That was what it meant, she supposed, to be authentic with the mailman. He listened, and he cared, and he made you feel safe enough to take risks. Maybe even the risk of being authentic with someone closer, who mattered more.

She smoothed her hand over the breast pocket of his jacket, then the front pockets, one by one.

“What are you searching for?” he asked.

“The list. Where are you keeping it?”

“It’s in my wallet.”

“Get it out.”

He shifted his weight onto his right hip and extracted his wallet from his back pocket. The list was folded in half, wrapped around his cash.

“Give it here.”

She pulled it from his grip, opened it, greedy for the hit of enjoyment it gave her—the thick paper, the dark fountain-pen ink, all to memorialize this shocking parade of things she’d never done, or he’d never done, or they both imagined they wanted.

Winston peered over her shoulder, his breath in her ear, and they studied it in silence. It was the first time she’d seen what he wrote for number ten. “Holy crackers.”

His knee pushed against her thigh, his breath at her ear. Casual touches, but the list charged each point of contact with active possibility.

And that was the whole point. They had a door they could open anytime she or Winston wanted an entry point to the intimacy they’d located last night.

Allie wanted. If she was being honest with herself, she’d wanted this all day.

She located a taller bit of grass that had grown small, feathery seeds, and plucked it.

Winston folded and refolded the paper into a fat square. “Bea wants to travel after college,” he said. “She has a list of all the places she’d like to go. Rosemary has her mountains. Nev and Cath—that’s my brother and his partner—”

“I remember.”

“—they have a bucket list they wrote up together with more than a hundred items. Jean’s got a five-year and a ten-year plan.”

Winston held the square up, pinched between fingers and thumb. “This is the first list I’ve ever had.”

“Face the other way.”

When he obligingly turned his back, she rose to her knees for a better perspective.

Neck, he’d written. An open invitation.

She ran the grass along the precise line where his hair ended and his nape began. His shoulders lifted, then dropped as she swirled a small star galaxy behind his ear. He let out a long breath.

“I have a hard time with lists, normally,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many times somebody’s wanted me to write a bucket list, or asked where I wanted to travel or what my long-term goals are. I’ve always hated those kinds of questions, the same as I hated people wanting to know what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

She swept the grass up the outside line of his ear to the top and inward, brushing over the scant gap at his hairline, and watched with satisfaction as his skin changed texture and color. “You should close your eyes.”

“I already have.”

She scooted closer to his back and put both her legs alongside his, her dress too short to straddle him from behind. “Lean into me, if you want.” He dropped more of his weight into his hands, and she put an arm around his shoulder and her hand in the middle of his chest, under his tie. His body was warm.

She replaced the stalk of grass with her lips, but tried to touch so softly he wouldn’t be sure what was brushing against his skin. She wiggled her fingers into the gap between the two buttons on his shirt. He wasn’t wearing an undershirt, so she could trace a couple square inches of his bare chest skin.

He cleared his throat, and she felt him melt a bit against her body.

Kissing his neck was such a pleasure. She didn’t have to look at him, so she felt like she could explore the entire range of neck kissing. Scraping the spot behind his ear with her teeth, sucking a bit under his collar, soft and slow kisses on the bump where his spine started. It was really warm up on the High Line, but he shivered a few times. She felt him make some soft noise, like a vibration against her mouth, more than once.

She realized that she was kissing and kissing, and well. Sort of undulating her upper body on his.

Tags: Ruthie Knox New York Romance
Source: readsnovelonline.net