Juniper Bean Resorts to Murder: Special Edition, page 29
I want to do crazy things with her, the kind of crazy that would only come from Juniper and I. I want to whisper poetry with my kisses, passing sonnets and verses back and forth between us. I want to consume the words on her tongue. I want to lick her stories from her lips.
They don’t make sense, these half-formed desires, but I want those things anyway. I want everything she has, greedy in a way I’ve never felt before.
She can direct all of her anger at me, and I’ll take it gladly. She can give me all of everything, all the bad and the good and the dark and the light, and I’ll take them all and keep them all and cherish them all—all the parts of this woman whose life has been entwined with mine since we were children.
I know that soon we’re going to have to talk about what she’s discovered. And soon I’m going to have to tell her what I’ve been keeping from her.
But for now—just for this little pocket of time, hidden in the back of the library—I give myself and my attention to her and her alone.
Our kisses slowly fade from passionate and full of fire to something slower, deeper, more languid and exploratory. Lazy and lingering instead of hurried and desperate, although I can’t quite bring myself to loosen my grip. There’s a corner of my heart that’s still racing not because I’m kissing her but because it scared me, receiving that call from Gus and then not being able to find her.
I give her waist a little tug, and she stumbles down from the step stool. Then I settle my hands on her shoulders, pressing one last kiss to her lips, forcing myself to breathe deeply and trying to get that last little corner of my heart to process the feel of her—trying to get my remaining fight-or-flight instincts to calm down. I let my eyes devour every part of her I see, just to make sure she’s okay.
She’s a bit sweaty, and she’s been thoroughly kissed, but she’s whole. When I’ve arrived at this conclusion, I let my head fall onto her shoulder—falteringly at first and then with abandon. My forehead drops to that intimate junction where her neck meets her shoulder, cradled in the space that seems perfectly designed for me, and for a second I just rest there.
Just to listen to her breathe.
Just to feel her warmth and the soft give of her skin, the tickle of her hair and the gentle rise and fall of her chest—all those things that tell me how alive she is.
How surreal is this? How strange has my life become that one month ago I was griping about teaching literature to my seniors, and now I’m merely feeling grateful that this hurricane of a woman is alive?
Autumn Grove should not be a town where I worry about people dying.
She clears her throat, a nervous sound that’s amplified by the press of my ear against her neck. “Hey,” she says.
“Mmm,” I hum, my hands sliding from her shoulders to her upper arms.
She clears her throat again. “What—what are you doing?”
“Just…making sure.”
She doesn’t ask me what I’m making sure of, and I don’t know that I could answer if she did. There are so many warring thoughts and feelings, so many opposing instincts that are battling for dominance.
I want to kiss her again.
I want to hold her.
I want to push her away and keep myself safe.
I want to pull her close and keep her safe.
“You interrupted me,” she says finally. “I’m not—I wasn’t done being mad at you.”
“I didn’t hear any protests,” I say, and it might be a good thing that she can’t see my smile. “But you bit my ear. You pinched me. Did you need more?”
“Yes,” she says. “I wanted to use my words instead of resorting to violence.”
“That’s fine,” I say. “You can keep going.” The bridge of my nose presses into her collarbone as I speak, a sharp ridge I want to trace with my tongue. I tighten my grip on her upper arms, trying to ignore the shiver that courses through her at my touch.
Intoxicating. She’s intoxicating.
“I—you can’t—” She swallows, something I feel and hear rather than see. “It’s hard to tell you off when you’re being like this.”*
My sigh is heavy, but it’s also accompanied at last by a sense of relief. It finally seems to be sinking into my system that Juniper is okay. “All right,” I say, lifting my head. “Go ahead, then.”
She looks pointedly at my hands on her upper arms. “Are you moving those, or are they staying?”
Ha. Let’s not get crazy.
“They’re staying unless you want them to move,” I say.
Juniper tilts her head as she looks up at me in a way that makes my pulse spike all over again; this is a curious look she’s giving me, intrigued, searching for…something.
“You know,” she says slowly, a faint smile curling her lips—lips still red from being kissed. “I have this theory about you. And I think you might end up proving me right.”
“Of course I won’t,” I say, fully aware that I’m spewing nonsense. “Now are you going to be mad at me?”
“Yes,” she says immediately. “Just don’t be obnoxious, Aiden. Don’t shout at me, and don’t make assumptions.”
“Is it an assumption if it’s true?” I say, my eyes narrowing on her. “Because I have it on very good authority that Gus told you about Sandy and you immediately booked it out of there to come here.”
“Gus is a little snitch, I see,” she mutters under her breath.
I clamp down on the laugh that wants to escape. “I will try not to make assumptions,” I say instead, “if you will promise not to run recklessly into situations that could be dangerous.”
“I didn’t go recklessly into a dangerous situation,” she says, rolling her eyes. “That’s my point. I hid in the library.”
“You did,” I say with a nod. “After you went to the dangerous situation.”
“Well, it’s not like I could just go sit at home, either,” she says, fisting her hands on her hips as some of that spark returns to her eyes. “And it’s not like I was going to go around asking people stupid questions. I’m not dumb. I have a well-developed sense of self-preservation. Thus”—she gestures at our surroundings—“the library. So don’t be a jerk.”
I swallow, my eyes dropping to her lips. “I want to kiss you again.”
She blinks in surprise.
“Except…” I say slowly, and now my heart is starting to pound for a different reason. “There are things we need to talk about first.”
Juniper sighs. “Just one more, then, before you overthink everything.” And before I can respond, she goes up on her tiptoes and presses her lips firmly to mine.
And it’s so tempting. It’s so tempting to forget about all the things she needs to know, to just be with her and forget the rest. But—
“Goodness gracious!” a voice gasps from our left. I start, and pressed against me, Juniper does the same. We break our kiss as our heads swivel to look at our intruder. It’s the librarian, her glasses perched at the end of her long nose, her hands disapproving on her hips as she marches toward us from the end of the row. “Students kissing in the library after school—”
“Not students,” I say quickly. Juniper moves to pull away from me, but I hold onto her with tight hands until gradually she relaxes against me once more. “A teacher and his legal, non-student—” Crap. His…girlfriend? Friend? Roommate?
A deafening silence falls between Juniper and me as I search for the right term. I look at her quickly, only to find that she’s turned her gaze back to me too.
“Gonna finish that sentence?” she says, arching her brow at me.
I shrug helplessly. “I am not capable of kissing you like this one time and never doing it again.” I hesitate. “I also am not capable of casual relationships. So friend and roommate both feel wrong. But…” I can’t date her. Not yet, anyway.
I sigh internally as our little bubble of bliss pops, thanks to the librarian and also thanks to the reminder that Juniper and I have things to talk about if we want any sort of romantic relationship. “Let’s go,” I say, finally releasing her and stepping away. I hold out my hand for her to take. I don’t want to forfeit contact completely. “I guess we’ve got things to figure out.”
* For this chapter, listen to You Are The One by Shiny Toy Guns!
* I love them I love them I love them!
24
IN WHICH AIDEN TELLS THE TRUTH
“Tell me.”
It’s the first thing I say when Juniper slides into the driver’s seat of her car, closing the door quietly. She’s jumpy, looking around with a tight, nervous expression, and that’s part of why I chose to get in her car instead of going to my own. We can come back and get mine later sometime. Right now I just want to stay close to her.
She’s silent for a moment as she buckles, the belt snapping into place with a click that somehow seems too loud.
“Juniper,” I say when the silence stretches on. “Just tell me.” I’m well aware that the next words out of her mouth will be shocking, but that just makes the anticipation worse.
It’s a relief when she finally turns to me. “How well do you know Rocco?” she says.
In my head, my brain produces the same sound you see in cheesy comedies—that sound like a record scratching that happens when a character is taken aback or when something unexpected turns up.
How well do I know Rocco?
How well do I—how well—Rocco—what?
She must be able to tell that this one question has reduced my intelligence to a pile of scrambled eggs, because she sighs, and the look she gives me is almost pitying.
“Rocco Astor,” she says, her voice betraying a slight tremor. “I think it’s possible he’s the man Sandra was seeing.”
I blink once. Twice. “Explain,” I finally say.
She sighs again, starting the car. “I’m not sure I can,” she admits. “Not properly, anyway.” She looks over her shoulder as she backs out of her parking spot. “It seems sort of…I don’t know. Sort of nebulous, I guess, in my mind.”
“Try,” I say. It comes out as more of a croak.
She shrugs, but the movement is tight. “When I first came to town, I went to Grind and Brew. I was waiting for you, right? But someone followed me there. I didn’t think anything of it; I just figured we were going the same place and they were riding my tail. It was a couple sitting in that car, or at least two people. They were looking at me sort of surprised, and I thought it was because of my bad parking job.”
My first idiotic thought is that I remember that parking job, and it was bad. But the thoughts keep flowing, and her words register. “You actually saw them together?” I say, my eyes widening. “It was Sandy and Rocco?”
“The thing is,” she says, “I’m really not sure it was them. I didn’t know Rocco yet, and I hadn’t seen or heard of Sandy. I did think Rocco looked familiar when I first met him at the dance, but then you told me he was Lionel’s brother, and I figured that was why—because there’s a resemblance between them. All I remember about the people in the car is that they were wearing matching tops, some sort of bright pink color. It was hard to tell exactly what shade through the window, and I only saw them briefly.”
“Okay,” I say slowly, my brow wrinkling as I try to figure out what I’m missing. “But why would they have been following you? No one knew you were in town.”
“That’s not true,” she says as she shakes her head. “I posted on the town forum about a place to live. I set up the meeting with you through your sister in the comments on my original post. It’s a bit of a stretch, maybe, but we definitely talked about the move-in date and the color of my car and the place and time of our meeting at Grind and Brew.”
“Okay…” I say, trying to put everything together.
“But when I spoke to Gus,” she goes on, “he told me about the man he saw on Sandy’s phone. The contact picture of the guy was him and Sandy together, wearing matching pink hoodies. He didn’t describe exactly what color pink. But it reminded me of the photo Sandy’s mom showed us, of her in that fuchsia hoodie with the hood pulled up, the drawstrings tied so it scrunched around her face. You remember?”
“I remember,” I say after a second. “So…your reason for suspecting Rocco…is a pink sweatshirt?”
“I told you I can’t explain it,” she says, sounding frustrated. “Not fully. It’s just—I guess it’s intuition. Have you ever heard the theory that gut feelings are really just your subconscious brain noticing obscure details and making connections?”
“I have,” I admit.
“All I can—” But she breaks off, her eyes widening, her mouth forming a little circle. “Oh,” she breathes. “That’s it. That’s what I’ve been missing.”
I blink. “Sorry?”
“In my book,” she says, turning to me excitedly. “It’s all been feeling very mechanical and neat and just too—too—something. But it’s the human element! That’s what I’ve been missing. The humanity.”
“I…don’t follow,” I say.
She sighs. “I need more right brain in a book that so far has been very left brain,” she says. “I need intuition and instinct and feelings. Not just facts and observations and proof. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” I say. “When you explain it like that, it does. But what does this have to do with Rocco and Sandra?”
“Oh,” she says, looking startled. “Sorry. I got distracted. But it goes back to the instinct thing.” She sighs again. “All I can really boil it down to is that Sandy did cross country, and Rocco is the coach. The whole cross country team wears shirts in that same fuchsia color. I saw that couple in that car the day I arrived in town, and barely any time later Sandy got in touch with me. A lot of the people in Autumn Grove didn’t know who I was or that I had moved here by the time Sandy was asking to meet with me. Plus…” She trails off, glancing over at me before looking back to the road. “Rocco knew my mom. He looks like his brother, and his brother as a child looked too much like me for there not to be some relation. We all have the same eyes.”
I swallow as something sick and nauseating slithers into my gut. “Rocco keeps chickens,” I say, staring blankly out the window as my mind works furiously.
“He does,” Juniper says, in a way that tells me she’s already thought about that too. “And he wanted us to stay away from all of this. He was very insistent.”
I shake my head, pushing one hand through my hair. “But that doesn’t make sense. Rocco never hung around with them—your mom and her friends.”
“Aiden,” she says, her voice patient. “Who told us that? Who gave us that history?”
Crap. I’m an idiot. “Rocco,” I breathe as my stomach churns more violently still.
“Yes.”
All right. I understand what she means. There are no huge clues, no neon signs pointing to Rocco proclaiming him as the killer, but there are lots of little things—too many to be coincidence. He fits in a way no one else has so far.
“So how well do you know him?” she asks again.
“I mean,” I say, running my hand through my hair once more, “obviously not well enough to guarantee he’s not secretly a psychopath. I don’t know much about his past, and I’m not sure I could trust the things he has told me.”
We fall into silence, and I’m sure her mind is spinning the same way mine is. I jump when her phone begins to ring, vibrating and blaring loudly from the cupholder in the center console. I pick it up and press it wordlessly into her outstretched hand. After she looks at it, though, she puts it back in the cupholder.
“It’s Matilda,” she says. “I’ll call her back later.”
We’re quiet for the rest of the drive, and I’m so lost in my thoughts that when the car comes to a stop, it takes a full thirty seconds for me to realize we aren’t at home.
“What are we doing here?” I say, blinking up at the entrance to Forester’s.
“Getting groceries,” she says.
I blink again. “Right—right now?”
She shrugs. “Dish soap doesn’t magically appear just because you think you’ve figured out who the bad guy is. Plus,” she adds lightly, “I need chips and guac.” As nonchalant as her voice is, though, her face is paler than normal, and that’s the detail that convinces me to play along.
“This is true. All right.” I hesitate before saying, “But you should know, Gale Forester and I don’t get along.”
“I know,” she says with a little smirk. “He’s mentioned it to me before. He always grumbles about you when he sees me, ever since he found out we were roommates. He loves me, though.”
I sigh, unbuckling. “Of course he does.” Then I get out of the car, closing the door gently behind me so that it doesn’t fall off or something. That always feels like a possibility with Juniper’s car. She does the same on her side, and then we head toward the entrance.
“It’s because I’m delightful,” she says, walking backward toward Forester’s and grinning at me.
“Of course you are.”
“Just wait until he hears we’re dating.”
“We aren’t dating.” The words pop out of my mouth before I think them through, before I can decide whether they’re a good idea.
Spoiler alert: they’re not.
“Ah,” she says, her face falling as her steps slow. “I see.” She hesitates while I mentally drop-kick myself in the face. “Is it going to be one of those ‘for your own good’ situations? I’ve written one of those. I liked it in my book, but…” She breaks off, frowning as her gaze drops to the ground. “I don’t like it so much in real life.”
“It’s not that,” I say, sighing and running my hand through my hair. “I just—there are some things we need to talk about first. That’s all.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, and her eyes narrow. Then she moves back toward me, slowly, and I swear she’s swinging her hips like that on purpose—or maybe it’s just because her yoga tank and leggings don’t hide as much of her figure. Either way, my mouth has gone completely dry by the time she’s planted herself right in front of me.
