Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

I gaped at him. In fact, he had been the first. Well, not counting Christina Marciano at the eighth-grade social that Carter had dragged me to back when we were still best friends. Before he decided that sports were cooler than movie marathons and being popular was more important than me. And she didn’t really count because that was spin the bottle, so she kind of had to kiss me. But that wasn’t even the point.

Will’s smile faded in the silence.

“Okaaay. Um, I shouldn’t have done that. I was in a weird place. Being back in Michigan, and stuff with my sister and—”

I couldn’t listen. He regretted kissing me—not even regretted: discounted. Basically the best moment of my entire life, and it had been nothing to him. A mistake.

When you’re in a weird place you, like, impulse buy dumb trinkets at the gas station or decide that you probably should watch Fifty Shades of Grey just to see what everyone is talking about. But Will had kissed me. I mean, really kissed me.

Even all these months later I could slide back into the moment like a jacket worn perfectly to fit my shoulders….

Laughing at a snarky joke Will made and looking up to find his eyes locked on my mouth, those honey gold lashes vulnerable where his eyes always flayed me. The sudden heat I felt, like every atom between our bodies was agitated to a singing vibration. The drag of those lashes as his eyes met mine and he inhaled sharply through his nose like he was startled by whatever he saw in me. How slowly he moved—almost imperceptibly—until my eyes crossed trying to track his mouth’s approach.

His breath caught moments before we touched, a tiny automatic sound that I thought might be nerves, though Will had never indicated he had any. I closed my eyes at the hint of vulnerability and waited for contact, the whole world—my whole stupid, pathetic life—reduced to our mouths, microns apart, taking each other’s breath into our bodies like maybe we could share something.

But when contact came it wasn’t Will’s lips. It was his hands, one on either side of my face, holding me fiercely still. His eyes were knives again, any hint of uncertainty gone, and he crushed his mouth to mine before I could even register that he’d moved. It startled a sound out of me, a kind of whine in the back of my throat that I try not to think about, and then it was just the taste of him, like warm ocean water on my tongue.

I pushed up on tiptoes to kiss him back, fisting the fabric of his shirt until he yanked me against him and his tongue stroked mine. It was a shock that electrified my whole body. The fucking intimacy of it. Of someone touching my mouth with his. That something of Will was inside me, a part of me—spit and breath and taste and touch. In that instant he owned me.

When I slid my fingers into his hair it even felt blond, the strands smooth and heavy, and Will let out a breath into my mouth. We broke apart for a moment and his eyes were narrowed. Had I done something wrong? Made a misstep I didn’t even recognize?

Before I could apologize or ask or do anything, really, other than try not to plaster myself back against his body, he covered my mouth with his palm and closed his eyes, shaking his head slightly. I tried to say something, but he pressed his palm tighter against my lips, his fingers a blunt disappointment after the poetry of his mouth. His hand stayed there for a moment before sliding away in a silent benediction as he took a step back, leaving me breathless and shaky and tremblingly hard.

Leaving me totally destroyed for anything but another taste of him.

Since the moment I had gotten my acceptance letter to NYU—no, from the moment it had occurred to me that I could come to New York—I’d had a fantasy of this moment. The one where I saw Will for the first time since our leave-taking in Holiday. I’d played it in my head so often, scripted different versions of it so many times, that it almost felt like it’d already happened. As if this meeting were something I’d already read in a book, years before, its details gone flat and hazy with the familiarity of a scene read a thousand times.

I’d pulled that story around myself like a blanket for so long, and needed it so badly, that I hadn’t ever let myself imagine what would happen if Will went off script. After all, I’d written him so many.

There were the ones I’d thought of as realistic, where he smiled and was amused at me and I was awkward and self-deprecating, and we kind of laughed and he said, “Yeah, we’ll see,” but in a way that left me buoyant with hope. There were the ones that were more porn than romance, where we didn’t speak at all, he just stripped me bare and claimed me, as if I had finally come home.