AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You can put your bike back there”—she pointed toward the back of the garage—“Nobody goes back there much.”
Taking his own helmet off, Zaxx shook his head. “I don’t need to hide, Gia. I told you I’m not scared off.”
She smiled and stepped in, so her leg pressed against his. Her hand came up and pushed through his hair, and she brought her mouth to his.
The way she kissed rocked Zaxx to his toes. There was something in it, deep within her take-charge confidence, that was a little bit ... he didn’t know. Naïve, maybe? Innocent? Whatever it was, it gave her kisses a taste both sweet and bold, like a cherry cordial inside a dark chocolate candy.
He could kiss this woman forever. For all he cared, they might never move from this spot. Spend the whole night with their mouths joined.
As he sent his arm out to pull her closer and settle in, she stepped back, smiling again.
She offered him her hand. “Okay. So let’s go.”
Chapter Eight
Zaxx slipped his fingers between Gia’s and folded their hands into a snug hold. They strolled across the quiet yard, lit only by the ambivalent light of the big dusk-to-dawn between the house and the garage.
Not even the porch light was on at the house. The main house. She really didn’t live there anymore.
As they crossed beneath the huge oak with the old tire swing, a new ray of light blinked into existence, dappling through the oak’s dense leaves. Zaxx stopped sharply and turned toward the main house, but Gia already knew by the slant of the light which window held it.
“It’s Bo, not my parents.” She looked up and saw her brother at his bedroom window, holding his curtains back. He went to bed around ten and fell asleep easily. Probably Otto had heard her bike arriving and had woken Bo.
She put her hand up in greeting. After a beat, Bo did the same. Another beat ... two ... and he let the curtain fall into place. As Gia pulled Zaxx to start walking again, Bo’s light went out.
“How’s Bo gonna feel about this?” Zaxx asked. “Me being here, I mean?”
Gia wasn’t completely sure; her sex life had not been lived here at home, ever, so Bo had never been confronted by that part of who she was. They’d talked about love and sex a few times, in a general way—Bo considered Gia his How People Our Age Act encyclopedia—so he knew what kind of men attracted her, and she knew that everything about love and sex confounded him. He probably fit best under the labels of aromantic and/or asexual, but that wasn’t quite right, either. He found women attractive and got turned on, and he enjoyed sexy stories (he preferred romance and didn’t like porn). They’d even had a profoundly uncomfortable (for Gia) discussion about masturbation and how it was completely normal.
But Bo understood love and sex only through fiction. For him, real-life people were unpredictable puzzles, and most physical touch was unpleasant and agitating. He couldn’t imagine understanding anybody well enough to want them to be that close to him. But he could enjoy a story about two people falling in love and exploring their feelings physically, and therefore, he could feel that lack of connection in his own life as something missing.
Gia looked up at his dark window and wondered if seeing her holding hands with Zaxx, walking to her backyard shed in the middle of the night, made him feel that empty space.
How was her perfectly unique baby brother going to feel about her bringing a guy home to fuck? Gia had no idea. She hoped it didn’t hurt him somehow.
That wasn’t the point of Zaxx’s question, she knew. “He’ll be fine. He won’t tell our folks. We have a pact, and Bo doesn’t betray his promises.” The pact was, essentially, that they didn’t blab each other’s shit to the parentals. Bo, being hardwired for precision, had added an asterisk to their promise: it did not apply to anything that could reasonably be considered dangerous.
Like, he’d blabbed to everybody that she’d ignored the parental demand to hurry home before a big Christmas storm a few years ago. But then she’d wrecked in the snow and almost died, so ... dangerous.
With the exception of his daily use of very sharp woodworking tools, with which he was militant about safety, Bo never did anything that could reasonably be considered dangerous. He also had very few secrets. Their pact was doing all its work on Gia’s side.
“I meant it when I said your dad doesn’t scare me off, Gia.” Zaxx said, tugging on her hand.
“I know. I believe you, or you wouldn’t be here. I’m just assuring you that Bo won’t try to make trouble. We don’t make trouble for each other. We help fix it.”
Zaxx reacted oddly to that assurance. He made a sound like a half-baked chuckle and, as they stepped onto the porch of her ‘house,’ he pulled his phone from his jeans and checked the screen. He didn’t try to block it from Gia, so she saw that the only preview was from ESPN.
“Something wrong?” she asked before she opened the door.
“No, sorry.” He put his phone away. “Just checking if I heard from my sister. She’s going through something right now.”
“And you’re helping her fix it?”
“I’m trying.” Worry dimmed his smile a little.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“That is absolutely not what I want to do right now.”
