by Cara Bastone
She was liquid lightning, her blood slicking backward through her veins, her heart beating madly against his. She knew, without a doubt, that whether she’d meant to or not, she’d just busted the lock on a treasure chest of feelings that he’d meant to keep locked up forever. She could feel him, helpless against the onslaught of desire between them, but still desperately trying to cling to yesterday, when everything had been easier. When none of this had even been an option.
“It won’t be easy,” she whispered, her lips a breath from his.
His eyes widened and his nostrils flared. “You read my—” But she cut his words off when they pressed their lips together.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE SECOND, THE VERY SECOND, their lips touched, Tyler knew how well and truly fucked he was. It was like that horrible first millisecond after stepping off a high dive at a public pool. There was nowhere to go but down. And down he went. Fast.
He tumbled into her mouth, pressing smoothly against her plush lips until he caught, finally, the elusive flavor of her. He’d expected something earthy, sagey, herby. But no. Her flavor was surprisingly light, open, with hints of vapor and ozone. Tyler made a soundless groan, gripping her tighter, and slid his lips along hers.
His temperature was all off, the heat of the air that touched his skin as stifling as strips of steamed fabric laid over him. He gasped for breath and he breathed only color. Rivers of multicolored paint seemed to start at their feet and slow-motion tornado their way up. His eyelids pressed closed so hard that he saw his own heart, hidden in the lightless black cave of his chest, pumping colorful blood maniacally fast.
Her delicate hand, her grip surprisingly firm, traced up his back and they both jumped when static electricity shocked them where she touched him.
She made a noise into his mouth, just a soft little “hmm,” like she was both curious and overwhelmed by what was happening. The noise pleased him so much his mouth opened and so did hers, their tongues meeting in a glancing, tracing movement that had them both, all at once, pulling their heads back to catch each other’s eye.
They breathed hard, his muscles starting to protest at how tightly he clutched her. Their eyes bounced back and forth, trying to read one another. He could see nothing but her desire for him. Couldn’t see past it. Maybe because it utterly shocked him. She’d spent so long putting distance between them and now here she was, her fingers tangled in the back of his shirt, her tongue tracing her bottom lip, tasting his flavor that he was sure still lingered there.
Affectionate, gentle, passionate. Her words describing him were on a loop in his head, taunting him. Confusing him. He’d become so used to the idea of her barely tolerating him that the idea of her admiring him didn’t compute.
He tore his eyes from her gaze and stared directly at that mouth of hers. Her white teeth peeked out. Her lips, so plush and pouty, but he knew, viscerally, just how goofy that mouth could be when she was smiling, really smiling.
Her hand moved on his back and again, there was another jolting shock of static electricity. This time he even heard the snap of it, like a starting gun at a footrace. They both dived back into the kiss, wasting no movements with pleasantries. Her tongue tasted his once, twice, drew back, inviting him into her mouth.
She made that noise again, and Tyler let one of his hands trace up to cup the back of her head; his other hand finding the small of her back. In this way, he held her, told her in every way he knew just how badly he wanted her. Had wanted her for so long.
Might always want her.
The idea left him gasping as he turned his head to one side, breaking the kiss. But she took his chin and pressed her mouth to his again, soft and fierce at once, sucking his lower lip. Her teeth were just starting to scrape along his lip when they both heard footsteps coming down the hall behind them.
They instantly sprang away from one another, and as their bodies came apart, three or four sparks of almost painful static shock zapped between them. Whether it was punishment for separating or for having come together in the first place, Ty had no idea.
Fin turned before he could catch her expression and plunged her hands back into the dishwater, rifling through the dirty dishes. Tyler turned and picked up the Tupperware, marching mechanically to the fridge.
“Hey, Ty?”
“Yeah?” he responded. Knowing Kylie was leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, he stuck his head behind the open door of the fridge and took a few deep breaths, surreptitiously fixing his hair, hoping he didn’t look too indecent when he looked up at her. Meanwhile, he could still feel Fin’s hot mouth pressed against his, the imprint of her long body, softer than he’d expected, banded against his own, his colorful blood still high-speed chasing itself through his veins.
“One side of my headphones isn’t playing. I think they’re broken.”
“Oh.” He closed the fridge door and stood up, concentrated on his sister’s words. “Crap. We just bought those.”
“I know.” She grimaced. “Think we can return them?”
“Sure.”
“But can I take yours for the trip?”
He blinked. She’d never asked to borrow anything of his before. Hell, it had taken her long enough to even appear comfortable using his cups. She used to just fill and refill her own water bottle.
“Oh. Sure. No problem. Let me grab them.” He padded back to his bedroom and took a minute just to sit on his cool bedspread.
“Holy shit,” he muttered to himself, dropping his head in his hands. “Holy shit.”
Fin had kissed him. No. Wait. He’d kissed her? Damn. The details suddenly seemed extremely important. He hadn’t pushed it, had he?
He thought of her face right before they kissed, her eyes on his mouth, how hard she’d gripped his shirt. He winced because the memory of it was so potent it hurt, like a hard suck on a lime.
He stood, gave himself a mental shake and dug through his desk drawer, pulling out his headphones.
He walked back out to where Fin and Kylie were chatting in the kitchen still. He saw that Fin had finished the dishes and was drying her hands.
“Here you go,” he said, handing over the headphones. “Make sure to leave yours out so that I can return them while you’re gone.”
“All right,” Kylie said with a yawn. “I’m gonna hit the hay, I think. Remember that we have to be at school early tomorrow.”
“Right.”
She gave Fin and Tyler a quick hug each and then her door closed down the hall.
A few excruciating seconds ticked past as Tyler’s hands found their way into his pockets. They both looked anywhere but at one another, and Tyler fought the almost irrepressible urge to whistle something. Anything.
“I...guess I should go?”
She was asking?
Hold on. He’d been waiting for her to bolt out of here. He could practically already read the text he fully expected to receive sometime in the next twenty-four hours: That was a mistake. Let’s be friends.
Shouldn’t she have left a Roadrunneresque trail of dust in her wake already?
Yet, here she was, shifting her weight from foot to foot, her eyes pointedly looking at his chest instead of his face.
Was this what a nervous Serafine St. Romain looked like?
Tyler felt like he’d walked into a room only to find all the furniture had been glued to the ceiling.
Was she nervous because she regretted the kiss but didn’t want to get kicked out of Kylie’s life? Was she nervous because she was just as confused as he was? Was she nervous because she’d liked it?
Was there any chance in hell, even an ice cube’s worth, that she wanted to do that again?
“Um. Okay?” was his genius response. He turned it into just as much of a question as she had, hopefully letting her know that he had just as little idea what to do next as she apparently did.
“I’ll walk you down,” he said to no one. Just talking because it seemed like the thing to do.
It wasn’t until they finally had their coats and boots on that Tyler cracked a smile. “You look like Red Riding Hood in that coat,” he informed her, letting his eyes snag on hers.
“I get that a lot.”
She was smiling too, just a little bit, and Tyler felt a miniwave of relief wash over him. At least he had that tiny buoy to cling to while he figured out just how bad the damage was.
They walked silently down the hall, endured a painfully quiet elevator ride and then they were out on the sidewalk. It was warmer than he’d thought it would be on a random February night. And a thin sheaf of clouds had pulled over the sky, almost like a veil separating the earth’s face from the eyes of the moon. Tyler felt oddly protected by it, even if it was only a thin layer of cloud.
He dragged his eyes down from the sky and onto Fin, who stood, her breath in misty puffs in front of her, her hands in the pockets of her red coat.
“Crap,” Tyler said, making her eyebrows rise in surprise. “I didn’t call you a cab.”
“Let’s just hail one.”
“At this hour?”
“There’s one right there.” She pointed down the street.
“But its light is off, it’s probably off duty—oooooofffff course.” He laughed to himself wryly when the second Fin put her pretty hand in the air the cab driver flipped his light on and pulled a U-turn to get to her side of the street.
She gave him a sideways smile, with just enough smugness for him to know that everything was going to be okay eventually. Their kitchen kiss hadn’t ruined anything.
They’d have to talk about it at some point, of course. He just hoped that this time she’d let him down easier than she had at the baseball game. That wasn’t exactly something he was clamoring to endure again anytime soon.
He opened the cab door for her. “Well...”
He expected her to duck down into the cab but instead, she turned in the circle of his arms, went up on her toes and sucked his bottom lip into her mouth again, as if this were merely a continuation of their kiss upstairs. She made that soft little “hmm” again and then his tongue was in her mouth. He banded an arm around her waist and yanked them together, stepping her back until she was flush against the cab. He tasted and tasted her, feeling instantaneously drunk, like he’d slugged back a cup of what he’d thought was water but had turned out to be tequila.
There was something about kissing her under the moonlit clouds, with that water vapor mouth of hers that just—
“’Scuse me!” the driver’s loud voice had them breaking apart, their foreheads pressing together, huffing curlicues of breath against one another’s mouths. “You coming or going, lady?”
“Right,” Fin muttered. “The world still exists.”
Her eyes were fuzzy and nervous and...happy. Would it just be the stupidest thing ever to assume that this had been a positive experience for her?
She stepped back from him, loosening his grip, and folded herself into the cab. “Night, Ty.”
“Night, Fin.”
He closed the cab door and she popped her head into the window, lit in an orange stripe by the streetlamp overhead. She gave him a small smile and one quick glance of those eerily light eyes of hers before the cab pulled away from the curb and off they went.
He stood on the curb and watched the cab go. Even though they’d said very little to one another in the last half an hour, he couldn’t help but feel like she was leaving smack-dab in the middle of a conversation.
* * *
FIN WAS LUCKY enough to have back-to-back appointments with clients in two different corners of Brooklyn the following morning. It meant that she didn’t have the time to dwell on Tyler. Or to dwell on what had promptly become the best kiss of her entire existence.
Her first client, a noob to this whole energy thing, had been exhaustingly gung ho, asking a million and two questions about how it all worked and chattering so compulsively that Fin had demanded the client, Ana, get quiet. Fin then balanced crystals on several different points of her body, hoping it would calm her down a bit. Her second client, someone Fin had been seeing for years, had been much calmer.
But when, just after three p.m., Fin locked her apartment door behind her, she found that there was not much else to think about besides Tyler at that point. It was almost as if her brain had tossed a sheet over him for the morning and now that she’d pulled the sheet away, she could see that he’d been there the entire time.
She’d eaten lunch between clients, her indoor herb garden was tended, she was up-to-date on tinctures and teas, all her crystals were cleansed. She sighed. There was nothing to do but to clean the house.
She strode back into her room, slid all her jewelry off, changed into some leggings and a baggy T-shirt for cleaning and gathered her hair into a high ponytail to keep it out of the way.
Four minutes later, she was staring around her living room, realizing that the place was already perfectly clean.
In a huff, irritated at herself and at her stupid clean house that didn’t offer a single distraction, she finally admitted that it might be time to reach out to Tyler. There was nothing more she could reasonably do without her actions tipping down into avoidance territory.
She went back into her room and took her phone off the charger on her nightstand and plunked down on the edge of her bed, opening a text window to him.
Can we talk?
She deleted it. Too ominous.
Hey.
She deleted that too. Too juvenile.
How are you?
Delete. Too formal.
Got any free time today?
That one she stared at for a while. It was a solid maybe. But she still wasn’t sure.
There was a knock on her front door, and Fin automatically flung her phone away from her, open text box and all, as if it had somehow summoned a visitor.
She took a breath, closed her eyes and knew exactly who it was. She’d recognize that energy across a football field. In a rainstorm. With her back turned and her fingers stuffed into her ears.
Well. She’d attempted to climb inside his skin in his kitchen and it was time to actually discuss that particular phenomenon.
She strode through her living room, took a deep breath and swung open her door. And there he was.
His peacoat was unbuttoned—she still couldn’t believe she had feelings for a man who wore peacoats—his hair flopping to one side. He was breathing through his mouth, like he’d taken the stairs, and the expression on his face looked downright curmudgeonly.
“Tyler,” Fin said warily, not quite able to pin down his mood.
He stood practically in the middle of her hallway, three feet away from her, his hands loose at his sides and looking a little untethered from the bonds of gravity. She wouldn’t have been surprised to look down and see his shoes untied. They weren’t. Because this was Tyler, but still. The man looked a little off-kilter.
“Did you know that I talked my editor into letting me write more freely?” he asked without preamble.
“Oh. No. I didn’t know that. You mean that you won’t have to write the play-by-plays of the games anymore?” She squinted at him, trying to keep up with the unexpected beginning to an unexpected conversation.
“Right. I mean, I’ll still have to keep up with the team. But I get to write a lot more of what I want. Not exactly whatever I want. But pretty damn close. It’s probationary. Contingent on me actually having something to say.”
She cocked her head to one side, leaning in her own doorway, trying to figure out why the hell he was backing away from her. He was almost standing on the welcome mat of the door on the opposite side
of the hall at this point. “Ty, you wanna come in?”
He barreled on as if he hadn’t heard her question. “And Kylie’s gone for two days, so I figured I’d have no interruptions. I’d bang this article out, knock my editor’s socks off and I’d be well on my way toward this new facet of my career. You know, a beat writer who waxes philosophical on the role of sports in our society.”
“Ty.”
“Do you know how meaty that subject is? Especially in this day and age? There’s so many angles. Athletes as celebrities, influencers. The role of an athlete in his or her community. Political movements. Whether or not professional athletes should be taking a stand when it comes to the exploitation of college athletes. Racial politics in sports. Gender inequality. God, there’s enough there for me to write novels!”
He dragged a hand through his hair and then put both hands on his hips. That curmudgeonly look was full force, and his eyes were narrowed as they finally zeroed in on her face. “You know how much I’ve written today, Fin?”
She knew a trick question when she heard one and wisely kept her button buttoned.
He answered the question for her. “Nada. Zero. No, that’s wrong. I wrote two words. I wrote my fucking name at the top of the Word doc like it’s my sophomore-year book report.”
“Tyler.”
“Did I kiss you or did you kiss me?”
Ah. And here they were, at the heart of the matter. Speaking of hearts, Fin’s had decided to flip upside down in her chest.
She let out a sound, a “who knows” sort of exhalation and watched the look on his face turn even more confused.
So, maybe she didn’t know what she wanted from Tyler, but she had a pretty good idea of what she didn’t want. And him standing in her hallway looking freaking bamboozled was what she didn’t want.
“Tyler, why don’t you come in out of my hallway, all right?”
