Page 48 of What's in a Kiss?

“We need to talk,” I say.

Glasswell—Jake—tilts his head. “What’s up?”

“Remember prom?”

“Patient-Reported Outcome Measure?”

“I’m serious.”

His brow lifts. He clocks my rigid body language. “You fell asleep reading your high school journal. I carried you in at about two.”

A hazy memory surfaces—a scene I’d relegated to a dream. Jake lifting me from an antique library chair. Jake’s arms like a sanctuary. Jake carrying me through darkness into this cloudlike room. Jake lying down next to me.

The silk cocoon wasn’t the fancy comforter. It was him. His fingers on my skin. His nearness and heat.

How is it possible that the best sleep I’ve had in ages happened inhisarms?

“Are you okay?” Jake asks, rubbing his eyes.

“Did we... move too fast? After prom?”

Jake runs a hand over his stubble, his eyes locked on mine. Just when I think I’ve slipped up and revealed that I don’t belong here, he smiles. “I think it worked out alright.”

But it didn’t. Not for me, because I don’t know whathappened after that night. I’m missing miles of autobiography leading me to who I am. And I’ve lost my mom, my dog, and my best friend.

I turn toward the sun. Where does one dream end and another dream begin? How do you walk the line between fantasy and spin? In my real life, I told myself that better days were just ahead. That was fantasy, sure, but then... what exactly is this? I don’t know who I am here. I don’t know what I want.

What if everything I thought my life was is actually a dream I had last night? With Jake’s naked body looped around my leg?

No. That life in the bungalow down the cliff was real. It was mine. It was hardscrabble, it was unadorned, but it was me. And I’m going to get it back.

But how?

I fall back on the bed and consider a quick, invigorating cry. But then Jake lands beside me, draping the comforter over us. He lays on his side, watching me with verdant eyes. He nuzzles his face in the crook of my neck, and oh boy, here it comes. When he exhales against my skin, it feels so good I could surrender everything. His breath holds me hostage. My cells rise toward him. I don’t know how he does it, turns me on with just his breathing.

“Do you think we have time?” he whispers.

He can only mean one thing...

Morning sex.

The rest of him moves closer. Including the lumber he seems to have purloined from the Petrified Forest.

“I need to fuck my wife.”

I see in his eyes he’s not acting. He’s not dreaming. He’s notimagining I’m someone else. High Life Jake Glasswell wants me. In this bed. Posthaste.

And this absolutely cannot happen.

As I scramble to the foot of the bed, Jake’s iPhone alarm goes off. He groans and rolls away but not before he takes a husband’s squeeze out of my ass. The shock of his touch sends a lurid lash through my body, leaving me paralyzed.

“I’ll make coffee,” he says from the doorway.

It takes a full hot minute for the effect of Jake’s touch to burn off. I know I’ve got to be out of this bed before he comes back, but I don’t know where to go.

I think of Gram Parsons, who would be eating his Mexican breakfast about now.

“Hang in there, burrito brother,” I say. “I’ll find you.”

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