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“What the hell are you talking about, princesita?”
Piper was starting to genuinely think that her wires had gotten crossed. Had she dreamt up the whole thing? The press of his lips? The feeling of his tongue battling hers? No, she wasn’t delusional enough to make that up. She set her shoulders back and hit Leo with a sidelong glance that said she wasn’t playing games.
“You kissed me,” she stated.
“I’m aware,” Leo bit off. “I was there.” He had the audacity to look irritated, which riled her up even more.
“Well, why the fuck did you do it?”
Leo straightened his back and hit her with narrowed eyes. “Why did you kiss me back?”
“I didn’t—” She cut herself off when she saw Leo’s eyebrows rise in disbelief in her periphery. “I don’t know why I did, but I’m the one asking the questions here.”
“You blatantly asked me to kiss you.”
“Okay, well, you brought it up first.”
“Mira, your guess is as good as mine. Maybe I just wanted to see if the cherry stem thing was true. Maybe you were annoying me, so I wanted to shut you up.” He shrugged. “It won’t happen again.”
The last piece of Leo’s speech came out in a disgruntled huff, and for some reason, Piper’s stupid heart dropped into her stomach. She shouldn’t want to do it again. She should wholeheartedly agree with him that it was a massive mistake, but her body said otherwise. He was minimizing the best kiss of her entire life, and her stomach sank at the thought of not being good enough yet again. It was her destiny to finally enjoy a kiss only to realize that she was alone in her enjoyment.
“Right.” Piper nodded and looked back out the window, finding a tree in the distance to focus on. “Yep.”
Leo massaged his temples earnestly before letting out an exasperated sigh and rifling through his bag for something. Piper kept her eyes on the road, but curiosity had her sneaking looks. When he found what he was looking for, he turned the small jar over in his hands a few times before ultimately holding it up for her to see.
“This was meant as a truce.” A jar of maraschino cherries stared back at her. “It’s also a statement of sorts.”
“You think I need to practice tying knots in cherry stems because I’m a bad kisser,” Piper guessed.
Leo groaned. “You’re not making this easy on me.” He fisted the cherries tighter in his palm and shook the jar a little. “I thought it was pretty fucking obvious that I liked the kiss, Piper. I think you’re infuriating. I think you’re fake. And—”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I wasn’t finished. Don’t interrupt me,” Leo warned before continuing. “I must have temporarily lost my sanity when I kissed you. But it was a fucking good kiss, Piper. I went home and got off immediately. That’s why I bought these. You don’t need practice at all. You were right about the cherry stems. I still despise you, and you still piss me off. But you’re a good kisser.”
There was no way to prevent the blood from creeping into her cheeks, so Piper stopped trying to hold her embarrassment. The way Leo blatantly talked about sex always made the heat surge between her legs, but knowing he had thought about her when getting himself off made the heat fester into a throbbing, unsatisfied ache. She fought the urge to ask more questions. Fought to keep the image at bay of Leo lying on a bed and imagining her as he stroked himself. If she had enough guts, she would have admitted to using her wand vibrator when she got home, too, but she wasn’t that confident.
“All right.” Piper let out a slow breath, thankful that she had to focus on driving so she didn’t have to look at him. “Then… I guess I should say the same.” She’d let him decide which pieces she was admitting to. “You’re an asshole, you walk all over everyone to get what you want, and you perpetually have a storm cloud over your head. But you’re a good kisser.”
“Great. Are we done rehashing this now?” The words were as grumpy as ever, but one glance in his direction before her eyes locked on the road again confirmed the slight smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. He probably couldn’t help but feel a little self-righteous. She was feeling high on the praise herself, which was odd considering compliments usually made her feel uncomfortable. It was easier to accept her kissing abilities when she knew that Leo hated her. The fact that he had said it at all meant it had to be true. Even if the compliment had followed a bunch of insults to soften the blow to his ego, he had still said it.
“You didn’t tell Sam, right?” The question sprang to the forefront of her mind in a panic. If Sam knew, it was only a matter of time until Thea found out and got livid that Piper hadn’t told her.
Leo let out a bark of laughter and shook his head. “Fuck no. As much as I love the guy, he’d be absolutely relentless about it.” She watched him stiffen next to her, his arm shooting out to touch her shoulder, equally panicked. “Did you tell Thea?”
“No.” Piper shook her head. Leo relaxed back into the passenger seat, leaving her arm without the warmth of his palm. “I don’t plan to, either, for the same reason you aren’t telling Sam.”
“Okay, we’re on the same page for once. We never speak of this again.”
“Fine by me.” Piper removed one hand from her steering wheel and held it out, palm up. “Cherry me.”
Twenty-One
LEO
Two and a half hours passed without another hitch and without Leo prattling on again about his masturbation sessions. Whatever had possessed him to tell Piper that little tidbit was firmly wrangled back into his mind and his pants. Since then, they had devoured an obscene amount of cherries and managed to not kill each other. He was counting it as a win.
Knotted cherry stems and sunflower seed shells filled a paper cup in one of the cup holders. It reminded Leo of his brother Marcos, who’d chewed tobacco for a hot minute in high school before he had gotten caught by their mother. Marcos had received a long lecture about hygiene and tooth decay while Leo and his other two older brothers snickered at their brother from the side. It was how all four of them had ended up scrubbing the bathrooms in Lydia’s Grocery from floor to ceiling to “learn discipline.” Really, all they had learned was that Antonio, the eldest of them, thought that the manager of the store at the time was hot. They gave him endless shit for it, especially when they found out that Amala Winston was over ten years his senior and also married. Leo’s brother had always been into older women, so nobody in the family was surprised when Antonio married a sweet-as-pie receptionist at a car dealership who was three years his senior. Antonio had managed to knock Saanvi up less than two months after they got married. It was one of the many reasons Leo agreed to carpool with Piper in the first place. He had only gotten to see his baby niece three times since she was born, and it felt wrong. Then again, most of the things he missed out on felt wrong. Antonio and Marcos were both living the married family life. Alvaro, the wild child among all his siblings, was living out of a converted van like a Portland hipster. Mariana was at a state school on a soccer scholarship. She was only about two hours from Fletcher University, but Leo still didn’t have the resources to see her as much as he wanted to.
