“Yes?”
“Yes, Blue. Yes.”
I drop my forehead to hers.
I feel her breath sync with mine.
She’s looking at me like a girl who has loved me her whole life.
She has.
She has loved me her whole life, and I’m about to lean down and kiss her for the first time in a long time.
Chapter 19
Melly
Hismouthisonmine before either of us can think about it.
And God — God — this kiss. This is our first kiss as boyfriend and girlfriend, and something inside me cracks wide open. The flame that’s been smoldering in my chest for years catches and roars and floods every inch of me at once. My hands are shaking. My whole body’s shaking. I’ve kissed this mouth before, but not like this. Not with my heart hammering against my ribs like it’s trying to get to him through bone. Not with my stomach turning over and my thighs pressing together and every nerve in my body firing at once.
This is a tragedy. It’s outrageous. We should’ve been kissing all this time. His tongue flicks mine, and I make a small needy sound at the back of my throat. I push my tongue against his andtake him deeper because I can’t — I literally cannot — get close enough to him.
He makes a sound at the back of his throat. It’s low and broken andsofucking hot.
I’ve never heard him make this sound before, and it lights up something low in my belly that I’m not ready for. My pulse in places it has no business being. I’m pressing my thighs together against the edge of his mattress, and I can feel my own heartbeat between them.
He pulls back a quarter-inch and looks at me.
His eyes are doing something I’ve never seen them do. They’re entirely on me — not on the wall, not on the floor, not on his own hands, not in the distance. Just me. His pupils are huge, black, blown out over blue, and his mouth is slightly open, and his breath’s coming fast, and the pad of his thumb is at the corner of my jaw, and I can feel it tremble.
He’s trembling.
Blue Golding is trembling.
The realization hits me, and tears prick at the corners of my eyes before I can stop them, because the boy who has always been the calm one, the unreadable one — the boy I’ve never seen flinch — is shaking against me because he wants me this much.
He kisses me again. The second kiss is longer, deeper. The second kiss is the kiss of a man who’s tasted the first kiss and decided to take more, and I’m coming apart underneath it. My hands find his wrists because my hands need somewhere to go, somewhere to anchor, because I’m dizzy. I’m actually dizzy. The room is tilting, and the only thing holding me to the earth is Blue Golding’s mouth.
I’m kissing him the way I’ve always wanted to kiss him.
I’ve held onto the memory of what he tasted like and — God, it’s so much better than I remember. Underneath his toothpasteand mouthwash, it’s just him, just Blue. I close my eyes and breathe him in until my chest aches with it.
I kiss him harder.
He huffs into my mouth.
The huff’s half a laugh.
I’ve made Blue Golding laugh inside a kiss. My heart does a thing in my chest — a swooping, dropping thing.
He lifts his left hand off my face and slides it to the back of my neck under my hair, and his fingers spread against my scalp like he’s holding something precious, and I feel that touch in every single nerve I have. Goosebumps race down my arms. The hair at the nape of my neck stands up. His right hand goes to my waist over the dress and stays there. He’s being careful without making a thing of it. The geometry of his hands makes me melt into him, makes me go soft and pliant in a way I didn’t know my body could go.
I make a small sound I don’t mean to make, and he kisses me harder.
The kissing’s changed.
It’s no longer the slow, careful, welcoming-each-other kissing of the first two minutes. Now we’re kissing like we’re making up for lost time, like we’re trying to swallow years of wanting in one breath, and I’m aware of his body. I want to feel him flush against me, every inch, no air, no fabric, no years between us.
