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“I’m working on it. But here’s the distinction, so listen up. It’s not fine to try to hurt me. Snap at me all you want about stuff that doesn’t matter, but if you try that bullshit from earlier again—if you tell me I’m a stray, or that you don’t give a shit, and you use all that anger to push me away like you’re so good at doing? If you do that one more time, I’ll go, and I won’t come back.”
He lifted his head. It was too dark for him to see his heart in her eyes. Too loud inside his head for her to hear the fear hammering against her hand.
But he could anyway, and so could she.
“Don’t go.”
“This is me,” she said softly. “This is me not going.”
He kissed her then. He had to kiss her, to try out every way he could move his mouth over hers—hard and soft, deep and reverent—and he had to move his tongue against hers and cup her breast in his hand because he was so fucking grateful and so fucking lost.
“You make me want to be a decent person,” he murmured against her lips. “It’s just awful.”
She laughed then, and put her head against the bricks and closed her eyes with her hair tumbling down and sticking to her face and her neck. “You’re the strangest man I ever met.”
He kissed her collarbones and the swell of her breasts. Her hands smoothed over the back of his
head. “I want you,” he said.
“I got that. I think you more or less have me. I’m cool with it.”
“You’re cool with it?” He smiled and kissed her again, so much lighter now. She’d transmitted some of her buoyancy to him, intoxicating him with her mouth and her taste and her dark brown eyes. He tried to reciprocate. He kissed her long and lingering, with every shred of longing in him. Every broken shard of devotion she’d somehow collected together and remade.
And then with one last, light brush of his lips over hers, he stepped away.
She slumped against the wall. Very beautiful, very bright.
Very drunk.
“Not tonight, though,” he said. He trailed his thumb over her flat top lip. “You had too much to drink.”
She closed her eyes as he moved to trace her wide cheekbones, memorizing all the shapes of her face. Her arched eyebrows. The broad bridge of her nose. The point of her ear.
She sighed. “That feels good.”
“I want to make you feel good.”
She nuzzled her face against his palm. “Me, too.”
“But not tonight.”
Turning her head, she kissed his palm. “Sure I can’t change your mind on that?”
“I’m sure.”
“Because I didn’t have that much to drink. I’m a Wisconsin girl. We can hold our liquor.”
She turned his hand over, staring abstractedly at the scars on the back. Reaching out a fingertip to touch one.
“Not tonight,” he repeated.
“All right.” She wrapped her fingers around his, lowered their hands, and squeezed. “Take me home, then, fella. Find me a Band-Aid in your bathroom cupboard. Give me a glass of water and some aspirin.”
“I can do all that.”
“Maybe I’ll get lucky and you’ll rub my feet.”
“Do they hurt?”
