Her lips are pressed flat in an effort not to laugh too hard at me. I push off the wall and plant a hand over her head. The line of her mouth softens.
Her breath hitches.
I let my mouth drop to her ear, where she’s warm and the lemon-sun scent of her is concentrated. It’s pure serotonin. A shot to the brain that makes my body tighten.
I want her to know what she’s been missing, but I want to know if I’ve been missing something too.
“Katie,” I murmur.
She arches. My blood seems to sing in my ears.
“Don’t you think a date should feel like this?”
“Like what?”
She’s breathless. I hear it.
“Like I’m a kid again and I’ve just spent a day on the boat. Like everything is sunshine. I feel like nothing can go wrong.”
The words tumble out of me, like song lyrics I’d strum in private.
Her lashes flutter against my cheek.
“I dreamed about days like that,” she whispers. “I read about them in stories.” I feel the words in my stomach. She didn’t have them, she means, but she’d never say that. She never complains, and every time she accepts less than she deserves, it makes me want to give her the world.
I press closer, rub my cheek against hers, like I can heal the past.
“But you make it sound magical, Tristan.” Her voice is wistful. “Like opening all your Christmas presents at once.”
The words twist through me. “Have those days with me,” I urge softly, desperately. I can’t bear the thought of her not getting everything she wants.
“I have been for years. I’m in your orbit, Tristan Prince.” She turns her mouth against my neck and my skin electrifies.
“Fuck.” I don’t mean to curse, but it slips between my teeth. Her breaths are shallow. Mine are harsh. I fist the material of her shirt. Her stomach is trembling under my hand.
What I mean to say is the line I uttered earlier.
What comes out is, “Katie, I was made for you.”
Her mouth goes slack against my pulse. A sound pulls from her throat. Soft, needy, and damp against my skin. I turn my face to the left, hoping our mouths will connect, praying the corner of mine will find the edge of hers and I can say it was an accident, that I don’t want this more than I want to keep breathing.
She must feel it too, because her face tilts and the soft edge of her lip finds my jaw. Higher, then higher, until finally our mouths brush and our breaths hitch in unison.
“Can we?” she whispers. “Is this part of it?”
The deal, she means.Practice with me.
It doesn’t feel like I’m the professor right now. It feels new and hesitant and fumbling. Like a first kiss in the back of a car.
“Do you want to?”
“Tristan.” My name is a plea.
“We can do this too,” I say huskily, even as I know that two kisses stretches the limits of our deal. But we aren’t kissing yet. I’m still on the precipice.
My tongue flicks against the edge of her lips. My blood is thick. My body sings.
A millimeter more, uncertain, seeking and sweet, until we connect. Her bottom lip so soft against mine, then my tongue slipping between her teeth. Her breaths that I swallow.
