run my hands up and down her back, and she sighs and moans with every touch. She loves to be touched. She responds to each sweep of my fingers, each press of my palms.
As she wraps her legs around me, hooking her ankles over my ass, I let myself forget that we’re not a couple.
This will all end very soon.
But right now, it feels like we won’t ever stop.
Later, when she’s sound asleep in my arms, I play out scenarios in my mind. I imagine possibilities.
Maybe I’m stupid for not seeing this coming. I should have considered this kind of trouble before we started working our way through the list. But jumping through all those hoops with her, watching her take chances, push herself, surprise herself . . .
It’s like reading a great book for the first time.
Or the fifth.
You don’t want to put it down. You just want to keep turning the pages, to discover its secrets, to see if it’s still as good as you remember—and it always is.
Ruby is the book I want to keep reading, the person I want to know, inside and out.
I park my hands behind my head, stare at the ceiling in the dark, questions flickering before my eyes.
But they all start and end with bridges I don’t know how to cross. I have a plan, a path, and I’m too far down that road to turn back now.
I’ve resigned myself to the list. Just the list.
And then I’ll let her go.
19
Ruby
Must draw cartoon pies and adorable animals eating said pies.
Must not draw Jesse’s face or Jesse’s hands.
But those hands . . .
My God, he sets my skin on fire with those hands.
I think I’m in love with them.
For a few minutes, I give in, sketching his fingers, recalling their shape, their length, their feel.
The way he skims them over me.
How my skin sizzles and my heart trembles.
I draw and I draw and I draw.
I sit back in my chair, brush the loose strands of hair from my face, and study the sketch.
A man holding an orange and the words squeeze the day.
I smile. It’s 100 percent not workable for the menus at Sweetie Pies, but maybe I needed to get it out of my system.
And maybe I need to get this one out too.
I draw a quick sketch of a cartoon figure woman tossing a heart at a man and saying take it.
Yes, Jesse. You make me want to squeeze all the days, throw my heart at you, draw you all day long.
You’re a muse.
And that’s not what I need since you’re leaving.
And I have menus—freaking menus—to illustrate.
Sweetie Pies relies on me for my drawings, and I can’t let my parents down.
Must focus.
Focus.
I give myself a continuous mental pep talk, but it still takes me nearly two hours to finish the new illustrations for the fall menus and send them to the printer. I’m too distracted. Not only by Jesse’s many sketchable parts, but by the man himself, tromping around in my bedroom, pawing through my drawers, packing God only knows what for our trip.
I made sure to remove every pair of granny panties from my lingerie drawer before he started this morning—he doesn’t need to see those or imagine what I look like in them—but there are other embarrassing things in there.
My collection of unicorn shirts, for example.
Growing up, I dearly loved unicorns, and I still do, but at some point, unicorns tees became a Thing People Give Me, and now I have literally two dozen shirts showcasing magical one-horned horses, all of them silly, but some more ridiculous than others.
“Why have I never seen you in this?” Jesse asks as I’m uploading the new card designs to my Etsy shop.
I turn to see him in the door to my bedroom, holding up a blue T-shirt with a pair of unicorns doing the nasty on the front. “Um, because it’s obscene?”
“It’s unicorn sex,” he says with a snort. “It’s amazing. And magical.”
I arch a brow. “Tell that to my mother. Gigi has one too. She wore it to work under her apron once. Mom almost had a stroke.”
“Your mom could stand to loosen up a little,” he says, folding the tee. “And this is definitely coming with us. I want to try this position with you. In the woods. While you’re wearing nothing but rainbow glitter.”
I laugh and blush. Images flash in my mind. Him. Me. Sex in the great outdoors.
And my nipples are hard. Again. “Stop. I’m having enough trouble