“Lake’s lips,” he continued. “Lake’s backside. Lake’s lips again. Lake’s hands. Lake’s lips, yet again. Lake seeing my scars. Lake naked. Lake in a tux. And again, Lake’s lips.”
He turned around slowly. She couldn’t even begin to describe the look on his face. It was somewhere in the middle of mystified, amused and delighted.
“You’ve written ‘Lake’s lips’ four times,” he pointed out. “They must make you really anxious.”
Kirsty finished wiping up the ice cream and sat on one of the kitchen stools. She may as well endure it. There was no escape. It wasn’t like she could send him packing while her mum was breaking into his shop.
“For the record,” he told her as he stood up, “I have never taken steroids.”
He flexed his muscles to make the point and Kirsty’s fingers tingled to get a hold of the board marker and add “muscle flexing” to her list.
“You weren’t meant to see that,” she said.
“Kind of stating the obvious there, babe.”
He folded his arms over his faded blue shirt and stared at her.
“We need to do something about the list,” he said.
“It’s a coping mechanism,” she said pointlessly. What it was, was a sign of insanity.
“It’s a helluva long list. You’re running out of door space.”
Kirsty rested her elbows on the counter in front of her and put her face in her hands.
“They say,” Lake said, “that if you confront the things that make you anxious and think them through logically, then they won’t upset you any more.”
Kirsty’s head shot up.
“Who says that? Who exactly is ‘they’?”
“I did psych courses as part of my training.”
He walked around the counter, never breaking eye contact. Kirsty checked her exit—it was behind her, there was still time to bolt. If she was fast she could lock herself in the bathroom until the evening was over.
“Now, seeing as my lips feature quite a bit on your list, I think we should start there.”
“I don’t need your help. I’m perfectly fine. See? No freaking out. What I really need is a lock on the cupboard door.”
He stepped right up against her.
“What you need to do is realise that the world isn’t going to end if my lips touch yours. Sometimes, a kiss is just a kiss. It doesn’t need to lead to anything. I think that’s what’s really freaking you out. And the only way I know to stop that is to kiss so long that you stop worrying about what comes next.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Ready?” he said as he stroked her cheek with the back of his knuckles.
She shook her head.
“Glad to hear it,” he said with an evil twinkle in his eye. “Pucker up, Kirsty—it’s for your own good.”
And then he leaned forward and kissed her. He kissed her long. He kissed her slow. He kissed her in ways she’d never been kissed before. She clung to him, feeling waves of desire wash through her body as his lips kept coming at her. And, sure enough, he was right—soon she could think of nothing but kissing Lake. Kirsty wasn’t sure how long she’d been lost in him, but when he stepped back she felt like every bone in her body was made of jelly.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” His voice was heavy with desire.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Kirsty conceded.
Kirsty’s mobile phone rang. Lake looked at it.