One broken only by P.J. speaking his name.
He jerked his head up, pulling his gaze from where it had drifted—from the gather of Jo’s shirt between her breasts. P.J. had an eyebrow cocked as she tried to catch him in the rearview mirror.
“Huh?”
P.J. chuckled, and the knowing cast to it made his neck feel hot. “I said, the stores are probably still open. Do you want to stop and see if you can take care of your phone?”
His… phone. Right. How had he forgotten about his phone?
Without really thinking about it, he drew his arm back, draping it over his lap as he rubbed his other hand over his face. “Um. Yeah. Actually. That would be great.” He happened to have the shattered remains of the thing in his backpack anyway. He’d had them there for a week and a half, just in case he ever got around to reminding someone they’d promised to take him, but the moment had never seemed right.
He hadn’t been ready to find out what messages he’d missed. Or, more likely, what he hadn’t.
“If nobody else minds,” he added after a second’s thought.
“I’ve got nowhere else to be,” Jared said.
Jo and Kim both made indifferent noises, but Jo had curled into herself while they’d been talking. No more easy, barely conscious press of her knee against his leg. She wasn’t looking at him either, and her jaw had gone hard, and oh no. They weren’t doing that again.
The car started up, and Adam didn’t care if Kim or Jared or anyone could see. Eyes trained forward, breath tight, he reached out in the darkness and took her hand. She went to pull away, but he held on, intertwining their fingers and squeezing her palm, trying to say all the things he couldn’t right then. All the things he didn’t know how to put into words, about how she was beautiful and tough and interesting, and about how he wanted inside her walls. Under her clothes and inside her body and into her trust. Her mind.
But at the moment, his personal life was a mess.
His stomach was a knot as they pulled up in front of a big electronics store. Jo withdrew her hand as they got out, and once they were inside, she gestured toward the rear of the store before heading off.
“I’ll find you?” he called after her.
“If I don’t find you first.”
The others all wandered away, too, leaving Adam to go in search of the cell phone counter. Fortunately, the woman manning it spoke fluent English. She frowned at his declaration that he’d dropped it, but he had insurance on the thing, and with only a little bit of bitchface, she got to work on getting him another one.
In the meantime, he leaned against the glass and gazed around, trying not to think about what might or might not have come in while he’d been phoneless. He could have checked online if he’d really wanted to, but he hadn’t. There was no more putting it off now.
The lady was just handing him the new phone when Jo picked her way over to him, and the timing seemed a little too convenient. “So?” she asked, disinterested in tone, but the way she gazed off into the distance was pointed.
He braced his elbows against the counter and held the thing out to her with the boot-up screen displayed.
Mirroring his posture, she tapped the blunt, short tips of her nails against the glass. He wanted to reach out and still them. Wanted to pull that lip ring out from between her teeth with his mouth. Instead, he stared at the screen as it finished up its sequence. Searched for signal.
It buzzed in his hands, and he kept it angled so she could see as he scrolled through the list of texts he’d missed. There were a bunch from the first day or two, before everyone had gotten the message that he was e-mail-only for a little while. His brothers and his friends from school.
The last one was from just a couple of days ago, though.
“It’s from Shannon.”
“Is that her name?”
“Yeah.” Had he really not ever told her that? He tapped the message with his thumb.
Got the day off for when you’re in Baltimore. See you soon!
The day? He’d booked out the whole weekend just to see her. Delayed his flight and extended the hotel stay. He’d explained all this, sent her an e-mail with the details, and she was… He didn’t know what she was doing.
It was like she wasn’t listening to him. Like she hadn’t been for a while.
But someone else was listening, was hearing this all loud and clear. Jo edged away from him, twisting to put her back to the counter, cracking her knuckles in front of herself and not meeting his eyes.
“That’s great. That you’ll get to see her. Right?”
A few short weeks ago, he would’ve said yes. It was fantastic.
But he wasn’t so lonely for home anymore. Not so willing to take what he could get—at least not from Shannon.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Her voice was tight. “When do you leave?”
“Next week.”
Finally—finally—she looked at him, but her eyes were as guarded as they had been when they’d first started this… whatever it was. “Well, I guess we’ll find out then.”
Chapter Seven
Living in the tropics without goddamn air-conditioning was for masochists.
Christ. Jo mopped her brow as she stormed into her room, tugging at the overshirt she’d just about sweated through on her walk back from the lab and dragging it over her head with a growl.
“Are we mad at the shirt now?”
Somehow managing not to have a coronary or jump five feet in the air, Jo jerked around to find Carol sitting at the head of her bed. Fuck. Jo turned and dropped her gaze, flinging her shirt onto the pile of laundry in the bottom of the closet.
“The shirt’s fine. The climate’s on notice, though.”
“Yeah, it’s rough.”
Carol was one to talk. She was in another one of her stupid, cute sundresses, her hair tied up and off her neck, the one fan in the room pointed right at her face.
Meanwhile, Jo was in a tank top and baggy shorts, sweating like a pig and feeling naked, and—
And Adam was leaving tomorrow. For almost a week. To go hang out with that bitch who wouldn’t even give him a straight answer or make time in her day for him. In air-conditioning. And Jo was going to sit here boiling alive and pretending not to care.
Whatever. God knew she had plenty of experience with that at least. Maybe not the boiling part, but the rest of it she’d been practicing her entire damn life.
If she were back in Chicago and feeling like this, she’d spend some quality time with her punching bag, but no. She was stuck here, and Adam’s send-off dinner was in an hour. Part of her wanted to say fuck it all and go hide in the lab for the rest of the night. Another part wanted to march over to his room and finally put this thing that was brewing between them out in the open. Fight it out or fuck it out.
But all of those options made her feel so cowardly she wanted to scream. She wasn’t avoiding her problems, and she wasn’t going to let someone turn her into the other woman. No way.
At the sound of movement behind her, Jo sighed and tried to collect herself. She shoved the damp flop of her hair off her forehead, frowning at the way the dye was starting to fade.
Then, out of nowhere, Carol asked, “Is it your arms?”
Jo’s skin went cold. “Excuse me?”
“Or your shoulders? That you don’t want anyone to see?”
“It’s…” What the hell was Jo supposed to say to that? Her insides squirmed, and she was about to tell Carol off. What right did she have to ask? Or to notice, even? So what if Jo always wore long sleeves? There wasn’t any law against it or anything. “No, I just…”
She faltered. Just what?
“It’s okay,” Carol said. “I’m not judging. I just figured, with it this hot, you must have a reason for wanting to dress like that.”
“Like what?” A lesbian? A tomboy? She turned to look over her shoulder at Carol, only to find her standing a couple of feet away, peering into her half of the closet in consideration.
Carol shrugged. “Like someone who likes to wear sleeves.”
Hesitating, Jo rubbed at her shoulder.
The thing was, Carol wasn’t wrong. Jo’s stomach dropped, remembering the time her father had taken her to the university that once. She’d been in ninth grade, and her rebellion of the week had been frilly tank tops and short shorts. She’d walked through the halls, past the other professors’ offices, and she’d felt the same way she did now.
Naked. Frivolous. Like she didn’t belong.
She’d done a complete one-eighty over the course of the next year. The harder her look, the boxier and more manly, the easier it had been to edge her way into the heavy engineering projects on the Science Olympiad team. The more the guys in the AP Chemistry class had let her into their fold.
She still wasn’t afraid of wearing a corset top out to a bar, but never with the people from her department. Never with anyone she’d have to interact with professionally the next day.
“Shoulders,” she admitted quietly. That had seemed to be the line.
Carol nodded. She reached into the closet to grab Jo’s towel off the hook. Before Jo could ask, she pushed the terry cloth into Jo’s hands. “Go. Shower or clean up or whatever. I’ll pick out something for you for tonight.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Of course I don’t. But I want to.” She cast a quick glance Jo’s way. “Girls help other girls out. And I figured with Adam taking off and all… maybe you’d want to look a little extra nice.”
Carol had clearly chosen her words carefully. Nothing in it to insinuate that Jo didn’t look nice in general—although Jo would be the first to say she didn’t. The only implication was the one about her and Adam, and…
And it wasn’t as if Jo could really deny it. Not after the way they’d acted on the trip to the rain forest.
She took the towel and swallowed hard. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Grabbing her toiletry case, Jo turned and made her way out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom, which was blessedly empty. She seemed to be on a roll with not being too much of a bitch today, so she called out, “Anybody mind if I get in the shower?”
Nobody spoke up, so Jo stepped inside and locked the door behind her. She stripped, unlacing her boots and piling her clothes atop them before starting the water, keeping it lukewarm. The spray felt good on her overheated skin as she stepped in, the soap that followed even better. Rinsing off, she turned the temperature as cold as it went and braced her hands against the tile as she let it wash over her.
Her nipples hardened, making the barbell running through the left one stand out all the more. She gave it a little tweak between her forefinger and thumb and felt it in her cunt, squeezing her eyes shut and twisting her neck to the side to suck in a greedy lungful of air through her mouth. She dropped her hand away from her flesh. Opened her eyes to cast a glance down her frame.
She’d never really given a good goddamn about what men might think of the things she’d done to her body, the metal and ink she’d put there to make it feel like her own. But it was hard not to wonder how Adam might react. So many of her assumptions about him had been wrong, but he still gave off such a vanilla vibe. If he saw her like this, would he be aroused or repulsed?
She rolled her eyes at herself as she turned off the water. The boy had seen her neck and her face, and he hadn’t run yet. The rest of it couldn’t come as too much of a surprise.
She really, really hoped he’d be aroused.
The heat in the air crept back in as she dried herself off, humidity making a mist cling to the medicine cabinet mirror. She swiped at the surface until she could see her own reflection. Flushed skin and big, dark eyes and hair dripping into her face.
She dug into her bag for her hair goop and scooped some out with her fingers. She combed it through the wet strands, then pushed the ends behind her ears. Tilting her head to one side and then the other, she looked deeper. Something in her chest thrummed.
There probably wasn’t much point to this. She burrowed deeper into her kit all the same, until she got her hands around the little pack she’d buried in there without exactly knowing why. Makeup wasn’t part of her usual routine, and all she really knew how to do with it was get ready for a club—or Halloween, not that there was much difference between the two in how she dressed. She could do this, though. Look normal. A little extra nice, just in case.
Wiping the mirror down whenever it got too fogged up for her to see, she dabbed concealer under her eyes and blended in foundation. A tiny bit of eyeliner and lip gloss.
When she stepped back to get the full effect, her shoulders fell. She looked ridiculous. Not strong and powerful the way she did with crimson lips and smoldering eyes. Not normal like she did with nothing at all. She felt like a doll. And now Carol was going to play dress-up with her.
What was she doing?
Resisting the urge to just wash it all off, she wrapped her towel around her chest and zipped her bag, hauling it along with her as she stormed to her room. If Carol tried to put her in a dress, she’d just say no. Wear the same plain shit she wore every day, and if anybody didn’t like it, they could kiss her ass.
At her and Carol’s door, Jo stopped. Carol was sitting on her own bed again, her earbuds in, her attention seemingly on whatever she was reading, but her posture was too stiff. She was waiting. Steeling herself for the worst, Jo turned to her own bed, and…
And it really wasn’t so bad.
It was her own damn skirt—the only one she’d brought. Knee length and army green with about a million pockets. And laid with it, one of Carol’s tops. It was black, thank God, with short sleeves. A little flowy and gauzy, but over one of Jo’s typical undershirts, it’d be okay.
“Just a suggestion,” Carol said.
Jo’s throat didn’t quite know how to work. She flexed her jaw. “Thanks,” she managed.
“You’re welcome. I have some jewelry, too, if you want.”
“Nah.” She stepped closer to touch the fabric of the shirt. It was soft. “I have my own.”
She kept her back to Carol as she dressed, tugging on her underwear before dropping the towel and strapping on one of her few bras that was meant for more than keeping her boobs from bouncing and her piercing from showing. She dressed without thinking too hard about what she was doing, only noticing once she was done that Carol’d left out some sandals, too. They were strappy and black with a barely there heel. Jo stared at them for a long minute.
“You’d be a hell of a lot cooler.”
Carol wasn’t wrong. Jo stepped into them. They were a little snug, but not too bad. Before turning to face the mirror attached to the back of their door, she opened the bottom drawer of her dresser, shoving aside the rest of the stuff she’d stowed in there until she came up with the silk change purse. She only owned two necklaces, and one of them was a black studded choker. The other, though, was a delicate silver chain with a small oval locket.
Taking care not to twist the links, she extricated it. Brought it up to her throat and fastened the clasp at the nape of her neck. The metal sat cool against the space between her collarbones, and she ran her thumb over the locket’s hinge before squeezing it once.
Before she stood and turned around, she pulled in a long, slow breath. Then she opened her eyes and looked.
And there in the mirror was… her. Only a little extra nice. A little more skin.
A few more memories pressed against the center of her ribs.