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I had never thought much about this particular part of my hand before. When Katy got a tattoo there on her eighteenth birthday, she cried through the whole thing, and afterward the tattoo artist told her she’d picked a particularly tricky spot for a first tattoo—the inside of your wrist is all nerve endings.
I understood that now. With Russell’s lips, feathery and soft, tracing the inside of my wrist, suddenly I was feeling everything a lot more than usual, like every nerve in my body was suddenly awake. He kissed the inside of my wrist, and I gasped when I felt his tongue on my skin, his teeth scraping lightly over it.
He raised his head up and kissed my palm again, and then the back of my hand, like we had all the time in the world—and like he knew just what he was doing.
He traced his hand down my cheek again, and looked at me like he was drinking me in. “Hi.”
“Hi,” I said, slightly breathless, feeling very certain I was not going to be able to wait more than a few more seconds before kissing him. It was actually not going to be physically possible.
We hovered there for just a moment, in the space between, the anticipation building and stretching out—and then he tilted his head down, we both closed our eyes, and Russell kissed me.
I stretched up to kiss him back, our lips lightly brushing at first—but then it was like we both took a breath at the same time and started kissing for real.
And he was really good—and we were good together, finding a rhythm right away, our lips and breath fitting together as easily as our hands had.
Russell lifted my hand—he hadn’t stopped holding it this whole time—and placed it above me in the grass, then traced his fingertips down my arm, all while continuing to kiss me. Which was good, because I didn’t want him to stop. We were kissing in waves, almost—first fast and breathless, then slowing down, taking our time, exploring. But then he’d give a shuddering breath or lightly bite the inside of my bottom lip, and that would be all I’d need to start kissing him quickly again. My arms were around him, my hands running through his hair, trying to pull him even closer to me.
Russell broke away and kissed my neck. He started in the hollow of my collarbone, the little indentation there, then traveled slowly upward, finally stopping just under my chin, where I could feel my pulse thundering wildly. He rolled over a little closer to me, one of his legs tangling in between mine, and we were kissing again, faster now, like even that brief break had been more than either of us could handle.
I don’t know how much time passed. I was just living in the moment—the AstroTurf tickling my bare legs and our lips and our breath and his heartbeat and our fingers twining together and Russell rolling me on top of him so I could look down, seeing him below me in the growing darkness, tracing his freckles with my lips the way I’d wanted to when I first saw them. It was like nothing existed except his lips and my lips and my hands tangling in his hair—when Russell pulled away.
“Sorry.”
“About what?” I asked, pushing myself up to sit up with arms that felt wobbly. I knew, without a doubt, that if I tried to stand right now, I’d go crashing to the ground. I blinked, trying to focus. I felt flushed and kiss-drunk, like everything else had gone fuzzy around the edges.
He tugged at the hem of my sweatshirt, rubbing the fabric between his fingers. “I was just wondering if maybe we could do something about this?”
“Um,” I said, looking down at my sweatshirt.
“Like turn it around or something?” He gestured to Wylie Sanders’s circa 2002 pout. “It’s just… kind of distracting? And,” he said as he leaned closer to me, tucking my hair behind my ear and then untucking it so he could play with it, turning it between his fingers, “I really, really don’t want to be distracted right now.”
I laughed as I looked down at my sweatshirt. From his perspective, I could understand why it really might have been a little off-putting to see a shirtless, pouting rock star in this particular moment. “I could definitely turn it around. Or… I could take it off.” I didn’t let myself look away from him as I said it.
“That sounds really good,” he said, smiling at me, and even in the darkness, which was falling fast, I could see his cheeks had gone pink. He reached over, cupped my head in his hands, and kissed me again—was that ever not going to feel miraculous?
He slipped his hands under my sweatshirt and started pulling it up, sliding up my rib cage. I raised my arms and he pulled it over my head. He didn’t just toss it aside, though—he shook it out and then folded it neatly, setting it near my bag on the grass, like he somehow knew, without me having to tell him, that it was important to me. “There,” he said, turning to me with a smile. “Much better.”
I laughed and leaned over to kiss him, running my hands down his arms, bare except for his watch. “We don’t want you to be distracted.”
“That’s the last thing we want,” he said between kisses. He was sitting up now too, and pulled me into his lap, so that my legs were around either side of him and I was sitting just a little taller than him, looking down.
I kissed his cheek, his temple—he closed his eyes when I did that and kind of sighed—his neck, his lips again—but then I drew back.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, even as I untangled myself from him and looked around. “Do you think that the bathrooms here would be unlocked?” All at once, I was cursing myself for not going into the cowgirl bathroom back at the bus station. Why hadn’t I anticipated that it might be the last one I was going to see for a while? I was suddenly regretting my Sprite.
He laughed, and I could see relief in his eyes—that I wasn’t pushing him away, that this was literally just nature calling. “That’s a very good question. And now that you mention it, one that I could also use the answer to.”
He pushed himself up to standing and squinted over at the area behind the home bleachers, where there was what looked like a locked concession counter, and on either side of it, the bathrooms. “I’m going to go check.” He bent down to kiss me once, quickly, before starting to jog over to them. “Be right back!”
I lay back against the grass. Like Russell had felt, lying on a floor in Rome and looking up at a painting on the ceiling, I felt overwhelmed—but in a good way—by everything that had just happened. While we’d been kissing, the sunset had almost totally faded out, and the first stars were starting to appear. I looked around the football field—the goalposts, the scoreboard. It didn’t seem possible that these things were the same, but absolutely everything else had changed.
“All right,” Russell said as he jogged back onto the field, and I sat up. “So, good news and bad news.”
“Bad news first?”
He smiled. “Okay. So these bathrooms are locked. But! I walked to the top of the bleachers, and I think I saw somewhere we can go.”
