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Mom softens, pullingmeinto a hug now. We embrace for a long time as I wait for more morsels about Jaxson, but Mom offers nothing, and I don’t want to press too hard.
Once she’s gone—get some sleep, Zoey—I pick up my phone again. I probably shouldn’t do it this eagerly, this desperately, but I miss Jaxson. I miss him after only talking to him for a little while via text.
I’m too old for LOLs,his text reads,but there’s something funny about “very deluded, angry person.”
You’re not old. You’re forty.
When I was twenty, forty seemed ancient,he replies.
Of course, he wasn’t waiting up just to receive my reply. As I comforted Mom, Jaxson wasn’t hungrily staring at his phone, thinking of me, needing more conversation, more contact between us—words that will one day become physical touching. Nope, no way.
It doesn’t seem ancient to me,I text quickly.Anyway, you’re not an old forty.
I didn’t realize there were degrees of forty,he replies.
There are…
I stare at my unsent message. Is he going to find this weird, me insisting so stubbornly that he’s not old? He can’t think of himself in that way, not if anything’s ever going to happen between us.
He’s mature, fine, and experienced. He’s not old—more like a fine wine getting intense, stronger, and more handsome with age.
Just like there are degrees of twenty,I go on.Some women my age might as well be toddlers with how they behave.
This must say something about me, about my status as a daughter. After holding Mom, I shouldn’t be saying any of this to Jaxson. I shouldn’t anyway, but especially not now.
And you’re the exception, Zoey? Is that it?
Grief ages people,I reply.I had to grow up fast. Looking around at my classmates, I feel like a different species. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got friends. I’m not some freakish hermit, but that’s how it seems sometimes.
So, you’re saying I’m so immature, and you’re so mature, we meet in the middle. We’re basically both thirty.
I grin, then quickly type,Now it’s my turn for an LOL.
Send me some chapters,he replies.I want to read your work.
I will.I’ll need your email.
He sends it, and I sense that’s the end of the conversation… for now.
CHAPTER4
Jaxson
“You got it,” Peter says over the phone when I ask him to look into Axel Todd. “I’ll let you know when I have something.”
I take a sip of my hot black coffee. Sleep was a jester last night, taunting as it danced out of my reach. Instead, I obsessed over Zoey, even reading through our text conversation.
It was the age thing I lingered on. She seemed real keen for me not to think of her as too young or myself as too old. Why would she care about that? Does she want me? If so, this is going to get far more complicated.
While this is one-sided, I can just about stifle the hungry thoughts, but if she becomes in reality what she is in my mind… Oh, damn, if she pouts those kissable lips, pushes her breasts together, whispers breathily for me to stroke my hands up her legs, between her thighs, rub at her pussy until she’s wet and ready…
“Jax?” Peter says, drawing me from my thoughts.
I can’t even share this with Peter. He was friends with Luke, too, brothers-in-arms. He’d hate me if he knew. Hell, I hate myself, but that doesn’t mean I can stop.
“Yeah?”
“I said, how’s the book going?”
