So I hike up my thighs around his hips, wrap my hands around his neck and fist his damp hair.
I hug him tightly and he hugs me back.
And then I can’t stop talking. Everything I’m feeling needs to come out. It’s the adrenaline, I think.
“What were you thinking? What’s wrong with you?” I grit out my words as I tuck my face in his neck and he walks toward something – I don’t even care what or where.
“You’re crazy, you know that? I can’t believe you put yourself through this. I mean, I know people with dyslexia have other things they’re wickedly good at; I’ve been reading up on the internet. But what the fuck? You could’ve died. You could’ve broken your neck. You could’ve paralyzed yourself. Did you see all those people? They couldn’t make the landing. They couldn’t…”
My breath hitches, thinking about all the botched-up attempts to land smoothly on the ground and I hold onto him tighter. I rub my lips on his pulse, tasting his skin, the salt of his sweat. It soothes me. It makes me believe that he’s alive and he’s taking me somewhere with him.
“Do you have any idea how scared I was? Any idea at all?” I continue, tugging on his hair, crossing my ankles at his back. “I was going out of my mind, watching you fly through the air. Newsflash, Zach: it’s a bike. Not a fucking plane. And is this even legal? I don’t think so. I don’t. Fucking. Think so.”
I bite his pulse slightly; his taste, his smell explodes on my tongue, and his hold on me goes even tighter.
“I can’t believe this is where you go almost every night. What if you get caught? What if the cops come and arrest you? You wanna go to jail, Zach? Is that your plan? Is that –”
I stop talking when my back thumps against something – the door of a rusted, white truck – as Zach deposits me against it, and we come apart.
We’re far away from the crowd and roars of flying bikes and all I can hear is our roughened breaths.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he growls, leaning into me.
His hands go down to my butt and squeeze the flesh over my skirt, and I bite my already-torn lip at the pressure.
“I followed you.”
“What?”
“After that dinner… I didn’t want you to be alone. I didn’t –”
Another squeeze of my ass. “Who said I wanted your company?”
God, he’s rude.
And big and bad.
He hasn’t changed. He’s still the same as he was back at St. Patrick’s.
I, however, have changed. I have changed the way I look at him. His rudeness doesn’t bother me. It just… fits. Fits him like armor.
He probably needed it for all the wars he has fought, living in that glass tower.
I tug at his hair with equal pressure. “Me. I said you wanted my company so here I am.”
His nostrils flare. “Is it going to take a restraining order for you to keep away from me?”
“Try me. I dare you.”
Zach bows his body toward me even more. It’s like the clouds are obstructing the moon and the world has gone dark.
It’s okay.
I’m wrapped around darkness; I’m not afraid of it.
“Remember the line, Blue. You’re very close to being on the side of stupid,” he warns.
The strands of his hair graze my forehead and my nose bumps against his. Even that slightest touch is enough to make my back arch and dig my nails in the nape of his neck.
“You’re stupid too,” I whisper, thinking about the tattoo on his wrist. “Look what you’re doing. Jumping across canyons. Even though, it was… a teeny, tiny bit magnificent.”
It was.
Now that I’m not scared out of my mind, I can admit that he looked really, really sexy and invincible. A daredevil.
Zach’s eyes rove over my face. “You are obsessed with me.”
“No.” I flinch, then, “Kinda.”
He presses me into the truck with his body. His torso is pressing into my belly and his chest is flattening my heavy, throbbing breasts. His weight must be crushing me but all I can feel is a sense of freedom.
A sense of life.
So much life that I might die from it.
“Didn’t your mom teach you to stay away from your bully?” he rasps.
It’s so reminiscent of all the things he said to me when we first met that it takes me a second to gather my breath.
In that second, I imagine him when he was twelve, all angry and arrogant, and I was ten, all indignant and annoyed. I imagine what would’ve happened if he wasn’t so screwed up and we hadn’t fought that day.
Maybe we would’ve been friends. And maybe one day, we would’ve become something more.
Instead of a hate story, our story would’ve been one of love.
I look into his eyes as I cradle his hard cheek. His stubble is rough under my fingers and his skin is hot and that expression – the one I’ve been chasing after ever since I saw it when he cornered me in the hallway.