Breakaway hearts, p.16
Breakaway Hearts, page 16
“Fuck, this is good,” he groans, a string of mozzarella dangling from his lips. I wrap it around my fingers and pull it into my own mouth, and his eyes darken as I lick my lips.
“You don’t usually get to eat like this,” I comment, knowing he usually keeps his diet pretty clean.
“I’ll make this a cheat day,” he says. “I think I’ve earned it. You know me, though. I want to be in the best shape possible. I’m not gonna play well on the ice if I’m stuffed with mozzarella sticks and ice cream.”
“Fair.” I tilt my head in acknowledgement. “Although I don’t envy that part of your job.”
“What part do you envy?”
“Easy. The adoring fans.”
We laugh again, and he nudges me with his shoulder before turning on the TV to some cheesy action movie that neither of us will pay attention to. Reese likes background noise, and I get that. I usually need it when I’m in a bad mood or missing my dad, but it’s nice sometimes when it’s just the two of us hanging out too.
Because, oddly enough, even though we’ll be sleeping in the same bed tonight and I somehow came just from giving him a blowjob, it also still feels like we’re just two friends spending an evening together. It makes me think that this whole friends with benefits thing might actually work. At the core of it, Reese and I are friends. Experimenting like this, learning from him, isn’t going to ruin our friendship.
And it’s turning out to be a lot more fun and way more illuminating than I expected.
“You know,” he says after a moment, picking up a brownie. “The romance novels were a surprise to me.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. It just makes me wonder what else I don’t know about my best friend.” He lowers the volume slightly on the TV and glances at me. “I thought I knew everything about you.”
“There’s no way you could know everything about me,” I murmur, lifting one shoulder. “There’s probably plenty I don’t know about you too, I’m sure.”
“I guess so.” He nods thoughtfully, although he doesn’t seem pleased by that fact.
“Definitely.”
“Then tell me something I don’t know about you.”
Reese’s determination to fill in the gaps of his ‘Callie knowledge’ makes me smile, and I hide my grin behind a slice of pizza as I consider my answer. I have to think about it for a while, because even though he didn’t know about the romance novels or just how bad my relationship with Austin had gotten, Reese does know me very well. It takes a couple of minutes for me to come up with a fact about myself that I haven’t told him before.
“How about this? My first kiss was with Ben Atherton when I was in fifth grade.”
Reese gapes at me. “When you were in grade school? Damn, Firefly, look at you. I didn’t have my first kiss until I was fifteen. How was it? Amazing? Life changing?”
“Disgusting.” I make a face. “So awkward. Slimy, kind of? It only lasted like two seconds, and I still ended up getting scolded by Mrs. Watson because Kathy Lowell saw us from behind the slide at recess.”
He shakes his head in mock outrage. “Damn it, Kathy.”
“Right? I think she had a crush on Ben, and I swear, the two of us didn’t speak another word to each other until high school.”
“What a grudge.”
Reese leans over the side of the bed and digs into his bag, producing a pack of Twizzlers. I gasp as he straightens up. He opens the bag, passes them my way, and I immediately dig into it.
“You are an angel of a man.”
He laughs. “Well, I didn’t know we’d end up ordering room service, so I brought them just in case. And since this hotel shockingly doesn’t have Twizzlers on the menu, it’s a good thing I did.”
I let out a satisfied moan that makes his eyes heat. “You’re the best. Seriously, I’m thinking about fake marrying you at this point.”
“Hah.” He nudges me with his shoulder, but there’s a slight flush in his cheeks. He lounges back on the bed, his expression turning thoughtful. “But I guess you were right. I don’t know everything about you. How did I not know about your first kiss? That seems like some very basic getting-to-know-you stuff right there.”
“Not if I’m absolutely mortified about it.”
“But still.”
He tugs his lower lip between his teeth, and the sudden urge to kiss him hits me like a ton of bricks. It’s almost a magnetic desire, and if it weren’t for the Twizzler I have between my lips, I might’ve done it without even thinking.
Have Reese and I even kissed since we started this whole friends with benefits situation? I think back on it, but our first and only kiss was at the charity event in front of Sienna. Maybe it’s better if kissing isn’t part of the friends with benefits/sex tutor deal, but it’s not anything we’ve ever discussed. Does he just not want to kiss me?
“I don’t know,” I say instead of voicing my overthinking frenzy. “I never told Austin this stuff either, and I feel like it’s the kind of thing you tell your real boyfriend.”
“Please, for the love of god, don’t compare me to Austin.” Reese shakes his head, scowling. “Remember what we say. Austin is a—”
“Shithead.”
“I was going to say slimebag motherfucker, but shithead is also accurate.”
My laugh draws a chuckle out of Reese, and he has to grab my plate off my lap to stop it from toppling. He places both of our plates on the nightstand next to the bed with the rest of the food and then lies on his side. He rests his head in the palm of his hand, watching me, and my mouth dries up at the sight of him, tousled and comfortable, dressed only in a pair of athletic shorts.
“I think it’s your turn,” I manage to say. “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
“Hmmm. Something Callie doesn’t know about me. This is harder than I thought.”
“Try your best,” I insist, eager to hear what he’ll say.
“Did you know I tried to Parent Trap my folks after their divorce?”
I raise an eyebrow. “Are you serious?”
“Yup.”
He draws the word out, and I wait for him to say more, but he just gazes back at me with an enigmatic look on his face.
“Oh my god, Reese, please, you can’t leave me hanging like this.”
“Okay, okay,” he says with a laugh. “Let me see, what are the ways I tried to get them back together? The most basic one was telling them that one or the other couldn’t pick me up from hockey practice, so they’d both show up. They stopped falling for that one pretty quickly, though. I was not the brightest kid,” he adds, making a face. “My best one, though, the one even Lindsay Lohan would be proud of? I roped in Violet for this one, my poor little sis. We both ran away, knowing that our parents would have to work together to find us.”
I gape at Reese. He leans over, grabs a Twizzler out of the bag, and takes a bite.
“Well?” I poke him. “What happened?”
“Hold your horses, I was getting there. Let’s see. There was this massive forest behind my dad’s house—or it seemed massive when I was a kid, anyway. It’s really quite small, only a few acres at most. Violet and I grabbed the camping gear from the garage and set out into the woods. We were young at the time, you know. I was maybe ten, and she was only seven, so all we grabbed for food were granola bars and a bag of goldfish. We left a note for our folks, saying that if they didn’t get back together, we’d never come back home.”
The image of Violet and Reese running off into the woods might be a comical one, but it also leaves my heart aching. Reese tries to laugh, but it’s half-hearted. I know that somewhere inside him, there’s still that little boy who had the rug pulled out from under him, who had to suffer between hopping households and countless fights.
“Anyway,” he continues, “my dad called my mom almost immediately, and the two were combing through the neighborhood for us, I guess. They called the police eventually when they didn’t find us at our usual spots—the playground on the corner, the ice rink, the pond near my mom’s place—and it caused this whole incident. Super embarrassing when the two of us trudged out of the woods on our own because it was dark, and we were scared and had gotten hungry. God, did our parents read us the riot act. But I also saw my dad hug my mom because she was crying. Complicated feelings, you know?”
“I’m sure.”
“I stopped trying to get them together after that. They said I was too old to pull tricks like that, and they were furious I dragged Violet into it too. Fair on their part. Now that I’m an adult, I can see why it was not a great thing to do.”
I grab Reese’s hand and squeeze tight. He stares down at our joined hands, seeming lost in the memory, and I want to pull him into a hug so badly.
“Sorry to ruin the mood,” he murmurs, grimacing.
“No, you haven’t ruined anything. But thank you for telling me. And I’m sorry you had to go through that. I see it in my students all the time. Divorce is so shitty, and it’s harder on the kids than a lot of parents may think.”
Reese shrugs and plays with my fingers. “It took me a long time to realize it was better for my parents to be apart. They were making each other miserable, and I think they were worried they were going to make Violet and me miserable in the process. The fact of the matter is, you can’t force love.”
I smile softly at his words because they’re truer than anything else.
“I think you’re right. But I also think that you have true love waiting for you. Everybody does. That’s what my parents taught me, and that’s what they showed me. My mom and dad were so in love that even though it’s been a decade since he passed, my mom still hasn’t moved on from my father. It’s sweet and romantic, but also a little scary, don’t you think? To love someone that much? But…” I bite my lip, my heart fluttering. “That’s really what I want, more than anything. I want that once-in-a-lifetime kind of love.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment, and I worry that I may have only rubbed salt in the wound by talking about my parents after what he just said about his. But I want him to know that it’s true. Someone is out there waiting for him. Sienna, maybe, even though part of me has a hard time imagining it—or doesn’t want to.
“You deserve that kind of love, Firefly,” he whispers finally. “More than anyone else, you deserve it.”
My heart clenches in my chest at the same time he gives my fingers one last squeeze before letting go. He tries to stifle a yawn but can’t quite hide it, and I peer around him at the clock.
“What time is it?” I murmur.
“Two in the morning.”
“Oh shit. We should get some sleep. I don’t want Coach Dunaway coming after me for keeping you up too late.”
Reese sighs and nods. He heaves himself out of bed and disappears into the bathroom to brush his teeth, and when he returns a few minutes later, I take my turn.
When I shuffle back into the room, I glance at the single large bed in the center of it, suddenly feeling awkward. I hesitate as I stand beside the bed frame, but before I can ask if maybe one of us should sleep on the floor or something, he reaches out and tugs me down onto the mattress beside him.
He drags the covers up over us, and a giddy little feeling of happiness runs through me as he pulls me close against his side.
“Thank you for tonight,” he says. “I had a great time.”
“Me too.”
My head is resting on his chest, and he strokes my hair, toying with the curls absently. When his movements eventually go still and his grip on me slackens, I wriggle out from his arms to turn off the dim bedside lamp and the TV.
As I settle back in beside him, I can’t stop myself from staring at him for a long moment. His thick biceps tense a little as he adjusts his position, his handsome features softened with sleep. I want to reach out and trace my finger along his sharp jawline and down the veins in his arms to his hands, which are large and strong. Capable of picking me up. Capable of doing so many things to my body.
My pulse picks up, and my chest aches in a different way than when Reese made me come over and over.
This isn’t good, I realize.
I shouldn’t be thinking about my best friend like this. Shouldn’t be watching him sleep, or dwelling on how much I enjoyed it when he pulled me into his arms to cuddle. I shouldn’t be replaying every moment of what happened between us tonight—both the sex and the non sex parts—on an endless loop in my head, tucking away each memory like something precious. I shouldn’t allow any of the feelings stirring inside me right now to take root.
Because if I actually end up falling for this man?
It’ll be game over.
Chapter 22
Reese
The light streaming in from the half-closed curtains wakes me, and I open my eyes to see Callie next to me, still sleeping.
Fuck, she looks gorgeous. Her curly red hair all tangled on the pillow, the early morning sunlight illuminating her skin… it blows my mind that Austin ever used to tell her that she needs to lose weight or dress differently.
The memory of Callie on her hands and knees last night flashes in my memory. She looked so damn good like that, crawling toward me, kneeling in front of me, taking me in her mouth. Austin was a fucking fool for letting her go, and every shitty thing he told her about herself was dead wrong. Because there was absolutely nothing boring about what she did last night with me. She was so enthusiastic. So ready and eager to please me, the same way I want to please her.
I can’t wait to help her discover more about what she wants. What she needs. Because her needs have always been there. It’s just the world and people like Austin who have tried to dim her light.
Fuck that.
Callie is the brightest person I know—not just smart, but bright in every meaning of the word. She lights up every room she walks into, I swear.
That’s part of the reason I started calling her Firefly. I barely thought about it at the time, blurting out the first thing that popped into my head in the bar that night when Callie first posed as my girlfriend. It was only later on that I realized why exactly I’d chosen the nickname, even without consciously realizing it.
Back when we were counselors at Bear Creek Camp together, the summer we first met, the fireflies always seemed to flock to her. They’d float around her head at night like a halo, and she would look up at them and laugh at the blinking little dots of light. They never did it with anyone else, just her, and it was a running joke among the counselors all summer.
I’m convinced that the reason the fireflies all gravitated toward Callie is because she gives off her own light. She shines so brightly and is so damn full of life, it’s no wonder the fireflies mistook her for one of their own.
I reach out and tuck a piece of hair behind her ear, then let my fingertips linger, tracing the soft lines of her cheek and the curve of her jaw.
Callie lets out a small sound and stirs, and I pull my hand back without thinking. Something in me doesn’t want to let her know that I was watching her like this, admiring her in the morning light. So I close my eyes and blink them open at the same time as her, feigning a yawn.
“Good morning,” I murmur.
“Morning.” She rubs her bleary eyes and smiles at me.
The sight of her nearly knocks the breath out of me. How is she so stunning first thing in the morning?
I clear my throat. “How did you sleep?”
“Really good. Surprisingly good.” She sits up and stretches, and I sit up with her. “I haven’t shared a bed with anyone in a long time. Not since Austin. I hope I didn’t hog the mattress or steal the sheets or anything like that. I’m a notorious sheet-hogger, or that’s what Austin used to say. But, as we’ve come to figure out, we can’t trust a word that came out of his mouth.”
I chuckle, even as I mentally add another item to the list of reasons I want to fucking murder her ex.
“That’s right, Firefly. Besides, even if you did hog the bed or steal the sheets, I wouldn’t care.” I shoot her a suggestive look, winking. “It’d just give me an excuse to cuddle up real close with you.”
She laughs, the kind where she throws her head back, and where her whole body moves with it. My number one favorite laugh.
Fuck, the sound of it is perfect. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world.
Something in me stirs, heat racing through my veins. My cock was already hard when I woke up, and it pulses as even more of my blood flows downward. Before I can think about it, I reach for Callie, pulling her back down to the bed as I settle between her legs, bracing my upper body over hers.
“I know it’s early,” I murmur. “But are you in the mood for another lesson?”
She grins, looking so damn sexy I can barely stand it. “You mean lesson number three? I suppose so. I always was a diligent student.”
“Of course you were.” I chuckle. “That’s what makes you such an amazing teacher.” I drop my head, my teeth grazing her jaw. “This will all be on the test, by the way.”
Another one of my favorite laughs fills the air, and she tilts her head a little, exposing more of her neck to my wandering lips. “Oh yeah? Is that a multiple choice or short answer test?”
“It’s more of a hands on kind of test,” I reply, grinding my cock against the warm softness of her pussy through our clothes. “Sort of a practical application kind of thing.”
She groans, arching against me. “I see. Then I’d better make sure to practice a lot.”
“Exactly.” I pepper kisses along the column of her throat, then over her jaw and cheek. When I get closer to her mouth, I draw back, gazing down at her. My heart gives an unaccountable thud in my chest as I murmur, “Can I kiss you?”
The teasing grin drops from her lips, something flashing in the depths of her dark green eyes. She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, then nods slowly. “Yeah. I should practice that too.”
I don’t know if she really thinks she needs practice, or if she’s just looking for an excuse like I am, but either way, I don’t question it. Instead, I lower my head and press my mouth to hers, feeling the pillowy softness of her lips against mine.
