Twisted Vows

CHAPTER 2

Leah

“Is it the good stuff?” he asked.

“It’s from Dad’s library cabinet, so yes.”

He crossed the room, took a glass from the shelf, and poured.

We sat in the library with the party going on without us and drank my father’s whiskey.

I waited.

“She said no,” Jacob said eventually.

I went still.

Lizzie and Jacob had been inevitable. They were the thing everyone knew without saying.

“I’m sorry,” I said after a moment.

“She’s going to Los Angeles.” He said it like he still could not make the words fit. “She said she wasn’t ready to settle. That she had a life she wanted to build first.”

He stared into his glass.

“She’s leaving this weekend.”

Five years.

Neither of us said it.

“Why didn’t she tell you before tonight?” I asked.

Jacob was quiet for a moment.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she liked knowing I’d be here waiting when she was done deciding who she wanted to be.”

I said nothing.

He wasn’t asking for comfort, and I respected him too much in that moment to hand him something cheap.

“What about you?” Jacob asked.

“What about me?”

“You’re sitting on the floor of the library alone at your family’s party drinking whiskey.” He looked at the photo album on the table. “I’m guessing there’s a reason.”

I followed his gaze.

“Ah,” he said quietly.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“No, it isn’t,” Jacob said.

The answer was so immediate that I looked at him.

He held my gaze.

“You don’t have to say that with me,” he said.

My throat tightened.

I looked down at my glass.

“Tonight was supposed to be partly for me,” I said.

I hated how small my voice sounded.

“But it doesn’t matter.”

“Leah.”

My name sounded different in his mouth.

Not flat.

Not like an afterthought.

“I got into UT Austin,” I said. “Social work. I leave in two weeks.”

I swallowed.

“No one has mentioned it tonight.”

The silence that followed was not empty.

It was worse.

It meant he had heard me.

“Well, I’m mentioning it now,” Jacob said. “UT Austin is a big deal, Leah.”

“I know.”

“You’ll be good at it.”

I looked up at him.

He was watching me with an expression I did not know what to do with.

Direct.

Careful.

Angry, maybe, but not at me.

Nobody in my family looked at me like that.

Like I was a whole person.

At some point, he moved from the chair to the floor beside me, his back against the sofa the way mine was. I wasn’t sure when. I only knew he was closer now.

Close enough that I could feel the warmth of him.

Close enough that wanting him became harder to hide from myself.

“What do you want?” he asked.

I blinked.

“Not what they want for you,” Jacob said. “You.”

The whiskey was warm in my blood. The party kept going on the other side of the wall. Of course it did.

“I want to belong somewhere,” I said.

The words came before I could make them prettier.

“Not as Lizzie’s sister. Not as the awkward extra person at the table. Just me.”

I turned the glass in my hands.

“I want to walk into a room and not feel like I should apologize for being there. I want to do something that matters. I want to come home tired and know it was for a reason.”

My voice dropped.

“I want someone to be happy I’m there.”

Jacob went very still.

“That’s not small,” he said.

I smiled, embarrassed. “It sounds pathetic when I say it out loud.”

“It doesn’t sound pathetic,” Jacob said, his voice rougher now. “It sounds like the bare minimum.”

I looked at him.

“You shouldn’t have to beg for the bare minimum, Leah,” he said. “You should have more.”

“Jacob.”

“I’m serious.” His jaw tightened. “I’ve seen it. The way they do that to you.”

I could not speak.

“I should’ve said something before,” he said.

The words hit somewhere I had no armor.

I blinked.

Looked away.

Looked back.

He was still watching me.

Something shifted in his expression.

He lifted a hand and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. Barely a gesture. Gentle enough to make my throat tighten. His fingers lingered for a second at my jaw.

“How are you doing?” Jacob asked quietly.

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

I looked at him.

The space between us was almost nothing. His hand was still at my jaw, barely touching, and I was eighteen and lonely and he was looking at me like my answer mattered.

“Better,” I said honestly. “Right now I’m better.”

He exhaled slowly.

His forehead came to rest against mine.

Not smooth. Not planned. More like surrender.

His breath was warm.

His eyes closed.

I reached for him.

I put my hand on his jaw slowly enough that he could pull away.

He didn’t.

His breath changed.

His hand moved to my cheek, warm and careful, and then he tilted his head and kissed me.

It was soft and a little uncertain, like he wasn’t sure he was allowed and had decided to do it anyway.

I answered it.

My hands curled into the front of his shirt.

The kiss deepened slowly. Neither of us rushed. Heat built between us, and it had nothing to do with the whiskey anymore.

He pulled back a fraction.

His forehead stayed against mine.

“Leah,” Jacob said.

Just my name.

A question and a warning at once.

I thought about Lizzie.

I thought about five years.

I thought about the photograph where I wasn’t in the picture.

I thought about being fifteen in a car while Jacob Fairfax asked me what I wanted, and how nobody else had asked me that in years.

I thought about leaving for Austin in two weeks and never having this again.

Never being in a dark library with Jacob looking at me like that again.

I nodded.He kissed me again, and this time there was nothing tentative about it.

We did not speak as we moved through the house.

The party had thinned. The music was low. Most of the guests were gone or gathered in small pockets downstairs. I noticed everything anyway: the soft click of my heels on marble, the sconces making the hallway darker than it should have been, Jacob’s hand finding the small of my back as we reached the stairs.

There.

Then gone.

Like he was giving me time to change my mind.

We passed Lizzie’s door.

Her voice came through it, low and quick. Not crying. Not broken. Talking to someone on the phone.

For half a second, my stomach turned.

Then Jacob’s hand brushed mine, and I kept walking.

I still don’t know what that makes me.

When the bedroom door closed behind us, the sound felt too loud.

Jacob stood in the middle of the room and looked at me like he was still deciding whether to leave.

Then his eyes moved over my face.

My mouth.

The dress Olivia had promised was a good idea.

Whatever was left of his restraint seemed to go with it.

“I meant what I said,” Jacob said, voice low. “You deserve better than this house has ever given you.”

Nobody had ever said that to me in a way I believed.

He crossed the room slowly.

His hands came to my face first, both of them warm against my jaw, tilting me up toward him. He kissed me like he had stopped pretending he was going to be sensible.

Not the careful kiss from the library.

This one had teeth.

I kissed him back.

My hands went to his chest, feeling the shift of muscle under his dress shirt, the heat of him through the fabric.

He made a sound against my mouth.

His hands moved from my face to my hair, then down my back, finding the zipper of my dress with a patience that made my breath uneven.

“Okay?” Jacob asked against my mouth.

“Yes,” I said.

Then, because I could not bear for him not to know, I added, “I haven’t done this before.”

He stilled.

He pulled back enough to look at me properly.

“Leah,” he said.

His voice had changed.

Lower.

More careful.

“I know,” I said. “I still want to. I just wanted you to know.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.

The gentleness of it nearly hurt.

“Then we go slow,” he said. “And if you change your mind, you tell me.”

“I don’t want to change my mind.”

Something moved across his face.

Not heat exactly.

Something steadier.

Like he had needed me to say it and hated that he had needed it.

He kissed me again, softer this time, taking his time, like he was learning the shape of my mouth before he asked for anything else.

His hands moved carefully at first. My waist. My back. The bare skin where the dress had slipped away.

Every touch made me feel too awake inside my own body.

When his mouth moved down my throat, I tipped my head back without meaning to.

“Is this okay?” he murmured against my skin.

“Yes.”

My voice barely sounded like mine.

He kissed the hollow of my throat, then lower, over the top of my breast. The warmth of his breath there made my stomach pull tight. His hand covered me, thumb brushing over my n****e through the thin lace, and I made a small sound before I could stop it.

He went still for half a second.

Then he did it again.

Heat rushed up my neck.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

Jacob lifted his eyes to mine.

“Don’t be,” he said.

The way he said it undid me more than the touch had.

He lowered his head and kissed me there, first over the lace, then with his mouth against my bare skin after he eased the fabric aside. When his tongue moved over my n****e, my fingers clenched in his hair.

The sensation shot through me so sharply I almost tried to move away from it, but his hand settled at my waist, steadying me, keeping me close without trapping me.

Then his mouth closed over me.

I gasped.

He drew gently, his tongue moving slowly, and my whole body answered in a way I did not understand yet. Heat gathered low in my stomach. My thighs pressed together, instinctive and embarrassed, but he noticed.

Of course he noticed.

Jacob noticed everything when he wanted to.

“Leah,” he said, my name rougher now.

I looked down at him.

His mouth was still close to my breast. His hair was mussed from my fingers, his eyes darker than I had ever seen them, and for one suspended second I thought, wildly, stupidly, he wants me.

Not Lizzie.

Me.

His hand slid down my stomach, slow enough for me to stop him.

I didn’t.

When his fingers slipped beneath the lace, the first touch made me jolt. He paused immediately, eyes on mine.

“Tell me no,” Jacob said quietly, “and I’ll stop.”

“Don’t stop.”

He touched me again, slower this time, learning what made my breath catch and what made my hips lift helplessly into his hand. When his mouth closed over my breast at the same time, the pleasure stopped being something I could follow and became something I could only feel.

“Jacob.”

“I’ve got you,” he murmured.

That was what broke me. My body tightened around the rush of it, my face buried against his shoulder as the pleasure rolled through me. He held me there, his hand gentler as I shook through it, his mouth against my temple.

When I could breathe again, he kissed me. Slow. Deep. Like there was nothing about me he wanted to look away from.

I felt him hard against my thigh, and my body turned toward him before I knew how to ask for more.

He drew back enough to see my face. “Still okay?”

“Yes.”

His eyes searched mine. For a second, I saw the wreckage in him too. Lizzie. The failed proposal. The future he had lost downstairs.

Then I touched him, and whatever warning had been trying to form disappeared beneath his mouth.

When he moved over me, I opened for him.

The first press of him stung sharply enough that my nails dug into his back. He stopped at once.

“Look at me,” he whispered. “You okay?”

I breathed through the ache. Beneath it was heat, fullness, the dizzying knowledge that there was no distance left between us.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Just slow.”

“Slow,” he promised.

He entered me carefully, kissing me whenever my breath caught, until the sharpness eased and my body softened around him. When he finally began to move, the ache turned warm. Then warmer.

I held on as he found a rhythm, slow at first, then rougher when I lifted into him. His face pressed into my neck, his breath breaking on my name.

His hand slipped between us again. The pleasure came faster this time, fuller, tangled with the deep pull of him inside me. I tightened around him with a cry I could not swallow.

Jacob groaned against my mouth. His rhythm broke, and then he followed me over, one hand locked around mine on the pillow.

For a long moment, there was only breathing.

His and mine.

The quiet house.

The Dallas night outside the window.

Then he went still in a different way.

Not soft.

Far away.

I felt it before I understood it.

And me, eighteen years old, lying beneath the only person who had made me feel chosen, did not understand yet that being chosen for one night was not the same thing as being kept.

So this is what it feels like, I remember thinking.

To be eighteen and new to my own body, and have someone touch me like I mattered.

Later, when everything had gone warm and still, he pulled me close and pressed his mouth to my temple. He held me there for a long moment.

I don’t know if he knew he was doing it.

I don’t know what it meant to him.

I only know that in that moment, with his arm around me and the Dallas night quiet outside the window, I felt something I had been waiting for my entire life without knowing the shape of it.

Wanted.

Not admired.

Not tolerated.

Wanted.

I didn’t think about what it would cost.

I don’t know if thinking would have stopped me anyway.

Afterward, we lay in the quiet, his arm heavy across my waist. The house had gone still. Somewhere outside, a car moved slowly down the drive, the last of the guests leaving.

I felt everything. The weight of his arm. The warmth of him.

And beneath it, the first small sense that he was already somewhere else.

His breathing evened out. A distance settled into him even in stillness, like part of him had started leaving before his body moved.

I noticed.

I stayed anyway.

I had known, even before we crossed the hallway. Some part of me had counted the cost and chosen the night anyway. Being seen, being present, being the person someone turned toward in the dark, felt worth whatever came after.

I still believe that.

I’m still paying for believing it.

When I woke, pale morning light had come through the curtains, and the space beside me was empty.

The bed was still warm.

Jacob was gone.

My chest tightened. I sat up and pulled the sheet around myself. His jacket still hung on the chair by the door.

Hope came first.

How cruel was that?

His jacket was still here.

So he had not left.

Not really.

That was what I told myself.

I sat in the pale morning light, stared at his jacket, and did what I had always done.

I waited.