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She’d have to come up with it later, when the warm breeze and sunshine and vanilla sugar and beautiful man near her were not dulling her will to do battle.
She looked up from her haze to find Levi had moved on to a Filipino woman with purple yam cupcakes, and if she didn’t catch up, Blue was going to eat them all without sharing.
Finally, after they’d eaten a truly alarming quantity of buttercream, Hannah dragged Levi to a picnic table and made him sit still long enough to drink a cold brew coffee.
“You must always balance your sugar intake with large quantities of caffeine,” she told him primly. He reached over, wiping a little frosting off the side of her mouth with his thumb, and then sucked it off. The sight of his thumb in his mouth made parts of her body feel things she was not excited to feel in public.
She needed to gain back some equilibrium. He was pushing all the way into her comfort zones and personal space, using every tool he had to disorient her. She just needed to get some of the power back.
Chapter 15
Levi
Hannah was sitting across from him at a picnic table, her hair shining like a halo in the sun and the freckles on her shoulders calling to him like a siren song. She leaned her elbows on the wood, her head tilting toward his. When he wiped frosting off her lips with his thumb and sucked on it, her eyes sparked with a challenge. He felt a tiny victory. His inner asshole (which, to be fair, was also mostly his outer asshole) did a fist bump.
He’d gotten to her, and now she was going to get him back. He could not wait.
Their foreheads nearly rested together. She smelled of roses, always, because she used a soap, lotion, and shampoo all from the same company that had been supplying little old ladies for a century and somehow was still in business. She’d been using them since they were teenagers, right around when Levi had realized that, while he wasn’t generally interested in sex in the way boys his age were told they were meant to be, he was desperately in love with Hannah. He’d never been particularly like other children, so he wasn’t overly concerned about being unlike other teenage boys.
Living in a small town meant that the few boys he knew teased him about being gay when he didn’t profess interest in girls, and he’d leaned into that by starting to wear eyeliner and care about fashion, because it annoyed and confused them. He was ashamed of a lot of things in his life, but people assuming he was gay had never been one of them.
He’d found that he felt more himself in eyeliner and leggings and clothes his classmates deemed “too girly” than he’d ever felt in the khakis and polos his peers preferred.
When he and Hannah got together, all of Advent had been baffled. Several well-meaning elderly ladies had quietly ceased their machinations to set him up with Sawyer Bright. For the first time, he’d understood why people cared about sex, or went out of their way to have it. And all of that—figuring out that sometimes his body really did do all those things people talked about—was wrapped up forever in the smell of Hannah’s rose soap.
“Where did your brain just go?” Hannah asked, looking up at him through her lashes. She brushed the edge of his lips, right in the crease, the softest drop of a touch.It was an exact mirror of what he’d done to her a few minutes earlier, but instead of the contact being tinged with sex, it was both gentler and more cutting.
He was left starry-eyed and shaken. How did she do that? She had his whole heart in her hands, and it made him breathless all the time. Suddenly, he was feeling less victorious about goading her into playing this game with him.
“I was thinking about your soap,” Levi said. “I was in a rose garden in London and the smell overwhelmed me with missing you. I spent that whole night looking at pictures of you on social media and wallowing.”
“I get that way about crème brûlée,” she whispered, her voice husky. “Remember the month you made nothing but crème brûlée, trying to perfect it? I can’t eat one without crying anymore. It’s annoying.”
He wanted to have a very long conversation about fancy pudding and maybe nudity, but instead he moved his body out of her physical space and chugged the last of his cold brew. “Do you remember the time we took my motorcycle—”
She cut him off. “Shut up, Blue.” Her eyes flashed, hot.
She did remember, then.
They had driven up into the mountains, into the night, to a big clearing under the stars, with nothing but a blanket, and they had been much louder than they could ever be at home. On the drive back, they’d stopped for pie at a little all-night diner and hadn’t left until they’d tried a slice of every flavor.
“I miss that bike.” Levi sighed. He wondered what exactly had come of his bike, now that he thought of it.
“Wait,” Hannah said, “you showed up on a bike. Whose bike was it? You left yours at Carrigan’s.”
“Oh, it’s Laurence’s.”
Hannah looked at him. “Laurence, like, your roommate Laurence from college? Is he in the area?”
“Yeah, he lives up on St. Regis Mohawk land, with his family.” Levi nodded. “He just got off a stint as the guest chef at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and now he’s launching a program to bring traditional food knowledge to Indigenous kids who grow up in urban areas.”
“Um, Laurence is a badass, firstly,” Hannah said. This was true. Laurence could cook circles around him. “Secondly, why haven’t you been hanging out with him? Have you even gone to see him?”
“I mean, I saw him when I borrowed the bike?” Levi realized that he probably should also return the bike at some point, having had it for a couple of months. Or maybe he could buy it off Laurence.
Hannah poked him. “You should invite him to dinner, or trivia, or to one of the events!”
“I don’t know if he’d want to hang out,” Levi said, running his hand through his hair. “He’s super busy. I don’t want to bother him.”
