Page 108 of Snake

Wanting him back.

Cox pushed into her mouth, tasting her moan as he found her tongue.

Not even the hope that had propelled him across two states, a hope so new its feathers were still wet, had prepared him for a reunion like this. Of course he’d never imagined simply kissing her before they’d exchanged a word.

On the ride here, he’d tried repeatedly to play out scenarios for how she’d greet him, and he’d failed every time. He wasn’t good at that kind of forward, strategic thinking. Instead, he’d fixated on his inability to see possible futures and realized he’d been living in place his whole goddamn life, reacting but not planning, living in the losses of the past every bit as much as his mother had.

Mixed in with his deep, desperate love and need of her, he’d been so angry at his mother—not only this fresh rage after her suicide but a low, constant simmer for the past two decades, a steady beat of resentment for not being enough for her. Now he knew that he hadn’t been angry at only his mother, maybe not even primarily at her. His rage was for his father, placing duty to country over his family, and he was even angrier at Billy, for his damnable obsession with ‘finishing Dad’s fight,’ only to die in the same fucking war. Leaving him alone with a mother who’d already been half ghost.

Now he was nearly forty years old, older than his father had ever been, and he was as angry as he’d been the day they’d buried his brother. In all these years, he’d come to terms with none of it, learned nothing at all. He’d been carrying a teenager’s fury with him all this way.

That thought fired his nerves and tightened his hold of Autumn. She moaned again, and he lifted her off her feet, stepping to the wall, pressing her to it, leaning into her, slipping his thigh between her legs.

At his side, someone cleared their throat with theatrical emphasis.

Autumn tensed in his arms, and her mouth closed. Cox stepped back, but he couldn’t look away from her.

For a moment, she couldn’t look away from him, either. Her eyes glinted under brows arched high with ... wonder, or confusion, or curiosity, or fear. Or all of them. Her gaze flashed quickly to the side, then returned to him.

“You must be Cox,” said the woman who’d cleared her throat. Cox ignored her.

Autumn smiled. Her lips glistened with their kiss.

“Cox, this is my friend, Ida,” she said, still focused on him. “Ida, yes, this is Cox.”

“Hello, Cox. I won’t say it’s nice to meet you because I don’t know if it is yet. I will say that as best friend, I claim the right to tell you to get your paws off my girl. You haven’t earned back your touching privileges.”

Her tone straddled the line between serious and sardonic. Autumn’s smile grew pert. She was still focused on him.

For Autumn, Cox finally located some words. “Do you want me to back off?”

Her hands slipped from his nape and glided to his chest. Cox thought she meant to push him back, but instead she pushed her hands under his kutte and grabbed fists of his shirt.

“I want to understand,” she said.

Of course she did. But he was only figuring shit out and could hardly order his own thoughts, let alone make words that contained it all. “I don’t know if I know how to explain.”

At their side, her friend Ida made a loud, infuriating buzzer noise. “EEEEHHHHHH!!! I’m sorry, wrong answer! But thank you for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts backstage.”

What the fuck with this stranger shoving her beak into shit not her business? He whipped his head in her direction and discovered a tall, slim, ethnically ambiguous woman with a mane of curly dark hair. Her head cocked, she grinned at him with the clear message You wanna make trouble with me? Try.

“Ida—enough,” Autumn said, her voice low but her rebuke decisive. Cox returned his attention to her, and she sighed heavily. “Will you try? At the intercom, you said you were here because you want me.” He nodded at once, and it brought her smile back. “Okay. Before that can happen, I need to understand what happened before, and I need to understand what exactly it is you want, and if I want the same things.”

Again, Ida made that fucking game-show noise. If he had duct tape with him, that chick would be shutting up right quick.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but that, too, is the wrong answer. Before there’s any explaining or understanding or fucking planning, there’s gotta be a whole lotta groveling. Like, on his knees, kissing your feet groveling.”

Cox wanted to send a threatening look Ida’s way, but he didn’t want to look away from Autumn. He wanted to see in her eyes if she’d demand humiliation from him.

He wouldn’t be able to do that. Moreover, he wouldn’t believe she cared about him if she needed something like that. It would dim his feelings for her—and that was the worst thing he could imagine right now.

He’d humiliated her, he knew that. Abandoning her to his mother’s funeral, sending her away while they stood in the parking lot, after all she’d done to keep him going and handle what he could not, after how hard he’d leaned on her and how strong she’d stood under that pressure? He’d been a colossal asshole and caused her more than heartbreak. No doubt he deserved some humiliation of his own.

But he hadn’t been trying to hurt her. She would have to try to ‘get him back.’ He didn’t think he’d be able to trust her if she did that. He meant to make it up to her, with interest, but he needed her to trust that he would. There was no trust anywhere in revenge.

So he focused on her and tried to find her intention behind her eyes.

With a sigh, she released her clench of his shirt. She patted the cotton smooth again and said, “We need to talk, Cox. About a lot of things.”

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