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Chapter 8
Luna
Luna sat down on the couch while she waited for Connor to come back from the kitchen. She balled her fingers up in her skirt, then squeezed them between her knees. Anything to keep them from trembling as violently– and visibly– as they were.
She was glad that Connor wanted to talk. But at the same time, she was terrified. This whole “getting outside of her comfort zone” thing was new…like, less than twenty-four hours old kind of new. It was scary and uncomfortable– but worth it. As nervous as she was, she knew that for sure. Whatever the outcome of this conversation, it would be worth it.
Nothing was worse than hiding. She was done with that.
Connor came back into the living room, wiping his hands on a towel, which he then tossed onto the kitchen table on his way to the couch. Her eyes locked in on his hands as the terrycloth fabric rubbed over them. His long fingers. His rough palms. His strong wrists.
Hoooo, mama…..
She had to shake her head a little to clear the lust fog forming behind her eyes. Now wasn’t the time for that! Now was the time to strip her heart bare, not her…um, everything else.
Connor settled into the cushions on the other couch, which sat at a ninety-degree angle to the one she occupied. Even though they were technically on different pieces of furniture, their knees were only a couple of inches apart. She could feel the heat radiating off his legs and it raised gooseflesh on the bare skin of her calves.
She drew air deep into her lungs and closed her eyes to center herself. Damn, this was hard. Keeping her wits about her when she was distracted by strong emotion was hard enough, but trying to focus through both that and lust at the same time? COME ON! It was almost too much to ask.
Still, she was determined as hell to get through this conversation– and, more than just get through it, she wanted to be present and clear-headed enough to do it right. She didn’t want to spend the next ten years suffering through moments of mini-epiphany, where something would pop into her head and she’d be forced to say, damn it, I wish I would’ve asked him this, or I wish I would’ve thought to say that!
She opened her eyes and looked at Connor full in the face. She opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t. So many things washed over her at the same time– nostalgia, affection, pain, longing. They bunched up in her throat and made it impossible for words to pass.
Luckily, like he had so many other times in the past, Connor took control. “Why don’t I get the ball rolling?”
She nodded gratefully. It would definitely be easier to just respond to questions or statements, versus thinking of things to say off the top of her head.
He returned her nod with a quick, sharp one of his own. “Okay, then. Let’s just dive right in. I understand why you wanted to break things off when you went away to college. That’s pretty normal, actually. But why the total freeze out after? Why did you act like I was radioactive? Like the whole town was?”
The words hit her like tiny knives to the chest. I mean, that was really at the heart of it, wasn’t it? The thing she’d been trying to figure out herself for years.
“I mean…” her eyes drifted down to her lap, unable to meet his. “It was all I could do to drive away from you the first time. I felt like a part of me was being physically ripped from my body. I had to repeat a mantra in my head to force myself to keep driving. ‘Straight ahead, hands on wheel, foot on gas.’ I must’ve chanted it in my mind a thousand times on that drive.
“I couldn’t imagine bringing myself to do that again. I didn’t think I’d be able to. I really thought that if I came back here, I’d never leave. Never make something of myself. Never make my grandparents proud. After all they did for me, that was the least I could do for them.”
She looked down at her lap, trying to put together anything else she could say to explain it. Silence stretched between them, until finally Connor said, “You do realize how lame that is, right? To think that the only place you could ‘make something’ of yourself was anywhere but here? With anyone but me?”
More knives, directly in the chest. She didn’t care. She deserved it. “I’m beginning to. Yeah.”
More silence, until he said, “Okay. So, you admit it, then. You were an idiot.”
Her head snapped up and she saw a small, rueful smile on his lips. Breath escaped her lungs in a violent whoosh and all of the tension seeped out of her shoulders. The whole thing was sudden, like the strings being cut on a marionette. She hadn’t realized how damn tense she was until she relaxed, like not realizing how hungry you were until you smelled a sizzling steak.
“I was. Definitely. Full admission of idiocy.”
He laughed. It was a soft sound, not full of joy– but not bitter, either, and that encouraged her. “Look, Luna,” he said, “we’re cool. Things are fine between us. I mean, sure…we have a lot of history and pain in our past. But what teenage couple doesn’t? That’s kind of what the whole ‘first love’ process is about.”
Her heart clutched in her chest. Of course, he was her first love. She’d used that phrase in her own mind to describe their relationship many times. But to hear the words popping so casually out of his mouth made her lose her breath a little. “Okay. Great,” she murmured.
“Not so fast,” he amended. “You’re not off the hook that easy.”
“Cool. I can take it. Come at me, bro.” It felt so good to tease with him again after all the years of radio silence. Their energy crackled in the air between them, sending tingles skittering over the surface of her skin.
He shook his head. “Hopefully it won’t be too painful. All I want is for us to keep in touch. Not like we have to talk every day. But, now that we’ve reconnected, it would feel too weird to suddenly go another decade or more without speaking.”
Her cheeks flushed with pleasure. “I totally agree. In fact, I’m going to be sticking around Valentine Bay for a while. That’ll be a good way to kick things off.”
“A while? How long?”
