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He offers it to me to eat, and I open my mouth so he can drop it onto my tongue.
Placing it into my mouth with two fingers, he’s being cute and friendly. I should leave it at that. But crazy instinct takes over, and I close my lips on his thumb. I watch the surprise take over his face. His jaw goes slack. His eyes heat and darken.
It fuels me, and I lick his thumb slowly, drawing circles around it with my tongue. I can’t take my gaze from his face, and his eyes watch me as though I have a plan. When I part my lips, he leaves his thumb for a moment, and I suck it between my lips once more before letting him go.
He inhales a shaky breath, and it’s all I need to feel calm.
Because I just needed to know he isn’t made of stone. And that sharp inhale and how his face looked tells me everything. He’s not immune to me.
The way he leans a little closer, eyes tracing my face and landing on my lips, drives that point home even more. His face is inches away. I could close the gap and fuse our lips together, but I’ve already made my move. The next one belongs to him.
Under the dim house lights, it feels like we’re sealed inside a bubble of privacy.
Dangerous thought. It’s that kind of thinking that causes people to get sloppy and make mistakes with their hearts and minds that will come back to haunt them later. I know this. I earn my living because of this.
But I can’t back away. We’re in Napa. It’s a small town. No one has paid a bit of attention to Colin all day, and we’re in the last few rows of the theater. All of these thoughts and none of them play through my mind in a discordant, unhelpful maze.
“Junebug…” Colin breathes my name like it’s the answer to a confounding riddle.
“Yes.” His face is a little blurred at this proximity. I can feel his breath when he speaks.
He shakes his head. “This is not a good idea.”
“I disagree.”
His eyes drop closed for a beat. When he opens them, the blue is a different, fiercer color than I’ve seen before. “I—I can’t do what you’re asking.”
“I don’t know the difference between can’t and won’t. If you’re not feeling it, just say so.”
He leans his head back and takes another long breath. Shaking his head slowly, he finally returns his gaze to mine. “If you only knew how much I fucking wanted you, you’d run.”
“Why would I run?” My voice comes out in a whisper because he’s sucked all the remaining air from my lungs. I feel dizzy. He can’t have just said what he did. He can’t mean it, even if he did say it.
“Because if I thought I could have you the way I want to, I wouldn’t be able to stop.”
“Who says I’d want you to stop?”
“You’d be wise to be careful around me. I don’t do relationships, and you deserve better.”
“Who says I want a relationship?” I don’t want one, or at least I never did. Now I don’t know what I want.
He lingers, face so close to mine for so long that I stop breathing. He has to kiss me or I just might suffocate. And yet, I should be listening to what he’s telling me. I should be hearing him.
“Why no relationships, just out of curiosity?” I try to keep my tone light, but the weight of my question falls like a boulder on my ears. I gauge his reaction to see if he feels it too, but he doesn’t flinch.
“I’m married to my work. The one time I tried being married to a person at the same time, it did not end well.”
He snaps his lips shut after the brief explanation as though he didn’t just open a trove of new questions. At the same time,I have my own set of responses that I wasn’t expecting. For the first time in my life, I’m not sure I want another fling, even though he’s hotter than sin and he’s right here. Maybe I do want a relationship.
And I know better than to try to create one where it can’t ever exist. I’ve made that mistake before, and I won’t repeat it.
So I do the unthinkable, given how goddamn much I want to kiss him. I do the right thing, even though I want to know how his lips taste just one time.
I back away. I lean back in my movie theater seat. And when the lights go down, I slowly wipe the cool cup of wine against my forehead and watch the hot nerd played by Cary Grant try to wrangle a leopard.
He’s way too smart for the job he’s doing, and Katherine Hepburn’s character knows it. But she plays along, each of them hitting the comedy notes perfectly until they can’t stay away from each other any longer. Then they fall in love.
The tight tether between them pulls like a heavy rubber band until it snaps with such a satisfying explosion of desire that it makes the audience fall in love with them too.
