When Life Happened by Jewel E. Ann
Chapter Twenty-Six
Too many hours after the alcohol wore off and just as the sun started to edge its way into the morning sky, Parker eased off Levi’s chest. Cringing when Old Blue creaked, she climbed out of the truck bed, shaky on her legs, searching for her clothes. She dressed as fast as one could with a painful hangover, walked the half acre to the fence, climbed over it, and clumped her way up the yard to her farmhouse.
She eased open the back door to the kitchen then closed it slowly behind her.
“Good morning.”
Parker whipped around. “Caleb.”
He smirked, nodding to the counter. “Coffee?”
There was no way to hide the guilt on her face. She felt the heat crawl up her neck. “Shower. But thanks.”
Caleb continued to eye her with that stupid smirk. “Long night or early morning?”
“If only it were any of your business.” She glared at him as she slipped off her shoes and walked toward the stairs, but he kept grinning as he returned his focus to his phone and sipped his coffee.
She carried an extra hundred pounds of guilt as she climbed the stairs, straight into the bathroom. After flipping on the exhaust fan and turning on the shower, she stripped down and stood in the middle of the bathroom with her face buried in her hands as she cried. There were no words to explain why she felt so incredibly guilty. Why she felt like a cheater again. Why she felt like a terrible person.
Gus was dead. He had been married. They never had sex. Levi wasn’t married. They were two consenting adults. And for a few hours after too many beers, she enjoyed life again—emotionally and physically.
Sex. How could something that seemed to ruin everything one minute, feel like the exact thing she needed the next? And she did … she needed to do nothing more than feel connected to another human without having to use words or make sense of it in her head.
Still, the guilt won over. It always did. Parker sat on the toilet, desperate to relieve her full bladder. “Shit!” She grimaced, leaning to the side. When she finished, she wiped the steam off the mirror and glanced at the refection of her backside. On her right butt cheek there was a red bite mark.
“Lovely.” She closed her eyes and wiped a few more tears before getting in the shower.
*
“Stop looking atme like that.” Parker laughed even as she hugged her nauseous stomach, sitting on the end of her bed, staring at the unpacked suitcase on the floor—talking to the suitcase. Maybe she needed to bury it too. That required saying goodbye and that was too much to ask. How could she say goodbye when part of her still waited for him to knock at the door?
Parker rolled her eyes when a real knock sounded at her bedroom door. She hurried and slipped on her shorts and tee then fingered through her wet hair as she opened the door.
“Dad,” she said, narrowing her eyes, expecting to see her mom, if anyone, knocking on her bedroom door the morning after a drunken night.
He rubbed his chin. “Uh … Old Blue is in the field … with a half-naked guy in the back. Should I call the police?”
“No! I-I’ve got it. Don’t call anyone.” She shot past him to the stairs. “Especially—”
“Your mom?”
“Exactly.” Parker slipped on her shoes, ignoring Caleb and his dumb-ass grin, and ran out the back door. She figured Levi would have woken up by then and gone home. If he wasn’t careful, crows would be pecking at his bits and pieces.
As she approached Old Blue, a bare, hunched back appeared in the bed, moving stiffly. Levi was on all fours and lumbering to his feet. She stopped in her tracks, eyes flitting between the road with cars going by and the burly man standing in the bed of her truck, shirt off, hair a disaster, jeans unbuttoned and holding on for life low on his hips. He brought his fists up to his chin, elbows out, and twisted his torso side to side, mesmerizing her with the shifting and rippling of his muscles. Levi stopped when he spotted her.
“Morning.” His face pulled into something between a grin and a grimace. Maybe a grin gone wrong or a grimace trying to redeem itself.
Parker swallowed hard then opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. The previous night replayed in her head. Her naked body pressed to every part of his. The flex of his muscles when he moved behind her, above her, beneath her. What she couldn’t see clearly in her mind, she could feel along her skin. Those lips sucking her sensitive flesh. The slide of his tongue between her legs.
Those hands were not the delicate hands of an artist. They were large, strong, and controlling. Parker liked every single fucking thing he did to her with his hands—palming her ass like he owned it and fisting her hair so she knew it.
Levi fastened his jeans and pulled on his shirt. “You’re not real talkative in the morning.”
Old Blue whined when he jumped out of the back. “You have that look.” He walked toward her.
“Look?” She managed a shaky word past her lingering thoughts and an enormous hurdle of regret.
He nodded. “The what-do-I-say-about-last-night look.”
That was the look for sure.
“About last night …”
Levi grinned. “It happened.” He shrugged. “It didn’t happen. Totally up to you.”
There was an option B. She liked that.
“What if it happened?” she whispered.
“Then we talk about it.”
“And if it didn’t?”
“Then … what didn’t happen?” His lips twisted, concealing his amusement.
Before Gus, the answer would have been: the night before happened—once the previous night and another three times in her head that morning. But Gus happened, which meant the night before should not have happened.
“It didn’t.” Her gaze left his and settled on the clumpy dirt around her shoes. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize for something that didn’t happen.” The hard ground crunched beneath him as he walked past her toward the Westmans’ house.
