if this is real then I’m happy for them!
FREE RAMONA
still rooting for her and eli tbh
And those are just the ones that make a marginal amount of sense.
“Uh…” He passes the phone to Ramona, as though the thing is on fire and she’s the only one who can put it out.
“It seems pretty contained so far, thank god,” she says as she scrolls. That’scontained? “But you should probably go on private.”
“Right. Good idea. Do you mind—?”
A couple taps. “Done.”
He exhales, slowly coming back to himself. Okay. It’s okay. Those are just strangers on the internet. This is nothing compared to what she had to deal with on a daily basis.
“For what it’s worth, you’re much more to me than an unidentified male friend,” she says, her fingertips brushing his as she hands back the phone. The gentlest touch, and yet it makes him fight back a hundred different emotions.
Even like this, even after the shock of the article and those comments, he still softens so easily for her.
Being Ramona Wilder’s friend, it turns out, is even harder than the advanced statistical methods course he took the first year of his PhD. And soon he may not be anything to her at all. Except her teacher. But then again, that’s what got him into this mess, isn’t it?
“The dean wants to talk to me tomorrow,” he says, and he watches the reality cross her face, a slight wrinkle appearing between her brows.
“But we didn’t even—I mean, it just looks like two friends at a basketball game. Completely platonic.” Yeah, somehow he’s not sure the dean is going to see it that way, especially if none of those anonymous commenters did. “So…we’re going to have to stop spending time together.”
“I’m not sure if there’s any other outcome.”
Her eyes are hard on his. Slowly, she takes a step forward. It’s intentional, this time, the way she grazes his hand with a fingertip. Inevitable, the way he opens his palm for her.
“We haven’t even found you a girlfriend yet,” she says in a whisper. He almost wants to laugh, but she sounds so sweetly sad about it that it breaks his heart a little.
Everything about this conversation suddenly feels sofinalthat he can’t resist pulling her closer. Their fingers tangle, his thumb dragging along her knuckles. Up her wrist.God, he’s missed touching her, and the way she reacts to him might be lethal. A flicker of her lashes. A sharp inhale.
Every time they’re together, he’s trapped between logic and impulse, and he’s usually so good at listening to logic. But now he’s desperate to ignore his brain andfeel.
So he brings his other hand to her face, thumbing the trio of freckles next to her mouth.
“I don’t think we were trying that hard,” he whispers back.
Then he crushes his lips to hers.
If their first kiss was like being stuck in an electrical socket, this one is like being hurled directly into the sun. Like their last meal on death row, both of them knowing the fate that awaits them. She grips his collar as she kisses him back, whimpers as he bites at her lower lip. Those perfect needy sounds—his memory hasn’t been able to properly re-create them.
Andfuck, it’s incredible, being this close again, all of his senses tuned only to her. Peaches—now he’s certain that’s what her shampoo smells like, sweetness and warmth andRamona.Ramona. Her name lit up in neon inside his brain.
“She—she might be back soon,” Nick says against her mouth. His hands are already lost in her hair.
“She said twenty minutes.” Another kiss. “Probably ten, now.”
It’s not nearly long enough for everything he wants to do with her, but if this is all he gets, he’s going to take it. Even if Ramona’s not the kind of girl he wants to rush with. He wants a proper bed. Ten-thousand-thread-count sheets. The ability to stop time.
That invisible countdown turns them frantic. In mere seconds, they’ve lost all pretense of “just friends”—but then again, he never had much faith in it. With one hand on the nape of her neck and the other at her hip, he backs them up against the wall of the bedroom with nothing in it. Pins her there for a moment, the two of them breathing in sync. Then she lifts up and kisses his neck, and he has to fight to keep his eyes open—he doesn’t want to miss any of this—because that’s always been his favorite place to be kissed.
“God, I needed you,” she says on a breathy exhale as he digs his hands into the back pockets of her jeans, palming her ass. “How is this even better than I remember?”
Nick’s not sure. One of life’s great mysteries.
