The Space Between (The Book of Phoenix) (21 page)

His hand slid over my jeans to my ass, and he lifted me, putting me at eye level so he wouldn’t have to crouch. I wrapped my legs around his waist, and he pressed harder against me. We moaned into each other when his erection throbbed between my legs. My heart pounded, and my belly quivered as butterflies danced inside.

I swear my soul was dancing, too. I’d never felt such joy, such elation, such emotional bliss. Every part of my being, physical and otherwise, wanted this. Wanted us completely and totally together in every sense of the word. Wanted him. Micah.
My other half
.

My mind pricked at this. Okay, maybe my brain didn’t want it. At least, not yet.

“Micah,” I panted against his lips. “Too . . . fast.”

He didn’t stop kissing me.

“Please . . . Micah.” I placed my hand on his hard chest. I didn’t push, but I did press. “Slow. Please.”

He did slow the kiss down and eventually pulled away enough to look at me. His brown eyes smoldered with heated desire, sending another thrill through me. My throat worked to swallow.

“Um . . .” I gave him a weak smile. “We’re moving a little fast.”

He returned my smile, dimples and all. When he spoke, his voice came out husky. “I can’t help it. You . . . if you had any idea what you do to me . . .”

He kissed each corner of my mouth.

“I know,” I said, closing my eyes as a new wave of desire rushed through me. I forced my eyes open and squirmed against him. “You do it to me, too. But, this is all . . . just . . .”

He grazed his teeth over my bottom lip then pressed his forehead against mine. “Too much. I know.”

His hands grasped my hips, and he took a step back. Reluctantly, I unglued my legs from around his waist so he could set me on my feet. My knees nearly gave out, and I stumbled. Micah caught me with a chuckle, making me blush.

“Wow, a little light-headed,” I mumbled.

“Mm-hmm.” His lips danced with a teasing smile.

I blushed harder. “I haven’t eaten anything today.”

He nodded. “I’m sure that’s what it is.” He winked at me, then took my hand. “I’ll take you to lunch, and the library, but first, what we were doing before . . . before you did that thing you did to me.”

I smiled as I followed him around the corner. “And what did I do to you exactly?”

“We’ll just say you found my soft spot.”

“It felt pretty hard to me.”

He laughed, then shook his head. “See? That. That’s what you do to me.”

“Ah, smart-ass, ex-punk girl makes tough Marine a little soft?”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, so any girl does?” My elation dropped a few levels.

He stopped and turned his full burning gaze on me. “No, only smart-ass, ex-punk girls named Jacey, who has managed to make me nearly lose control as I’ve never done before.”

I rolled my eyes. “Please don’t try to convince me you’re a virgin. I’ll never buy it.”

“Of course not.” He pulled me closer to him, our bodies nearly touching again. “But I’ve always been in control of the situation. I’ve always known what I was doing. With you . . . it’s one surprise after another. Half the time, I have no clue what I’m doing. And even though I sometimes think I’m losing my mind, I can’t say I don’t like it. Which is the biggest shock of all.”

His eyes flashed, his hand dropped mine, and he walked off, as if afraid of what he’d admitted.

“So you’re a control freak,” I said as we stepped up to the center of the building’s rear wall.

“A
self
-control freak,” he corrected as he squatted down to inspect where the building’s siding met the concrete foundation.

The way he’d ordered me around earlier and became so overprotective, I wanted to argue the point, but didn’t.

“So is being a self-control freak why you went into the Marines, or are you like that
because
you’re a Marine?”

“I grew up in foster homes, bouncing around from one shithole to another, most people only taking me for the state aid money.” His fingers grasped onto an edge of the siding, and he yanked. The aluminum protested loudly before pulling away from the building. “The few I actually liked either had kids of their own and decided they couldn’t foster anymore, or had other issues, and I was pulled out and placed into hell. My childhood was chaos.” He pulled on another piece of siding and dragged it back. “I couldn’t wait for the day I could take control of my own life. My last foster mother was pretty cool. I still talk to her now and then. But I enlisted on my eighteenth birthday. And yeah, the Marines helped me learn the control I wanted so badly.”

Whoa. That was heavy. Imagining him as a young boy with no parents and having to grow up with virtual strangers made my chest ache. I’d lost my parents at nine years old, but at least I’d always had Pops. I now understood what he’d meant when he said he had no one.

“And then I came along and ruined it all?” I teased in an attempt to lighten the mood.

Micah peeled one last piece of siding out. “Yeah, something like that.”

He had pulled away about five feet of siding, leaving the pieces pried back perpendicular to the building, revealing a six-foot-high rectangle of plywood. He began knocking around on it until we both heard the hollow sound.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means there’s nothing solid behind there.”

“I know that,” I huffed. “I mean what you said—
something like that
. You were all nomadic before I came along. Or were you a
controlled
nomad?”

“Yeah, I was.” He turned to face me and put his hands on his narrow hips, right where his jeans hung. “After my discharge, I had a few places to visit. People I owed a personal thank-you to. That part was controlled. And then I had the uncontrollable need to go to Virginia and make a stop at that god-awful show that night. I don’t know why, but I knew I
had
to go. How can you listen to such noise?”

I chuckled. “Yeah, it sucked, didn’t it?”

“Sid Vicious must have been rolling in his grave. Anyway, I hung around for a week or so, but the need to be there disappeared. I started heading north again but stopped in Northern Virginia, having no idea where to go next. I had no home, no job, no purpose.”

“Wait. You were in Northern Virginia? Right after the show?”

“A week after.”

“Whoa. That’s when I’d gone home for Pops’ funeral.”

His eyes tightened as he stared at me for a moment, then he gave a slight head shake before he went on. “I decided to give Angie, my last foster mother, a call, and she suggested I come down here. Said she had a widowed friend who needed someone to watch her house over the summer while she went north, and she even had a place for me to stay. I wasn’t sure about the idea when Angie first mentioned it, but eventually I couldn’t ignore the urge to come here. As soon as I got to town, my new neighbor asked if I knew anything about fixing his roof, and then more work fell in my lap. And right when I finished my last project, you showed up.” His gaze drilled into me. “Any control over my life I thought I had . . . it was all just an illusion.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Well, isn’t that how life is anyway? Anytime you think you have control, life waves its big magic wand and poof! Everything around you has changed.
Life’s
an illusion.”

He lifted his hands in the air. “Do you get what I’m saying, Jace? The last several months were all about you. As if I was
drawn
to you. Or pushed to go where you would be.”

The description of Twin Flames echoed in my mind, causing chills to slither over my skin.

I broke eye contact with Micah and looked at the plywood. “So, uh, are you going to find a way in or not? If not, I think we need to get to the library.”

“I’ll get my saw. It shouldn’t take long.”

Ten minutes later, Micah had cut a door into the back of the building. The long and narrow space was about eight feet wide and seemed to stretch all the way to the front of the building, as expected, although the other end receded into dark shadow. While Micah went to retrieve a flashlight, I stepped inside. And became completely disoriented.

I still stood in the dark, empty space, but at the same time, I felt like I was in an entirely different structure. Like an image overlaid onto my vision, I also stood in the hallway of a big house with shiny hardwood floors and pale yellow walls. In front of me, a curved, sweeping staircase with a wrought iron and wood banister rose to the second floor ahead. Sunlight poured through a large Palladian window at the second level of the foyer up front, and a pair of gorgeous, dark wooden doors stood open, exposing a manicured lawn shaded by royal palm trees and oaks dripping with Spanish moss. The view beyond, however, was obscured by a bright, white light.

“Jacey?” Micah’s voice came from a distance. The vision faded, but the disoriented feeling lingered.

“Did you see that?” I asked. “Do you feel it?”

Micah’s eyes darted around. “It does feel strange in here, but all I see is an empty space.”

He shone his flashlight over the gray concrete walls.

“This is unexpected,” he said as he walked farther inside to inspect. “I’d hoped the pipes would be exposed.”

The light careened over the area, glancing over an object in the far corner.

“What’s that?” I asked. Micah moved the beam back, and it landed on a rectangular, brown object lying in an otherwise empty room that shouldn’t even be here.

I rushed over to it. A book. My fingers caressed the soft leather cover before picking it up. Micah stood behind me, looking over my shoulder as he directed the light on the front cover. We both gasped.

An intricate picture was embossed into the leather—what appeared to be a large willow tree with fish and dolphins swimming underneath it. A clasp secured the book closed, like a journal, but there was no keyhole, no knobs to squeeze together, nothing. I turned the book over, only to find the same image embossed on the back, but still no way to reveal the pages inside. Looking at the front again, I swiped a finger over the clasp, feeling for something, anything, but only found smooth metal.

“I wonder what’s wrong with Sammy,” Micah said, distracting me. Sammy stood at the makeshift door Micah had cut open, barking in our direction but not coming in. “We better get going anyway. We have a lot to do, including buying you a new door.”

When we returned to full daylight, I inspected the clasp more closely and ran my finger over it again, but still nothing.

Micah set the plywood into place, kind of leaning it precariously, then half-assed pushed the siding over it.

“There’s nothing for anyone to bother in there,” he said as we walked around the corner. Then he glanced up toward my door. “But your place is a different story.”

We went upstairs, and Micah fiddled with the door enough so it would close. The latch wouldn’t lock and the door would be easy to push open, but at least it wouldn’t be hanging ajar, an open invitation to anyone passing by.

“Sammy, be a good boy and guard our stuff, okay?” I said, scratching him behind the ears. “Don’t let anyone in. Bark like crazy and scare them away.”

He wagged his tail, as if he understood.

“I could really use a shower,” Micah said as we headed toward his truck. “Do you mind if we swing by my place for a minute?”

Trying not to let my imagination carry away at the thought of Micah in the shower, I could barely manage to say, “No problem.”

“Why’d you bring that?” he asked when I slid into the cab.

“Oh.” I looked down at the book still in my hand. “No idea. Didn’t realize I had.”

I placed it on the seat and pretty much forgot about it when we pulled into a familiar driveway.

“You live here?” I asked with a laugh.

“Yeah, back here. Why?” He drove up to the guesthouse that sat behind the very house I’d first pulled up to when I came to town. The one where Buck found me right when I’d thought I’d seen someone moving around inside. The “someone” had been Micah!

“Um . . . no reason,” I said, my voice wobbly. Adding this “coincidence” in with everything else made me want to break into laughter—hysterical, likely maniacal laughter. “Trust me. You don’t want to know.”

I felt kind of weird being in Micah’s little home. After all, I’d only met him yesterday. But I was also curious to see where he lived.
How
he lived. He left me in the small living room with its adjoining kitchen while he went into the bedroom. He didn’t bother to close the door, and it was all I could do to not follow and watch. Instead I poked around a little, though there wasn’t much to see. The owners had obviously furnished the place, and whatever personal belongings Micah possessed, they weren’t out on display.

Just as he grumbled something incomprehensible then turned the shower on, the knob of his front door wiggled. My breath caught, but before I could move, the door swung open. A tall woman, only a little older than me, wearing a bikini top and a beach towel around her waist, stood in the doorway. She sucked in a breath and glared at me with slits for eyes and fists on her hips.

“Like, who the hell are you and what are you doing in my house?” she demanded.