Page 196 of Across His Line

“I don’t want to scare you,” he says.

I inhale, trying to calm down whatever’s happening in my gut. It’s like the butterflies have gone rampant and it’s twisting.

“You’re not,” I whisper.

He looks at me.

“Not anymore,” I say.

And something lets go in him. I feel it right under my hand in his jaw, in his shoulders. Not all the way. Just some.

He kisses me again.

And it’s different.

His hand slides from my waist to the small of my back under my coat and pulls me in, all the way in, until there’s nothing between us at all. His other hand goes to the back of my neck into my hair and holds there. And he kisses me like he’s been waiting to. Like everything before was the door being held, and now he’s let some of it in. Deeper. Surer. Still controlled, I can feel the control in it, in his hands, which never grab, never pull too hard, but there’s so much more behind it now that I can feel the size of it.

The first one taught me what a kiss was.

This one tells me how much he’s been holding back.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I just do it anyway. I let go of his face and put my arms up around his neck, and then my fingers are in his hair, at the back, and I hold on. I press up into him. I follow him when he tips my head, and the next time he pulls back, I follow him there, too, and he makes that sound again in his chest and kisses me harder.

I don’t know how long. I lose track. The lamp. The couch. My coat slides off one shoulder.

When we stop, it’s because I can’t breathe.

I stand there with my forehead against his chest, my arms still around his neck, his hand still spread on my back, breathing into his sweater. He’s breathing into my hair. Neither of us says anything. My lips feel strange. Bigger. Like they belong to somebody else.

After a while, he says into my hair, rough, “You should go to bed.”

I laugh into his chest. “Is that a demand?”

He’s quiet for a second.

“It’s a request,” he says. “Before I stop making good ones.”

I pull back enough to look at him.

His hair’s a mess where my fingers were. His mouth is red. His eyes are still dark, all the way, and he’s looking at me like I’m something he can’t believe is standing in his room.

I go.

I unlock his door with hands that aren’t steady, cross the hall, close the guest room door behind me, and lean on it.

My phone is on the nightstand. I pick it up. There are texts in the group chat with Payton and Elsie, a photo of Elsie’s dog in a Santa hat, a long thread about Payton’s cousin’s boyfriend. There’s one from Kylie, from an hour ago, a picture of her dad in a sweater with a light-up reindeer on it.

I could tell them.

I open the group chat. I look at the little box at the bottom. I type you guys and then I sit there with my thumb over it.

I don’t know how I’d say it. Rafe Waleska kissed me. I kissed him. I asked him to. And then they’d ask, all of them at once, how, and why, and what about high school, what about everything, and I’d have to explain that he’s not who I thought he was, except he was exactly who I thought he was, and both of those things are true, and I can’t make them fit into a text box with a dog in a Santa hat above it.

I delete you guys.

I put my phone on the nightstand.

I get into bed in my clothes, which I never do, and lie on my back in the dark and look at the ceiling with its crown molding like the trim on a cake.