Are you feeling okay?” I ask, concern cutting through everything else. “Is your arm bothering you?”
“I’m fine,” she murmurs, but she sounds softer than usual, like the edges have been sanded down.
Yeah, I may not have a ton of experience in dating, but even I know when a woman says she’s fine. She’s far from it.
“About what happened back there—” I start.
“Don’t,” she cuts in.
Lila finally turns her head to look at me, and the expression in her eyes stops every coherent thought in my brain. She looks exhausted from the pain medication, curled into the passenger seat with her sling pressed against her chest, but there’s absolutely nothing foggy about that glare.
Message received.
“We should probably talk about it eventually,” I say carefully, tightening my grip on the steering wheel. “For the sake of our research partnership.”
The second the words leave my mouth, I know I’ve made a catastrophic mistake.
“Our research partnership,” Lila repeats flatly.
I risk a glance at her. She’s staring out the windshield now, jaw tight, like she’s deciding whether or not to shove me out of the moving truck. Right. Definitely the wrong thing to say.
“I just mean?—”
“No, I know what you mean.” Her voice has that dangerously calm quality that somehow feels worse than yelling. “Nothing says unforgettable first kiss like immediately pivoting to tornado data collection.”
I blink. “…What?”
She turns toward me slowly. “Jonah, you kissed me like you were losing your mind.”
That does not help my pulse.
“And then,” she continues, holding up her good hand, “the second the warning went off, you basically turned into a weather robot.”
“I did not?—”
“You absolutely did.” Her eyes narrow. “One minute you were gripping my waist like you never wanted to let go, and the next you were talking about debris signatures.”
I open my mouth. Close it again. Because when she says it like that…yeah. That sounds terrible. In my defense, there had been an actual tornado warning. But apparently that is not the point.
“I was trying to keep us alive,” I say weakly.
Lila gives me a look so unimpressed it physically pains me.
“Oh, good, excellent,” she says dryly. “Very romantic. Thank you so much for prioritizing public safety after kissing the absolute shit out of me.”
The worst part is she’s not wrong.
That kiss had completely wrecked me. My mouth tingles every time I think about the sound she made when I pulled her closer. About the way she grabbed my shirt and kissed me back like she wanted me just as badly as I wanted her. An overwhelming amount, actually. Possibly life-altering.
And then the sirens had gone off and the researcher part of me kicked in before my brain could catch up with the fact that I was standing in the middle of a field kissing Lila beneath a rotating supercell.
I glance over again. She’s annoyed, arms crossed awkwardly beneath the sling, staring stubbornly out the windshield.
And suddenly it clicks. She thinks I shut it off. Like I kissed her and then just moved on.
Jesus Christ.
“Lila,” I say carefully, “I need you to understand something.”
