“Come on,” I tell her.
“I can’t just leave, I’m here with my father.”
“You’re about to lose your shit in a blue dress in front of the whole booster club. Service hallway. Now. I’ll go first.”
I peel off the pillar. She follows ninety seconds later. The hallway behind the ballroom is concrete and dim and blessedly quiet, the band just a thump through the wall, and the second the door shuts, she sags back against the cinderblock and breathes like she’s been underwater.
“Better?” I ask.
“Don’t.” Her eyes are shut. “Don’t take care of me in a hallway and then go back to two weeks of nothing. Pick one. I can do either. I can’t do both.”
It’s official.
I hate myself.
“I pulled back because I’m scared.” It comes out rough and almost too loud for the small space. “There’s a scout from Carolina. He could hand me the only future my family’s ever gonna get, and one mistake could end it.”
“I’m a mistake?”
“That’s not what I meant. Your dad sat me down and called you fragile, called you a thing he manages, and I had to sit there and eat it because the second I open my mouth to tell him who you actually are, he will know. All of it. And he will pull the rug right from under me.”
Her eyes are wide now.
“I told myself staying away from you was the smart thing,” I say. “The grown thing. It wasn’t. It was just old bad habits kicking in. You leave before the fire you start can reach somebody you love.”
She goes very still. “Somebody you what?”
I didn’t plan to say it. It hasn’t been long enough to say it. I haven’t earned the right to say it, but I’m saying it any damn way.
“You put on one hell of a dress and walked into the worst room in the world because I was too much of a coward to say all this to you earlier. The least I can do is be brave in a hallway.”
I kiss her. This one’s nothing like the careful one in the conference room or the easy ones we’ve shared on the couch. This one’s got two weeks of silence behind it.
She comes off the wall and into me, both hands fisting my lapels, kissing me back like she’s furious and forgiving me in the same breath. I slide a hand into her thick curls and the other flat on the cinderblock so the wall doesn’t bruise her, and she makes the sound, the one I’d burn everything down to keep hearing.
It gets away from us fast. Her hands under my jacket, my mouth on the bare shoulder that dress has no business exposing, her gasping my name, my actual first name, the one she’s only used once.
“Caleb.”
I carefully lift the hem of her dress and slide two fingers up the inside of her thigh.
She gasps.
This is not the time or place for this, but I have to know. Is she wet for me?
Holy fuck.
Soaked right through the cotton crotch of her panties.
I bend to my knees to pay homage to a place I hope to spend a lot of time in…under her skirt and between Jasmine’s thighs.
“Caleb,” she says my name again, but it sounds fuller, richer.
She likes this.
That means I like it more.
I slide the crotch of her panties to the side and make a beeline for her clit. I don’t have time to do everything I want to do to her…for her, because we’re in the middle of a fucking fundraiser.
