whole body above Reese’s.
It seemed to go on a long time, and then Tenny collapsed onto him with a groan, splayed out and boneless. “Christ,” he huffed into Reese’s neck. “Oh, Christ, I can’t do this.” But a moment later he lifted his head and blearily sought Reese’s mouth with his own, a tired, clinging kiss, still touched with desperation.
Reese had the sense nothing had been solved, but maybe something had begun. A start in the right direction.
When Tenny pulled back, and he saw that his eyes were fever-bright, he thought Tenny must be thinking the same thing.
Forty
“Doing okay?” Carter asked, arm sliding around her shoulders.
“Yeah.” Leah leaned into his side and turned a smile up to him. His expression was worried again.
He’d been very attentive tonight – maybe too attentive, because he kept giving her these measuring looks like he was waiting for her to freak out.
They were more or less alone now, as alone as you could get in a crowded room full of bikers, old ladies, and club chicks, with music blasting and booze flowing. Aidan had been telling a story that involved lots of rude hand gestures and which caused Sam to continually cover her face in played-up embarrassment. It shouldn’t have felt intimate, looking up at Carter now, but the din created pockets of small, close quiet in the space between bodies.
She’d had a glass of wine – okay, two – and felt pleasantly warm. She knew almost everyone here, and she’d been talking with Ava most of the time, getting to know the rest of the old ladies better. She’d settled, nerves long forgotten, but he was concerned, and that was cute.
She reached up to touch his face, a light scrape of her nails down his jaw. “I promise I’m really fine. Why are you so worried?”
He shrugged, and glanced away, out across the shifting crowd of bodies. “Dunno. Guess I was just kinda – it was a lot, my first party.”
“But it’s not my first party,” she pointed out.
“No. You were nervous, though.”
“I was. I’m better now.”
He didn’t seem relieved to hear it.
“Are you okay?” she countered.
“Yeah.” He sipped his drink, Scotch by the smell. She hadn’t known he drank that, and wondered if Mercy had been the one to fix his drink.
“Carter.”
He turned back to her.
“What is it?”
“I–” He paused. Made a face. Then set his drink aside and reached for her hand. “We can’t really talk here.”
Bemused, she let him lift her to her feet and then lead her not to the front door, like she’d expected, but down the back hall to the dorms.
A few doors stood open, but more were closed. And there were sounds coming from beyond them.
She laughed, and couldn’t manage to make it sound easy. “I forget it was like orgy city around here on party nights.” She hadn’t actually forgotten, it was, just – one thing to know it, and another to hear it.
He glanced back over his shoulder with an apologetic glance. “Sorry.”
“Not like I didn’t expect it.”
But the mood had shifted, she could tell. Had slid into a tense space that had the potential to toss them one way or the other. All it would take was telling a dirty joke – or pulling her hand from his grasp.
She did neither. Followed him into a dorm room that, after he’d closed the door softly behind them, finally letting go of her hand, she realized was his. She’d seen the dorms before, unremarkable, but private, each with their own bathroom, and small, covered windows. Each with the same ugly orange carpet, but always with scrubbed surfaces and clean linen. Ghost didn’t tolerate slovenliness.
This room had signs of a longer-term habitation. A stack of folded t-shirts on top of the dresser. Personal effects on the nightstand: an empty glass, an alarm clock, a magazine. Several pair of sneakers sat lined up against the wall by the door, and a gym bag hung off the closet doorknob.
“Do you live here fulltime?” she asked, turning to him.
He’d been turning, too, to face her, and he froze a moment. She realized too late that she’d said something that struck a nerve, and rushed to say, “No, it’s great. It is. Why wouldn’t you live here?”
His gaze landed somewhere to the left of her, and he nodded, face too blank. “Yeah. I know.”
Shit, things had tipped, and she hadn’t even meant them to. This felt like letting go, rather than stepping closer. “Plenty of the guys live here,” she