Where We Left Off (Phoenix Falls Series Book 1)
Where We Left Off: Chapter 21

When Mitch and my mom leave, I don’t know what the protocol is going to be with Tate so I choose to go about my day as usual. It involves preparing food, eating food, and then reading until my next meal. After a while I realise that I’m behaving like a self-imposed inmate so I decide to do something that I haven’t had the confidence to do on my own in a long time. I put my book down, slunk out of my quilt fortress, and I pull open a drawer. Once I have the necessary items, I change out of my in-the-house clothes and slip into the more fitted, purposeful pieces. I go downstairs, drink half a glass of water, and then head outside, locking the door and slipping the key into the pocket on the side of my leggings.

And then I start to run.

It’s really more of a jog because I don’t want to burden my lungs, but it’s fast enough to get my heart-beat racing. I focus on the muscles in my legs and on controlling my inhalations and exhalations, trying to distract myself from the heavy burn that quickly settles in my chest. I count the houses on the street and then I count each truck that I run past, segmenting them in my mind by make.

The one thing that I didn’t count on was deciding where to run to, but my feet seemed to find their way there all on their own.

I have been jogging for a while with a couple of walk breaks in between, and now I’m standing outside of my mom’s soon-to-be-former home. My soon-to-be-former home. I can’t see any of Mitch’s changes from the outside so I walk up the driveway with the nervousness of an intruder and peer in through the window at the front. I feel a cold, sharp sensation spread across my chest, but it isn’t anything serious – it’s just because it looks different in there. It matches up to the photographs my mom had been leafing through the night that she told me that we would be moving in with Mitch. It looks nice in there, but it doesn’t look like my home.

I don’t know if it ever did really.

I walk down the driveway and I count how many steps it takes to get to the bottom of it from the porch. It’s less than I expected. Then I stop my stalling and bite the bullet. I look up at Tate’s former home.

It’s basically the mirror of my mom’s. They aren’t big houses but they have all of the important bits. They look kind of quaint and it gives me a funny feeling near my heart. Nostalgia. I can’t believe that, after three years of not seeing Tate, I am now feeling nostalgia. How can he still evoke these feelings in me? I thought that our bond had been severed.

It’s after dinnertime when I dawdle back to Mitch’s place, so the air is extra cold and it’s getting dark enough for people to switch on their Christmas lights. I mull over what Tate must have done in the time between him leaving and then re-entering my life. Obviously he lived with his mom and step-dad for a bit. Then, at some point before he could legally live on his own, he lived with his dad. Where did he go to school? Technically, once he was back with Mitch, he could have come back to his former high school with me. Why didn’t he?

I startle when I reach the curb in front of Mitch’s driveway. Tate is sat on the step in front of the door just beneath the porch, with his elbows resting atop his knees, and he’s looking down at his open palms. He’s wearing denim jeans with a biker jacket and he has a large box packed in a white grocery bag on the floor to his left. On his right sits a small bouquet of roses.

He notices me when I’m halfway up the drive. His head snaps upright, and then he picks up the bag and the flowers as he stands, his eyes never leaving mine. I don’t know what the protocol is for this moment because I don’t even know what this moment is, so I walk up the porch until I’m right next to him – my shoulder to his chest – and I fish the key out of my pocket.

“I thought you had a key,” I say as I slide my key into the lock, twist, and pull down the door handle. I open the door and step inside, and then I look back at Tate over my shoulder to silently invite him in. He has to walk in side-ways to accommodate the box bagged up in his hand and – let’s be honest – his giant shoulders.

“I didn’t want to come inside whilst you weren’t home. This place is more yours than mine,” he replies. He closes the door with a backwards push from his deltoid and then he starts following me into the kitchen. I feel weirdly wired. I’m nervous because I don’t really know what’s going to happen whilst our parents aren’t here, but I’m excited too, which makes me embarrassed for myself, because I’m not sure if I’m being strong and self-indulgent or simply weak-willed.

I also can’t help the liquid heat that swirls in my stomach when I realise that Tate didn’t deny still having access to a key. I kind of thought that Mitch might have confiscated it from him, so the knowledge that he can freely enter this house whenever he wants is alarming – but, for some sick and twisted reason, I like it.

Tate sets the bags on the table and he moves around me to flip the switches on the heating dashboard, then opening a cupboard and grabbing a vase. He walks to the sink and fills it with a quick, long spurt of water, before setting it in the centre of the table. He tears the cellophane off the roses and pours the feed sachet that falls from between the stems into the water. Once he pulls open a drawer he mass-snips the bottoms of the stems with a pair of medium-sized handheld shears, and then he places the roses in the water. He crumples the cellophane in his hands and takes it to the outside bin, not looking at me the entire time.

I swallow dryly and, in my brief reprieve from his presence, I take the opportunity to literally smell the roses. They are a dark wine red colour and the petals are still mainly tightly compacted together in puckered buds, having not yet blossomed. I feel a warm, slightly painful constriction in my chest as I think about Tate buying these for my benefit, for no other reason than the fact that roses are beautiful.

No, it’s more than that. Roses are romantic.

“Are you running again?” Tate asks as he re-enters the kitchen. He’s being suspiciously normal, which I find disturbing. He peels the bag down over the brown box and I have a sneaky feeling that whatever is inside it is there for me. That warm sensation in my chest from earlier does a resurge but I try to keep my expression neutral, so as not to transmit how shamefully deeply my body enjoys this affection. When I don’t respond Tate continues talking. “I always thought that you would join the track team but you never did the try-outs, even though you had the stamina for it. I like your outfit by the way,” he says, looking up at me from beneath long black lashes, and a dimple flashes on his cheek when he crooks me a small smile.

The micro-biomes in my tummy are flustering. It’s hell in there. A fire has broken loose and every bit of my body is partaking in running, screaming chaos. I’m wearing leggings that are no doubt sucked six inches deep in my ass, and I have unzipped my waterproof jacket to unveil my halter-neck top that is damp with sweat, making it fit snug.

I cross my arms over my chest. I am deeply at war with myself right now. It’s a cross-fire between indulge and have some pride. The irony is that whilst I’m beating myself down, for some reason it feels like Tate is the person lifting me back up.

Tate comes around to my side of the table and rests against it, spreading his legs apart and holding himself up with his palms flat on the surface behind him. If I take two steps forward I will be nestled right against the protruding muscle of his-

“Tell me what you’re thinking, River.”

I scramble for whatever was in my brain before I started thinking about his… body. I’m not going to lie, it takes a few seconds.

I think that maybe some female honesty will repulse him enough to high-tail and leave me to my sexual frustration in peace, so I say, “I don’t know how to talk to you anymore. I don’t really want to talk to you anymore. But when I do start talking to you, I feel like I’m talking to the old you, and that makes it easier. But then that makes it harder, because I shouldn’t want to talk to you. You became a really unforgiveable person, and I don’t know if I want to let that go, even if you were only sixteen.”

To his credit, Tate looks as though he is trying to understand what I’m saying. His brow is downturned in contemplative irritation and his shoulders look a little tenser than they were a minute ago. He pushes off the table, somehow closing the little gap between our bodies with the sheer size of himself, and he gently clasps my shoulders in hot engulfing palms. He stoops a little so that I can look at him from a more even level. He speaks hushed but hoarse, and the words scrape down my sternum.

“What the hell are you talking about, River?”

I narrow my eyes on him. It’s fascinating how things that are detrimental in one person’s life can be completely forgotten in another’s. Maybe he literally doesn’t remember. To be honest, if he doesn’t, I’m not going to remind him, so I shake my head to say forget about it but he isn’t giving up that easy.

“Seriously, River, I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you think that I ever wanted to hurt you, there’s been some misunderstanding. It fucked me up when things ended like they did. If I could go back and wipe that day out of our lives so that things could have stayed the way they were, I would. Trust me, I would River.”

His death grip on my shoulders is now crushing me into his torso. He doesn’t seem to mind my post-run sweat rubbing into his clean cotton shirt so I lean in further, and he instantly notices. His eyes hold a dark glint for one long moment and then he brushes my jacket from my shoulders, down my arms until it hits the floor. He doesn’t let his eyes flick to my body – instead, they hold onto mine the entire time.

“I want to pick up where we left off,” he finishes. His hands slide into mine and he tugs them so that my arms are wrapped around his waist. Then he moves his own back to my collarbones, slowly guiding them until they are wrapped around both sides of my neck.

“Will you strangle me if I say no?” I ask breathlessly.

His eyes widen momentarily and then he drops his head to my shoulder, letting out a gorgeous, exhilarating laugh. When he lifts his head back up, I’m dazzled by the playful yet obedient look in his eyes. “Out of the two of us, you know that it would be you doing the strangling,” he teases, and I realise that he’s backing me up out of the room. My heart drops to my stomach and starts racing too quickly. Now? I think to myself. Are we doing this now?

He’s walking me backwards up the stairs so it seems likely and I’m panicking. But worse than that, after everything that he just said, I think that I made a mistake – and I’m not talking about essentially asking him over to ravish me whilst I’m unsupervised. I’m talking about three years ago. I think that there’s a huge gigantic missing puzzle piece that is spinning tauntingly on its sharp little edge, just out of reach. Then again, I’ll never know if that’s true, so it makes me think that I should never be able to trust him again. But I do. Maybe it’s animal intuition, or maybe I’m just a moron. Maybe both. But I do trust him, and I hate myself for it.

My face must be betraying the secret nature of my inner thoughts because once we’re on the second floor landing Tate asks me, “Why are you hyperventilating?” Then, just as he presses me into a wooden door panel and says, “The water should be hot in about five minutes,” I blurt out at the exact same moment, “I’m not ready to have sex with you yet.”

This is the moment when I realise that my back is up against the bathroom door and he has manoeuvred me here because he wants me to shower – i.e. he is not trying to fuck me in the first five minutes of our parents not being here.

He pins me with a look so startled that it borders on disturbed. “What did you say?” he asks, alarm managing to both raise and contort his brow. He looks shocked and distressed. Maybe he should be. I definitely am.

I quickly attempt to deflect. I languidly waft my hand in front of my face and make a woozy oof sound. “I think I feel a little bit faint. It must be my asthma.” I do a light wobble.

His eyes are sharp but slightly hooded as he watches me. He can read my mind, and I know it. He’s thinking about the fact that all I think about when I’m near him is the possibility of us getting it on. Or do I mean in? I don’t know why this doesn’t make him happy – I think it would for any other straight man with a librarian fetish. Instead he looks completely confused.

“Why are you trying to make this about sex?” he asks, his eyes glinting like knives.

“That’s why you’re here,” I say, confused. The duh is implied.

His eyes narrow so severely that for a moment I feel a shiver of animal chill slithering down my spine. It’s so much easier to enjoy him when he’s like this because I can see the bad in him, and it helps me detach from all of his annoying good.

“That is not why I’m here,” he replies gruffly. I feel the pane behind me give way, and I realise that he has opened the door and is crowding us into the bathroom. He yanks the bathroom cupboard open to grab a towel and he throws it on the counter above the sink. Then he leans us into the bath panel so that he can whip the tap around and get the hot water running. His eyes move back down to me where he does a quick sweep of my torso and then he turns me around and moves us to the centre of the room again, so that we’re facing the vanity mirror.

He rests his chin on my exposed shoulder and I gasp when his stubble stabs into my skin. Our eyes are locked onto one another’s reflections.

“You want to know how much that’s not why I’m here?” he asks, snaking one forearm around my shoulders and the other around my stomach. He keeps still for a moment and then he suddenly grips my body to his so firmly that I almost pee myself. He drops his voice to a whisper and it runs down my neck like hot syrup. “I didn’t bring any condoms,” he murmurs. “And you better not have any condoms. So unless you want me to knock you up tonight, I’m going to need you to cut it out.”

My eyes flick down to my stomach, where his arm is shielding me tight, and when I look back up I see that Tate is looking there too. I’m sizzling dangerously down below because, whether I like it or not, I know Tate. As in, I know what he likes. And I know more than anything that his deepest fantasy involves getting a nice girl to say I do by a church altar and then pumping her pregnant for the rest of her life.

“I’m taking you out tonight,” he says, chin rubbing side to side, stubble grazing into my skin. “So you’re going to shower, and then you’re going to be ready for me at the door in an hour.” His eyes lift to mine and his hands roam the sides of my stomach as he adds on, “If you want to.”

I don’t want to want to, but my common sense is being drowned out by the sound of blood rushing to all of my important parts. “Two hours,” I say. Yes, I do hate myself.

“An hour and a half,” he replies.

I scowl and try to push his hands off me even though that’s the last thing that I really want, but it has the desired effect. He squeezes me tighter in his grip and relents with, “Okay, okay, two hours.”

I’m evil and my insides are overflowing with the pleasure of getting princess treatment from Tate Coleson. This is what I’ve been missing for the past three years: someone to spoil me rotten.

“Is that okay? You’re… you’re going to come out with me in two hours?” he asks, eyes aglow with anticipation in the mirror. Three years of pining will do that to a man.

I huff, because I’m trying to think of a way to say yes without saying yes, and then I almost choke because in the past ten seconds the room has turned as opaque as a hot spring with all of the steam.

I take my glasses off because they’ve clouded over, and Tate removes them from my hand before I can even protest. I reach to get them back but he holds them far too high over his head, releasing a tidal wave of that heady cedar man smell. When I turn around I see a sliver of the dark happy trail running down his caramel abdomen and straight into the band of his jeans, so naturally I forget how to breathe, let alone how to put up a good fight.

“Hostages,” he says teasingly, and the lenses glint down at me antagonistically.

“Fine,” I mumble and then I push him out of the door, mainly just so that I can dig my pervy claws into his rigid abdominals. Delicious.

I slam the door, keeping up my you’re the enemy pretence, but I feel my chest pick up the pace. Whether my brain likes it or not, in my biology Tate is ninety-nine percent forgiven – and for that, it wants its parting gift.

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