Perfect Couple (Superlatives 2)

Amazingly, I might have been right. Kennedy seemed to get the same message. He didn’t engage with Brody. He turned back to me and demanded, “What are you doing?”

I held up my camera bag. “The light’s bad, but we were attempting to get our yearbook Superlatives picture out of the way.”

“Because her deadline is coming up,” Brody chimed in. He said this without a trace of sarcasm. Brody didn’t really do sarcasm. But I heard the private joke in his words: Kennedy had been on me to meet this deadline. In a roundabout way, he was the one who’d convinced us to stand in a shadowy beach pavilion alone together. So there.

Kennedy’s burst of anger seemed to have drained away. We’d managed to talk him down, just as I had in journalism class.

Except this time, he had reason to be jealous. Brody was toying with me.

Kennedy told me quietly, “Come on back.”

“I will.”

He paused a moment more, seemingly weighing the idea of insisting that I come back with him now. But he didn’t press it. He walked out of the pavilion.

My feelings were a confused tangle, but Brody and I were casual acquaintances indulging a passing flirtation. I knew how this would play out. We would make a little joke about Kennedy and part ways.

“What did I tell you earlier?” Brody asked. “If you’re going to break rules, you need to make sure you can get away with it.” He stepped toward me. He glanced out the doorway as if to gauge how clearly someone standing outside could see him. Satisfied, he braced one forearm against the wall above my head, exactly how I’d seen Will standing with Tia in the hall at school on Friday. He slid my camera bag strap off my shoulder and set the bag on the tile floor again. He leaned down.

My body knew what he was doing before my brain did. I was still puzzling through his motives. I’d felt guilty enough about flirting, and letting him touch me inappropriately. This was worse. Actually kissing, when I had a boyfriend and he had a girlfriend, was officially cheating. Every bit of this spun through my mind as I closed my eyes and lifted my chin. My lips met his.

His mouth was warm and soft. He kissed me gently, his lips brushing along mine, pressing. When I’d pictured making out with Brody—and I had—he’d come at me forcefully, like an athlete battling to win a game. It surprised me that this tough-guy football player could be so tender.

But admittedly, I didn’t have a lot of knowhow for a senior in high school. I’d kissed Kennedy, of course, and Noah, and Quinn when he wanted us to be seen, and a few guys before that when they’d brought me home from a date. I’d never had a long, intense session of experimenting with a boy’s mouth, though, the kind I’d seen in movies and read about in books, the kind Tia and Kaye had with their boyfriends every weekend.

Afraid I would mess it up and Brody would figure out how naive I was, I let him take the lead. The tip of his tongue teased my lips apart. He swept inside. For long minutes he held my chin cupped in his hand and kissed me harder, deeper. I kissed him back. Finally he kissed his way across my jawline to the side of my neck. I shivered.

His thumb brushed my nipple again.

That’s when everything changed for me. A current of electricity shot from my breast straight down to my crotch and pulsed there. He’d been toying with me before. I’d teased him back. Now he knew I wanted him, and so did I. In that one slight touch, every longing rushed back to me for boys who didn’t like me as much as I liked them, every regret that other girls had boyfriends who were into them while mine weren’t. Brody supplied me with more heat through the pad of his thumb than I’d experienced in my lifetime.

I set my hands on his hips, which were hard as rocks underneath his bathing suit, and pulled him closer.

“Mm,” he said against my neck. The syllable sent tingles down my arms. He lifted his mouth. His breath felt so good in my ear that I could hardly stand it—and that was before he touched the tip of his tongue to my earlobe. I gasped.

He slid his entire hand across my bikini top to cup my breast. Then one finger slid underneath the fabric. I shuddered.

“Okay,” he said, backing up again and chuckling uncomfortably. “That’s as much as we can get away with here.”

I stood there stunned for a moment, trying to make sense of what he’d said, as if it hadn’t been in English. He was backing off because Kennedy had already checked on me. Since there was no door, we couldn’t lock Kennedy out. If he didn’t catch us, someone else would. It was a public beach. Right.

I just hadn’t thought ahead to how this tryst with Brody would end. We’d fooled around because the school had made us curious about each other. And now he would go back to Grace, and I would go back to Kennedy.

Only, I didn’t want to go back to Kennedy. I wanted to stay here with Brody. He was brilliantly lit now, the sun slanting over the planes of his athletic body. The darkness in the pavilion had lifted. Either my eyes had adjusted or the sun had sunk lower to peek directly into the windows. Or maybe my pupils were dilated, which happened to people who were sexually aroused. My knowledge of eleventh-grade anatomy had returned with a vengeance.

“Are you taking your camera back to your car?” Brody asked.

“Yes,” I said, kneeling to pick up my expensive, beloved camera that I had completely forgotten about.

“I’ll wait here a minute and walk back on the beach so as not to arouse suspicion.” He said this in imitation of a spy movie, but he lacked Kennedy’s dry sarcasm. With Brody, I was never sure whether he was kidding.