Scandalized

“Maybe.” I am unable to stifle this grin, and he sends his other arm around my waist, pulling me against him. He tucks me into his chest and squeezes.

A hug.

“And this?” he asks.

Emotion swells thick in my throat at the familiar feel of his body and the duality of the sweet seduction of his embrace. Every memory from our night together is sealed back into place. I wrap my free arm around his neck, pulling his head down until he rests his forehead against mine, and like this, with eyes closed, we breathe in jagged, charged tandem for a handful of seconds.

I open my eyes to find him looking at me. Fondness blooms in my expression before I can tuck it away.

Alec smiles, pulling back. “How mad can you be if you’re looking at me like that?”

“Very mad.”

He swallows a laugh. “Your ‘very mad’ is not very intimidating.” He kisses his fingertip and gently rubs it over my heart.

“I felt stupid,” I admit, finally. “I told you about Spence. About where I work.”

“It wasn’t fair.” He presses his lips to my brow. “I’m sorry. I would have shared more but—it was selfish, I know. It was a perfect night. I worried it would vanish.”

“What are we even doing?” I ask. “We barely know each other anymore.”

“That’s not true. We may have changed a lot in the past fourteen years but just as with renovations…”

I grin up at him as we both register that he’s committed to the terrible metaphor. “We’ll always be part of each other’s foundations?” I guess.

He nods, laughing in self-deprecation. “That was bloody awful.”

“No, it was surprisingly cute.”

I take a minute to really look at him. It seems like his face should jolt me into a different kind of awareness, that his presence should now send me into shaking, nervous territory. He’s my oldest crush and now he’s an actual celebrity. But the electricity along my spine isn’t nerves or insecurity; it’s raw hunger.

Alec bends, hovering with his lips near mine, staring at my mouth. “You smell so good.”

“Do I?”

He hums. “I didn’t want to shower you off that morning. Wanted to feel you all over me a bit longer.” He tilts his head, breathing in deeply beneath my jaw. “It’s sugar and sex.”

His words light a fire under my skin, and I send my hand up under his shirt, feeling this body that’s immediately familiar, but with the new visuals in my head—the picture of him from Jeju Island with his shirt blown up off his beltline, exposing his tight abdomen; the way he’s so tall he has to bend to kiss me and how every fan site has written an entire feature about his perfect proportions—now I’m jolted into a new hyperaware territory.

And the mouth that is the subject of a thousand close-up photos—it’s sucking at my jaw, my neck—

I pull back, squeezing my eyes closed. “Okay. This is weird.”

He reads my tone immediately.

“No.” Alec tilts my face up to his. “Don’t do that.”

I slide my hands around his neck again. Dig fingers into his hair. His mouth hovers only a fraction of an inch away from mine and he tilts his head, waiting, letting me make the final decision.

I stretch, pulling his lower lip between mine, sucking. A helpless moan escapes his throat and he cups the back of my head, deepening the kiss with tongue and teeth, with his other hand sliding down my back to my ass, where he can hold me, grind into me.

“This,” he says when he pulls away to suck in a breath. It’s still like this, he means.

He walks backward to the bed, tugging me with him before sitting at the edge of the mattress and smiling as I straddle his lap.

Pulling back, I rest my fingertips beneath his jaw, holding him still and studying him feature by feature. Taking him apart and putting him back together in my memory, up close. The warm dark eyes. His perfect, straight nose. A soft, full pout; his lips make my own mouth water. Sharp jaw, cheekbones from dreams.

“How long do we have?”