Echols, Jennifer (18 page)

Chapter 17

He backed me up a pace and pressed me into the corner. His big middle finger stroked down my cheek, across my chin, and up to my lips. In the softest filter of streetlights through the blinds, he touched me like he really did think I was beautiful. Or at least was determined to make a good show of it. His dark eyes were so tender that I was ready to believe it.

Then he kissed me again. I opened my mouth and let him kiss me as deeply as he wanted. His hands slid down my sides and started to wander, and I let them wander where they would.

It was all good, until I flashed hot in my very small shirt, too hot. My chest pounded like I was having a heart attack. Red warning lights flashed behind my eyelids.

I pushed him away, and held on to him at the same time to keep from falling.

Dazed, he looked down at me, panting. He couldn't catch his breath. "What is it?" he whispered.

"Not in the corner," I breathed. "Anywhere but the corner."

He put his heavy arm around my shoulders and guided me across the room. I thought: Couch? Couch? Couch? No couch. We passed the living room couch and crossed the threshold into his bedroom. I thought: jackpot.

Lois's voice crackled on the humming police scanner.

I ducked from under his arm, dove across the bed, and switched the scanner off.

In the silence, I felt a wave of relief. Then it occurred to me he might be weird about keeping his scanner on at all times, listening for trouble.

I sat up cross-legged on the bed. He still watched me from the doorway, beside the large drawing of the bridge.

Since I'd already turned the scanner off and he hadn't kicked me out of his apartment yet, I considered asking him to take the bridge drawing down and deposit it in the closet, just for the next two hours. I opted not to, lest he think I was a complete fruitcake.

Wait a minute. Who was the bigger fruitcake?
He was
the one with the bridge obsession.

Okay, I did not want to hold a fruitcake bake-off just then. I wanted John to do me.

T held out my hand to him.

He approached me cautiously, beams of moonlight through the windows blinds moving over him. He thought I was going to bolt. He sat in front of me, weighing down the bed so I sank toward him a little on the mattress. With a hot palm on each of my thighs, he leaned in until our foreheads touched. Then he brushed his sensitive lips up my cheek and toward my hairline.

Here was more of what I expected from John. Tortured self-control. Now I didn't have nearly as much self-control as he did. I leaned in and kissed him hard.

We played this game for the next hour and a half. He would take over and kiss me carefully, with attention to detail, like I was one of his drawings. It was the slowest, most thorough, most agonizing, best make-out session imaginable. Until he tried to take my shirt off, or my jeans. I couldn't allow that.

Then I would take over, and things would go faster. There was also a certain amount of fascinated experimentation on my part. After his show of being a big strong policeman, it really turned me on to find out he was a normal boy after all. An unusually well-built boy, granted, but still a boy who reacted in predictable ways. When I whispered in his ear, he shivered. When I touched him, he gripped me harder. I managed to get all his clothes off while it was my turn to play authority. His beautiful naked body pressed down on me. wanting in.

I could have very happily spent a whole week in foreplay with him, but I had to leave for the diner soon. I needed to get what I'd come for.

One of the condoms I'd bought for Eric yesterday was in my pocket. If I pulled it out, I might look slut-whorish, like I was always on the ready. Anyway, I figured John was so uber-responsible, he had his own. Even if he hadn't intended them for me. I rolled out from under him, opened the side table drawer, and fished inside. "How lucky," I murmured. "An assortment." I spread them out beside us on the bed to look.

"Meg, I don't think we should do it."

His soft words stabbed me. The only other sound was the sheets slipping against each other as we breathed. Suddenly I longed for the hum of cars on the interstate, even the scanner. Anything to drown out those gentle words I'd known were coming all along.

"You could have fooled me," I managed.

"I mean, I do. Of course I do. But I think there's something wrong if you want to have sex with me but you won't even take your clothes off."

I moved my hands down to zip my jeans. "I have given you access."

"You've probably still got your shoes on." I felt him exploring with his bare foot at the end of the bed. "Yes, you've still got your shoes on. So you can run out the door."

"That's not why."

"Okay, then." He propped himself up on one elbow and gazed at me. "Why won't you take your clothes off?"

I shuddered at a little chill that slipped into the warm bed with us. "I would feel naked."

"You would
be
naked."

"Exactly."

In the soft light, I watched the worry lines appear between his eyebrows. He pulled one hand from under the covers and moved it to stroke my hair, but something in my face must have stopped him. He put his hand down. "You won't let me kiss you in the corner."

"I won't let
anybody kiss
me in the corner."

"Then you don't trust anybody. I'm not sure I want to have sex with a girl who doesn't trust me."

"You're not sure? Let me help you make the decision." I slid out of bed and landed with my shoes on the carpet, hard enough that the room shook, just to make my point.

He grabbed my wrist, his big hand tight and hot around me. "I mean, I
do
want to have sex with you, but I want you to trust me."

The red lights flashed behind my eyes again.
"Never grab me."

I think a few seconds passed before the red lights faded and I looked at John again. He had let me go in surprise, dark eyes wide.

"I hope I got sand in your bed," I threw at him on my way out of his bedroom.

I built speed across his living room, through the door of his apartment, and down the stairs outside. By the time my feet hit the asphalt, I was running at top speed across the parking lot and onto the shoulder of the highway. It was only about two miles to Eggstra! Eggstra! And the jog would be good for me. I hadn't gotten my run in yesterday. I probably had leukemia.

Through the trees, the interstate had begun to hum again with the traffic of early commuters to Birmingham. And footsteps rang behind me, gaining on me. John passed me and stepped in front of me. I stopped to keep from running right into him. He wore jogging shoes and jeans, no shirt. His white chest glowed under the streetlights.

He took a big breath. "You're fast."

"So they tell me." I stepped around him and started running again.

"Hey!" He ran a few steps after me and caught me with his hand around my upper arm.

I stopped and screamed at him, "I told you, don't grab me!"

"For God's sake, Meg! We look like a domestic!" "Whose fault is that? You're the one with your shirt off."

He looked down at his bare chest, then accusingly at a passing car. Then accusingly at me. "
What
is the
problem?"

I put my fists on my hips. Between panting breaths, I said, "All right, John. You want to play dumb? I'll explain it to you. Girls don't like it when boys don't want to have sex with them."

“I—"

"Boys are supposed to be helpless in the face of their hormones, or a pair of big tits. You didn't turn me down because I had my shoes on. That's bullshit. You're in love with someone else."

"I am
not
in love with Angie," he said with his hands out to me. "To tell you the truth, I was kind of relieved when she broke up with me. I should have ended it a long time before that, but she'd gotten to be a habit. A bad habit."

"You're in love with that dead girl."

He put his hands down. "Oh, come
on,
Meg," he shouted at me. "Why does it always circle around to that?”

"Right. Why does it?"

He ran his hands through his hair and held on to the back of his neck, both biceps bulging. God
damn
him for looking so hot when I wanted to run away.

"You reminded me of her that first night at the bridge," he said. "That's it. You didn't even remind me of her by the time I told you about her. And now you don't remind me of anyone." He squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath, gathering courage, before he told me. "I'm in love with
you."

I felt the tears coming. I lashed out to keep from crying. "You love me so much that you won't do me when presented with the invite. This is all about you needing to be in control. It's not enough to arrest me. You make me ride around with you while dirty men tell me they want to rape me. It's not enough to take away my spring break. You give me back a little piece of it, but only if you hold me on a leash. It's not even enough to have sex with me."

I gasped for breath, and he stepped toward me.

"You want me to beg for it," I choked out, "so you can say no."

I wished it wasn't true. But I could tell by his silence that it was. Maybe he was just now realizing it himself.

But then he said, "That's stupid. I said no because
you
don't love
me.
”

"I
do
love you," I screamed at him.

"You can't possibly! You're so closed off. You're just saying that to get laid."

He flinched and turned to look as a car swiped past us on the highway. I took the opportunity and ran.

He caught up with me in five seconds and stepped in my path. "We can't leave it like this," he said, feeling for my hand, chasing my hand around my waist when I held it away from him. "Let's talk about it when we're not mad. I’ll call you later today."

I blinked back tears. "I'll still be mad later today."

"Then you call me when you're not mad anymore."

"I don't call people." I brushed past him and escaped.

This time, he let me go.

*

After a mile and a half. I was too tired to go on. I slowed to a stop on the grassy shoulder and bent over with my hands on my knees, catching my breath. I did not have leukemia. This fatigue was of an entirely different sort.

I glanced at my watch in the moonlight. The problem with walking was, I would never make it to the trailer in time to take a shower before my shift at the diner. I needed to wash the sand and the ocean and John off me. I smelled his cologne and his sweat on my skin.

But I couldn't run anymore. I walked along the dark highway, wading through the long grass that had sprung back to life in the past few days. I should have felt scared, a teenage girl walking along the highway alone in a skimpy shirt at 5:30 a.m. I didn't. There was no one to scare me. This section of the main highway through town was lined with pine trees and utterly abandoned. I pictured John driving up and down this highway, nineteen times a night, for the rest of his life.

I had set up my project for the DA to discourage other teenagers from venturing onto the bridge, but also to encourage John to let the bridge go and leave town. Now that I finally faced my feelings for him, I realized I'd hoped all along he would follow me to Birmingham and we'd hook back up. And now that I'd gotten up close and personal with his control freak side, I knew it wouldn't happen. My project alone wouldn't be enough to nudge him off his orbit around the bridge. He would stay. I would go, but I would feel like I'd left part of me here with him, cemented as securely as my handprint tile on the wall in the park.

This wasn't happening, this couldn't possibly be the way it ended, but it was. Unless I did something.

With a final sigh, I started running again. I had gotten my second wind. I had a lot to do after my shift at the diner, before I finally went to bed. I needed to sweet-talk Lois. Then I would make an appointment with a train.

*

And at 6:01 the next morning, I called him.

"Hey!" he said. "I was just about to drive back to the police station." He sounded stoked to hear from me. Little did he know what was in store for him. "Where are you?"

"On the bridge."

Through the phone, I heard the wail of his siren begin. I also heard it in stereo, up on the highway. Somewhere beyond the bridge and the clearing and the dark silhouette of trees against the gray dawn sky, the siren woke the dead.

"John!" I shouted. "John, you don't have to do that. I looked up the schedule on the Internet. I even called to double-check. The train won't cross here for another fifteen minutes."

The siren switched off.

I joked, "And you thought I wouldn't make a good manager."

John had switched off, too. I repeated his name through the phone, but there was only static and the murmur of Lois's voice. He must have thrown the phone down on my seat.