Page 23 of Licks

I narrowed my eyes at him. “What?” My heart? My soul? He owned both already.

“The box. So you can lock up.”

Right. The box I was holding. So I could lock up.

Even his simple gesture had me picking apart his intentions. The action also had me all thumbs.

What should have been a simple handoff of a small box went haywire when his hand brushed my arm. I squeaked and fell into him. The box tumbled to the ground, his arm came around my waist, and my hand grazed his pole.

He grunted, short and harsh. I should have moved my hand. A normal person who needed to be only platonic with her ex-best friend while she chased down leads on her ghosted father should have moved her hand. I did move my hand, but it was more of a needy slide.

Air hissed through his teeth. “Do that again, Gwen, and I’ll toss you over my shoulder, take you up to your childhood bedroom, and live out the dirty fantasies that kept me up for most of high school.”

Good Lord.

I jumped back and smacked my shoulder into the doorframe. My lungs had practically incinerated, burned up with my unquenched desire. Still, I managed to say, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He was breathing hard, too, and he smirked.

He wasn’t a smirker. He was a hate-song writer. I couldn’t get my head around it all. “What are we doing?”

“Honestly?”

“No, August. I’d like you to lie to me so I can continue acting like a moron. I don’t even know why you came by or why you’re in town.” Most of his family lived in Chicago now. He didn’t have a house here.

His lips tipped into a frown. “I’m not really sure anymore.”

“Why you’re in town, or what we’re doing?”

He dragged a hand through his dark hair. The strands were shorter than they used to be, but they still had a slight curl, that one lick up top defying gravity. I itched to smooth it down. Touching him wasn’t smart, and I was a smart girl. A together girl. A girl who needed to focus.

“I came home to take care of some personal business,” he said cryptically. “As for us, I’d like to hang out this afternoon. We’ll take it from there.”

A loony laugh escaped me. “We’ll take it from there?”

“Now who’s repeating who?”

“You do know how weird this is, right? You and me hanging out and…” I glanced at his crotch, the loose fabric tented slightly. For a second, I wondered if that personal business had to do specifically with me, but the possibility was laughable. His brother lived here. He likely had music contacts in the area, too. Still, he’d shown up at my mother’s door, looking for me.

He shrugged an unaffected shoulder, like our flirting didn’t mock the laws of nature. “I’ve decided to stop analyzing it.”

He bent to gather the few things that had tumbled from my box, and I froze. It was one thing to give him his Badass PI badge, but each memento littering the walkway—the only keepsakes I’d saved from my childhood—were all linked to the man bent over them. Every last one.

My first Wonder Woman comic—his gift when I’d won my track meet.

The Die Hard DVD he’d sent over when I’d been holed up with mono.

Every homemade birthday card he’d slipped into my locker.

He righted the box and returned the escaped items, but paused on each one. My throat closed. They were damning, hard proof I’d never gotten over him. The longer he lingered, the hotter my neck burned. Mortification over my obvious obsession with him winded me, along with hope he’d understand how important he’d been in my life.

Seeing as we’d never unleashed our monolithic sexual tension, his flirting made sense. A quick fuck could offer him closure, even though it would ruin me. This evidence wasn’t simple flirting. This was proof of a deep emotional scar, years of missing him nurtured and splayed on flagstone.

I expected him to stand, make some excuse about a forgotten appointment or meeting. Flee the scene of the crime. Instead he placed my mother’s journal over our memories and stood, facing me. “I have a picture of you on my laptop, from our trip to the zoo, with you making faces at the chimpanzees. I’ve switched computers over the years, had plenty of opportunity to delete it. I never could.”

He smiled a sad smile, his gaze traveling over my face and landing on my lips. He licked his, a slow slide of his tongue. Then he turned and jogged to his car.

My heart jogged in time.