Bet on It (65)

“Come here,” she said, her voice rough. “Let me kiss you.”

“I don’t know if I’m ready to share just yet” He ran a tongue over his lips, making a show of cleaning her off of him.

“Nasty…” she remarked, leaning up to chase what she could from his mouth.

“We need to get back out there,” he mumbled against her lips.

“You want to go back out there with this thing all cocked and loaded?” She pushed up against his crotch, making him grunt.

“Don’t have much of a choice, we’re already pushin’ it, bein’ in here so long.”

“Why don’t you let me…” She reached for him, but he shook his head.

“We really don’t have the time,” he told her. “I don’t need anything in return for pleasing you. I promise I don’t have any regrets about how this went down, OK?”

She looked at him through her lashes. “No regrets?”

He snorted. “Not a one.”

“Not even knowing that we already broke our pact?”

“Honestly … not even that.”

“I guess one moment of weakness is to be expected.” She reached down to pull her shorts on. “But this can be enough. It should be enough. We can stick to our word after this.”

Walker had his doubts about that, but he didn’t voice them. He told himself that he’d resist the pull of her as hard as he could. Maybe it would work. Mostly he found himself not wanting it to. Trying to stay away from Aja was more work than he’d thought it would be. It was also a shit-ton more upsetting.

“Of course we can. We’re two smart, strong-minded millennials. If there’s anything we can do, it’s stick to a sex pact.” He stood up, checking the couch to make sure they hadn’t soiled it. Luckily, it was as plush and red and untainted as it had been when they’d first sat down.

She looked like she wanted to kiss him again, and if she tried, he wouldn’t object.

“We should probably go for real now.” She swallowed, suddenly looking at the wall behind him instead of meeting his gaze. “We’ve definitely pushed our luck.”

“We should stop by the bathroom to wash up first. If somebody asks us where we’ve been, we won’t have to lie completely.”

Aja moved first, and he could do nothing but watch her. The euphoria he’d felt moments before had faded into something else—sadness and longing.

“You coming?” She stopped at the door, eyes half hidden by their own lids but beguiling anyway.

“I’m right behind you.”





Chapter 21


When Walker had arrived in Charleston for his first year of college, he’d encountered plenty of classmates who’d called him some version of “country boy.” He’d come from farther south in the state, and while most of the people he interacted with had accents, his was certainly thicker. He also figured he had a certain kind of air about him, the type of wide-eyed innocence that could only come from someone who’d spent the majority of their life in a tiny town. His gut told him that their jokes were lighthearted, so he took them in stride, blushing or shaking his head anytime someone brought up how they thought he spent his free time running barefoot through the woods near campus or something.

Truth was, he probably couldn’t have been further from That Guy if he tried. He’d spent his childhood tucked firmly under the wing of May Abbott and knew more about the plotlines on Days of Our Lives than hunting or mudding. He’d been too to-himself to join Boy Scouts and too anxious to go exploring on his own. Which was exactly why he’d surprised himself one morning when he laced up an old pair of boots that he’d found in the back of his closet and stepped into the wooded area behind Gram’s house.

A few days after the picnic, Walker had woken up with something heavy sitting in the middle of his chest. He’d rubbed over the area at first, suspecting indigestion or a pulled muscle. It had taken him five minutes of pain before he finally recognized it as anxiety. He’d spent the last few nights wide awake. Tucked into bed and staring up at the moonlit ceiling for hours, growing more exhausted until his body shut down enough to allow him to crash for a couple of hours. The insomnia wasn’t exactly new; he’d experienced it plenty of times before. In recent years, he’d come to think of it as an old friend, a distant memory. But it had decided to visit. Just what he needed—yet another thing to make his life difficult.

Talking to Aja about his family’s history had made him feel … well, he wasn’t entirely sure. There had been some measure of relief; part of him had found opening up to her cathartic. But he hadn’t told her everything. A larger part of him still found it necessary to hold back. He didn’t have all the words himself, so how could he give them to her? Half the time he didn’t understand his own feelings surrounding his family well enough to form coherent thoughts about them, let alone share them with other people.

He also still found comfort in keeping himself locked up tight. The last time he’d been in Greenbelt, he’d had a wall around himself so thick and high that even his own grandmother couldn’t scale it. The wall had been chipped away at, block by block, during his time in Charleston. But the second he’d driven into those city limits he’d felt it getting strong again. Not as thick or impenetrable as before, but present nonetheless. It was just another thing to add to the list of reasons why it would be ridiculous to pursue something with Aja. He had too much fucking baggage. And his baggage wasn’t the regular kind either. It was monogrammed with about a thousand letters, each one representing something in his life that had served to turn him into a man who, he was afraid, didn’t have it in him to allow good things for himself. Not when he’d lived a life so devoid of them.