Page 6 of The Anchor Holds

“Do you miss them?” I thrummed my fingers on the foam mat. “Your other foster parents?”

He opened his eyes then, turned to look at me, his gaze piercing yet empty at the same time. Appearing much older and more jaded than any kid our age should be.

“I don’t miss anyone,” he declared. “Because I know better than to get attached to people.”

I heard the ice in his tone and was perceptive enough to understand that that was an outlook honed from years of pain and rejection. My throat closed at the reality of the world. People like Jasper were really going through serious shit, and I complained about my life like it was a sport. Like it was a cornerstone of my personality I should be proud of. I had a mother who asked about my day and wanted to make me lunches. A father who wanted to throw a softball with me anddidn’t want me dressing like a woman because he still saw me as his little girl.

My stomach churned with discomfort at what an asshole I’d been to them. Surely, this feeling was fleeting, and I was going to continue being an asshole to them, though I tried to cling on to it.

When Jasper pushed up from the mat, I made to do the same. Mimicking his body language was quickly becoming natural to me. Something that should’ve been disturbing yet felt alluring. I was so desperate to march to the beat of my own drum that I hadn’t realized how exhausted I was from it, not until I got the respite from making decisions through the simple act of following Jasper’s movements.

“No.” His voice was an octave deeper, more masculine, sending a flutter to my lower belly.

I rested on my elbows, watching him crunch through the grass in bare feet to the end of my mat.

My previously even heart rate accelerated to that of a galloping horse as I understood the expression on his face as he slowly descended to his knees.

His movements weren’t rushed, and I recognized the unspoken question in his eyes, the request for consent. I was not naïve, and I certainly wasn’t a virgin, so I understood when a boy was requesting sex. What I hadn’t experienced was a boy doing it so wordlessly, sensually and intensely that he had the aura of aman. Heat erupted in my core, a desire I had never experienced with any boy flooding through me. Jasper stayed there while I considered.

Not that there was anything to consider. My body was overcome with excitement and a kind of desire that was utterly foreign, adult and addictive.

I let my legs fall open as an invitation, my breath already coming in low, quick pants.

Jasper’s large hands confidently grasped my sweats, I instinctively lifted my hips as he rolled them off. It was jarring, exciting and vaguely terrifying that he exposed my naked lower half so quickly, without ceremony or so much as a kiss.

Jasper, as it turned out, had other plans. His lips settled between my legs long before he kissed me on the mouth. He sent my body wild with pleasure, eliciting a scream so loud from me that doves nesting in a nearby tree fluttered from the sky—earning me a lifelong term of endearment that never failed to make me think of this moment.

And that was where we started.

In a beautiful meadow.

How far we’d come.

How far we’d fall.

Two

It’s Called: Freefall — Paris Paloma

PRESENT DAY

Ifelt like shit the next morning on account of the lack of sleep. Not that I was a stranger to lack of sleep, but my mind had been shaken, a lot, by Jasper’s presence, my ensuing trip down memory lane, and the pain of where we’d both ended up. Where I’d ended up.

I’d been on my laptop for hours, desperate to find a way out. Knowing there wasn’t one. I was a victim to Jasper’s whims. To how long he deigned to let our history outweigh his duty.

It wouldn’t be an extended process. That I knew. I’d felt it. In recent years, I’d felt him slipping through my fingers, if you could ever really hold on to a man like Jasper Hayes. You couldn’t. It was like trying to grasp shadows. Even all the way back then, that day in the meadow with my hands clasping the naked skin of his body, I wasn’t really holding him.

What was worse was after the chilling revelation that my luck was running out, that the longest relationship I’d ever had with a man was growing more and more toxic and deadly… I’d had to deal with my broody brother on my doorstep at seven in the morning.

“It’s criminal,” I muttered to him, banging around making coffee after I’d let him in. “Just because you havechildrenwho wake you up early doesn’t mean you inflict the same on your childless—by choice—sister.” I poured him coffee with a hostile glare. “Criminal.”

I had barely slept, just tossed and turned. But I did it on my $10k mattress in Egyptian cotton sheets, panicking at my leisure. Without an audience. I needed a mask in front of Rowan so he didn’t catch a whiff of my unease. I’d already seen him note the two glasses I’d left drying by the sink. He didn’t ask questions, but he’d noticed them.

“Why are you here, Cal?” Rowan stared at me in that intense way of his. You wouldn’t know it then, with him being all broody and menacing, but there used to be a lightness to my brother’s eyes. He used to have a softness about him. A playfulness.

Sometimes I saw it when he was with Nora and his daughters, but it was tarnished right then.

I grieved that.

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