I gasp even though I’m barely outraged; his humor-filled eyes are making it a little hard to take offense. Even so, I should at least pretend.
“I got up on your stupid shoes because you’re… monstrously tall, okay? You’re a giant.”
I gesture at his sprawled form with my waving hand. He is a giant.
He’s sitting on one end of the couch but somehow, he’s taking up half of the space. His thighs are spread wide and they look so powerful and brawny. It makes me think once again, that I can crawl over to him and perch my entire tiny self on just one of those limbs. He probably wouldn’t even notice I was there.
While I’m staring at him, he takes in my curled form. He takes in my bare legs, folded up at the knees, and my puny arms wrapped around them.
“Maybe to you,” he says.
I narrow my eyes at him. “It’s not normal. You being this tall. And big.”
Okay, I shouldn’t have sounded this… fluttery, but I did and I’m not happy about it. But it’s true. His size is intimidating.
Or should be.
He half-smiles. “Again, maybe to you.”
I have this strong urge to be a brat and stick my tongue out at him. But all I do is mumble, “Whatever. It was a mistake, anyway. The kiss.”
“A stupid, drunken one, I know.”
My eyes fall to his lips then.
It’s been ten months – ten freaking months – since I touched them for the first time and obviously, the last.
But I remember everything about them.
I remember that his lower lip is plusher and meatier than his upper lip. There’s even a groove there, right in the middle of it, that you can see and that I wanted to lick. I wanted to dig my tongue in there. I wanted to dig my tongue inside his mouth and see what he tasted like.
On the outside, he tasted like those strawberries that I love so much but am allergic to. Which is so stupid and irrational because I know for a fact that he doesn’t even eat strawberries.
“Yeah,” I whisper, nodding.
But the problem is that it doesn’t feel like a mistake, that kiss. Not right now.
In this moment, it feels like destiny.
Like I was meant to kiss him. I was meant to throw myself at him, clutch onto his shirt, step onto his shoes and put my mouth on his.
Because if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here tonight.
Yeah, maybe I was meant to wreck it all, destroy everything. So I could finally do what I’m doing right now: talking to him.
“Who was she?” I ask all of a sudden, glancing up to his eyes.
He snaps his eyes up as well, and I could swear that they were on my lips. Although he looked away so quickly that I can’t say for sure.
“Who?”
“The woman you were kissing that night?”
That blonde and busty and queen-like woman. The one he was kissing back.
His chest expands with his breath in a way that makes me think he doesn’t like the question. Even so, he answers. “No one. Someone I picked up at the bar.”
“Do you pick up a lot of women at the bar?”
He frowns. “Shouldn’t you be going to sleep? I’m pretty sure it’s past your bedtime.”
“It’s okay. I can stay. We just won’t tell my babysitter that I’m breaking the rules,” I sass with a false sweet smile.
He watches that smile with a dangerous glint in his eyes. “Babysitter, huh?”
“Yup. I have two.” I show him the fingers. “You know, since I’m such a hormonal teenager and a bad girl and all that.”
His lips twitch slightly before he tips his chin up, still keeping his eyes on me. “I can believe that.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“Let’s chat.”
“You want to chat?”
I nod enthusiastically. “Yeah. I’ll tell you something and then you tell me something back, you know. That kind of stuff.”
Like the night of my eighteenth birthday, I’m filled with this urgency. A need to keep this going, whatever this is.
I wanna talk and talk and keep talking until I’ve got no words left or he gets bored of me. Until he stops looking at me like he doesn’t hate me. Because in this moment, it seems like he doesn’t.
In fact, I haven’t felt his hatred in days. For days, all I’ve felt is a peaceful, domestic, happy truce.
So I wanna talk and talk until this goes away because I feel like I can talk to him.
“Are we going to paint our toenails too?” he asks, sarcastically.
I shrug. “Maybe. I could do your nails, if you want.”
His eyes – dark and bottomless – sweep all over my face before he replies in a gravelly voice, “You don’t give up, do you?”
I shake my head. “Nope. So is that a yes on toenail painting?”
“That’s a maybe on chatting.”
I fist pump and he does the most extraordinary thing ever. He smiles. Not only that, he chuckles.