Free Runaway by Helen Winterfelt

guess that’s one way of putting it…’ He laughed.
    ‘So you know what I’m talking about.’
    ‘Come on, Emma, don’t ask me this stuff…’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘You wouldn’t even believe me if I told you.’
    ‘Try me,’ I said, ‘Look, I know that we’ve only known each other for like… What, 24 hours?’
    ‘Around that, yeah.’
    ‘But it feels like so much longer than that… And I know you think the same, or something like it.’
    Jack looked up at me, his dark eyes running over my body before returning to meet my own. He sighed, running a hand through his hair and nodding.
    ‘Okay, fine…’ He said, ‘… Come over here, though, you look really uncomfortable sat there.’
    I was a second away from jumping up from the bed and rounding to the other side to climb up by his side, but Jack got to me first. He leaned over and brought his hands up beneath my arms, lifting me up and over him effortlessly with his ridiculous, raw strength and sitting me down on the other side of the bed by his side. He sat up against the headboard and I against the backboard, facing each other.
    We sat in silence for a moment, my heart racing with that most sultry of movements he had just made… And though I didn’t even want to admit it to myself, I couldn’t deny that I already missed the sensation of his hands on me.
    ‘What do you want to know?’ He asked.
    ‘What you said before. The thing that I wouldn’t believe if you told me.’
    ‘So the whole story,’ he smiled. ‘Okay, as long as you don’t need to be back to your house anytime soon.
    ‘I grew up just outside of Chicago, like I said before, which is where my parents still live. Nothing much to tell from then. I was a smart kid, probably even cockier than I am now. Moved to San Francisco for college, living in a tiny room and sleeping on friend’s couches. But I wasn’t exactly your typical college student, getting wasted in the evenings and sleeping through classes. If anything I drink more now than I did then. While everybody else was partying, I spent most of my nights with a group of other overachievers at the college library working on business ideas, team projects, stuff like that. People came and went, but a small group of us stuck together and built a few things that took off more effectively than we could have ever imagined. That was maybe… Eight years ago?
    ‘We sold a few companies, built some more. Before we knew it we were managing more money than we knew what to do with. So we started a holding company, and if things were crazy before then they became almost unbelievable at that point. And… It was around that time that I met Clare.’
    ‘Oh, so there is a girl?’ I asked, raising my eyebrows at him.
    Jack took a deep breath, looking about the room and running his hand through his hair again.
    ‘We met when I was 21,’ he continued, ‘Straight out of college. She was one of our original team, she handled the accounts. I had never liked dealing with numbers, but she actually got me interested in it. And just like that, she had me hooked on her.
    ‘Things just went up and up. I couldn’t imagine myself with anybody else but her. Two years later she was pregnant and we were together every minute of the day. We bounced off each other, that’s the only way I can describe it. I had never felt like that before. And then he was born. Noah. We called him that because it rained for days after he was born… Neither of us were religious or anything but it just seemed like a fitting name, and we both liked it. Either way… He was the most amazing thing I had ever seen, something I never thought I would deserve, that I would have the good fortune to call my own.’
    Jack paused for a moment, staring towards the bottom of the bed, his chest rising and falling with long, slow breaths.
    ‘Marriages don’t always work out…’ I said quietly, ‘Sometimes no matter how much you think you know a person things just have a way of going