Long Summer Nights Read Online Free PDF Page B

announced, moving away from her, and she told herself she was glad. Relieved, even.
    “The work is calling,” she rationalized, trying to keep her mind focused on important things like her future career in journalism, instead of the length and width of his sexual prowess.
    “Yes,” he agreed, but he still wasn’t leaving, and he showed very little intent of going so, and she could feel the panic growing inside her, in direct proportion to the needy urge to lean in a little closer, ease into that completely planned yet seemingly arbitrary moment when two lips collide.
    Do not fall for this, she reminded herself. Ignore the sexy man with trouble simmering in his eyes. He wanted sex, his body nearly hummed from it, and unlike the twenty-four-year-old drummer with a passion for cartoons, this one would give her a night full of screaming orgasms, and then break her heart, most likely at the same time because he seemed to be that talented.
    “Who are you?” she asked, thinking that if he was going to break her heart, she wanted to know his name.
    “Aaron.”
    “Aaron who?”
    “Smith.”
    “Really?” she drawled, not bothering to hide the sarcasm.
    “It’s actually Jenkins-Smith, but that seemed pretentious, so I just use Aaron Smith.”
    “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Smith. I’m Jennifer Dade, and from now on, I’ll try to stay out of your way.”
    It was a desperate hint that she wasn’t in his way, that he was sitting on her rock, and if he truly wanted all that solitude and privacy that he kept blustering about, then he’d have to act a little less…stimulated. Not that she was complaining. Much.
    “I should go,” he repeated, but he moved closer, and his eyes were on her mouth, and Jenn felt herself go hot, then cold. “Normally I like to ignore everyone else. It makes my life much more comfortable.”
    “Why can’t you ignore me?” she asked, because she needed him to. She did not need this, but she couldn’t ignore it. She couldn’t ignore him.
    He brushed a gentle finger across her brows. “You look at me with those busy eyes, always digging for your version of the truth, but grasping for the first clichéd insights into the psyche because it’s easy and it makes your deadline, and it doesn’t matter that there isn’t always some three-point paragraph that explains who we are. You think there’s always an answer, always a reason, but sometimes people are simply the way they are.”
    It was not what she wanted to hear, not what she had hoped to hear, and all those roiling emotions finally erupted. “And that’s why you can’t ignore me, because you just can’t? The Twinkie defense? I had to be me. I was born to be bad. No, there’s always a reason. You just don’t want to tell me.”
    She thought he was going to leave. Thought she’d finally done it. Finally chased him away, but instead he looked with all the wretched want in his eyes. All the lonely hunger, combined with the same painful recklessness that she felt in herself.
    “I wrote about you. This afternoon, I came home and spewed out reams of pages about someone with your face, your eyes, your hair.”
    “How did it end?” she asked, breathlessly tempted by the drama of it.
    “You threw yourself in front of a train.”
    “Why?”
    “You are the mariner’s albatross, Ahab’s white whale, the magnificent obsession. In the end, there was no alternative. You had to die,” he said, sounding miserable and baffled.
    But then his fingers reached out, touched her hand, such a small gesture, such a telling gestured. Sometimes sex was scratching an itch, and sometimes sex was the very human need to touch someone. All the phones, all the gadgets, all the machines in the world that mimicked human contact, and yet nothing came close to the absoluteness of sex.
    “You like me, don’t you?” she asked, twining her fingers through his, locking them there.
    “I don’t want to like you,” he admitted. “You’re very happy and sure of