Chapter 22

We arrived at Jay's apartment building fifteen minutes later. I was excited to finally see his place after we'd spent all of our time at my house so far.

Jay followed me into the small, brightly lit elevator with a mirror on the far wall and pressed the button to the fourth floor. I stepped close to the mirror and wiped away a smudge of mascara from underneath my eye. Jay moved to stand behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. I leaned my head back against his chest, placed my hands on top of his, and regarded our reflection.

He was more than half a head taller than me and broad enough that my slim frame was completely surrounded by his silhouette. My blonde curls had become undone during the evening and fell loosely and messily onto my black leather jacket. Jay wore a black bomber jacket, and our jeans were a close match in colour too. The cold light in the elevator intensified the crystal blue of my eyes and brought out the blue in Jay's green eyes.

"We look good together," I noted and saw Jay's reflection smile in response.

I turned around in his arms and stared up at him. His smile widened as he tightened his arms around me, and I got up onto my tiptoes to brush my lips against his. The elevator dinged when it reached our floor and the doors opened, but neither one of us was ready to break our kiss just yet and we stayed where we were. When the doors began to close again, Jay reached back quickly to hold his hand into the closing gap and walked backwards, pulling me out of the elevator with him before breaking the kiss.

He grabbed my hand and pulled me down the corridor to the last door on the right. He unlocked it and I followed him into the open-plan living area of his apartment after he'd turned the lights on.

While I took off my shoes and hung my jacket onto a coat rack in the entryway, Jay headed into the kitchen to our right and threw his jacket onto a barstool by the kitchen island. He went to his fridge and I walked into the room to look around.

Immediately, I felt comfortable and at home in his place as I sensed Jay's presence and character in every piece of furniture and every object I saw.

The space wasn't big, but it was nicely furnished for its size. Half of the room was taken up by the kitchen and entrance area, the other half was the living room. Between two big windows in the far wall, stood a console table with a TV mounted above it. A modern, black, leather sofa and two matching armchairs faced the TV, and a wide, industrial style shelf filled with books and picture frames was placed against the wall behind the left armchair. On the opposite wall, hung a stylised painting of a motorcycle above a sideboard made out of the same dark wood as the shelf and console table.

"Do you ride?" I asked, standing in the middle of the room studying the painting.

Jay came to stand next to me and handed me a cold beer. "Yeah. Whenever I get the chance. Which isn't too often, sadly."

"Maybe you could take me for a ride one day?" I looked up at him hopefully. "I haven't been on a bike in years, but I'd like to do it again."

"My bike has been in storage for the last few months, but I could dust it off for our trip on Sunday," he suggested, delighted by my interest in his hobby.

I nodded eagerly with an excited smile on my face, then took a sip of my beer and walked over to the shelf. I recognised several of the books on display and owned a few myself.

"I liked this one," I said, skimming my fingertips across the spine of one book. "This one was emotionally difficult to read but amazing. Hated this one," I noted and tapped my fingernails onto a book with a red cover.

Jay chuckled behind me, "Yeah, me too."

When I reached the picture frames, I set my bottle down on the shelf and picked up one of them. It was a photo of Jay and the rest of Intelligence wearing all black gear under their vests and holding rifles. All members had elated smiles on their faces, and Jay stood proudly between Voight and Kim in the middle of the group.

"We'd just raided a stash house and seized an entire truckload of drugs and guns," Jay commented.

I placed the frame back and let my eyes wander over the other photos.

"Cute," I remarked and softly tapped a photo of Jay and Will as elementary school kids.

My gaze fell on an old photo from the 1970s showing an attractive young woman with long, straight, auburn hair and the same gentle expression in her green eyes that I often saw in Jay's. "Is this your mum?"

"Yeah, I think she was twenty in this photo. She died several years ago," he told me quietly.

I knew that she'd passed away because he and Will had talked about her in the past tense, but this was the first time he'd told me. "I'm sorry," I whispered. "You look very alike. Same eyes."

He smiled softly, "Yeah, people who knew her always tell me that. When we were little, Will would get upset when someone said it because he wanted the green eyes too instead of the red hair. We don't know where his brown eyes came from because our father had blue eyes."

"Why? I like Will's red hair," I chuckled and glanced back at the photo of them at kids. "Your dad passed away too?"

"Yeah, two years ago. It's just Will and me now."

I regarded his face for a moment, trying to gauge his emotion, but he kept his expression sober.

The next photo I picked up was a portrait of a young Jay in his army uniform, wearing a tan beret.

"That was at Fort Benning before my first deployment," Jay told me.

The photo depicted Jay in his early twenties looking at the camera with a proud glint in his innocent eyes and a faint smile on his lips. I placed the photo back down and examined two more photos. One showed a group of soldiers in the desert, surrounding and sitting on a Humvee, wearing their combat uniforms and helmets. Jay stood in the middle of the group with his foot propped up onto the step of the vehicle and his rifle hanging around his shoulders. In the other photo, Jay had his arm around another soldier. Both were smiling at the camera, but Jay's smile didn't reach his eyes the way it had in the portrait anymore. He looked a lot older than in the picture at Fort Benning, creases had formed on his face and his eyes had lost their youthful innocence. They had seen things that had changed the way he looked at the world and perceived it. The other man had a similar expression on his face.

Seeing the difference side by side, brought on an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Jay picked up the group photo. "This is in Afghanistan shortly before the end of my second tour," he paused before continuing. "Not all of us in this photo made it back."

My heart sank. I reached out and hugged his waist from the side, leaning my head against his shoulder. He put his arm around me and looked at the photo in his hand for a few more seconds before setting it back down.

"This is Mouse," he pointed to the other man in the second photo. "He helped me out a lot when we came home."

"Where is he now?"

"Back in Afghanistan," he sighed.

I let my eyes travel over the photos one more time. They were a representation of his life and showed how much he'd already been through and experienced in his young life. The stoic and sober manner in which he'd told me about his past awed and worried me at the same time.

"I am deeply impressed by you and everything you've done and experienced," I said earnestly.

He was still looking at the photos but smiled in recognition of my words with a smile that reached his eyes again. The innocence was gone for good, but he had recovered his full smile.

Jay picked up my bottle off the shelf, handed it back to me, and walked to his sofa to sit down. I drank another sip and took a seat next to him when his phone buzzed.

"Kevin wants to know if we're still awake," Jay told me when he opened the message.

He typed out a reply, and a second after he'd sent it off, the phone rang.

"Hey, Jay. Is Hailey with you?" I barely made out Kevin's voice through the speaker of Jay's phone pressed up against his ear.

"Yeah, she's next to me."

"Could you put me on loudspeaker?"

"Hey, what's up?" I asked once Jay had complied.

"Hey, Hailey. I was wondering if I could get Zoe's number from you," Kevin asked hesitantly.

Jay and I looked at each other with confused expressions on our faces.

"Didn't you ask her for it?" Jay questioned.

"No, I had planned on doing it eventually, but I didn't get the chance. She got a call from one of her brothers and had to leave, and I didn't really want to ask in front of everybody," Kevin explained hastily.

"Yeah, I'll text you her number in second," I grinned. "From what I saw you two really hit it off."

"On my part, yes," he said, and I could hear a smile in his voice.

"I think she feels the same way," I encouraged him.

"I hope so. Thank you in advance for giving me her number, Hailey. I owe you one," Kevin promised.

Jay and I looked at each other, and I pulled my bottom lip up, acknowledging the sweetness of Kevin's words and the entire situation. "No problem, have a good night!" I called into the phone.

Jay hung up, grinning. I pulled my phone out of my pocket, and he gave me Kevin's number so I could text him Zoe's.

"Some people are reserved even if their attraction is clearly reciprocated while others don't hold back at all," I assessed as I sent the message off.

"Are you talking about that woman at the bar?" Jay chuckled.

"Yeah! She did not hold back one bit, did she!" I exclaimed, finding the incident funnier after the fact than I had while it had happened.

"She did not," Jay agreed. "I had shot her down in a friendly but very clear way the first time she'd talked to me. That's why the thought that the drink spill was another attempt at flirting didn't even cross my mind! I hadn't seen her and thought that I'd walked into her," Jay explained laughing slightly. "I'm so glad that you came when you did, Hailey. I didn't want to buy her a drink and risk leading her on, but at the same time, I felt so bad about spilling her drink and ruining her dress."

"She sacrificed that dress for a chance to talk to you!" I realised. "I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that she doesn't do that for every guy she tries to flirt with. You can be well impressed with yourself, Jay!" I teased.

"Who knows. Maybe she has car trunk full of backup dresses," Jay pondered with a grin. "The way you saved me and handled her and the situation was impressively badass yet classy at the same time."

I blushed but felt a small surge of self-confidence rush through me. Jay sat up and took my beer bottle out of my hand and placed it onto the metal and glass coffee table along with his bottle. Then he leaned back again and turned in his seat to face me.

"That woman's flirting attempts backfired in more ways than one. Not only did they keep me uninterested in her, but they also made me feel even more attracted to you," Jay murmured as he inched his face closer to mine. I felt his lips on mine briefly before he pulled back, "And I was convinced that wasn't possible."

A bashful smile appeared on my face onto which Jay placed another kiss. I let my fingers slide into his hair as he held on to my waist. Slowly, he leaned back to lie down on the sofa and pulled me with him until I lay on top of him. His hands ran up and down my body, and I felt his firm chest and stomach underneath me. After deepening the kiss for a while, I sat up and pulled my shirt off. Jay watched me with his hands on my thighs as I undid the buttons of his shirt. When I was done, he sat up too so I could pull his shirt off completely while he brought his mouth to my neck where he placed a line of kisses from just below my ear to the neckline of my bra. My breath faltered at the sensation. When he pulled back, I brought his face back up to mine to kiss him. His lips parted and my tongue moved with his. Eventually, when we had to break apart to gasp for air, I got up from the sofa, took his hand, and led him to his bedroom.