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The dimple beside his mouth deepened. “It’s ten percent ABV.”
Sheesh.That explained why I felt buzzed off half of one measly beer.
“You want another?” he asked, pushing himself to his feet.
“No thank you.” A second one of these would have me under the coffee table singing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” before the night was out.
Donal went into the kitchen and came back with a fresh one for himself. “I almost forgot, I’ve got something to show you. Hang on.”
While he disappeared into the back of his apartment, I slipped my shoes off and pulled my feet up underneath me, getting more comfortable. A minute later, Donal came back carrying four large hardbound books.
“Oh, my God,” I said when I recognized our old yearbook covers. “Are those what I think they are?”
“Go Eagles.” Grinning, he sat down next to me on the couch, so close that his thigh was pressed up against mine. As he leaned forward to set his beer down, I took the topmost yearbook from him and opened it across my lap.
“Wow. Look at that.” Of course, the page I’d opened it to happened to be the band photo. I bent my head, squinting at the rows of familiar faces from our past.
“There I am.” Donal leaned in and pointed. His chest pressed against my arm, and his hair grazed my cheek as his finger moved across the page. “And there you are.”
It was like looking at a stranger. I still felt young inside my head—like a youthful twentysomething trapped in the body of a forty-eight-year-old. But staring at this seventeen-year-old version of myself, I could feel every single second of the years that had passed.
Donal flipped to the next page, and I was confronted by a photo of the two of us. We were sitting side by side on the floor of a classroom with notebooks propped on our legs—studying for Academic Decathlon according to the caption. Donal was grinning up at whichever one of our friends on the yearbook staff had taken the picture, while I appeared irritated by the interruption.
“God,” he murmured. “Were we ever that young?”
“I can’t believe I thought that spiral perm was a good idea.”
“I thought it was cute.” He pressed his fingers to the page, flattening the spine for a better look as he let out a wistful sigh. “I miss having that much hair.”
I swiveled my head to study him. “You’ve still got plenty of hair.” It was a little thinner on top, and his hairline might have risen a centimeter or two, but compared to most men he was doing extraordinarily well for his age.
His mouth twisted into a grimace. “You wouldn’t believe how much I’m spending on Rogaine and hair pills to delay the inevitable, but every year I lose more of the battlefield.”
“I use Botox,” I confessed as I flipped to the next page.
“Really?” He sounded surprised, and I felt the sweep of his eyes over my face like a physical touch.
“With my resting bitch face?” I tried to sound flippant, hoping he wouldn’t notice how much his scrutiny affected me. “I’d be able to hold a pencil in my forehead wrinkles by now if I didn’t.”
He didn’t laugh. “She has your eyes, you know.”
“What?” The abrupt subject change threw me.
“Erin. You said she was my clone, but she has your eyes. They’re the exact same color.”
“Really?” I hadn’t even noticed Erin’s eye color. She looked so much like Donal in every other respect, I’d assumed her eyes were blue like his.
He touched his fingertips to my chin, swiveling my face toward his. “Brown with subtle depths of green and gold at the center. I’ve never seen anyone else with eyes quite like yours. Until today.”
I swallowed as he studied my face. His words, his touch, and his soft, thoughtful expression made me feel unmoored and off-balance. Pulling out of his grasp, I directed my attention back to the yearbook in my lap and tried to ignore the way my skin felt feverish where his fingers had touched me.
“Oh, wow,” I breathed as I flipped the page to our senior class superlatives.
Best Looking, Most Athletic, Cutest Couple. And there in the middle of the page was another photo of me with Donal, his arm slung casually around my shoulders, under a banner that readMost Likely to Succeed.
“Huh.” He propped his arm on the couch behind me as he bent closer. “I forgot all about that.”
I inhaled a shaky breath at the sensation of being surrounded by him. His arm was at my back, his chest pressed against my shoulder, his lightly stubbled cheek mere inches from mine. The problem wasn’t that it made me uncomfortable being this close to him. It was that it felttoocomfortable.
