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I know. I need you so much, Kiera. No one will do…but you.
Without considering what I was doing, I stepped into her. Her hand slipped around my waist, mine went to her hip. We pulled each other closer, like we couldn’t bear to be apart anymore. And I couldn’t. I felt like I’d been waiting for this my whole life, and I didn’t want to stop it…but…pain and doubt were still waging war within me.
We kept staring at each other’s mouths, and the tension between us was mounting. I wanted to kiss her so badly. I wet my lip, dragging my teeth over the tender skin, but it was Kiera I wanted to feel touching me.
I angled my head down to hers; we were just inches apart now, and her fast breath washed over my face. “Kiera, I thought I could leave you. I thought distance would make this go away, and it’d get easier, but it hasn’t.” I paused to shake my head. “Being apart from you is killing me. I feel lost without you.”
“I do too,” she murmured.
Our fingers separated. Kiera ran hers up my shoulder, mine trailed down her necklace again. “I’ve thought about you every day.” My fingers kept going, ghosting over her chest, her bra. “I’ve dreamt about you every night.” My fingers trailed along her ribs, hers tangled in my hair. It was intoxicating, and confusing. “But…I don’t know how to let you back in.”
I pulled back a little to take in her expression; all I saw looking back at me was confident love. I wished I felt the same. I wanted so much to just push all of my fears aside and say yes to whatever this might be, because holding her felt so right. But it had gone so horribly wrong before…I wouldn’t survive another heartbreak like that. She was so hard to resist though. My lips lowered to hover just above hers. “I don’t know how to keep you out either.”
That’s when I was shoved from behind. Someone laughed, but I couldn’t concentrate on it for long. That small push had closed the distance between Kiera’s lips and mine, and now that we were touching, all thought of walking away fled my mind. I simply…couldn’t.
We froze in shock for a few seconds, then we melted into a long-desired kiss. It felt different than before, guilt-free, careless, and about ten times as intense. I wasn’t sure if I was going to start letting out tears of joy, curl into a ball of misery, or throw her down on the ground and take her.
“Oh, God, I’ve missed…” I couldn’t even complete my thought. Our kiss heated, and still my stupid body tried to speak my conflicting emotions. “I can’t…” do this again. “I don’t…” want to be hurt again. “I want…” you. A deep groan escaped me, and Kiera matched the sound. “Oh, God…Kiera.”
Breath intense, I pulled back to grip her face. Her tears were streaming again, but her breath was just as quick as mine. I wanted her…so much. “You wreck me,” I growled before crashing my lips down to hers.
I pushed her into the wall as our eager kiss revved up my body. Her hands tangled into my hair. She wanted me, I wanted her, and this was really happening. Just as I was running my fingers along the amazing indentation along her lower back, contemplating how many steps away from the back room we were, Kiera gently pushed me away. Confused, I offered no resistance. Was she saying no again? I shouldn’t be surprised, this happened all the time, but yeah, I was. Hurt immediately started filling my body, freezing my chest with a bone-numbing ache.
Kiera seemed to understand what I was thinking. Seeing the pain in my eyes, she immediately said, “I want you. I choose you. It will be different this time, everything will be different. I want to make this work with you.”
The ache started fading as her words lessened my fears. She wasn’t saying no, she was saying, Not like this. I could accept that. Still fighting the desire within me, I gazed at her lips, her eyes, then back to her lips again. “How do we do that? This is what we do…back and forth, back and forth. You want me, you want him. You love me, you love him. You like me, you hate me, you want me, you don’t want me, you love me…you leave me. There’s so much that went wrong before…”
The ever-cycling pain of our relationship overwhelmed me. Even if she did want me, I wasn’t sure I could do it again. Being in love was so hard. But not being in love was even worse. I didn’t know what to do anymore. Stay, go, love her, leave her.
Kiera brought a hand to my cheek, and I looked up to her eyes. “Kellan, I’m naïve and insecure. You’re a…moody artist.” My lip twitched at our inside joke that wasn’t really a joke, but I contained my laugh. Kiera continued with a smile that warmed and relaxed me. “Our history is a mess of twisted emotions, jealousies, and complications, and we’ve both tormented and hurt each other…and others. We’ve both made mistakes…so many mistakes.” Leaning back, her smile widened. “So how about we slow down? How about we just…date…and see how it goes?”
It seemed so simple, I was momentarily stunned. Everything about us had been so intense for so long, it was hard to picture it being any other way. But maybe…if we took a step back, went a little slower, we could ease into this, and maybe then we wouldn’t both be so scared.
It was the perfect solution, and I was surprised it hadn’t occurred to me earlier. I thought an all-or-nothing approach was it for us, but that wasn’t necessarily true. I definitely wanted to do this, to see where this could go, but first…I had to tease Kiera a little for her choice of words. I tossed on a devilish smile, and Kiera instantly understood. She’d asked to date me, and in my past, dating had meant sex. Pointless, meaningless sex. I knew that wasn’t what she meant now, but making her blush was fun.
Embarrassed, she looked down. “I meant…actual dating, Kellan. The old-fashioned kind.”
I started laughing and she looked up. With a peaceful smile that actually felt genuine for once, I told her, “You really are the most adorable person. You have no idea how much I’ve missed that.”
Her smile seemed equally untroubled. Stroking the rough stubble on my unshaven face, she asked me, “So…will you date me?”
She said it suggestively, and my grin grew. “I’d love to…date you.” The playfulness of the moment died down, and seriousness blanketed my voice. “We’ll try…we’ll try to stop hurting each other. We’ll take this easy. We’ll go slowly.”
It was the only way we could truly recover from what we’d done to each other.
Chapter 35
Dating
For the first time in my life, I was dating. Real, old-school dating. And Kiera had said she wanted it traditional, so that was exactly what I did. I opened doors for her when I took her out to dinner, I only held her hand, and I gave her a brief kiss on the cheek at the end of the night. And, surprisingly, I was happy that the evening hadn’t ended with sex. It made me feel like we were building something, or rebuilding something. We were forming connections that went deeper than physical intimacy, and as frightening as that was, it was also ten times as euphoric.
When we were together, I couldn’t stop looking at her. The fact that she was with me, and only me, was something that blew my mind. My cheeks hurt from smiling so much, and my band constantly asked me if everything was okay. Yes, it is. Finally. Or at least, it was getting that way. There were a lot of scars between Kiera and me, and scars took time to heal.
Wanting to prove to myself that I could touch Kiera without it getting overly sexual, I took her dancing next. Everyone came with us, and it turned into a group date. My hands, while desperately wanting to run over every inch of her seductive skin, stayed on her hips. We would have made seventh graders proud. Well, maybe fifth graders.
When we were all gathering together for our date night, Anna greeted me in her typical fashion. With a smack across the head, she muttered, “Ass.” I only smiled at her in response. Someday she would get over the fact that I’d pretended that we’d slept together. And even if she didn’t, Kiera’s smile whenever Anna reprimanded me was glorious. I’d let Anna hit me every day to see Kiera’s face light up like that.
Anna wrapped her arms around Griffin, and we didn’t see much more of them for the remainder of the evening. Let me rephrase that. During the night, they disappeared for long stretches at a time, but when they were around us, we all saw way too much of them. Kiera turned green on several occasions.
Jenny came out with us too, and she brought along her roommate, Rachel. Rachel and Kiera worked together at Kiera’s new job. I’d met her a time or two before. She was a cute blend of Latin and Asian, and she was quiet as a mouse. Jenny said that made her the best roommate in the world, but it was Matt who looked captivated. The two of them found a corner of the club that wasn’t too noisy and spent most of the night talking instead of dancing. I’d never seen Matt really date anyone before—the band took up way too much of his time—but I thought he might actually give it a go with the laid-back girl. Assuming she was into music, of course. If she was ambivalent or uninterested, they’d never work out. I wished them the best.
With all the rest of us paired off, that just left Evan and Jenny. I cornered him in the club hallway. “Are you gonna man up and make a move?” I asked.
