Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(69)

“No, no. This isn’t working. I need to get a better version for the kind of stuff you’re going to need it to do—fuck.” He forcefully ejects the CD and leans back in his chair, chucking the CD into the trash.

“Hey, I was playing with that.”

“It’s not going to work for you.” He leans his head back, his throat’s exposed, his T-shirt’s riding up again, and that’s the hotness, but also, this is the first time I’ve ever seen him really frustrated, or kind of angry.

It’s a little sweet, if you ignore that he’s indulging in man pain on my behalf, and I’m just fine.

“So we’ll try another version. Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that.”

“But this is your Rome.” He says this to the ceiling.

“Okay.”

“So it needs to get built faster.”

He rubs one of his hands in circles over his heart, and it bunches up his T-shirt even more and, God help me, I see his belly button.

Seeing someone’s belly button is like being next door to seeing them naked. I don’t know why. It just is. “So do you run?”

He leans up to look at me. “I do. Why do you ask?”

“Your shirt?” The pink shirt that will feature in all of my brand-new fantasies.

He looks down as if to remind himself that he’s half-undressed in my office. “Oh yeah. This run was a couple of years ago.”

“Did you run it for someone?” My friend Neil ran a lot of prostate-cancer races for his dad, and I always liked to watch the races and see the names of people the runners loved and were running for.

“My mom.”

I just wait because the way he said that makes my gut sink.

“It was the last race she watched me run. She had recently made the decision to discontinue treatment. I was so angry about that, I wanted her to keep fighting, she was still so young, and I knew it had been awful, but I just couldn’t hear her. I had this really fucked-up fight with her about it, punched the wall, and I’d never punched a wall.” He rubs his left hand absently and I think his scar.

It’s one of those kissable scars, then. One of those you want to kiss and make it better even after everything’s all healed up.

“I ran the race to try to convince her to start up treatment again. I thought that seeing all the runners, runners she’d met over the years, the family members and the survivors, would remind her to fight. She cheered, just like usual. She mingled at the big party afterward, even though I knew she was tired. Sometime at the end of that race I figured out that she wasn’t getting inspired to fight, she was saying good-bye to the fight. To her friends. To the others who had fought alongside her.”

“To you?”

“Yeah, to me. To the part of me that needed her to stay with me forever just because she was my mom and that’s what she’s supposed to do. Even if she couldn’t fight for herself anymore, she was supposed to fight for me.”

I lean over and grab his hand. The wall-punching one. I count the little white dots where the suture knots were. “Eleven stitches.”

“Thirteen, actually.”

“I guess the wall won.”

He breathes out something like a laugh. “I guess so.”

I put my face against his hand, and he lets me, lets me hold his hand up, his scarred knuckles against my lips. Then I kiss his knuckles, and he makes a fist into my palm where I am holding his hand, so I kiss the scar again.

I look at him, watching me, and put my finger on his knuckles. “Right here, twice.”

“Jenny …” he starts.

“Is that why you keep trying with me?” I interrupt, my heart beating around in a knotted tangle of feelings. “Because you want me to fight?”

He looks at me for what seems like a really long time. “Yes. I want you to fight. Maybe I want you to fight, some, for me. So I can see that I can inspire someone to. Especially someone as great as you are. I know we’re not talking about this, but we have to talk about it, even if we don’t talk about it, how I feel means I have to do the right thing and let you fight with someone else.” He lets me take that in, take in how hard this is for him, too.

He keeps his gaze steady. “I thought you were great, first. Also, great is pretty much an understatement, and some of the things I think about you are pretty shallow.”

“Shallow?”

“Yeah, the package that all the great parts are wrapped up in, shallow.”

“Oh.”

He smiles and rubs his hand over his face. “It’s been confusing, what I want for you. Figuring out what you might want for yourself. Wanting—”

“We’re not talking about that yet.”