I want to be good for him. I want to be thebestfor him—all my existence whittles to that need.
“I canna concentrate on anything when you’re around,” he whispers. “I just want to taste you, I just want to do this to you—”
Bottles tip over behind me; one shatters on the stone floor. It makes me jump, and Loch, wrapped around me, turns to marble.
I match him. Still tied up in his gravitational pull. The pause gives me space to breathe, gasping, whiny breaths.
Loch presses his forehead to the curve of my shoulder. “Shite.”
He shoves back off of me, putting so much space between us that I’m immediately hit with a blast of cold in his absence. I shiver, splayed out on the table, arms propping myself up, legs wide.
“I should na have done that.” He’s looking at the floor. He’s flushed and his hair is sticking up on the side and I don’t even remember touching his head, but my hand feels it, that texture, the way my neck echoes the burn of his beard.
That’s what I feel. Roughness, a scour on my heart from the regret painted so clearly across his face. It’s him pulling away in the car all over again, except this time, everything he said is draped over me in contrasting silk.So good for me, you’re perfect—
“Loch,” I get out. My throat is wrecked. My body is a disastrous collision of mismatched pieces.
“I should not have done that,” he says again, more forcefully, and he marches down the kitchen, rips open the door, and leaves.
It’s all I can do to stagger off the island, legs gone to liquid, heart banging around my rib cage in ardent, aching thuds.
Glass crunches under my shoes. The bottle was empty, at least.
And I focus on that.
The glass everywhere. The crisps spread on the island. The half-full bottle of vodka.
Blearily, I pull my phone out and take a picture of it all.
I come back into myself midway through cleaning up.
We just made out, and he ran off, and I’mcleaning up his kitchen.
I hurl the dustpan I found back onto the shelf. It hits with a clang and I slam the cupboard and I—I—
I don’t know. I don’t know.
I should know.
Idoknow.
I know that his kiss tasted like all the dreams I waxed on about inthe writing I don’t do anymore, the words I wove while trying to imagine Iris but all I imagined was a fantasy, an ending.
Hetasted like those fantasies.
Hefelt like those endings.
It’s him.
Chapter Ten
I lurch out of the kitchen, 45 percent certain I’m leaning to the left like I’m on a listing ship.
My hip bangs into a doorframe.
Okay, 70 percent.
But I am 100 percent certain that I have never been this drunk in my life. The kind of drunk where I’m back in my guest room with no memory of walking there and I’m holding my phone and staring down at a link I don’t remember opening. It’s a tabloid site, a picture of Loch and me at the race’s starting line, not looking at each other in a way that’s even more potent than if we’d been staring into each other’s eyes.
