Burn It Up(12)

He smirked, seeming to realize she was staring. “What?”

“Nothing. Just in my head.”

“If we weren’t on baby patrol, I’d take you out back and make you smoke a joint.”

She smiled and shook her head. “I’m not much for drugs.”

“Pot doesn’t count.”

“Pot also never solved anybody’s problems.”

“Nah, but it’ll shut your brain up real good.” He pocketed his lighter. “Damn, that sounds perfect, actually. Smoke a bowl, stare at the fireplace . . . Hardly anything better in the world than that. Not with your clothes on, anyhow.”

She laughed. “Sounds fun, I’ll admit.” The exact kind of fun she’d missed out on in her teenage years.

“Being a grown-up is such a drag sometimes.” Casey sighed.

“Tell me about it.” Again, she couldn’t help but imagine some different world, one in which she and Casey were the same age and had met in high school. Some world in which he’d maybe taken her virginity, been her date to prom, horrified her parents in ways that looked downright innocent, compared to reality . . .

Would he stop me, if I tried? Tried to kiss him? Tried to touch him? This felt like her last chance. Her last reckless mistake . . . Did that old crush still live inside him someplace, strong enough for him to maybe forget the baby and the danger and the fact that she was his employee, just for a little while? Make her feel like a sexual person again, remind her how good wanting someone could feel, and being wanted right back?

Heart pounding, she turned, bending her legs so her knees rested atop his thigh. She laid her arm along the couch, and her cheek on her shoulder, leaning a bit closer.

Casey seemed to take the move for exhaustion or vulnerability, and wrapped his own arm around her shoulders, giving her a little squeeze. It had been a long time since he’d touched her with this kind of casual ease. It reminded her of her final weeks of pregnancy, the nights they’d closed the bar together and he’d sometimes rub her aching back when there was a lull in orders. Not sexual, but friendly and familiar. Comforting.

Though tonight she wanted something more than comfort.

“Everything’s going to turn out okay,” he told her in that soft, fascinating, un-Casey-like voice. “Right now, this will probably be the worst of it. The waiting.”

“I wasn’t even thinking about tomorrow.”

“No?”

“I was thinking about how much things have changed, since last summer. Since I first met you.”

“No f*cking kidding, huh?”

“You used to flirt with me,” she said, making sure he’d hear the smile in her tone, and know it wasn’t a complaint. “Shamelessly.”

“And you must have turned me down, like, eighty times.”

“I miss those days, sometimes.”

He sat up straighter, took his arm back, and met her eyes. “I still think you’re real pretty, you know. If things weren’t so different, I’d still be hitting on you, every chance I got. Wait—did that count as hitting on you? Don’t sue me for sexual harassment.”

She poked him in the side and let her hand linger there. A tiny but bold move, and something spiked in her blood, something hot and nearly forgotten. Nostalgic, a touch dark. Innately natural.

Do what you always did best, a mischievous voice whispered. And to heck with tomorrow.

? ? ?

Casey swallowed and glanced at the fire, trying to blame it for how hot the room seemed to have grown. It couldn’t be the contact, right? This was just friendly, innocent touching. Like friends might do, if they got along real good.

Like, real good, he thought, feeling the heat of Abilene’s palm through his tee, warming his ribs. He couldn’t seem to make sense of that hand.

“What do you want most, Casey?” She asked it quietly, but there was a strength in those words—a fierce and curious charge.

“What do I want?” He used to know the answer to that. He could’ve replied with a single word, without thought. Money. But things had changed since he’d moved back to Fortuity, and now the answer wasn’t so obvious. He’d come home after that long, frivolous absence to find his mother a decade deeper into her mental illness, a childhood friend dead, and his hometown in the grips of scandal and tragedy. He’d agreed to stay as a promise to his brother, but more was holding him here now—he could feel it. Something stronger than his word, stronger than guilt. Duty. Pride, even. Foreign sensations, both. “I want . . . I want the bar to succeed, first and foremost. And for you to find your way through this messy situation with your ex.”

“No, I mean, what do you want most in life? Like, some people want a family. Some people want to be successful. Some people want . . . I dunno, they want to be singers or actors, or to travel the world.”

I want to be somebody, to the people I care about. That was what came echoing back from his subconscious, though he couldn’t say if that was exactly true. He wanted to want that. He wanted to be capable of it. But he also felt lost half the time, and his future was foggy in ways he couldn’t begin to explain to her, and all of that made the wanting a dangerous luxury. The girl had enough worries. No need to burden her with the news that he was due to lose his marbles in five or ten years, like his mother.

“I guess I’m not sure anymore,” he said. “What about you? What do you want? Aside from a white house with a white fence, red shutters, and a red mailbox?”