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When they stopped, she realized she had completely disarmed him. The handsome, charming, hell-of-a-kisser stranger stared at her, face flushed and lips shining, at a loss for words.
“I like kissing you,” she said, her own head in the clouds but honesty still capable of traveling from her brain to her mouth. It wasn’t the most eloquent or sexy thing to say, but it was the truth.
The bashfulness that overtook him made Lucy melt. He rolled his lips inward, perhaps to rein in his smile, and looked at their knees. Where the smooth guy from the bar and the motorcycle had gone, she didn’t know, but this shy, swooning Adam was adorable. “Well, I know you’re telling me the truth.”
“I am.”
“I like kissing you too, it’s just... Well, I thought—” he stammered, flapping his hands, “that first one seemed like an accident, so I wasn’t sure— Oh! Okay,” he mumbled against Lucy’s mouth when she leaned in again.
Kissing Adam felt like a key in a lock. Or perhaps a truth in a sequence of lies. She hardly knew him, yes, but she trusted whatever force kept bringing them together. And she trusted the warmth unfurling into her limbs and the feel of his hand on her cheek. Most of all, she trusted that she wanted to kiss him. Kissing a near stranger on a bench in a community park was not something well-behaved women did—her mother would scold her if she saw—but dropping the oppressive charade and embracing her desire right there in public was not only thrilling, it was liberating.
When they parted, she didn’t apologize for being forward or dissolve into a blushing fluster like she may have on another day. She smiled and enjoyed the leftover tingle on her lips. She pressed her fingertips to her mouth as if to stamp it in place.
“Wow,” Adam said, dazed. “Uh, what were we talking about?”
Lucy laughed, trying to gather her thoughts. “I think you asked me what I do.”
The reminder of her job brought her back to earth and made her check her phone for anything from Monica.
Still nothing.
“I’m a publicist.”
He bobbed his head like this made perfect sense.
“What?”
“I guess I should have known by the power lunch in Beverly Hills and the fact that I’ve yet to see you without your phone in your hand,” he said with a grin.
“Is that a bad thing?” she asked, realizing his opinion mattered to her.
“Not if it’s what you like doing. I’ve just known people who act like they’re curing cancer by making movies. But who am I to talk? I make overpriced cocktails for Westsiders who can only afford them because they’re in your industry.” His smile was genuine and knowing, and it made Lucy lean closer.
“Don’t undersell yourself; they’re life-changing cocktails, remember?”
“Ah, yes. How’s that going, by the way? Did whatever emergency that sent you running back to work get sorted out?”
“That is a long story you probably don’t have time or energy for.”
Adam looked up and down the street as if to indicate his open schedule. “Well, I’ll take an excuse to skip my run, and I don’t have to be at the bar until four for happy hour, so.” His hazel eyes were warm and sincere, interested.
Lucy may have trusted whatever force brought them together, but she was starting to second-guess how this charming, helpful, sincere, willing-to-listen-to-her-problems guy even existed in the first place.
A terrifying thought struck her that suddenly shifted her whole insane day into a new perspective.
Could it be possible that she had... made him up?
While the truth-telling could be chalked up to some inexplicable cosmic intervention, it could also be a symptom of her having lost her mind. Maybe she had snapped and he was a hallucination.
In that moment, she wanted to believe in the impracticality of the universe teaching her a lesson more than the much more logical chance that her brain might have gone haywire and she needed professional help.
She swallowed hard and looked at Adam. “Are you real?”
He stared back at her for a sobering second that made her sure she was insane before he burst out laughing. “What does that mean?”
Embarrassment hit her hard, and she wanted to duck under the bench and hide, but she needed to know. She found his gaze, determined, and held it. “I mean I didn’t make you up, right? Very strange things keep happening to me today, and then there’s you, and you’re good, like too good to be true, and you keep showing up, and I just want to know that you’re real and I don’t need to be committed.”
His brow furrowed at her fluster, and she was sure he regretted everything and was about to run away because her honesty had gone from charming to terrifying. But then his eyes softened, and she realized just how honest she’d been. “You think you made me up because I’m too good to be true?”
