Page 61 of Holiday Wedding
He nods and gives me his dimpled smile. For a minute, I forget to breathe. The candlelight softens the normally hard angles of his face, giving him a youthful, carefree expression. It flickers, sending an undulating golden glow over his skin.
It’s nice.
Seeing him here in my room, relaxed and content.
I stand to pour the last bit of wine into Dean’s cup when the radiator goes off, making that sharp, pounding sound I heard the first day I checked in.
Two things happen at once.
One, Dean stands and leaps at me like he’s protecting me from a drive-by shooter. He flies into me and knocks me to the floor. The bottle falls from my hand. Thankfully, it doesn’t shatter, but wine spills out of it, staining the thin rug beneath us.
Two, as the knocking, rattling sound continues, Dean curls into a fetal position next to me, with his hands over his ears and his legs drawn up to his chest. I look him over, noting how tightly he’s screwed up his mouth and squeezed his eyes shut. He rocks, muttering under his breath.
My heart pounds. It’s scary, watching Dean spiral out of control. I stare at him—helpless. No clue what’s going on besides the obvious, that he’s in extreme distress. Frantic to end his pain, I wrap my arms around him, press my chest against his back, and hold him.
“It’s okay,” I whisper over and over. “You’re safe. Everything’s okay.”
It seems like an eternity, but eventually he unfurls enough to look at me. There’s panic in his gaze, wild and raw. He turns so that his upper body is beneath me. I’m pressed to his chest, where I can feel the rapid pounding of his heart and every ragged breath he takes.
I put a hand on each of his cheeks, forcing him to meet my eyes. “Dean, you’re okay. It’s okay.” I repeat it, but he’s trembling, his expression pure misery. It hurts me to look at him, to see him like this. I need to pull him out of it, bring him back from whatever dark place he’s gone. I can only think of one thing to do.
I kiss him.
A good hard kiss, pressing my mouth to his unyielding lips. He locks up, tenses. Just when I’m about to move away and apologize profusely, he melts. His mouth falls open with a stuttering gasp, and his tongue meets mine. In a flash, he rolls us over so he’s braced on one elbow above me. Wine soaks my sleeve with its cold wetness. I don’t mind though, barely noticing it. I’m too distracted by the intense way he’s kissing me, like he’s holding nothing back.
Dean kisses the way characters kiss in books or movies. A kind of kiss I thought only existed in Hollywood, but here between the two of us, it expands into something even better. Something pure and powerful and demanding.
I wrap my arms around him and pull him closer. His lips move to my neck, where he gently scrapes his teeth over my jawline. I sigh with pleasure and turn my mouth to his. We stay like that, kissing on the floor for a few more minutes. Then Dean gives me a gentle kiss on my cheek. He says, “You know, there’s a perfectly good bed right next to us.”
I laugh, the sound breathless and happy. “Maybe we should move up there?”
“Definitely.” He stands and holds his hand out to help me off the floor. We climb onto the hard mattress and settle against one another. I rest my head on his shoulder, my body pleasantly humming just from being close to him.
My brain isn’t relaxed, though. It’s busy replaying how groundbreaking those kisses were. I sigh and snuggle closer, when I realize that I haven’t thought about my body all day. I haven’t sucked in my stomach or adjusted my shirt like I usually would. He’s seen me in my pajamas as well as in my tight-fitting jeans, and I haven’t worried about it once. Somehow, lying here with Dean, feeling comfortable with myself, seems like the most natural thing in the world.
Don’t get used to it,I remind myself.
There’s an expiration date on my time in New York. No matter how wonderful this feels, it won’t last.
22
Saturday, December 21
3 days until the wedding
Jenny
What was that?” I ask Dean later, when I wake from a nap to find him propped on one elbow, staring down at me.
“I believe it’s called sleep.” He presses his cheek to mine, then tenderly kisses the soft spot right below my ear. The feeling of it almost makes me forget my question, which I think is what he’s hoping, but I’m a reporter through and through. Asking questions is my job.
“No. Not my nap. What happened before. When you freaked out.”
He sighs and rolls onto his back. “It’s nothing.”
“Didn’t seem like nothing to me.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
