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“London, do you want it to be real?”
He wasn’t supposed to ask me that. None of this should be happening. Resolved to extricate gracefully from my position, I opened my eyes. Before I could regain control of the situation, Beau’s lips brushed across mine. They were warm and tender, and he tasted better than anyone I had ever kissed. This must be what the show meant by champagne kisses. I shed the warmth of the blanket and any rational thinking. My arms wrapped around his neck as he groaned quietly, deepening the kiss.
My body trembled when his arm enfolded me and eased me onto the cushions his friend had arranged for our planetarium rendezvous. I ran my fingers along his neck and through his hair, urging his mouth onto mine harder. His hand slid down my thigh and tugged under my knee so that my leg coiled around his waist.
I twisted my head to the side, allowing his hot mouth to kiss my neck. His tongue played with my ear. For the first time, I slowly opened my eyes, unsure if I was ready for the reality of what Beau and I were doing.
The flames flickered a bright orange. “Beau, fire!”
“Um…hmm…I feel it too.”
I pushed him forward, knocking him back. “No, it’s on fire. Our picnic basket. Look.”
“Shit.” He jumped up, pulled the champagne bottle from the bucket and turned the ice and water onto the smoldering fire that had begun roasting our grapes and cheese.
“Are the brownies ruined?” I asked as Beau inspected the remnants of our late night snack.
He exhaled. “Yes. But at least nothing else caught on fire.” He tossed the basket and sat next to me. “That was intense.”
“Yeah, I—” I started smoothing my hair and taking light breaths. Did we actual do that?
“Maybe we should call it a night.” He surveyed the charred basket. “This wasn’t how the date was planned. We weren’t supposed to—you know—cross the line.”
He ran his fingers through his hair, and I could tell that my usually cool and casual partner was completely out of his element.
Here it goes. The champagne bubbles were swirling in my head and I had to ask. “What did you think would happen when you bring a girl up to a rooftop on Valentine’s night, give her roses, light everything with candles, and on top of that, give her champagne when you know she can’t drink much? What exactly was the plan, Beau? Sit up here and talk about class theory? You don’t even do the readings.”
I had more bottled up, just ready to spew, but his lips claimed my mouth and the only sensation I felt was the deep burning I had for this boy and his many mixed up signals.
“There. That’s what I had planned, but never in a million years did I think you would let me kiss you.”
Confused, but slightly satisfied he had kissed me again, I sat forward. “You wanted to kiss me?”
“Yeah. Why is that so hard to believe?” He was playing with my hair and I wasn’t sure I could complete my thoughts.
“Because you have been anything but interested since the first day of class. You take every chance you get to remind me we are group partners.”
“And we are. You are my Comm 224 partner. But I’m not the one who came up with the idea to disprove the show. We can’t very well disprove it, if we are proving it, can we?”
The giddiness I had earlier in the night bubbled through my heart like the champagne. “Are we?” I was nervous to ask. This question had been plaguing me since he rolled out of my driveway the other night and every time he looked at me. “Are we proving it?”
“You tell me.” He leaned toward me again, this time pulling me on top of him so that my legs straddled his waist.
I wanted to give in to the impulses raging through my body. “Ok. Stop. Stop.” I inhaled. “This will ruin the entire project. The whole month of blogging we’ve done is a waste. We’ve messed up everything. Oh my God. Oh my God.” I dismounted Beau and paced through the maze of candles. “I’m not going to graduate. I’m going to fail Communication 224. My parents won’t let me move to L.A. and I’m going to end up in the family business after all.”
“Whoa. No one is failing anything.” He stood to face me and grabbed both my shoulders. “Who says we have to tell anyone?”
“What? You think we should act like this didn’t happen?”
I was crushed again. He wanted to pretend as if we never kissed or that his hands weren’t all over me on a blanket surrounded by rose petals. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to forget this night, but maybe he was right. We should reestablish our partnership.
“No. What I’m saying is we keep blogging as if we were. We tell everyone that the show is still a phony and the dates are not bringing us closer together. We go on the fake dates, but they don’t have to be so fake anymore. It stays between us.” I was beginning to like the devilish expression in Beau’s eyes.
“But isn’t that lying? The entire experiment is rigged if we do that.” I couldn’t deny I liked the prospect of going on a real date with Beau, but I wasn’t totally comfortable with lying to the whole school or to Professor Garcia.
“You said it yourself. If we come clean now, the whole month’s worth of work we’ve done was for nothing. If we admit that our hypothesis was wrong, what kind of project do we have to present? It doesn’t test or challenge anything about the show. Why can’t we keep this between us? Unless you want to go back to being just partners—nothing more. We can do that too. It’s your decision, London. I’m not going to force you to do something you don’t want to do.”
Something in the way he handed me the power to decide made it easy to choose. I walked over to him and let my hands explore the hardness of his chest before wrapping them around his neck.
