Page 20 of Something Like Sugar (Pine Forest Something #2)

DUSTIN

S he’s a magnetic force beyond my control, and we connect faster than her date can leave the restaurant. I slam my lips against hers, in a bruising pull of my passion against her own, and we fuse together.

Touch me , she commanded, and like a knight before my queen, here I am, kneeling at her call.

She fits with me, a piece of my puzzle, every curve of her body clicking into place.

My fingers thread through her hair, deepening our kiss, and it’s only passion moving me now, my sole mission to memorize her feel and taste and touch.

And maybe it is.

Maybe we only have one job in this life, and it’s to find the person who drives us to the darkest places of our minds, dangling feet over edges of what-ifs, long enough to make it brighter.

“I can’t just watch anymore, Shay.”

“Then don’t.”

I lift her at once; tight, powerful thighs wrapping around me seamlessly.

“Why me?” I ask, as her fingers rake my hair. “You’re fucking perfect, Shana.”

“I’m not,” she starts, but I stop it with my lips on hers.

“You are.”

Our eyes swirl together with we breathe.

Think.

Plan our next words, perhaps, both of us aiming to win an age-old argument neither of us ever wanted to start.

“You could have your pick of anyone less fucked up. So, why me?”

My hands tighten around her thighs, holding her up, because I don’t know what else to do with them. My heart tells me to run them back over her body until she’s liquid in my arms, and I’ve filled her with so much of me she couldn’t think of another man as long as she lives.

There’d be no room left.

But my brain battles with the concept, my father’s voice replacing my thoughts, lacing them with doubt. I loosen my grip, and she slides down my body until her feet touch the ground. “I-I’m fucked up, Shana. You don’t want this. You don’t want what’s in here .” I point to my head.

We sit in silence, beat after beat, my finger pressed against my skull as sweat beads my brow.

The paddle fans blow above, and our hair tangles together with the wind, the universe demanding we entwine. It commands me, as if it’s on her side.

“I already know what’s in there,” she whispers, prying my hand away from my head and placing it back in hers.

“You are not fucked up, Dustin.”

We sit at a table I made to match the color of her eyes, whether she knows it or not, and those same tiger-striped irises flare now, a period at the end of her sentence.

“You are not fucked up,” she repeats. “Do you hear me?” She kisses me, her voice softening when I release a nervous breath. “Of course I want you. Besides, dating is impossible for me if you haven’t noticed. If they aren’t boring me to tears, you’re breaking their hands.”

“It was only a few fractures.” I grin.

I nudge her shoulder, and it’s like no time has passed since childhood. I’m just a boy with no clue how to talk to the pretty friend at the dinner table, the one who became a permanent part of our home for the rest of my life.

She still feels like home to me.

Her smile masks the earlier doubt from my mind, replacing it with memories of camping and sparklers, of jumping over stones in narrow creeks.

“Not to mention,” I whisper, “I’ll bet none of your other dates know an ultra large tampon holds eighteen grams.”

She twists her lips. “Well, I’m glad you’re finally starting see your worth. That’s what this entire night was about, you know?”

“Tampons?”

She swats my shoulder, and we both grin before her eyes drop. “I’m ashamed to say I let Lemon talk me into making you jealous.”

“What? You?” I roll my eyes. “That’s not news. It was comically obvious.” I play with the dark hair falling over her shoulders.

“I know,” she says. “But provoking you was wrong. I didn’t need you to tell me you were the boy beneath the window.” Her eyes burn a fire into mine. “I’ve always known it was you, I just wanted you to admit this thing between us exists. That it always has and never wont.”

“It never won’t,” I say. “But you didn’t need a fake date to know I want you, Shay.”

“Want isn’t the same as need, Dustin. You say you want me, but I need you. With every part of me.”

“Shay—”

“No. Just let me…” She exhales, lifting her chin. “I wanted to know that you need me like I do. Your words are mere words, no matter from the heart .” She swallows, wiping away a single tear as she steadies her breathing. “Shakespeare wrote that.” She wrings her hands together.

I grab them, holding them in mine.

“So, what will it be? Do you want me in words or in actions, Dustin Campbell?” She nods at our hands on the table.

It takes not a moment longer for the grin to slide across my face when I place our joined hands over my heart.

“As I’ve said before, you’re you , Shana Holiday.”

Her breath hitches and her brows pull in. I know what she thinks. That I’ll say what I’ve said before to push her away, but I can’t watch from the darkness anymore.

Not when it feels this good in her light.

“You’re you …and I don’t just want you…I need you. Your words, your thoughts, your mind…and this—” I kiss her. “Just how you are.’

Tears fill her eyes. “You mean that?”

“I do.”

“Good.” She smiles. “Because I don’t have much taste for rich lawyers or handsome actors it turns out.”

“Handsome?” I narrow my eyes.

I can hardly wipe the shit-eating grin off my face when I think about the lengths this woman went to get me here, acknowledging what we’ve always been.

On the other hand, she’s made herself a target for strangers on the internet, even if it was someone Lemon may know, Shana’s got a public profile, and she has no idea she’s a walking wet dream to any asshole with eyes.

As we sit here now, her friends are staked out in Lemon’s unmistakable bright yellow sports car in an amusing attempt to spy.

As if I didn’t see them.

But not all spies are amateurs.

There are corners of the internet she has no idea exist.

And I’ve seen it, locked up right alongside those sick fucks.

I know how they prey on their next victim…

burner phones smuggled into the cells and internet tokens provided by enabling family.

I’ve heard them bragging about the deranged shit they’ll do to their next victim when their sentencing is through.

The most fucked up part is they already have one picked out.

They just wait, watching them from a screen until it’s time, bragging to the others of fantasies that made me want to stab my ears out.

And Flinger? It’s a buffet for their perversion.

I look at the flawless woman across from me, someone so pure I fear she couldn’t see the darkness in the devil himself, and I know it’s crossing every line imaginable, but none of that matters if she becomes a target.

Obsessive compulsive, Dr. Robins will say, trauma-based fear.

They can call it whatever the fuck they want, but I followed my gut to the quarry that day, to the field-party years later, and it’s my gut that leads me now as I shoot a quick message to my buddy, the agent during my sentencing who uncovered the truth Thomas’ family tried to burry.

When they tried to point fingers at me for the shit they’d done.

And likely the only reason I cleared my name.

I attach the image of Haans with the words, background check. It shouldn’t have to be this way, but women are not safe. Not anywhere.

Screams, crying, fingernails caked with mud.

“Are you okay?” Shana comes to my side of the table and sits on my lap, wrapping her arms around my neck.

“I am now.”

“Yeah, okay,” she rolls her eyes, “now that there’s a half-naked woman in your lap.” She tugs at the hem of her too-short dress, and I try not to laugh. She could have been in a potato sack, and she’d still have my dick hard as fuck.

“I meant, I’m okay because somehow you still want me. Even after…you know, who I am .”

“You really are thick headed, you know that?” She smiles, shaking her head.

“I’ve wanted you since sand caked the bottom of my jelly shoes.

Since my feet turned in and my crowns were made of plastic.

Since I watched you shove a kid to the ground for peeking up your little sister’s skirt…

and her best friend’s .” She cuts her eyes to mine.

“I don’t just want you, Dustin Campbell, I have you.

In my corner, and in here.” She takes my hand and presses it over her heart this time, and it beats beneath my flesh, steady and strong, just like her.

“The real question is, will you have me back?”

She looks at me like nobody else in the world exists.

Like she’d be okay if that were true.

I bite my lip ring and watch her eyes fall to the motion. “If I have you, Shana,” my lips curve, “you’re mine. I take care of what’s mine.”

She blushes beneath my stare.

“Do you know what I mean by that?” I stroke my thumb over her lips, loving the softest fucking whimper that falls from them when I do.

“You’ll protect me?”

I move my fingers lower, brushing them over her chest, down to the pebbling nipples pressed tightly against the fabric of her dress.

“I’ll protect you.” I nod, circling the tight buds with my fingertips.

She moans, but she doesn’t move, challenging me to scare her away.

But she must know she’s tangling with crazy. I can’t be what I’m not. I’ll always carry their screams. I’ll forever be paranoid for the safety of the ones I love.

Of her.

“I’ll watch you. I’ll become obsessed.”

She draws in a sharp breath as I lean into her ear.

“When you walk home. When you wake up and sit by the window sipping your Gatorade because you can’t stand coffee or tea…

” She gasps, her pupils round as saucers.

“I’ll especially watch you from that bathroom window when you let your hair down at night…

when you drop your robe.” I nip at her ear, but she doesn’t shy away…

my sweet little seductress leans in. “You can’t want this, Shay. You can’t love crazy.”

“Yet, somehow I do.” She lifts her chin. “You say you’ll protect me, but you already have, many times. You say you’ll watch me, but I’ve seen the way the bushes rustle late at night. I’ve always known it was you .”

Now it’s my eyes that go wide.

“Did you think I didn’t see you out my windows all these years? First home, then work. You’re already obsessed with me, Dustin Campbell… Watcher.” She sucks my bottom lip into her mouth, but a few celebratory hollers from random patrons remind us where we are.

In public.

“Oh my gosh!” Shana giggles and pull away. “Your sister could be here, and we wouldn’t even know it. We have to be more careful until we figure out what we’re going to tell her.” She scrunches her nose. “What are we going to tell her?”

“That you’re mine .” My tongue darts out over my lip, like it always has when she’s around, sentient as fuck and completely insatiable for Shana Holiday.

Is it wrong to love the flush of her cheeks, and the way her dress tightens around her pointed nipples when I call her my girl?

“I’m going to need Jesus around you,” she breathes. “You are sinfully inappropriate just by existing.”

“Is this what you find inappropriate?” I flick my piercing with my tongue, and she studies it like a longawaited relic she’s finally dug up.

“I’ve been imagining what this little jewel would feel like on my lips for a long time.”

“And?” I chuckle. “Did it meet your expectations?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes sparkle. “I was imagining it pressed against my other lips.”

And I’ll be damned, but we’re both gonna need Jesus tonight, because I’ll be on my knees with my head bowed, but it sure as fuck won’t be in prayer.