“You could kiss me,” he offers, so close now his breath feathers over my skin. Steamy, yet minty. So close the rumble of his deep voice reverberates in my own chest.
“You mean kiss you?” I ask. “Or like kiss you kiss you?”
He chuckles and lifts the hair off my shoulder, tucking a chunk of it behind my ear.
“I’m pretty sure the second one,” he says, piercing me with another heated glance. “Is that the one with tongue?”
My brain, temporarily atrophied though usually agile, reaches for the nearest excuse.
“I-I don’t kiss guys who have girlfriends.” I arrange my face into polite apology and hope to end this perplexing conversation.
“Ahhh.” He nods, his expression reflective. “I figured you’d say that.”
“Yeah, so, we should probably—”
“That’s why I don’t have a girlfriend anymore.”
The breath stalls in my throat. My heart pummels me from the inside out, rattling against the cage of my ribs.
“You mean Cindy?” I ask.
“Yeah, no more Cindy.”
“You wha-wha . . . huh?”
“You wha-wha . . .” he mocks me, his full lips spreading into a blinding grin. “You heard me. I don’t have a girlfriend anymore. Cindy and I broke up.”
“But I’m not your type,” I blurt.
“And yet I broke up with her so you,” he says, laying the tip of one long finger on my breastbone, “would kiss me.”
I glance from the finger resting between my breasts to the sculpted lines of Jared’s face. Does he feel my heartbeat tom tom-ing through my sweatshirt, hope and doubt trading thumps in my chest? I’ve imagined kissing him, not just how he would taste or how his lips would feel, but imagined him wanting it as much as I did. Imagined how it would feel to be wanted back. Now that he says he does, it seems too good to be true.
“I think I’m getting, um,” I say, licking my lips, “mixed signals.”
His eyes trace the slide of my tongue, making me self-conscious. I tuck my lips in, hiding them from the singeing heat of his glance.
“Really?” he asks with a husky chuckle. “You’re too smart to be confused by something so simple.”
His other hand cups the nape of my neck, subtly pulling me closer.
“No mixed signals, Banner.” He lowers his head to breathe the next words over my lips. “Just this one.”
Doing laundry the last few years, I understand static electricity—the charge produced when things rub against each other. I didn’t even realize we’d been rubbing against each other all semester in some form or fashion; the clash of our wills, the meeting of our minds, and now our lips rub together. Our tongues move in tandem. We cling.
He possesses my mouth. There’s no other way to say it. As much a command as it is a kiss. I’ve never been kissed this way. His thumb presses my chin so my lips open wider, and he storms in. It doesn’t feel like a first kiss. There’s nothing uncertain or tentative about the way he fits his lips over mine. He kisses me like he’s rehearsed it a thousand times.
And God help me, after a startled gasp, I kiss him back. The heat between our mouths burns through my shock like a flame eating through wax, and he quickly reaches the wick—the very end of my hesitation. He flattens his hand between my breasts while we kiss, and though he’s nowhere near my nipples, they peak. Tight and hard and sensitive, anticipating the possibility of his touch. His other hand angles my head back, and he plumbs the depths of my mouth, licking inside, stroking my tongue with his. He traps my hair in his fist and pulls, growling into the kiss.
What the actual fuck?
It’s so intense. It’s deeper and hotter and on the edge of what I can handle. His hunger grabs me, holds me so tight for a moment I can’t breathe.
“Jared,” I mumble against his mouth, pull back and touch my throbbing lips. “Slow down. I . . . it’s a lot.”
His forehead crashes against mine, his hand still at my neck and his fingers wedged into my hair.
“Shit,” he breathes. “Sorry. I’ve just been thinking about this for a long time. It’s hard to go slow.”