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“What’s he been like with you?” I ask her.
She knows who I mean.
Has he been kind? Protected her? Stood up for her?
But she just says, “I don’t want to talk about him right now.”
She slides up a little, and I turn my head, feeling her breath on my mouth.
She whispers, “How long have you wanted to kiss me?”
I chuckle. “Uh…for as long as I can remember, I guess.”
I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawn to her. As a kid, she was a ball of energy, and it didn’t fade in the least as she grew up. She wanted to be the reason people smiled, and never the reason they cried.
“There was always a charge in the air when I was in the same room with you,” I murmur, memories of all the longing hitting me hard. “I knew you didn’t feel it, too, I just…”
“Left,” she interjects. “You left.”
It wasn’t because of her. Maybe I wanted to see what would happen between them with me out of the way. Maybe my pride and ego constantly shriveled under his shadow.
What I do know for sure, though, is that I was sick of thinking about it. Wanting things I didn’t know how to get,and worried that I’d always be worthless to everyone just because I meant nothing to him.
I was fucking sick of the talk, talk, talk, fucking talk in my head, and I had to go.
“Kade’s like my dad,” she tells me.
I look down, seeing her eyelashes fan in the faint light.
“Like all our dads.” Her voice is so soft. “They dominate every crowd they’re in, and when you wish you could be like that, it makes their attention feel like some gift.” She threads her fingers up the back of my neck and into my hair. “He tugged at me. And then pushed me away. Tugged again. And then ignored me. By the time I was fifteen, I would go from feeling important one minute to just being one of the guys the next. I was a kid, Hunter. I still am in a lot of ways. There are so many feelings, I don’t know what to do with them sometimes.”
So many feelings.That’s exactly what it was like. I just needed to not see him every day.
“But then we started to grow up,” she says, and I hear her voice thicken with excitement. “And you grew your hair a little longer one summer and tanned really well and always seemed to be without a shirt or shoes.”
I smile, listening to her and thinking back to what I might’ve been doing when she started looking at me.
“Looking like you just walked in from the beach in your shorts or jeans,” she goes on. “And you started to get quieter and brooding, and I got a little sad when you stopped sneaking into my bed at night.”
I tighten my arm around her, my other hand finding her thigh over my stomach. I grip it gently.
“When we reached a certain age, it felt like I should wait for an invitation,” I admit.
“And what if I’m shy?” She lifts her head up, propping her elbow up underneath her. “What if I’m as shy as you and we fumble over our own insecurities and never do this again?”
Never again…
Her breasts press into me, the warmth between her legs touching my thigh but coursing through my whole body.
“What if I don’t want to be the one chasing someone,” she asks, “and you bury the things you want inside of you like you always do, and we go to colleges far away from each other and I meet someone else?”
I curl my fingers into her skin.
“And this time next year he’s kissing me?” she continues. “And holding me?”
Images flood my brain, every muscle in my body turning to steel.
“And what if I love him?” she asks me.
