I put my arm on the wall above her head, boxing us in, creating our own little world in the space we had available to us. I expected her to ask what I was doing, to lean away, to look at me with questions as I rushed to explain, but her fingers found my shirt, clinging to me in a way I didn’t yet deserve. She waited for me.
She waited right there in my gaze, knowing that she was safe with me…and I’d never been so destroyed and utterly put back together again.
I heard the noise erupt from my throat before I could stop it. She seemed puzzled, but gripped tighter to me. “Are you all right?” her whispered plea asked in the sweetest way.
“Me?” I asked, completely incredulous. “Are you all right? Sweetheart, those boys want to tote you off and make you their sacrificial lamb.” She smiled in a placating way. “You don’t agree?”
Her eyes never left mine. “My mom used to think that I was better than I am.”
“Well, who says you’re not?” I kept my eyes slammed onto those gray ones.
She gasped just a little before she shook herself. “I’m just saying, she had all these ideas. She was always talking about the person I should be one day, the kind of person I had to become. I was so little, so I know she was trying to just pack in as much info without scaring me, but get her point across. But on my eighth day of birth anniversary she brought home…”
“An Around Landu doll,” I guessed.
She nodded sadly, as if admitting it betrayed me somehow. “Her buying that doll for me was the reason that we couldn’t—”
She had to stop and I knew why.
“The reason you couldn’t pay your taxes. Ah, Soph, no wonder you…” I tugged her to me and pressed her face in my neck. When she nestled in and wrapped her arms around my middle, I sighed from the balls of my feet to the ends of my hair follicles.
I looked over my shoulder to find Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum still standing there, little smiles on their dumb faces. I rolled my eyes at them and went back to rubbing her back, trying anything to make her feel better. I pulled her close to me with my free arm, letting my hand dip in and out of the small of her back, hoping it was helping to warm and comfort her. When she started to nuzzle her face into my neck, the barest of movements, and brought her hands back to my chest, I tightened my grip on her.
“Soph,” I whispered, but it was everything a growl should be. “Those idiots already interrupted us once, at the very best part. Please don’t make me kill them if they do it again.”
She complained in a small groan of her own and I couldn’t help but chuckle.
She whispered against my jaw. “Wow. Who knew you were this much fun?”
“I am completely offended.”
She giggled. “No, you’re not.”
“Okay, I’m not.” I pulled back to pull her face up to see it full-on. “Are you sure you’re all right? I mean, we’re not even sure what all this means.”
“It means we should go with them.”
“Say what now?”
She smiled small. “I know you just want to help. And…” Her face went completely, utterly blank. I knew I wasn’t going to like this. And I was going to take another hit. “Honestly, you could just leave me with them and go back to your family. You don’t owe me anything.”
She was looking down at our shoes. And I waited. She wanted me to pull her face up, to beg her, to tell her it would never happen that way, but I thought I had been telling her that all along. I thought I just had. I felt like I needed to let her make this step on her own instead of me chasing her, or else I wouldn’t know if she really even wanted this.
But when she finally did look up, I realized my fatal mistake. That by not leaping for her when she jumped, she thought I no longer wanted to catch her.
I took her upper arms in my hands before she could move away and then moved those hands up to hold her face, letting my thumbs whisper over the skin under her eyes, carrying the tears away to be forgotten. I forced her to look at me, but she didn’t fight me like I thought she would. Where had my feisty Sophelia gone? She was ready to bust Tweedle heads one minute and then crumbling before my eyes the next?
No.
I groaned like I’d been kicked in the gut. She wasn’t crumbling; she was blossoming. Her walls came down for me and when we got around other people, they came right back up again. I was so honored by that. Her showing these tears—the tears for me—was her way of showing me she wanted this, it was her way of chasing me, it was her way of catching me and leaping at the same time. And that’s when I knew I had to…
I leaned in swiftly, but not too swift, down to her space, hoping I wasn’t wrong. When she sucked in a breath against my lips right before I touched her, I knew I’d been spot on.
This girl. The girl with fire for hair, defenses for a tongue, and a weapon for a heart, she was mine and she needed to know it. She probably thought it was weakness when she cried, but any good leader needed compassion. And this world needed compassion more than any other emotion.
I wrapped one arm gently around her back and let her lean back just a little as I kissed her. As second kisses went, it...was amazing. The first time, I was so caught off guard and confused. I couldn’t believe that, one, holy-wow-she-wants-to-kiss-me-wait-no-come-back that by the time my lips caught up with my brain, she was already pulling away and thought I was upset. In the history of kisses anywhere, has there ever been a guy who has ever gotten mad about being kissed? Ever? I didn’t think so. And if you actually come up with a reference, well, just keep it to yourself. And two, I was just so shocked at the fact that she actually wanted to be kissing me!
She really should have cut a guy a break. You can’t kiss a guy senseless and then expect his brain to work two seconds later. Order in the court. I object!
See? It makes no sense.
And Sophelia wanting to be with me made no sense either. Not at first. I guess it still doesn’t. I was a black market trader.
But I’ve stopped asking questions. I’m a tradesman, I’m an oxygen jockey, I’m a lowlife who did what he could to survive and gave what he had to make it happen, but I didn’t give everything. Not like Soph. She paid the ultimate sacrifice and I didn’t deserve to be within ten feet of her, but she saw it the opposite way. She thought she didn’t deserve me.
The absurdity of that statement started to scramble my brains again, so instead, I just held on tight to this girl, bent her back a little farther, died inside of complete happiness when she sighed against my lips, and dove in, hoping I was getting it right. Begging and pleading with the man upstairs that this wasn’t amateur hour and Soph was not just enjoying this but being rearranged by this.
It was only fair since that’s the puddle I was currently standing in.
She slung her arms roughly around my neck, but pulled her lips away from mine in the same breath as she righted herself, keeping her arms on my shoulders. “You should be with your family, Maxton,” she insisted, but it held no real fire.
That made me smile. She wanted to send me away so badly, but wanted me to stay.
“If my mother knew how I felt about you, she’d tell me to—” There was that gasp again. “She’d tell me that I already made sure they were safe. And they are. Now I need to make sure you are. The best thing to do for them is to make sure this world is still going to be here, and if those knuckleheads are right, then you’re the one I should be looking after even if I didn’t…”
Her eyes begged me to make it all worth it, this whole thing, everything we’d been through. She didn’t have to beg me. She thought she did. I got that now. I would keep catching her as many times as she jumped because Sophelia was tossed into the world and there was no one to catch her. Until now. And I was hell bound and determined to make her see that she didn’t have to beg and she didn’t have to jump at all. We would be in this together now and I would walk as fast or as slow as she wanted to go, right beside her.
“You wouldn’t go back?” she asked. “You wouldn’t go back a
nd do things differently. Your life?” She looked up at me, right into my eyes. “Change the way we met, everything that’s happened to get us here?”
I shook my head hard. “No,” I said softly, contradicting my body’s reaction. “I wouldn’t change a thing. If one small detail of our story was different then we might not have met at all. And that would have been a tragedy. Something I don’t even want to think about.”
She sniffed. “Me neither,” she whispered so low I barely heard her.
I took her face in my hands once more. “Give me the breath in your lungs, all the steps you took to get here, the only heart you’ve got, your very soul. I want all there is, Soph,” I groaned.
“Maxton,” her broken whimper tried to get out, but I just covered her mouth and began devouring her once more.
When we came together this time, there was no more cracked Sophelia. My fierce girl was back and in full swing. She wrapped her arms around my head, standing on her tiptoes, letting her elbows rest on my shoulders. So it was nothing to push her back against the wall, her belly and heaving chest pressed to mine, our lips fused, my maddeningly deafening pulse raging in my ears.
She tasted like every fantasy I ever thought to have, she sounded like all I could ever want a girl I had pressed to the wall to sound like in that position, her nails on the back on my neck and the bottom of my scalp—I wished I could curse out loud; there would have been growled obscenities.
She was a walking, breathing fantasy.
And, hot damn, she wanted me.
I grinned into our kiss, unable to keep it under wraps.
“What?” A hint of her self-consciousness poked its head in the door.
I pulled her close so fast that she gasped into my mouth. I then proceeded to suck on her tongue, in essence, for lack of a better term, shutting her up. Nicely, of course. My fingers gently stroking at her neck under her jaw, the way her legs scissored a little between us and she sometimes stuck her knee between mine, the way my hand sometimes found its way down to her hip to drag her closer.
The waste of our oxygen was so freaking worth the next ten minutes of that make-out.
When I finally pulled back, I made sure to look her in the eye. I wanted to see what I saw there. To see if there was still doubt and the girl waiting for the guy to run for his mommy, or the girl who knew that he was there to stay. I saw a little of both. I could accept that for now.
I smiled and put my forehead against hers. “Oh, my gosh, woman. Give me a minute to breathe before we go at it again.”
She giggled. And that giggle was something magical. Like she had been reading my thoughts, she lifted my face and smiled at me. It was like…she was looking for something magical in me, too, and had found it.
“I’m kind of in like with you.”
She sat stunned for a few seconds, not laughing like I thought she would. I was thinking how I could re-manage the whole joke, play it off in a new way, reconfigure, something, when she smiled in the smallest, most honest, real way, and said, “I’m sort of in like with you, too.”
She hugged my middle and then leaned her face up to accept my kiss, which was already some progress as far as I was concerned. I kissed her slowly, letting her wrap her hands around my arm as we turned, and then we both stopped dead.
Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum stood there, looking sick and green.
I opened my mouth to tell them all the ways I was about to rearrange their faces.
“Oh, don’t worry, bruh.” Dum waved his hand to us. I think it was Dum. “We left. Across the street to get some snackage for our “quest”. He even made air quotes with his fingers when he said ‘quest’. “But, next time, you need to make sure you don’t have an audience when you go and mack on the savior.”
“Mack?” I asked at the same time that Sophelia asked, “Savior?”
“Furthermore,” the other one started, not even listening to us, “who jumps the savior in the street? I mean, you were really getting in there deep.”
What? I made a move for him. His twin moved to block him at the same time that Sophelia grabbed my arm. “I thought you weren’t watching. I thought you left to get snackage for the “quest”.” I air-quoted also.
“We still kept an eye on her. We had to make sure you didn’t run away with her since we found her. Finders keepers and all that.” I looked back at Soph and back at the twins. “Then wouldn’t she technically be mine?”
The other twin groaned. “See Roddy!” He slapped his twin in the back of the head. “You shouldn’t be the one doing the talking!”
Soph cleared her throat. “Um, can’t I just belong to myself, boys?” Her eyes shot to mine as she licked her lips, knowing we’d just done the whole your heart is mine bit.
“And since he’s got the hots for you, I imagine she’ll belong to you, too,” one of them grumbled.
“Soph’s right,” I avoided. “What are we doing now?”
“Soph’s coming with us,” one of them said.
“Sophelia,” I corrected him. I glanced at her and she had a little half-smile on her face, but it was her eyes that made me know right then, in that moment, that this would be far from some crush or first love or whatever other fist-level realm it could have fallen into.
“How come he gets to call you that?” one of the twins whined.
“He earned it,” she whispered, her gaze latched onto mine.
We’d never talked about my transition from calling her one to the other, somehow it just kind of happened, but hearing her say it made my bones curl.
The twin was still talking. “Sophelia is a mouthful, little lady. I don’t know if you know that. You know, since you never have to say it. It’s not like you talk to yourself.”
The other hissed, “Bro, she may talk to herself and now you’re just making her self-conscious about it. You always take things that extra step too far.”
He smacked his forehead. “You’re right, you’re right. I always do things the wrong way. I always jump the gun. I mean we haven’t even told her the bad part yet.” They both looked at us with a jerk-head motion, realizing what he’d just done.
“We talked about this!” his brother yelled
“I know, I know!” he scolded himself. “It’s like the horse before the cart.”
“Exactly, bro.”
“It’s ‘don’t put the cart before the horse’,” I corrected him.
They both stared at me blankly before one of them said in an offended deadpan, “That makes no sense, man. Why would a cart go before the horse?”
I ignored them and cornered Soph once more. With my arm on the wall above her head so they couldn’t see what we were saying, I made sure she was calm. “Okay, look. We can lose these two if we have to.”
“I heard that!” Dum said.
I rolled my eyes. “I can lose ‘em. The point is, do you want to? Do you believe in all this stuff—truly believe? I’m with you, no matter what. I don’t want you to just do it because you feel like people are counting on you…if you don’t actually believe it’s true.”
She looked at me. “Do you believe it?”
I tilted my head. “Weirdo twins show up out of nowhere—correction, the worst timing ever, with a crazy story about your doll from when you were a little girl. And it’s allegedly supposed to be the key to bringing down Congress somehow?” I shrugged. “It’s a little too much to just be coincidence, but what do I know?”
She stared at me too long. She knew what to do, she was just too scared to make the decision.
“Okay, I’ll tell you what.” I pointed at the storefront across the granite street. “The next person that comes out of that store—if they’re a brunette we go with Tweedle Dee and Dum,” she groaned, knowing exactly where I was going with it, “if they’re blond, we go the opposite direction and never look back. Deal?”
“What is it with you and flipping coins and making bets? Do you have a gambling addiction?” I laughed, but said nothing. She waited, knowing I wasn’t go
ing anywhere. “Fine,” she ground out.
I turned her so her back was to my front, leaning down to put my cheek against her cheek, and we waited. I could hear Dee and Dum over there betting on who was coming out first on their own terms.
“We want a brunette to come out, doofus, otherwise we lose!”
“But if we put money on it, then we win twice. Think about it!”
“How are we related? How did I share a womb with you?”
I tuned them out and waited, watching, focusing on Sophelia’s breaths under my arm as I wrapped my arms around her.
When someone finally walked out a couple seconds later, it was hard to focus on Sophelia solely with Dee and Dum trying not to set off the profanity sensors.
“That’s it. We’re cooked. Mommy’s going to kill us and put us in the stew!”
“That’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever said. And totally untrue.”
“It’s kind of true!”
“No. First, she’ll humiliate us for not bringing the savior home, then kill us.”
“Right! Right you are, brother. She’d make it a practical killing.”
“Shut up, you two,” I muttered as I turned Sophelia to face me. “So?”
“So,” she muttered. “You did it. You made me take one of your bets.” She shuffled her feet and gripped my shirtfront. I loved that she still felt safe enough with me to do that. Did that make me a jerk?
“And how do you feel about the answer?”
“The answer was blond, which meant go the opposite way and not go with the twins. So…”
“I’m assuming you’re not happy, given by the way you’re refusing to look at me,” I said wryly and quite amused.
“I would have picked brunette,” she looked up and some of her fire and steel had returned, “had I chosen. But I didn’t choose. You made me do this stupid bet and now—”
“Now what? Now we go with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.”
Her brow scrunched in the most adorable way. “What? Then what was the point of betting?”
“To find out what you really want.” She scoffed. “You didn’t know what to do. So I made out like I was taking the choice away. Then when the choice was made, you’d know which one you were disappointed about.”