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“Now kiss me.”
She blinks those soft, sage eyes up at me, lashes fluttering. “Pardon?”
“You heard me.” I take a sip of my wine, waiting. Her face is priceless.
“But I…if…” She flusters, stopping to lift her glass to her lips for a long pull. She drains half the glass. “If you want to kiss me, why don’t you just kiss me?”
“Because I want you to kiss me.”
“We’re in public.”
I raise my brows, making a show of looking around. “And?”
“Well, I—”
“I don’t care where we are or who can see. And by the way, I can be just as bossy as you. So fucking kiss me, Claire, now.”
Her head goes backwards like I’ve just slapped her. She blinks a few times, face riddled with shock.
But then she leans forward, one tentative hand sliding over my thigh, the other curving around my neck. Her lips touch mine timidly at first, once, twice, and I think that’s all she’s going to give me when she pulls back a fraction.
But then she dives in, her tongue sweeping inside my mouth. Frantic hands grip the collar of my shirt and she shifts, turning in the booth until she’s practically crawling onto my lap.
Chuckling, I cup her face and push her back just a touch. “Easy. We’re in public,” I tease, throwing her own words right back at her.
Her cheeks tint with color and she raises a trembling hand to her swollen lips. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all good. Just trying to remind you how you feel about me.” I flash her a cheeky grin.
She folds her arms over her chest. “In case I’ve forgotten?”
“Well, yeah. It took me, like, four hours to get that far on Saturday.”
Her face breaks and she smiles. It turns into a snicker and her arms fall to the table, fingers wrapping around her wine glass. “You act like I’m so tough to crack.”
“You are incredibly tough to crack. I’ve never met a more hard-headed woman in my life. Except maybe my mom, my sister…Yeah, you’d fit right in with them.”
“Trying to fill your life up with stubborn, hotheaded women?”
I press a kiss to her lips. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”
It’s interesting to watch Claire open up, to watch her slowly melt into a state of comfort. The more she talks, the more those green eyes of hers light up. She gradually sinks against my side, though I’m not sure she even knows what she’s doing. Her hands wave wildly around her face when she talks about growing up with Casey and Charlee and Dex and all the trouble the four of them got into.
“Once we had a huge kegger when my parents were away. It was wild. I mean, with three years between us, something like a hundred people were there.”
“You had enough room for that many people?” I ask, swirling some of her sweet potato fries in her chipotle mayo before popping them in my mouth.
She shakes her head, stabbing at my goat cheese stuffed chicken, and I watch her lips close over her fork. She moans, eyes falling closed. “Mmm, so good. No, our house wasn’t super big or anything, but we lived on a nice property. An acre and a half and no close neighbors. Our parties were famous at our high school.”
She offers me a slice of her pork tenderloin, and I take it off her fork.
“Anyway, the cops showed up. We ran. Me, Casey, Charlee, and Dex, all of us.” She lifts one shoulder. “It worked out because they couldn’t give us a ticket because there was nobody home at the time that lived there. We sat in a Tim Horton’s until almost four in the morning and ate, like, twenty Timbits each. By the time we got home, I’d completely forgotten about a hole in the wall some drunk idiot put there with his elbow. I was freaking out. Casey took a piece of paper, drew a big happy face on it, slapped it over the hole, and told me tochill the fuck out,” she says with a laugh, eyes sparkling at the memory.
“You guys have always been close? You and Casey?”
Reaching over my plate, she scoops up some of my loaded baked potato and I watch her push it past her lips.
“Uh-huh,” she mumbles. “Always. But even more so when Vivi was born. Dex actually let me reduce my hours for a while so I could help Casey out. Watching my brother learn to be a dad was so much fun. I remember this one time, Vivi was only three days old, and we were arguing over how to put her diaper on best. We were literally screaming at each other, getting right in each other’s faces.”
