Slow Twitch - Реинхардт Лиз (бесплатные серии книг .txt) 📗

All of my problems with Jake and Saxon, sex and school paled for a minute and fear gnawed on my nerves.

“Mischief?” I rolled the word around on my tongue as I wriggled into my pajamas. Technically all it meant was mildly troublesome, undesirable behavior without malice. Well, that was one definition anyway. How far would my friend take it?

One of the scariest things about Evan was she was like that girl in the nursery rhyme with the curl. When Evan made up her mind to play it like a good girl, there was no one better. But when she decided to let the bad girl out? I decided I’d better sleep with my phone by my ear, and made up my mind that I would use the number her gramma had sent to my mother in case of emergencies if I didn’t hear from by early the next morning.

  Chapter Fourteen

Saxon

The Folly concert was a total success. Tony and Rosalie were pumped about the whole thing, and when all was good in the Erikson house, all was good with Cadence.

Which was beyond good for me.

She was beyond good for me.

She’d been nervous about the whole concert thing. Especially once she saw Bren’s design, which freaked her out a little. I thought it was damn cool, and kind of talked Cadence out of freaking about it.

“It’s me!” She held the concept shirt Bren had left at Tony out in front of her. Her hands were a little shaky.

I grabbed one hand, bright pink paint on the nails compliments of me. “It’s cool.” I squeezed her hand tight. “Bren’s an art genius. If she thinks it’s good, it’s good.”

Her mouth did this sexy twitchy move that let me know loud and clear she didn’t love that I’d said that. She’d been jumpy about Brenna since the whole essay thing came up.

“Do you still like her, Saxon?”

We were in her room, door open, Sullie running by a hundred miles an hour, the smells of Rosalie’s tortillas wafting up the stairs and making my stomach rumble. It was loud and chaotic and not remotely private, but I loved it.

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed and I was sprawled on the floor. I definitely mostly played the hands-off good boy at her place. No use dredging up trouble with her fucking scary parents.

“Not the way you’re asking. Do you still like Jeff?” I poked her leg with my foot.

“No.” She grabbed my foot. I knew what was coming, because my girlfriend is a sex goddess. She pulled my sock off and grabbed a bottle of lotion from her dresser, then gooped it on her hands and rubbed it into my feet. “But that’s different. I never really liked Jeff.”

“Oh my God,” I moaned. Her fingers were sure and relaxing and fucking magic. “What do you want, woman? Anything! You can have anything!”

“Just you.” Like a damn angel, she smiled over my disgusting lotioned feet.

“Liar,” I accused. “No one gives something that fantastic and gets something that shitty in return unless she’s a moron. And I know for a fact that you’re no moron.”

She laughed, her big-smiled belly-laugh that I loved so much it made me a little nervous. She had these great, full lips…great at smiling, great at kissing, great at telling me to shove it up my ass, and great at telling me how much she loved me. Perfect lips.

“I want to know about Brenna.” She looked right at my lotion-gooped feet, avoiding any eye contact at all.

The thing with Brenna was, if I could have taken her essay and turned it around on her I would have. Reading that to Jake was pretty much the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Because I knew exactly what she was saying. And he didn’t.

Just like Cadence wouldn’t.

Because Brenna and I had something that was deep and real, but it wasn’t exactly love. Not the way I felt about Cadence or that Bren felt about Jake. I knew why Brenna was freaked about Jake reading it. I would have burned it and any record of it if I’d had the balls to write something like that and Cadence wanted to see it. No way in hell would I try to explain it all.

But Bren was always more fearless than I was. I needed her in my life.

Not as a girlfriend: I thought that would work, but it didn’t. And I’m glad that we tried, because if we hadn’t given it a shot, I would have sworn to God that dating was the thing for us. But I knew now that Bren and I had to be where we were and who we were to each other and just let it go.

It was pretty much impossible to explain. Especially to someone I loved and wanted to make happy.

“Brenna is special to me, Cadence,” I said, and, even though her hands never stopped moving, I could see that her face tensed up. “C’mon, babe, it’s not like that.”

“Like what?” Her words trickled out, deceptively serene.

“Like I want her to be my girlfriend.” Her thumb glided over my arch and I bit my lip hard to keep from moaning.

She shrugged. “I thought she didn’t want you.”

And therein lay my girl’s powers of genius. Here she was rubbing my feet like some kind of perfect saint, rendering me defenseless as she barbed me with her dead-on quips.

This was love.

“She didn’t want me, but she gave me a fair chance. And much as I wanted her to want me, in the end I really didn’t. It wouldn’t have worked between us. We didn’t have the right chemistry.”

“What does that even mean?” Worry lines popped out on her forehead.

I pulled my foot out of her hand and knelt by her bed. I grabbed one of her feet and kissed her toes, made her giggle, and then leaned up and kissed her mouth. “It means I was waiting for you.”

She rolled her eyes. “Sussex County Casanova strikes again.”

“Not Sussex County anymore, babe.” I kissed her neck. She smelled like some kind of cookies. Vanilla wafers, I thought.

“Why not? Are you extending yourself past Sussex County? Are you going to be the New Jersey Casanova? Or the East Coast Casanova?” She giggled as I kissed her collar bones and down to her breast plate, all the time keeping one eye on her open bedroom door and the currently empty hallway.

“No.” I ran a hand up under her shirt, all the way up to the bra that I could feel was little more than a tiny bit of lace. God, I loved her underwear. “I have no plans to expand. In fact, I’m contracting.”

“What?” she asked, her voice a little giggly and off. She bit her lip a little when I got my hand under the lace.

She felt amazing.

“I’m relocating, and downsizing,” I explained, then I saw Sullie run down the hall pulling a wagon full of toys that would serve equally well as run-of-the-mill playthings and items of torture. For my head and sack. I pulled my hand and mouth away from my very hot girlfriend, sat back to wait for Sullie to administer some pain, and finished explaining. “I’m an official Essex County resident.”

Sullie came in and pulled out a heavy toy keyboard, dropped it on my bare foot, and clapped along to “Bingo” while I screamed in agony.

“What do you mean?” Cadence asked, her focus snapped back as mine blurred out in a red cloud of pain.

“Ow, damn, Sullie, that hurts!” Sullie laughed and held his hands up. I swept him off the floor and jostled him on my shoulder. “I mean that I can’t leave Aunt Helene in her rotting hole of a house. What the hell will she do about the ice and snow? What about the heat? That fucking furnace is a hundred years old. I’m surprised you don’t have to shovel coal into it.”

“Don’t swear in front of the baby,” Cadence said absently, which was a fairly hilarious warning considering their mother’s language could melt the ears off a fucking truck driver. “So you’re going to fix Aunt Helene’s up more?”

But, like I said before, my girl’s no moron. Her eyes were shiny with the promise of what she wanted me to say.

I pulled Sullie’s shirt up and blew a loud raspberry on his belly. He screamed with happy laughter. “Yeah, I’m fixing it up more.” I paused to give one more tremendous raspberry, then let the news drop. “And I’m enrolling.”