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“I’m Julia.”
Jakob gasps and slaps his forehead in pretend shock. “The famous artist Julia?”
The little girl giggles and shakes her head. “No!”
Jakob studies her and looks at the crayon drawing he holds in his hand once more. “Are you sure? Because this looks like a Julia that I saw at the Louvre!”
“No, I’m just regular Julia!”
Jakob eyes her skeptically, stroking his beard. “No, no, there’s nothing regular about this. You must autograph this for me, Julia.”
The child clearly thinks Jakob is bonkers, but she shrugs and says, “Okay, I’ll sign it for you.”
Just as the girl is scribbling orange crayon on the back of the page, the girl’s mother comes huffily down the aisle.
“Julia, honey, are you bothering these people?”
“Not at all!” I say.
The girl hands the paper back to Jakob, then turns to her mother, hands on her hips. “I was giving him my autograph, Mother!”
The harried mom chuckles and rests a hand on the girl’s head.
“That’s very nice, but you should come back to the front of the bus and stop bothering the other passengers.”
I try to set her at ease. “She’s adorable.”
“And very talented,” Jakob says.
“I think so too!” says the chubby-cheeked cherub, nodding emphatically.
We laugh and wave goodbye as her mother corrals her back to their section at the front of the bus with her brother and sister.
Beaming at him after the way he conducted himself with the little girl, I watch as Jakob carefully folds the picture into fourths and tucks it away into his back pocket.
I don’t know what comes over me, but I have the overwhelming urge to grab him by the front of his perfect white shirt and plant my lips on his.
But I don’t do that. I want to, but I don’t do it.
The bus weaves through the countryside, and my anticipation builds as the environment grows more wild. And I’m kicking myself for thinking of little else but kissing him when we have so much catching up to do.
I reach over and grasp his hand. “I feel awful you had to stay at the group home, even up until you turned 18. If things were different, if my mother hadn’t gotten sick, I know she would have taken you into our home in a heartbeat. She loved you like a son, Jakob, you know that. And…we might never have moved away.”
Emotions well up over things I never had any choice about.
“Josephine, Josephine,” Jakob sighs, compassion filling his eyes as he strokes his thumb over the back of my hand. “We can grieve about what we missed, but let’s do that later.”
I blink at him in surprise and confusion. “Later? Why later?”
The compassion in his expression changes to something darker. The look he gives me does confusing things to my body, and my skin prickles in anticipation.
“Because right now, I want to kiss you.”
Our lips come together sweetly at first. Short, sweet, lovely kisses.
Holy hell, I’m being kissed. By a man. And that man is Jakob. My Jakob. After all these years!
My hesitation is set aside for now because kissing this man is not at all what I imagined. No one told me I would feel a good kiss everywhere in my body, including my lips. Places untouched and unseen by anyone except me. The pricking of my nipples makes me tremble.
