Page 60 of Wasted Lust

He doesn’t turn to me, just puts his head in his hands and rests his elbows on his knees.

“You OK?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” No emotion in that statement. Just blank.

“You gotta leave?”

He finally turns a little to give me a sideways glance. “I do. I know it’s bad, Sasha. I know I should stay here with you. But I have to go.”

“Should I go with you?”

He smiles then. Like big. And then he lies down and pulls me up to his chest. “God, I wish. See, if you take me up on that offer we could be partners. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

I picture it in my head. “Am I Scully or Mulder?”

“Definitely Mulder,” he says with a huff of laughter.

“I think so too. Can we look for aliens and take on weird X-Files cases?”

“For sure.”

It’s my turn to smile big. I think I might really like Jax. He’s nice. “I’ll think about it.”

“Will you be OK here?”

“I’m OK everywhere, Jax. Don’t worry about me.”

He leans in and kisses me on the lips. It’s a little kiss. Not meant to be spectacular. But for some reason it feels amazing. “I gotta go. That call was about my brother.”

“Oh, did something bad happen?” Jesus, I hope not. I can tell his brother means everything to him.

“Very bad. Very, very fucking bad. But he’s OK, so I can’t ask for anything else without being selfish.”

I prop myself up on my elbow. “Are you religious?”

“What?” He shoots me a confused look.

“Do you have guilt for wanting more out of life, even when you have plenty?”

“A bit.”

“And you think asking for too much makes the bad luck come?”

“In a way, I guess. I just try to be grateful for the small things.”

I lie back and think about that as Jax drags himself out of bed and starts to get dressed. “Do you think we bring our own bad luck? Or do you think sometimes our luck mingles with the luck of someone else, and gets tangled up in it?”

He’s pulling up his pants when I ask this question, but he stops with his fingers on the zipper to look at me in the approaching dawn. “I never thought of it, I guess.”

“What time is it?”

He points to the bedside clock. “Four-thirty. I don’t know when I can come back, Sasha. It’ll probably take me all day just to sort out what happened. So if you want to go home, it’s only a two-hour drive. There’s a car in the garage. The keys are in the kitchen drawer next to the fridge.”

“Is someone coming to pick you up?”

“Yeah,” he says, grabbing a white dress shirt from the closet and sliding his arms into the sleeves. “The jet. There’s an airfield about a half a mile away. By the time I get over there, the jet should be landing.”

He buttons his shirt and grabs a tie. I watch him as he dresses and feel… like I should not ask for too much more right now, either. If he’s right, and we should be satisfied with the little things that makes us happy, then I’m way overdue for some bad luck. Because I really want more with this man.