The Other Side Of Gravity (Oxygen, #1) (25 page)

She really should have cut a guy a break. You can’t kiss a guy senseless and then expect his brain to work two seconds later. Order in the court. I object!

See? It makes no sense.

And Sophelia wanting to be with me made no sense either. Not at first. I guess it still doesn’t. I was a black market trader.

But I’ve stopped asking questions. I’m a tradesman, I’m an oxygen jockey, I’m a lowlife who did what he could to survive and gave what he had to make it happen, but I didn’t give
everything
. Not like Soph. She paid the ultimate sacrifice and I didn’t deserve to be within ten feet of her, but she saw it the opposite way. She thought she didn’t deserve me.

The absurdity of that statement started to scramble my brains again, so instead, I just held on tight to this girl, bent her back a little farther,
died
inside of complete happiness when she sighed against my lips, and dove in, hoping I was getting it right. Begging and pleading with the man upstairs that this wasn’t amateur hour and Soph was not just enjoying this but being
rearranged
by this.

It was only fair since that’s the puddle I was currently standing in.

She slung her arms roughly around my neck, but pulled her lips away from mine in the same breath as she righted herself, keeping her arms on my shoulders. “You should be with your family, Maxton,” she insisted, but it held no real fire.

That made me smile. She wanted to send me away so badly, but wanted me to stay.

“If my mother knew how I felt about you, she’d tell me to—” There was that gasp again. “She’d tell me that I already made sure they were safe. And they are. Now I need to make sure you are. The best thing to do for them is to make sure this world is still going to be here, and if those knuckleheads are right, then you’re the one I should be looking after even if I didn’t…”

Her eyes begged me to make it all worth it, this whole thing, everything we’d been through. She didn’t have to beg me. She thought she did. I got that now. I would keep catching her as many times as she jumped because Sophelia was tossed into the world and there was no one to catch her. Until now. And I was hell bound and determined to make her see that she didn’t have to beg and she didn’t have to jump at all. We would be in this together now and I would walk as fast or as slow as she wanted to go, right beside her.

“You wouldn’t go back?” she asked. “You wouldn’t go back and do things differently. Your life?” She looked up at me, right into my eyes. “Change the way we met, everything that’s happened to get us here?”

I shook my head hard. “No,” I said softly, contradicting my body’s reaction. “I wouldn’t change a thing. If one small detail of our story was different then we might not have met at all. And that would have been a tragedy. Something I don’t even want to think about.”

She sniffed. “Me neither,” she whispered so low I barely heard her.

I took her face in my hands once more. “Give me the breath in your lungs, all the steps you took to get here, the only heart you’ve got, your very soul. I want all there is, Soph,” I groaned.

“Maxton,” her broken whimper tried to get out, but I just covered her mouth and began devouring her once more.

When we came together this time, there was no more cracked Sophelia. My fierce girl was back and in full swing. She wrapped her arms around my head, standing on her tiptoes, letting her elbows rest on my shoulders. So it was nothing to push her back against the wall, her belly and heaving chest pressed to mine, our lips fused, my maddeningly deafening pulse raging in my ears.

She tasted like every fantasy I ever thought to have, she sounded like all I could ever want a girl I had pressed to the wall to sound like in that position, her nails on the back on my neck and the bottom of my scalp—I wished I could curse out loud; there would have been growled obscenities.

She was a walking, breathing fantasy.

And, hot damn, she wanted me.

I grinned into our kiss, unable to keep it under wraps.

“What?” A hint of her self-consciousness poked its head in the door.

I pulled her close so fast that she gasped into my mouth. I then proceeded to suck on her tongue, in essence, for lack of a better term, shutting her up. Nicely, of course. My fingers gently stroking at her neck under her jaw, the way her legs scissored a little between us and she sometimes stuck her knee between mine, the way my hand sometimes found its way down to her hip to drag her closer.

The waste of our oxygen was so freaking worth the next ten minutes of
that
make-out.

When I finally pulled back, I made sure to look her in the eye. I wanted to see what I saw there. To see if there was still doubt and the girl waiting for the guy to run for his mommy, or the girl who knew that he was there to stay. I saw a little of both. I could accept that for now.

I smiled and put my forehead against hers. “Oh, my gosh, woman. Give me a minute to breathe before we go at it again.”

She giggled. And that giggle was something magical. Like she had been reading my thoughts, she lifted my face and smiled at me. It was like…she was looking for something magical in me, too, and had found it.

“I’m kind of in like with you.”

She sat stunned for a few seconds, not laughing like I thought she would. I was thinking how I could re-manage the whole joke, play it off in a new way, reconfigure, something, when she smiled in the smallest, most honest, real way, and said, “I’m sort of in like with you, too.”

She hugged my middle and then leaned her face up to accept my kiss, which was already some progress as far as I was concerned. I kissed her slowly, letting her wrap her hands around my arm as we turned, and then we both stopped dead.

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum stood there, looking sick and green.

I opened my mouth to tell them all the ways I was about to rearrange their faces.

“Oh, don’t worry, bruh.” Dum waved his hand to us. I think it was Dum. “We left. Across the street to get some snackage for our “quest”. He even made air quotes with his fingers when he said ‘quest’. “But, next time, you need to make sure you don’t have an audience when you go and mack on the savior.”

“Mack?” I asked at the same time that Sophelia asked, “Savior?”

“Furthermore,” the other one started, not even listening to us, “who jumps the savior in the street? I mean, you were really getting in there deep.”

What? I made a move for him. His twin moved to block him at the same time that Sophelia grabbed my arm. “I thought you weren’t watching. I thought you left to get snackage for the “quest”.” I air-quoted also.

“We still kept an eye on her. We had to make sure you didn’t run away with her since we found her. Finders keepers and all that.” I looked back at Soph and back at the twins. “Then wouldn’t she technically be mine?”

The other twin groaned. “See Roddy!” He slapped his twin in the back of the head. “You shouldn’t be the one doing the talking!”

Soph cleared her throat. “Um, can’t I just belong to myself, boys?” Her eyes shot to mine as she licked her lips, knowing we’d just done the whole
your heart is mine
bit.

“And since he’s got the hots for you, I imagine she’ll belong to you, too,” one of them grumbled.

“Soph’s right,” I avoided. “What are we doing now?”

              “Soph’s coming with us,” one of them said.

              “Sophelia,” I corrected him. I glanced at her and she had a little half-smile on her face, but it was her eyes that made me know right then, in that moment, that this would be far from some crush or first love or whatever other fist-level realm it could have fallen into.

“How come he gets to call you that?” one of the twins whined.

              “He earned it,” she whispered, her gaze latched onto mine.

              We’d never talked about my transition from calling her one to the other, somehow it just kind of happened, but hearing her say it made my bones curl.

The twin was still talking. “Sophelia is a mouthful, little lady. I don’t know if you know that. You know, since you never have to say it. It’s not like you talk to yourself.”

The other hissed, “Bro, she may talk to herself and now you’re just making her self-conscious about it. You always take things that extra step too far.”

He smacked his forehead. “You’re right, you’re right. I always do things the wrong way. I always jump the gun. I mean we haven’t even told her the bad part yet.” They both looked at us with a jerk-head motion, realizing what he’d just done.

“We talked about this!” his brother yelled

“I know, I know!” he scolded himself. “It’s like the horse before the cart.”

“Exactly, bro.”

“It’s ‘don’t put the cart before the horse’,” I corrected him.

They both stared at me blankly before one of them said in an offended deadpan, “That makes no sense, man. Why would a cart go before the horse?”

              I ignored them and cornered Soph once more. With my arm on the wall above her head so they couldn’t see what we were saying, I made sure she was calm. “Okay, look. We can lose these two if we have to.”

              “I heard that!” Dum said.

              I rolled my eyes. “I can lose ‘em. The point is, do you want to? Do you believe in all this stuff—truly believe? I’m with you, no matter what. I don’t want you to just do it because you feel like people are counting on you…if you don’t actually believe it’s true.”

              She looked at me. “Do you believe it?”

              I tilted my head. “Weirdo twins show up out of nowhere—correction, the worst timing ever, with a crazy story about your doll from when you were a little girl. And it’s allegedly supposed to be the key to bringing down Congress somehow?” I shrugged. “It’s a little too much to just be coincidence, but what do I know?”

              She stared at me too long. She knew what to do, she was just too scared to make the decision.

              “Okay, I’ll tell you what.” I pointed at the storefront across the granite street. “The next person that comes out of that store—if they’re a brunette we go with Tweedle Dee and Dum,” she groaned, knowing exactly where I was going with it, “if they’re blond, we go the opposite direction and never look back. Deal?”

              “What is it with you and flipping coins and making bets? Do you have a gambling addiction?” I laughed, but said nothing. She waited, knowing I wasn’t going anywhere. “Fine,” she ground out.

              I turned her so her back was to my front, leaning down to put my cheek against her cheek, and we waited. I could hear Dee and Dum over there betting on who was coming out first on their own terms.

              “We want a brunette to come out, doofus, otherwise we lose!”

              “But if we put money on it, then we win twice. Think about it!”

              “How are we related? How did I share a womb with you?”

              I tuned them out and waited, watching, focusing on Sophelia’s breaths under my arm as I wrapped my arms around her.

              When someone finally walked out a couple seconds later, it was hard to focus on Sophelia solely with Dee and Dum trying
not
to set off the profanity sensors.

              “That’s it. We’re cooked. Mommy’s going to kill us and put us in the stew!”

              “That’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever said. And totally untrue.”

“It’s kind of true!”

              “No. First, she’ll humiliate us for not bringing the savior home, then kill us.”

              “Right! Right you are, brother. She’d make it a practical killing.”

              “Shut up, you two,” I muttered as I turned Sophelia to face me. “So?”

              “So,” she muttered. “You did it. You made me take one of your bets.” She shuffled her feet and gripped my shirtfront. I loved that she still felt safe enough with me to do that. Did that make me a jerk?

              “And how do you feel about the answer?”

              “The answer was blond, which meant go the opposite way and not go with the twins. So…”

“I’m assuming you’re not happy, given by the way you’re refusing to look at me,” I said wryly and quite amused.

“I would have picked brunette,” she looked up and some of her fire and steel had returned, “had I chosen. But I didn’t choose. You made me do this stupid bet and now—”

“Now what? Now we go with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.”

Her brow scrunched in the most adorable way. “What? Then what was the point of betting?”

“To find out what you really want.” She scoffed. “You didn’t know what to do. So I made out like I was taking the choice away. Then when the choice was made, you’d know which one you were disappointed about.”

“That’s…” her nose scrunched, “kind of clever. Listen, buddy, don’t be pulling this reverse psychology bull on me all the time. I’ll hurt you.”

I snorted and tried to cover it when the look of death surfaced. “I have no doubt that you could maim and murder me in the streets before anyone came to rescue me.”

“Dude,” Dee said slowly, “that just went to a dark place.”

I stared at him. “It’s called sarcasm.”

“Well let’s steer clear of there and drive back to happy town. Put away the knife, man. Put away the knife,” he said dramatically.

I just looked to his brother for answers. He shrugged. “He was dropped as a baby.”

Sophelia crooned, “Aww. Like…on his head? Is that what you mean?”

He scoffed. “No, at childcare. He was too young! He has abandonment issues.” He shook his head. “Don’t we all?”

Soph and I looked at each other and I wanted to run with her in that moment. I didn’t know if I could take much more of Tweedle Dee and Dum, but for her I would take any amount of torture…apparently.

She came to me and took my hand, forgetting the twins.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “You were right. I didn’t know what I wanted because I hadn’t had the option of having or losing either of those things yet. Thank you for helping me see.”

I shook my head. “My dad was so good about things like that. He could make you see things in ways that you just…”