‘Shh.’ He silenced me with a finger over my lips. ‘Now don’t move.’
‘But—’
‘Just close your eyes,’ he said softly.
And so against my better judgement, I did. He tilted my chin up gently with one finger. I paused, waited for something to happen, and when it did, when he brought that pencil down on my lips and started tracing the outline slowly,so, so slowly, it felt more like foreplay than actual make-up. Then came the lipstick itself. My lips tingled from the pressure, from the closeness of him, from hearing his breathing, from feeling it on my face.
I opened my eyes slowly.
He was staring at me. Just like he had earlier, except this time I couldn’t smell incense and there wasn’t a woman floating around us in white linen. I stared back, and the world seemed to shrink down around me. His eyes drifted from mine back to my lips, then back up to my eyes.
‘There,’ he said, pulling away to admire his work. ‘No, wait. Come back.’ He leaned in close again, then placed his finger on the edge of my lip and dragged it slowly across. The world shrank even more. It was now impossibly tiny, consisting only of my lips and his finger tracing them, nothing else.
‘Perfect,’ he said softly, before removing his finger. I immediately missed it more than I could describe. ‘Beautiful.’
I cleared my throat and quickly turned away from him. ‘Not bad,’ I said, looking in the mirror. ‘If this whole undercover thing doesn’t pan out, I guess you can always get a job at Sephora.’
‘Are we still doing this?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘What Sage said. You deflecting with spiky sarcasm and then me making a joke, and the two of us going round and round like that. Apparently, according to her, we’ve been doing it for ten lives already.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Please, you didn’t actually believe all of that, did you?’
‘I didn’t believe it all, but let me tell you what Ididbelieve.’ He moved closer to me again. ‘That moment when you were on my lap and we were looking at each other, I believed that.’
‘That was probably just you high on the incense fumes.’
‘See . . . this.’ He gestured between us. ‘This is what she was talking about, and what I mean. The sarcasm, the snappiness, the constant one-upmanship. You winning, me winning, trying to beat each other at everything.’
‘That’s just what we do, Cam. What we’ve always done.’
‘Well, maybe I don’t want to do that any more. Maybe I don’t want toonlytouch you because I’ve got you in a submission hold and I’m trying to get you to tap out.’ He took another dangerous – very dangerous – step closer and his voice grew softer. ‘Maybe I want to touch you because I justwantto.’
My mouth opened, then closed again. I had nothing to say to that.
‘Why does it all have to be about winning?’
‘We’ve never not been like that,’ I said.
‘Yes, we were. Once. That morning when we woke up and just . . . lay there. Together.’ He reached out and touched my chin again. ‘We were on the same team.’
I looked down at my hands. It felt too intense to look straight back at him. ‘You bring out the competitive streak in me.’
‘You too, and don’t get me wrong, I like that we do that. Sometimes I fucking love it, but also, sometimes it would just be nice . . . not to.’
‘You know we have to be on the yacht in ten minutes, right?’
‘I know,’ Cam said, still looking at me.
‘So technically we are almost running late.’
He smiled. ‘Technically, but maybe cosmically we are actually finally on time.’
I pushed him away. ‘See, nowyou’redoing it. Deflecting with humour, or whatever Sage said.’
He shook his head. ‘No, Lizzy, I’m being dead serious.’
