Here Without You

‘Huh.’

I roll my eyes, remembering how Graham and I had an infuriating conversation once upon a time about Emma and how she said huh whenever she couldn’t think of anything else to say. He thought it was so adorable, and I wanted to gag him with a knee sock.

‘I’ll, um, talk to him. No promises. He’ll call you if he wants to talk. If he doesn’t, he won’t call.’

I grit my teeth, feeling powerless. ‘I understand. Thank you.’

‘Goodbye, Brooke.’

After we disconnect, I pull up the photo of River I scanned into my phone and sent to Reid. Every time I look at it, I feel more overwhelmed, more terrified I’m going to fuck this up, and more sure that I can’t let that happen. If I have to go round Emma to beg Graham not to ruin this, I’ll do it. But I’m patient enough to bide my time and wait, and hope she doesn’t hate me as much as I deserve to be hated. If our positions were reversed, I’d have told her to fuck off and blocked her from Graham’s phone.

But Emma is not me. And that’s just one more reason why Graham is hers, and not mine.

12

REID

I have the driver drop me a block away from the Starbucks on the corner, pulling the beanie over my ears and hunching into my jacket before grabbing my shoulder duffle. It’s dark out, so I can’t wear my sunglasses, but it’s not like anyone expects Reid Alexander to pop up here, either. Even if I’m recognized, most people will merely assume I bear an uncanny resemblance to ‘that one guy from that movie’.

‘Nine tomorrow morning?’ I say, opening the door, and he nods.

‘Yessir.’

I didn’t realize how much I’d missed the sight of her until I see her. She sent a text fifteen minutes ago to tell me she’d arrived and staked out a chair on the second level. I was supposed to call her when I got there, but I didn’t. I wanted this moment. I hoped she’d be caught up in reading, not looking for me. That I could take a few precious seconds to drink her in. That I’d get to witness the exact moment she notices I’m there.

Dori never disappoints.

As though she feels my eyes grazing over her, she glances up and right at me. She snaps the book closed without marking her page and tosses it towards her bag on the floor. Springing from the chair, she’s clamping her mouth shut to keep from saying my name and giving my identity away – but her smile is a mile wide. One second later, she’s in my arms, on her toes, offering her lips up for a kiss. I’m happy to oblige.

‘I wholeheartedly approve of that welcome,’ I murmur into her mouth, kissing her once more as she regains her composure and recollects where we are – in public.

Sweeping her hair back on one side, I cradle her head in my hand and smile down at her now-demure expression – pursed lips, faint blush pinkening the curve of that exposed ear. My voice restrained, low, I say, ‘Let’s go be alone, beautiful girl, where I can ravish you without the audience that bothers only you.’ I feel her pulse speed under my fingertips and tighten my opposite arm around her, pressing her closer. ‘Or … I’d be happy to back you up against a wall, right here, right now, and kiss you breathless. For a start.’

‘I’ll get my bag,’ she says, her warm breath gushing against my neck.

I nod, and she ducks her chin low and steps away to collect her book and bag from the floor, and her sweater from the chair. Shrugging into it, she leads the way down the narrow staircase, across the expanse of main floor, and out of the door. I reflect that this may be the only time in my personal history in which I entered a Starbucks and didn’t buy anything.

Outside at the kerb, she pulls to a sudden stop. ‘Oh, did you want something?’

I arch a brow. ‘Not anything they sell. Let’s go see this tiny room of yours. And say hello-and-goodbye to your very considerate roommate.’

Glancing up, she bites her lip and smiles at the same time, pulling me across the street to the campus. Her face is a perfect picture of the inner mischievousness with which I’m oh-so familiar. Avidly familiar.

We don’t get far before we’re in a thick grove of storeys-tall trees, which I make a mental note of for some future encounter. When it’s warmer.

The campus is well lit and well populated for a Saturday night, which makes me feel easier about her being here. No one pays us any mind. We are two more students crossing the campus grounds, in search of entertainment – or privacy. As though I’m playing a character, I immerse myself in a storyline where Dori and I have parallel goals, parallel lives. Where we meet for coffee in between classes, commiserate about professors and assignments, take walks and weekend trips and lie out in grassy common areas on sunny days. Where we study between make-out sessions, and make love between study sessions.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asks, and I realize I’m frowning.

I stop, pulling her fully against me and tip her concerned face up to mine. ‘Absolutely nothing,’ I say. ‘I just need to do this before going any further.’ I lean to kiss her in the semi-darkness. Someone hoots in the distance – at us or at something unrelated – I don’t know or care.

I’m always amused by people’s reactions when I’m recognized in entirely incongruous, unexpected places for movie-star viewing. A state college dorm elevator is, predictably, one of these places. Dori grips my hand when a couple of girls with laundry bags get in. They’re whispering while giving me not-so-covert sidelong glances. Wrapping my arms around Dori, I pull her back against my chest and into our own personal space bubble.

When the girls exit one floor up and the doors begin to close, they turn back and stare, bug-eyed. I wink, and Dori catches me doing it.

The doors slide shut, and she smacks my hand where it lays across her abdomen. ‘You’re a bad boy, Reid Alexander.’

Chuckling, I whisper into her ear, though we’re alone now. ‘Baby, you just wait until I get you into that room. Unless you don’t want to wait …’

Breath catching, she shudders against the length of me, from my thighs to where the back of her head rests under my chin. I close my eyes and breathe through my nose, which only intensifies the cake-sweet smell of her invading my senses. Fucking hell. She has no idea how close she is to me slamming that emergency stop button and backing her into a corner.

Then again, maybe she has a very clear idea. Her fingertips stroke my hand, feather-light, where she slapped it seconds ago. When we reach her floor, she grabs hold of my hand and makes a sharp right, pulling me into the hallway. We may only have the next twelve hours, but I’m going to make good use of every single one of them.

DORI

Seated at a corner bistro table by the front window of the Starbucks, we wait for the car that will take Reid to the airport. He checks email and messages on his phone, facing away from the other Sunday-morning patrons, while I sip my latte and make note of every visually accessible detail of him. It could be weeks before we see each other again, unless he can slip away from his crazy promotion schedule – something he’s promised to try to do.

The late-January sun glints off the waves of his movie-star hair, burnished gold with darker natural lowlights. Falling over his forehead, curling over his ears, marginally flattened by the knitted cap he wore on the walk from my room, it begs to be touched. His dark lashes, too, are somehow gold-tipped. When those lashes sweep up and his gaze connects with mine, I catch my breath. In the clear morning light, his dark blue eyes are vivid enough for me to perceive every individual facet, his irises becoming mosaics of broken sea glass.

Angling his head, he says, ‘What?’

I shake my head faintly. ‘When I didn’t like you, the fact that you were so hot played against you.’

He smirks. ‘You don’t say.’

Struggling to find the right words, I lean on my elbows. ‘If I was already angry at you for something you said or did, I’d look at you and just get angrier. Because it seemed so unfair to be given a face like that and use it for nothing but … egocentric causes. I’m guessing that’s not how it normally works for you – or I guess I should say, not normally how it works against you.’

His mouth pulls up on one side and he shakes his head once. ‘Uh, no. That’s usually not the case.’

‘People find themselves letting you have your way, because you’re so beautiful that they don’t want to deny you anything.’

‘I feel so cheap now.’

‘You shouldn’t. It’s not your fault you were born looking the way you look –’

He barks a laugh, hand across his mouth, weirdly self-conscious. ‘Thanks for the … sympathy?’

‘What I mean is, how you look just intensifies everything else about you, which didn’t work with me, because I was raised to weigh people’s actions, to rank them higher than their looks. Superficial people can be swayed by surface beauty alone. It’s basic human nature to like pretty things, after all.’

‘I’m not so sure I’m enjoying the turn of this conversation, to tell you the truth. I feel like I should go and rub some dirt on my face, or at least change into polyester plaid.’

I shake my head and try again. ‘When you showed up at Habitat with the cast of Mercy Killing, I’d already experienced, first hand, what it was like to be cared for by you. By the time I left that day, I knew what you’d done for Deb – and the knowledge of that beautiful part of you – the real you, apart from your looks – stunned me. But the combination of the compassion you were capable of and your physical beauty, right in front of me, was so overwhelming.’

His mouth drops open just slightly, and his brows draw together just as disconcertedly. ‘Dori, I’m no angel –’

‘I know, and I don’t expect you to be. You know I like the, uh …’ I feel the blush creeping over my ears, and with my hair in a messy knot at the nape of my neck, I know that tell-tale signal is visible. My voice drops to the lowest possible level. ‘… The naughty side of you too.’

He takes my hand from the table between us and holds it loosely in his, splayed open, tracing loops on my palm with the tip of his thumb. ‘Is that why I was able to say a few words I’m not allowed to say in the daylight, when I whispered them to you last night?’ His voice is low and rough, dragging something deep inside me to the surface. He leans closer. ‘When I told you what I was going to do to you before I did it? When I told you what to do to me?’

My face floods with heat and memory. I had been beyond shocked to discover that those forbidden words – some of which he’s never spoken in front of me – made my body go liquid under his as he whispered them in the dark, his voice husky and demanding.

When he sat on the edge of my cramped bed this morning, stretching, his shoulder blades bore the evidence of my enthusiasm. And he seemed to have a bruise or two in curious spots. I was mortified.

‘I hurt you,’ I said miserably, tracing my fingers over the thin lines on his back.

He turned and flattened me against the bed in the space of one blink, his chest pressed to mine, his elbows bearing his weight. ‘If you ever apologize to me for doing,’ he closed his eyes and then flashed them open, ‘anything you did to me last night, I’ll have no choice but to punish you.’