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I hear some dude shout, “Don’t flick your cherry, man!”
“Yeah, please don’t,” I mutter.
Finally, I reach the ground. The grass squishes around my sneakers. I look up to find Elise already over the ledge.
“Sweet.” I cup my hands around my mouth. “Keep coming. You got it…” She’s moving pretty fast. Damn. I guess she knows her skillset. “Almost halfway now…”
The people on the balcony above ours start to chant. I hear Elise laugh. Her feet are just over my head now.
“There ya go,” I murmur.
When she’s close enough, I wrap my hands around her waist and pull her down into my arms. Everyone cheers. We both laugh like idiots. Elise beams up at me, and her eyes have this look. I smile back and then take off toward the long dock maybe fifty yards away.
She squeals like a little kid, and I jog till we’re out of the lamplight and into shadows draped across the wet grass.
“Oh my God, your shoes!”
“A little wet.” I laugh again, and then we’re on the dock, a single arm with two slots filled by a giant sailboat and what you might call a small yacht. I walk toward them, through circles of amber light from three black lamp posts. Then I hang a left, so we’re at a narrow strip of dock between the two vessels. I lower Elise onto the slats and wink at her before I sink down cross-legged by her. She moves so she’s facing me.
“Hi.” She laughs.
“Hello yourself.”
Her face is happy, and her eyes are on mine, making me feel so warm. That thing happens again, like it did up on the balcony. My heart starts beating harder, and my ears feel really, really hot.Chapter SixEliseI lean in first, and then he does—so we’re close enough to kiss. But I can’t kiss him, and he doesn’t kiss me. He just looks at me…right in the eye, as if he’s looking past the outside of me deep into the inside.
Softly, he says, “You know…you’re beautiful.”
My pulse roars in my ears, even as I try to roll my eyes. “Don’t say that.”
Luca’s lips curve slightly. “Why not?”
“Because it scares me.” I laugh.
“Why?” He tilts his head a little, his face gentle.
“I don’t know.” Emotion rises in my chest, a gentle swell of something I don’t know the name of.
He leans in and kisses my cheek, so when one hot tear falls—a mortifying shock to me—his mouth is there, lovely and soft. And then it’s natural to kiss him. We’re kissing, and it’s strange and wonderful, scary and soothing. Him and me. Me and him. We’re like a puzzle snapping into place. My hands are on his hard shoulders. His fingers sift through my hair, careful. Then I’m moaning into his mouth. One of his hands cups my nape and he pulls me closer.
We kiss until we can’t breathe. He wraps an arm around me, and the world constricts to just this moment, and it’s vast and slow and quick and frantic and so tender I feel like my heart is being tugged outward. I’m the first to pull away, but we’re both panting. His hands on my shoulders secure me up against him. His arm wraps around me like he never wants to let go.
For the longest time, we sit there with him holding me like I am so important to him. Like I matter. Really matter. He holds me like I’m cherished. Like I’m his.
Another tear drips down my cheek, and I think he can tell, but he doesn’t ask. He just holds me as the water laps and the air hangs around us like a curtain. As our classmates’ gleeful, laughing screams echo around the sailboat’s mast and, sometime later, people stumble onto the dock.
We slip back into the house through a back door and make our way upstairs to that same bedroom with the balcony from before. No words are exchanged. We are simply drawn there, moved by our own gravity.
Inside the room, he drops my hand and sprawls out on his back on the bed. “Sorry.” He shuts his eyes. “I’m so tired. You trust me?”
He peeks at me through his eyelashes, holds out his hand, and I climb onto the bed so I can take it.
“I don’t think I could ever be scared of you.”
I stroke his dark hair, loving the warmth of his forehead and the way his lips part slightly.
“That feels good,” he says—and it’s a soft, hoarse, sleepy voice.
I have the thought that my frantic pulse may never slow again. Not while I’m near him. Then the ether hears me, and the wheels of fate conspire to make that true. From outside the door, someone shouts, “Cops!”
It’s shouted a few times before the word permeates my love-drunk brain. I jerk my hand from Luca’s forehead.
