Floored - Karla Sorensen Page 0,49

her head.

Lia arched her hips into my palm while I emitted harsh puffs of air against her soft, soft lips.

She found her release just before I did, in the bend of her back and the way she pinched her eyes shut, the utter relief in the sigh she allowed me to taste from her mouth.

Relief.

To me, Lia felt like sweet relief.

By the time I groaned into her neck, and I fell like a great weight on top of her, I felt like I was in high school again. Our clothes were hardly even undone, yet the satisfaction spreading like warm caramel through my veins was absolutely brilliant.

For so long, the oblivion found in nameless women, the chasing of yet another goal, another benchmark that only meant something to me did nothing to ease the disquiet clawing at the inside of my rib cage.

But now, here, was peace. And I found that I didn't want to skip a moment of it.

Chapter Fifteen

Lia

Two weeks later

Molly: Can you tell your little strawberry that I am the favorite aunt? I feel like subliminal messaging is important right now, and I don't like the leg-up that Claire will get because of the twin thing.

Me: It is a strawberry right now. Good sleuthing.

Me: What about Isabel?

Molly: Isabel doesn't threaten me because I have a MUCH more maternal nature than she does. She'll be like... the cool scary aunt. Not the favorite aunt. It's an entirely different category.

Molly: PLUS, Isabel is visiting you in a few weeks. She'll get to plant her own subliminal messages before I get a chance.

Molly: I NEED YOUR HELP IN THIS, OKAY?

Me: I'll get right on that after I meet with Atwood. About to listen to her eviscerate my first draft.

Me: Are you home now? Didn't you just film something in ... Georgia? Somewhere south?

Molly: Tennessee. We did a piece on the Titans. If Noah got transferred there, I wouldn't be sad to live in Nashville. DON'T TELL LOGAN I SAID THAT.

Molly: He'd probably be more heartbroken to lose Noah from the Wolves than to have me move.

Lia: Oh, please. He would not.

Molly: I know. But he knows it's a reality we may have to face someday. Contracts expire. Athletes change teams.

Molly: Good luck in your meeting!!

My fingers itched to ask Molly about dating an athlete. Yes, we'd grown up with Logan, and yes, I knew all the ins and outs of his life, but that was my brother. Now I found myself in an entirely different position. Most nights, I was in Oxford in my cute little flat and my cute little bed, working on my paper in various places around the city. As I'd learned, the city limits housed ten different libraries, and each had a distinct mood. The Old Library at Oxford Union was my favorite, though. Something about the curved ceilings, lined with beams, the floral-shaped windows that allowed the light to stream in, and the pre-Raphaelite murals adorning the walls, I always felt just a little bit more connected to my material. Less distracted by ... well, by my entire existence.

Even the little strawberry seemed more well-behaved when I was in that building.

When I was curled up in the green leather chair that I'd claimed, I somehow managed not to think about the little piece of ever-changing fruit with its milestones and new body parts that slowly took shape.

I managed not to think about Jude and how we'd somehow slipped into a relationship with no label, the byproduct of whatever arbitrary rules we decided were acceptable. Chemistry had the wheel of that particular decision, considering it was hard for us to keep our hands off each other when we were alone. We hadn't slept together again, not since that first night, but everything else we'd done seemed to make that a friggin’ technicality at this point.

But I still wasn't sure how to balance it among everything else.

Or if I should even try. It was completely possible I was borrowing trouble at this point to try to force Jude to put a definition on what we were doing. Or what we weren't.

As I approached Atwood's office, it made me think about Charlotte Brontë, as I often did. Conventionality is not morality, she'd written in Jane Eyre, and it seemed like an especially appropriate quote for my situation with Jude.

Was it conventional? Hell to the no.

Very little about it was done “normally.” But what was normal anyway? My brain started spinning around that question, and I found myself pausing