kind of hot.

An image of Jax in a dress uniform, the kind I’d seen in my uncle’s closet when I was little, formed in my head.

Okay. Lots of hot.

“I enlisted for five years, hit active war duty two years in, spent almost three over in the desert,” he explained, and I swallowed hard. Active war duty was no joke. “When my term was up, I wasn’t sure I wanted to reenlist. And when I got back home, I couldn’t sleep. Didn’t know what I was going to do with myself. There wasn’t shit back home and being over there wasn’t actually the best thing in the world, you know? It’s a different life over there, and it changes you. The things you have to do. The things you end up seeing. Some nights I could only sleep for a few hours. Some nights I didn’t sleep at all. My head wouldn’t shut down, so I had a lot of restless nights.”

I wanted to roll over and look at him, but I couldn’t move. “Do you . . . regret enlisting?”

“Hell no.” His reply was quick and firm. “Felt good doing something for the country and all that shit.”

Something warm invaded my chest, and I really wanted to see him, but that required effort and courage. So, I went with words because that was all I had to offer, and I wanted to give him something. “I think that’s amazing.”