“Rowan?” he says as he pulls back, his voice a mix of surprise and awe. He’s breathing hard. His eyes are beautiful and heavy-lidded, those long lashes fluttering against the lenses of his glasses. Maybe it’s drowsiness, or maybe he’s just as drunk on this feeling as I am. “What’s… happening?”
“I’m kissing you.” I move one hand from the collar of his shirt to the back of his neck and into his hair. I want to burn every texture into my fingertips. “Should I stop?”
He skates his thumb along my cheekbone. Despite how light his touch is, I feel like I might detonate. “No. Absolutely not,” he says. He traces my nose. My lips. “I just wanted to make sure—I don’t know. That you realized it’s me.”
The uncertainty in his voice unstitches me. All the books in the world couldn’t have prepared me for this moment. There aren’t enough words.
“That’s the best part,” I tell him.
No, this is the best part: when we lean in again and it turns wilder. With one hand in my hair and one on my hip, he spins us so I’m pressed against the railing. Our mouths clash together, teeth and tongues arguing with each other. Trying to win whatever new competition this is. I run my hands over his chest, up the arms I’ve been staring at all day, overwhelmed by how much of him I want to touch. I underline and then scribble over that dorky Latin phrase with my fingertips. He’s so solid beneath my palms, and I can’t help gripping the fabric of his T-shirt a little.
His hands find their way back to my hair. And his lips, beckoning, taunting, daring me. Because fuck, Neil is hot. It’s absurd, and it’s true.
“You like my hair,” I tease between kisses.
“God. So much. It’s fucking phenomenal hair.”
Now I’m even more certain why I couldn’t picture him kissing anyone else: because it was always supposed to be like this. With us.
He keeps me pinned to the railing, kissing my jaw, my neck, beneath my ear. I shiver when he lingers there.
“Is this okay?” he asks against my skin.
“Yes,” I say, and he stamps my collarbone with his mouth. I’m addicted to the way he asks me that. How he wants to be sure.
This has to be the earth-shattering feeling he was talking about. This: his hands sliding down the sides of my body. This: his teeth grazing my clavicle. And this: the way, when he moves back to my lips, he kisses like I’m alternately something he can’t get enough of and something he wants to savor. Fast, then slow. I love it all.
Since we’re the same height, our bodies line up perfectly, and—oh. The proof of how much he’s enjoying this makes me feverish. I rock my hips against his because the pressure feels amazing, and the way he groans when I do this sounds amazing too.
I drop my hands lower, to his belt. My fingertips graze the soft skin of his stomach, and he lets out a quiet, involuntary laugh. Ticklish. Distantly, I’m aware that we’re in public. That we have to stop before we go too far. But I’ve never felt this wanted, and it’s an intoxicating, powerful feeling. I’ve never lost myself in someone like this.
With every molecule in my body, I force myself to pull away.
“That was… wow,” I say, breathless.
He leans his forehead against mine, still holding me around my waist. “?‘Wow’ is not an adjective.”
In four years, I have never heard his voice like this. This ragged, this spent.
I’m not sure how long we stand there, breathing each other in, breaking the relative silence every so often to laugh like the love-drunk loons we are. His cheeks are flushed. I’m sure mine are too.
“I was so sure I’d ruined everything,” he says after a while. He reaches for my hand, and it’s so easy to thread my fingers with his. “I wanted to kiss you on that bench so badly. But then we were interrupted, and I got… scared, I guess. Scared you didn’t feel the same way.”
It’s a relief to hear him say it. “So that’s why you said it would have been a mistake.” I trace his knuckles with my thumb.
He nods. “I thought, I don’t know, that you regretted it, and the best way for me to get over it was to pretend it was a mistake. I didn’t want it to make you uncomfortable.”
“A defense mechanism.”
“Yeah,” he says, bringing up his other hand to cup my face.
“I guess I have a few of those too.”
When we kiss again, it’s softer. Sweeter.
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see D. B. Cooper watching us, reminding me why we came here in the first place.
“The game.” I use all my willpower to stop kissing him. We’re so close to that five grand, to Neil potentially being able to change his name. To some freedom from his old life—whether I’m part of that new life or not. “We should go.”