No Kissing Allowed

Chapter 22: Hazel Eyes

Chapter 22: Hazel Eyes

"Three years," Jamie murmured, his voice tinged with wonder. He squeezed Cora gently as he spooned her from behind. How had she lasted that long without physical contact?

Jamie couldn't last three days of solitude before seeking out the company of some warm body. He had never been too particular about who or where or why, and few held his attention for long. Several bouts of not-quite-love might have turned to something more, if only some shiny new object hadn't presented itself and turned his head.

He had a weakness for shiny objects. Perhaps because that was all he was himself. A reflective outer surface. Still, it troubled him that the TV show runners had understood this fact so readily. They assumed he would forget his current partner and move on to the next, the moment they presented him with a new face on a glossy poster.

Under normal circumstances, they wouldn't have been wrong.

Jamie could recite the names of the characters from a book he had read three years ago, but not the names of half the people he'd slept with over the same period of time. People flowed through him like a sieve, all while his memory latched onto vast amounts of useless information -- lengthy passages from books or movies he could recite verbatim as easily as reading them off a page.

Cora Glass. He repeated the name inside his head, inventing a mnemonic to ensure its permanent place there. Cora made-of-glass. She might shatter if not handled with care. This woman's name he would remember. And this story she had told him. Jamie vowed so to himself, as he inhaled the scent of her hair.

By this time tomorrow, she would be no more than a memory. He would have to let her go. No question now, with that afterimage hanging in the air: a spurned lover speeding down a highway, with no regard to her pleas to slow down. Jamie had felt his face heat up from guilt as she described it. He'd been planning to do the same thing, metaphorically, with his decision not to send her on her way tomorrow. Override her wishes and keep barreling down the road...

No. Out of the question.

Cora made-of-glass was not to be manhandled in such a fashion. He'd done enough damage with his ghost stories. Now he would simply hold her and listen to her tale of woe. Tomorrow he would send her on her way.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"For what?"

"For spoiling your evening with my Patrick Swayze impression."

She sniffed. "I'm pretty sure that was me who ruined your evening."

"Did you enjoy anything about your stint in paradise?"

"This is nice." She nuzzled herself closer, urging his arms to squeeze her as he had before.

Jamie obliged, squeezing firmly.

She sighed. "Maybe this was all I really wanted."

"Someone to listen?"

"Someone to hold me," she corrected, tracing her fingers along his forearm from elbow to wrist. "I like your skin."

Her touch made him shudder, but Jamie grimaced at her words. Skin. That's what she liked, of all the things she might have said. "You are a good listener," she had told him earlier, and the praise had glowed inside him. A real compliment for something deeper than the surface. Those sorts of compliments were few and far between in Jamie's experience, and so he lusted for them more than anything.

He didn't want to let her go. No. Not yet. And not because he hadn't been inside of her. Because he longed for her to see something inside of him.