Page 12 of Naz & Roz

Naz had been told his whole damn life that he was something amazing. That he was going to do great things, and not becausehe was a genius, but simply because he was him. Was this that great thing?

Was she his great moment?

Naz wasn’t sure.

He sure as fuck wanted to find out.

Roz glanced over at him on the darkened trail, and though there was about six inches between the two of them as they walked, he had the greatest urge to grab her around the waist, and bring her closer. His heart and his mind just wanted her closer. And that was all before he got in to what his body wanted.

He ignored that bit.

Naz wasn’t fucking this up because regardless of how smart he was, he was still a damn man at the end of the day. And men tended to fuck shit up just because they couldn’t help it. Men thought with the smaller head between their legs, and not the one resting on their shoulders. He wasn’t one of those. Or shit, he was going to try really hard not to be.

Not for her.

“Did you know our dads cut these trails when they first built the houses on adjacent properties?” she asked.

Naz’s brow dipped. “I didn’t know that.”

He’d never asked, really.

Roz nodded, smiling. “Yeah, I guess when they were kids, they had trails connecting their homes. So, that’s why they did it.”

Huh.

Naz made a mental note to ask his father about that if for no other reason than he thought it was kind of … interesting. And also because Roz told him. From the moment she shouted for her brother on that porch, Naz’s mind had soaked up each and every single word that came out of her mouth. His brain was a sponge; it absorbed anything and everything it found most fascinating.

That’s just how it worked.

And right now, everything in his world had shifted just like that. With nothing more than a girl he had known his whole life—but never really noticed until it was apparently the right time to—speaking. His brain flipped the fucking switch on him.

He no longer cared about running the numbers in his head for an upcoming gun run for his father. That was all easy going, anyway. Nothing for him to worry about even if he was known to constantly nitpick detail after detail until it was go time.

And he sure as hell didn’t care about the current equation he’d been stuck on for a week as he tried to assume an infinite loop of time ran on the premise of an oval shape instead of the traditional figure-eight shape. After all, the usual figure-eight symbol implied at some point, time would have to intersect when it crossed over. There was no proof that—if infinite—time ever crossed over. And because he was such a fucking shit about things, Naz wanted nothing more than to just see if he could make the damn math work for it.

But that didn’t matter.

None of it mattered.

None of it fucking mattered anymore because when Roz spoke, he saw her, his brain decided to shut the hell off in every other aspect … and there she was.

Here she was.

She was suddenly the most fascinating thing in his life, and everything else could wait. His brain didn’t want to factor in anything else at the moment. It was going to soak up every little thing she said or did because he needed—like he never needed anything else in his life before this very second—to know everything there was to know about her. He just had to.

“You’re doing it again,” Roz whispered.

Naz smirked. “What’s that?”

“Looking at me like that again.”

He still didn’t know what that meant, though.

“Does it bother you?”

“Not even a little bit, Naz.”

“Good to know.”