Another pause, a long silence.

  “Renée left me. Broke up with me. Said she couldn’t and wouldn’t be with a man who was so stuck on himself that he couldn’t admit when something was beyond his control—and that the fact that I was so angry about it—at her, for even suggesting I let go of playing ball—meant I was weak and pathetic. Those were her words to me. Weak and pathetic.” He scoffs. “You know how deep that cut? I could squat six hundred pounds. Deadlift eight hundred. Bench over four hundred. Run the hundred-yard dash faster than half the defensive ends at the combine. And I was pathetic and weak? God, that hurt. She didn’t come back, either. Broke up with me in the hospital—walked the fuck out on me. Her parting words to me are something I’ll never forget. ‘Jamie,’ she said, ‘the only person, the only force in this entire goddamn world that will ever be able to stop you is you. You are too damn stupid and stubborn to get out of your own way, and I cannot and will not stand by and watch you keep hurting yourself. I love you, Jamie. I love you more than life, and I always will, but I won’t be with you if you can’t get over yourself.’”

  I shake my head. “Damn. Takes real balls to say that to the man you love.”

  “At twenty years old, too. She was the wisest and most self-aware person I’ve ever known.” He walks in silence for a while. “So I thought about it, and what she said. Took me weeks, but I realized she was right. The point is, though, that she left me. Broke up with me. Wouldn’t answer my calls, wouldn’t come back to the hospital. Nothing. I wrote her letters, sent them to her through Jess. Nothing. I was in so much pain, physically and emotionally, and my dad was just…suck it up, son. Play hurt. Toughen up. Get over her—she’s just a girl.”

  “Jesus. What an asshole.”

  “It’s how he was raised, so it’s how he raised me. It’s taken me this long to de-condition myself from all that, and sometimes I think I’ll never quite totally beat that mentality.”

  “Seems to me like you have,” I say.

  He shrugs. “To some degree, yes.”

  “I will go see someone,” I say, at length. “Craig is still inside me, down deep. Being with you still makes me feel guilty, sometimes, and I can stubborn my way past it for the most part, but…”

  James shakes his head. “That’s what Doc Rich has had to drill into me these past few months—you can’t stubborn your way past this shit. You’re just burying it, not dealing with it.”

  “You’re right, James. I know you are.”

  “These past few days, though?” He shakes his head. “Seeing Jess like that?”

  I gaze up at him. “Brought it all back?”

  He nods. “Yeah. Hard-core.” We reach the end of his street that ends in a T-junction at a huge fenced-in field, scattered with cows munching on grass. We stand at the fence line and watch the cows amble this way and that. “I was there again, for a minute. In that hospital, in that very fucking hallway. I remember it like—like it was yesterday. Jess was with the girls—my folks were in Florida, and hers were at their lake house. So it was just Jess there to watch Nina and Ella while I took Renée to the hospital. So I was alone. Totally alone. Pacing that hallway, trying not to panic. But I—I knew. I knew something was wrong. It all happened so fast—one second she was fine, the next she was…bleeding, having these crazy contractions. Twenty-six weeks, she was. Too soon, and we both knew it. I knew, I fucking knew something was seriously wrong, and nobody was telling me anything. The more time that passed the more I just knew in my fucking guts that it was wrong, all wrong. Eventually, I just…snapped. Just like Jesse did, only there wasn’t anyone to hold me back. There was one security guard, but he was this fat old dude, and he didn’t stand a chance. I shoved him through the fucking wall, literally. I shoved my way into the OR, and she was…” He blinks hard, coughs, clears his throat, keeps going. “There were these blue sheets covering her—the doctors, surgeons, nurses. Blood everywhere. She was opened up, and I—I fuck—I fucking saw. Saw her opened up, bleeding out, trying to save her and the baby. They couldn’t put her under—they had to do an emergency C-section, and she was awake, and alone. They were trying to save her, and the baby, but they—they couldn’t. And she knew it. And she was fucking alone.”

  “Good god, James.”

  He goes on, as if he didn’t hear me. “I grabbed her hand, and she looked at me, and I knew she knew. It was in her eyes. ‘Take care of the girls.’” He whispers this. The way she probably did. “I couldn’t say a damn thing, I was crying so hard. It’s okay, she said. It’s going to be okay. Take care of the girls.” A long pause. “‘Don’t stay alone forever, Jamie.’ She squeezed my hand so fucking hard when she said that. ‘Promise me, Jamie. Promise me you’ll find someone to take care of you.’”

  I’m crying, because there’s no other logical response.

  “I promised her.” He clears his throat, dashes a wrist against his eyes. “But until now, I had no concept of what it meant to be able to actually keep that promise. I made the promise in the moment, and it’s stuck with me, but…how do you do that? I couldn’t figure it out. I’m still working on it.”

  What do I say? I just hold his hand tightly, and lean my head against his shoulder.

  He glances down at me. “Doc Rich says I have PTSD from it. That people often go untreated, because there’s this idea that only combat veterans, or people who go through, like, something like 9/11, or whatever, can get PTSD. But anything super traumatic can cause it, and it’s a spectrum, you know? Varying degrees of severity and it shows up in different ways with each individual.”

  “Makes sense,” I say.

  “So, it’s not something I’m going to just get over.”

  I look up at him. “Of course not. I don’t expect that.”

  He lets out a breath, staring out over the field again. “I just want you to understand that I’m working on it. That I…I’m working on moving on. On being a better father to Nina and Ella—more present, more involved, more…how did Doc Rich put it? More emotionally available to them.” He fiddles with the barbed wire, rubbing the pad of his thumb over one of the barbs. “And for you. I want…us. I want you—not just sex, but life with you. I want to love you.”

  I feel my heart swell. “James…” I pull him around to face me.

  I have a million things to say, but they’re all jumbled and tangled and stuck behind the lump in my throat. And sometimes, the only thing to say is nothing—the only way to say what you need to say is with a kiss.

  So, I kiss him.

  And kiss him.

  And kiss him.

  Until we’re both breathless and I’m gasping and he’s rumbling in his chest, breathing hard and staring down at me with awe in his eyes. “Jesus, Nova.”

  I smile against his lips. “Now you know how you make me feel when you kiss me like that.”

  “I got one more thing I need to say. And it may come out kind of…messy.”

  I cling to his shoulders and nod up at him. “Okay, I’m listening.”

  “You’re not going to have to compete with her ghost, Nova. I’m gonna love you, and it’s…it’s a different kind of love. I don’t love you the same way I loved Renée. Don’t mean it’s…less, or not as strong, or…or not as real or whatever. Just that it’s…different. You’re you, and the way we are together is just a whole different thing than the way she and I were. So…you’re not competing. I’m not comparing. It’s like…well, at the risk of sounding like a typical construction dude, you’re a hammer and she was a screwdriver. Different tools, and you can’t compare them to each other. They’re different.”

  “Thank you for saying that,” I whisper. “I needed to know that.”

  “I needed you to know that.” He brushes my lips with his thumb. “You’re you, exactly you—and I’m in love with you. You make me feel like a kid again, sometimes. Like I just fuckin’ want you so bad it feels crazy. A good kind of crazy.”

  I smile up at him, a mischievous grin. “How about you be the hammer, and I’ll be a nail, and you can pound me?”

  He cackles. “God, Nova. Only you could make a dirty joke out of that.”

  I rub my hands over his broad hard chest. “Who was joking?”

  He doesn’t say anything—just stares down at me for a moment, and then hauls me into a fast walk back toward his house. We reach his front door, and he’s unlocking it, but pauses in the act of turning the key.

  I glance at him. “What’s the issue?”

  He palms the back of his neck. “The, um…the condoms are at your house. I don’t have any here.”

  I laugh. “Then I guess we go to my house.”

  We make the drive in record time—I wouldn’t say he drove recklessly, but this was an occasion when it was fortunate that he knew the back roads as well as he did.

  Finally, finally—we’re standing in my kitchen, closing the door behind us, and James is gazing down at me.

  I reach for him. “James?”

  He rubs that thumb over my lips again. “Nova?”

  “I have one quick, random question for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “We all call you James, exclusively, but I heard Jesse call you Jamie once, and you said, ‘I’m your uncle Jamie’ to little baby Renée.” I pause, and try to put this tactfully. “Is that a nickname you don’t go by anymore?”

  He considers his response for a moment. “Growing up, I was Jim to my parents, which I hated, and Jimmy at school, which I hated even more.”

  I frown, make a disgusted face. “God, no. You’re not a Jim or a Jimmy.”

  He laughs. “That’s how I feel. In junior high, I tried to get people to just call me Bod, which kind of stuck, and I refused to answer my parents until they stopped calling me anything except James, which is how I sort of ended up as James to pretty much everyone, and that’s the name I generally prefer. I absolutely hate being called Jim or Jimmy. Makes me feel like I’m in third grade again, dressing out in pads for the first time, getting yelled at by my dad to quit bitching about my sprained ankle and play fucking football like a goddamn man.”

  I wince in sympathy. “That happened?”

  He nods. “Oh yeah. He was a real hard-ass.” He laughs. “Well, Renée is the one who started calling me Jamie.”

  I scoff. “All roads lead back to her, huh?”

  He nods seriously. “Yep, pretty much.” He rolls a shoulder. “She knew I hated short versions and nicknames, but she felt like calling me James was too formal, as she put it. She actually tried Jamesy for a while.”

  I cackle. “Jamesy?”

  He laughs, nodding. “That morphed into Jamie, and that’s all she called me after that. Jess used to use it sometimes.” He goes serious. “Haven’t been called that since she passed, though.”

  “James it is, then.”

  He scratches the back of his head. “I actually considered going by Jamie professionally, but she nixed that idea.”

  “I think she was right. James is professional, Jamie is personal.”

  He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “I’ve been thinking about that lately, as a matter of fact. This whole therapy thing, moving on—rebuilding myself, in some ways…I was thinking it may be time to change it up. Go by something other than James to those close to me. It’s why I used Jamie with baby Renée. I want to be Uncle Jamie to her.”

  I pass my hand through his hair, thinking. “I don’t know. To me, you’re just…James.”

  He leans down, kisses me. “I actually like that.” He frowns in thought. “It feels like…I’m not sure how to put it. The way you say it, it feels kind of like a mental or emotional version of an affectionate caress.”

  I cup his cheek, rub his cheekbone, and scratch my fingers through his beard. “Like that?”

  He breathes out softly, eyes shuddering closed at my touch, nuzzling his cheek into my hand. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “A lot like that.”

  I whisper a laugh. “Like a little puppy,” I say, grinning as I caress his face and beard. “If you had a tail, it’d be wagging, I bet.”

  His eyes flick open, suddenly on fire. “Oh, something’s wagging all right, it’s just not a tail.”

  I lift up, touch my lips gently to his in a feather-soft, whisper-quick kiss. “Take me to bed and make love to me, Jamie.”

  His only answer is to pull me by the hand down the hallway to my room. He leads me into the center of my bedroom and stares down at me, and I feel him weighing something.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “I want to ask you for something, but I don’t want to seem…shallow, or…greedy. Not sure how to put it.”

  I peel his shirt off, toss it aside, and roam his huge hard torso greedily. “Ask me for anything, James.”

  “I wish we could pick up where we left off, last time.” His eyes are wild and raging with need. “You, in that sexy lingerie.”

  The grin that slides across my face is pleased, eager, and amused. “Oh, but we can.”

  “Yeah?”

  I nod. “When I woke up this morning and got dressed for Jesse and Imogen’s wedding, I did so hoping you and I might find some time alone.”

  He arches an eyebrow, and I see eager hope in his expression—it’s adorable and erotic at the same time, somehow. “I woke up hoping the same thing.”

  I smile up at him, put all my desire, all my nascent and growing love, all my need, all my long-denied arousal into that smile. “So, I guess you might say I have a little present for you.”

  I gesture at myself—I’m wearing a sleek green dress, one that’s tight enough to be sexy, but not so revealing as to be inappropriate for a wedding, especially one in a hospital maternity ward.

  “You just have to unwrap it.”

  Chapter 17

  I stand still and wait for him.

  I don’t have to wait long—he reaches for me, pulls me close. Bends over me, kisses me into incoherent stupidity in that way he has. And this time, while he’s kissing me, his fingers find the zipper tab at the back of my dress and tug it down from between my shoulder blades to the small of my back. My dress sags open, and I press my palms against his chest, round my shoulders to let the barely there straps slide down my arms. James helps, fingers grazing along my biceps, pulling the top of the dress away from my body.

  He steps away, breaks the kiss. Instead of letting the dress fall to the floor, he keeps hold of the bodice and slowly lowers it down my front—revealing my cleavage in slow increments, then my belly, then my hips, then my thighs; as he lowers the dress, he sinks to his knees, and his mouth plies my flesh with kisses on the way down. Each kiss leaves me more breathless than the one before.

  At long last, he’s on his knees in front of me, and I’m staring down at his love-struck eyes, blazing with desire and awe—for me. I caress his hair, stroke it back from his face. He kisses my belly, gazing up at me. His lips touch and dance and flicker to the side, to my hip bone, and his hands carve around my waist, fingertips clawing down my back. Another kiss, and another, just above the waistband of my underwear, from navel to hip bone, and then the other way. His hands follow the line of my spine upward, and his eyes remain on mine. I don’t dare look away, I cannot.

  I palm his cheeks, the nape of his neck. He finds the clasp of my bra, and I suck in a breath, hold it and wait. He leans back, and his eyes leave mine, but only to rake over my body, hungrily soaking up the vision of me in the white lace.

  “God, Nova—you are…so fucking beautiful.” His voice is a ragged whisper.

  “When you look at me that way…I feel beautiful.”

  “I feel like the luckiest man in the world, getting to see you like this.”

  “You’re about to get a whole lot luckier,” I say, smirking down at him.

  “Oh, I know. I just…I want to savor this.” He growls then, and opens my bra with a deft movement.

  I chuckle. “That was fast. I thought you were savoring?”

  He tugs my bra off and tosses it aside, feasting on the sight of my naked breasts. “I did. But I’m getting impatient. I’ll savor more later.” His hands grip my buttocks, fingers gently pinching the flesh, and then slide up my back and carve around my diaphragm, twist to cup and lift my breasts. “Plus, I’m hoping I’ll be able to convince you to wear that for me again.”

  I would laugh, but I’m too breathless from the fire of his touch. “James, baby—with the way you look at me, I’ll wear it all the time. Just try and stop me.” I gasp as he tweaks my nipples, sending a thrill of pleasure through me. “I’ll spend a fortune on lingerie if it means you’ll look at me that way.”

  “Babe, I’ll buy it for you, if it means I get to see you in lingerie. You are the sexiest woman in the world.”

  He uses his mouth for other, more worthy endeavors than talking, then his lips close over my nipple and his tongue flicks, and then he kisses the underside, around my wide pale areola. His hands, meanwhile, set fire to my skin on their journey down to my hips, where his fingers hook into the lace and continue downward, clawing down my thighs. My panties slide off, and I step out of them, and now I’m naked and his mouth laves kisses to my other breast, and he’s exploring my ass and the tender silk of my inner thighs. I bury my fingers in his hair and focus on breathing, sucking in the bliss of his kiss, his touch, his loving mouth and hands.

  Lips and tongue flick and slide down my belly, around my navel, and over my core. His tongue flits down my seam and I need to breathe, need to gasp, but I can’t. I have no breath and no capacity to remember how. I am nothing but the wild explosion of sensation as he parts my flesh with his tongue, and then drags a single thick finger over me and slides it into me and smears my clit with my juices, and then delves back in, curling to find it wet and hot and clenching already. His tongue circles and swipes, flicks and licks. I arch my back and push my hips forward, shamelessly begging more of this, whispering yes, yes—don’t stop, please, in a rhythmic chant.