He kisses me like it's both the best and worst thing he's ever done, and I match him on every count because I can't get enough. I want to climb inside this moment and live there. I want to pull him closer even though there's nowhere closer to go.
Then, too soon, his hands move to my shoulders and he steps back. Two feet of space opens up between us like a wound.
I'm standing in front of him with my hands still half-reaching for a shirt that's no longer in reach. My heart hammers so hard I can feel it in my throat.
He is breathing hard, and his mouth, which had just been on mine, is pressed together.
I make the mistake of meeting his eyes. Sea-green turmoil, nothing else.
"Fuck." Then again, quieter, through his teeth. "Fuck."
He meets my eyes again and I watch everything close back up. Piece by piece, right in front of me, like watching someone board up windows before a storm.
"Call..."
"I have to go."
He's already moving, already gone from the bay before I can find a single word, and I stand there watching the empty space he left because I don't know what else to do.
Agony. What a perfect word for what Callahan Holt has just thrust me into.
I stand there another moment, taking stock. My heart is still going at a pace that would concern me if I thought about it too hard.
I can still taste him. I can still hear the sound he'd made.
He'd kissed me like he'd been waiting so long that when he finally let himself, he couldn't be careful about it. And then he'd walked away like it was the worst mistake of his life.
I pick up my bag from where it had apparently landed during all of that. I don't even remember dropping it. I sling it over my shoulder and walk back out into the May afternoon, squinting in the brightness after the dim bay.
The parking lot is almost empty. His car is gone. He was in agony? Good. So was I. Now at least we were even.
13
CAL
For almost a year I resisted Lily Moreland with everything I had, and I still ended up exactly where I'd been trying not to go.
My whole adult life I've spent avoiding this specific feeling. This particular combination of want and need and rightness that refuses to leave.
I've dodged it, sidestepped it, watched other people fall into it and told myself I was smarter than that, more careful. And here I am, right in the middle of it anyway, like the universe took one look at my carefully constructed walls and laughed.
Why did I kiss her? Because now I know. Now I know that kissing like that exists, that a person could kiss someone and feel the ground shift under them, and I can never unknow it.
Every kiss before hers had been fine. Good, even. Enjoyable in the moment and forgettable by morning. Now I havea reference point I hadn’t asked for, and it stays lodged somewhere deep, sharp and wrong.
I feel sick. Genuinely, physically sick. The guilt is there, plenty of it, but what's worse is the want. The specific misery of knowing exactly what you're missing and understanding with complete clarity that you can't have it.
Ramsey takes one look at me when he walks onto the porch and says nothing. He doesn't ask what's wrong, doesn't offer a theory. He just sits next to me the way we've always sat, and the silence between us is the comfortable kind that doesn't require filling.
I pick up a beer and hand him one, dragging my own to my lips before I say it.
"I kissed her."
Ramsey nods once, like I've confirmed something he already suspected, and takes a slow pull from his bottle.
"At the firehouse," I add, because apparently I need him to have the full picture of my spectacular lapse in judgment.
"She came to apologize. Said she'd been coming on too strong and she was sorry and she was going to back off. And then I kissed her."
