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His hands steady on my neck, and he tips his head back. I think it registers what he plans half a second before he does it, but my entire body goes too still with shock to stop it.
Shiloh pulls me down and rests our mouths together. It’s just pressure, just warm skin on skin, but then he opens his mouth and I gasp, and he must take that as me welcoming the sweep of his tongue over mine.
I’m not kissing him back. I’m not even sure I’m breathing.
Which he notices, because he pulls away enough to breathe his words over my face.
“Kiss me, Atty. Make it fair.”
I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t understand why our lips are moving together or why his legs wrap around my waist.
But I give him what he wants, because this is Loh. I’ll give him everything he needs, even if I don’t understand it.
I hold him tighter because I fear he’s going to break. I don’t know why, but alarm bells blare in my head to not hurt him right now.
Eventually, he breaks away and presses a firm hand to my chest. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, that grin still plastered to his face like he’s won some sort of prize.
He kicks at my hip, and I step back, letting him hop off the counter.
“Wanna grab lunch?”
I’m pretty sure I should say yes because that’s my normal response to Shiloh, but my brain hasn’t booted back up yet.
“What was that?”
He shrugs and scoots around me to grab a bottle of water from the fridge.
“Just a kiss,” he says, uncapping the bottle and tipping it towards his mouth. When he’s finished, he smacks his lips together and sets the bottle on the counter. “Now you’ve kissed two Novaks.”
He winks and bounces out of the room without waiting on me to follow.
What the hell just happened?
My mouth tingles, and confusion ripples through my thoughts. That didn’t feel like just a kiss. It felt like Shiloh was searching for something. For a moment, I thought he might never let go.
It feels like I’m missing something. Like there’s a picture right in front of me with a chunk taken out of the middle.
Shiloh just started new meds. He’s been low for a few days; maybe the imbalance is making his mania act up.
A few more days and he should be closer to normal.
With that, I decide not to worry about it. Shiloh always does wild, unpredictable things.
Kissing me is just the next rung on that ladder for him.
B: I have been ripping up porch for at least an hour. I didn’t think the whole damn thing was rotten. Shit. I don’t have enough replacement planks for this. If I leave now, Dad’s going to try to find a way down the porch just to spite me and break something else.
Blair and I haven’t been talking as much as he keeps sending me paragraph after paragraph of complaint since I checked in with him over lunch.
It’s kind of cute the way he goes off, not seeming to care that half of his words are misspelled or ineligible. At one point I even got a butt-dial and listened to his jeans rub on the microphone for a solid minute before I realized he wasn’t going to notice and didn’t want to embarrass him when he did.
I hate that he’s doing all of this. Not just because his Dad is an obvious piece of shit who emotionally abused one kid and physically abused the other, but because I know it’s running him ragged. It’s biting into his bank account, and I know for a fact he worked and did tutoring this morning, so he has to be exhausted already.
It’s nearing six in the afternoon, and the sun is still heavy and hot in the sky. That’s what you get for Tennessee weather with May right on the horizon. I can’t imagine tearing at the porch is doing anything other than giving him heatstroke on top of everything else, but he’d never listen to me if I told him he should give it a rest.
Another day, maybe earlier in the morning would be better.
After getting a text that shows a long ass cut across Blair’s palm from a nail sticking from one of the planks, I decide that if he isn’t going to listen to reason, then it’s time to call in some drastic measures.
