Page 49 of Troublemaker: The Big Picture Edition

And I know when she smirks, reaches into her fanny pack, and brings out a tube of lip balm, that she wants me to.

I let her climb into the seat first. Even though I usually prefer to make my approach from the left when seated and making a move with the ladies, I will make this work from any angle.

When the safety bar is lowered above our laps, I glance over and see her rubbing her lips together a little nervously.

“Don’t be nervous. It’s not that scary of a ride.” I give her a little wink.

“It’s a little bit scarier when I’m sober.”

The vessel lurches forward, and we’re off to Never Never Land.

I rest my arm on the back of the seat, behind her neck. “There’s no turning back now.”

And there’s no time to waste. As soon as we’re in the dark, flying over early 20th Century London and being serenaded by the least sexy music ever, I lean in and touch my hand to her face to turn her toward me. There’s no hesitation. Loud recorded voices all around us are singing, “You can fly! You can fly! Youcan fly!” but her tilted head, her parted lips, her whole body is a murmured whisper offuck yes, Alex, yes.

I press my mouth to hers and kiss her slow and gentle at first. Her soft lips respond in perfect rhythm with mine.

There are hidden cameras all over the park, I know this, so I’ll keep it to PG-13 kissing. But there are a million kinds of kisses I want to give her, and I’m not waiting until the end of the movie to get to them. She tastes like cherry lip balm and pineapple and vanilla and my favorite month and the thing that’s been missing from my life all along.

I brush her hair out of the way to trail kisses down her neck, and the way her head falls back, the way she clutches at my jacket with one hand and the back of my neck with the other, it propels me with a sense of urgency even more than the ticking clock of this agonizingly short ride.

But I have to control myself.

“God, I want you,” I mutter as my mouth finds hers again. But I can’t touch her the way I want to. I can’t run my fingers through her hair, and I can’t grab her hips or pull her up onto my lap because of the fucking safety bar and the fucking hidden cameras. So I grab on to the safety bar with one hand and the back of the seat with the other and I let my mouth and tongue tell her just a few of the many things that I plan to do to every other part of her with it one of these days.

I tell her with a long run-on sentence of languid swirls and delicate sucking and determined sweeping and penetration and very light tugging with my teeth.

I tell her with brief and to-the-point statements of my intention to ruin her for any other man, ever.

I don’t think I’ve been so aware of all the nerve endings in my lips since I was a teenager. I fucking love kissing her, but she’s growing more frantic by the second. And I’m realizing that Peter Pan has just rescued the Darlings from Captain Hook. Thatmeans we’re about to be catapulted back into the light of day, so I do the opposite of what I want to do—I pull away from her.

It takes her a moment to realize I’m not kissing her anymore.

She turns away from me and drags her fingertip along the bottom of her lower lip.

I do the same with mine.

And I really fucking don’t want to stand up now, and I really wish I had a backpack to hold in front of myself.

But here we are at the happy ending of the Disney story, so off we get.

But without the getting-off part.

“You wanna go again?” I grunt out as I help her out of the pirate ship.

“Yes! But I can’t.”

And then she runs off.

She runs off, like a Disney princess from some other story.

And like every Disney prince who’s just kissed and been abandoned by a beautiful beguiling woman, I’m hiding wood and wondering where the fire is. Besides my pants. And hers, obviously.

When I get outside, I look around and I don’t see her anywhere.

I pull out my phone to send her a text:Are you vomiting?

In the couple of minutes that I’m waiting for a reply, I stroll toward the nearest restrooms.