I know what the right thing to do is. Nothing. Nothing is the right thing to do.
Actually, doing nothing is proving nearly impossible.
“Are you okay?” her voice asks, and my eyes fly open, my forehead still against the cool wood of my bathroom closet door.
“I’m fine,” I say, straightening. “I was just… checking.”
I turn, face her. She’s got the shirt fully back on and she leans her hips carefully against the bathroom counter.
“That the closet is flush with the floor. At a right angle.”
I point to where the closet meets the floor, as if that’ll convince her that I was considering carpentry and not counting the reasons I shouldn’t kiss her. It feels as though there are several thousand, though I suspect they’re all variations on the same few.
“Is it?” June asks after a pause.
I clear my throat, so at odds with myself that I’ve nearly forgotten what she’s asking.
“Yes,” I finally say. “Yes. It’s fine. I just thought for a moment that it might be… not fine.”
“Thanks for fixing me up,” she says. “You’re good at that. And prepared.”
“I’ve got four younger brothers, I pretty much had to be,” I tell her, truthfully. “Plus Silas.”
June laughs lightly, then glances away.
“And now you’ve fixed up a kid sister,” she says.
“Kid sister?” I ask, frowning.
I take a step forward, toward her. I take two steps. I can’t stop myself.
“Yeah, you know,” she says, her voice still light. “Since I’m Silas’s kid sister, I kind of figured I was practically yours, too.”
She finally looks up at me in the half-light of the bathroom, her eyes deep pools in her face, her dark hair pulled back, her lips slightly parted.
“That’s not at all how I think of you,” I say before I can stop myself.
I take another step closer and now she’s right in front of me, much closer than she should be, but I can’t help that, either.
“How do you think of me?” she asks, her voice nearly a whisper, her blue eyes bottomless.
There’s a moment where I could still lie, where I could pull back, make the right choice.
“Far too often,” I tell her, the words spilling from my lips.
I reach out. I touch her, run my fingers lightly along her jaw and June tilts her head, her eyes still locked on mine.
I could still stop this. I could drop my hand and walk out of this bathroom and tell June to leave and I wouldn’t cross that line that I can never uncross, but I don’t.
I slide my fingers into her hair, my thumb on her cheek.
And I lean down and kiss her.
There’s a moment when she doesn’t kiss me back, when she’s nothing but soft and yielding, and then she does. June kisses me back fervently, ardently, and she slides her hand around my neck and pulls me down and I already know I’ll never be able to bring myself to regret this.
She tugs at me, pulls, opens her lips under mine and deepens the kiss. My heart thunders and echoes like a marching band in a subway tunnel but despite that, despite my wild urge, I’m careful with her.
I don’t touch her back even though I want to pull her into me and push her against the counter all at once. She has one hand on my chest, and I lock my fingers around her wrist, hold it there.
The kiss ends and we stand there, centimeters apart, in perfect stillness.
“Is that the secret you were going to tell me in the library?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “I thought better of it at the time.”
She leans forward and her lips are on mine again, greedy and soft. I kiss her back, restrained, careful.
In the kitchen, my phone rings. I ignore it, keep kissing June.
It stops, then starts again, the sound tearing through the quiet of the house and I growl softly without meaning to. June lets me go, pushes herself onto the counter and I step forward, hands on her knees.
The phone keeps ringing. I ignore it until I can’t, pull away from her, both of us breathing hard.
“You should get that,” she says. “It sounds important.”
The phone stops ringing. We both listen to the silence.
Then it starts again.
“All right,” I growl, kiss her once more. “I’ll be right back.”
I feel like I’m moving through quicksand as I walk through the living room, into the kitchen, the damned phone ringing away the whole time. I grab the ugly tan receiver off the wall and hold it to my ear, the coiled cord bouncing.
“What?” I demand.
Silence on the other end.
Then, just as I’m about to hang up: “Levi?”
It’s Silas. It’s Silas and he sounds faraway, lost, ragged, and just from that one word I know exactly why he called.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I’ve been calling you all day,” he says, and I can practically see him pacing in his townhouse, walking back and forth with the blinds shut over the front window, the lights off.