“You . . .” I begin, and then trail off. I take a deep breath and speak the truth: “You are the strangest person I’ve ever known.”
The things that are the most off-putting about him are also what make him undeniably interesting. He has no respect for personal space. He says whatever pops into his head with no attempt at polite censorship. But he does it all with such ease and confidence that there isn’t a drop of malice in it.
He laughs at my calling him strange, and the sound is raucous and light and completely uninhibited. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed like that. He reaches out and tugs on one of my pigtails, then says, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
It might actually have been one. In the aftermath of our little scene, I’m feeling oddly . . . exhilarated.
“Come on,” he says, picking up my bag and slinging it over his shoulder. “Walk with me.”
I should ask him where, ask questions of any kind really, but I don’t. Instead, when he holds a hand out to me, I take it. I do it without thinking or evaluating or planning a single thing. And having his large hand curl around mine . . . I don’t have any words for it. I search for them, for a description of the way it makes me feel, but it’s a muddle of emotions, and those have never been one of my strong points. I cannot separate all the things his touch makes me feel, let alone identify them. But whatever it is . . . it’s not bad. So I don’t resist when he pulls me toward the back of the house.
There are a few people hanging out smoking, and I tense thinking maybe he means for us to join them, but he pulls me farther along toward the back of the yard. They’ve got an old, dilapidated privacy fence, and there’s a whole section of it that looks as if it had been knocked down in a storm. Or perhaps a more man-made disaster, knowing the residents of this house. When he steps onto the broken pieces of the fence, I hesitate.
“Trust me, girl genius. This will be worth it.”
I swallow, and step up onto the board and follow him out of the yard into a wooded no-man’s-land between the houses. We turn right and walk past a neighbor’s house, and then another before stopping. There’s a metal fence, with a gate on one side, and he lifts the latch and walks through.
“What are you doing?” I hiss, pulling my hand away.
“What?” He smirks. “Trespassing isn’t on your list?”
I shake my head sternly, and he reaches for my hand again, and this time his hold is too firm for me to pull away. “It should be. Add it.”
When I still resist, he steps back through the gate to stand directly in front of me, mere inches away. With the hand not holding mine, he reaches up and pushes a lock of hair off my forehead.
“Relax. I know the family who lives here. They’re out of town all this week.”
This is crazy. And ridiculous.
“Why are we here?”
“That’s up to you, sweetheart.”
I let him lead me through the fence, and around a wooden shed to the central open area of the backyard.
“I thought,” he says, “we could just hang out. Talk. Away from all the noise.” He pulls me up beside a quaint tire swing, and gestures for me to sit down on it. It takes some finagling, what with my short skirt, but I manage to lift myself up on it without making too much of a scene. He crosses behind me, takes hold of the ropes on each side, and I hold on tight, preparing for him to push me forward. But before he does, he leans down close, his lips brushing the shell of my ear. He points a finger to the far side of the yard and says, “Then I thought, if you were up for a little more adventure, we could check skinny-dipping off your list.”
Chapter 8
Mateo
Nell’s eyes take in the swimming pool, surrounded by a mesh fence because the Del Vecchios, the people who live here, have a toddler. A little boy. Her mouth drops open, then closes, and opens again.
She’s been remarkably agreeable for the last few minutes, letting me drag her over here, and I don’t want to screw that up by pushing her too fast, so I add, “Or you can stay here on this swing and tell me all your deepest, darkest secrets.”
Okay . . . so maybe I don’t know how to not push her at least a little bit.
She gives what might actually be a laugh and says, “What a choice.”
“Well, I do like to be fair.”
She looks at the pool one more time, her gaze lingering just long enough to make me think she might say yes. I imagine her flicking open the buttons on her white shirt, shedding that cock-teasing costume, and I’m hard in seconds.
Damn. I just can’t keep my cool around her.
It’s got to be her similarity to Lina. Has to be. I cut myself off from thinking about Lina in that way a long time ago because every time I let myself remember her . . . it would fuck me up for weeks. Messed with my head. With my game on the field. And considering the game is why I lost her, I refused to let myself screw that up, too. That would mean I’d lost her for nothing. So, ruthlessly, I burned away the memory of her in my bed. I replaced it with new memories. Not just in my bed either. My truck, too. Anywhere that made me think of Lina. And not just places either. It sounds psycho, but I did my best to blot out memories of actions, too. There’d been this time with Lina when she wouldn’t let me kiss her the whole time we had sex. She held her mouth half an inch away from mine, but anytime I lifted up to seek out her lips, she’d pull away. Only after we both came would she kiss me, and it was the best goddamn kiss of my life.
Last year, three months into my first semester here, I re-created that night with one of the girls on the cheerleading team. It wasn’t quite the same. I’d had to hold her face to control her movements, but I held her just close enough, teased us both until we were desperate, only kissing her at the very last moment.
It wasn’t the best kiss of my life. It wasn’t even particularly good.
But it served its purpose. It had taken the edge off that memory, dulling it with this new one, until the grip of the past eased. I’d done that so well and so often last year that I rarely thought of Lina these days.
Until Nell.
Because it isn’t sex that raised the memories this time, but the cute indentation in her brow when she’s thinking. It’s the way she talks. Using words that I’ve only ever read in textbooks, rather than heard out of a person’s mouth. The arrogant tilt of her chin when she knows she’s right. Those are the things I’ve never been able to burn away about Lina, and I see them all in Nell.
And I’ve starved myself from the memory of her so much that I’m too damn hungry now to separate the past from the present. That’s the only explanation for why Nell can practically bring me to my knees with a tilt of her head or a long look.
I can’t decide whether that means that I should stay far, far away from her, or take this one last opportunity to demolish the remains of my broken heart. I can’t help but think that after a few weeks with Nell, I could break Lina’s hold on me once and for all.
“Well?” Nell asks, pulling me out of my thoughts. “Are you going to push me or not?”
I smile. “Your wish is my command.”
The tire is laid flat so that you can sit with your ass in the opening, but Nell is sitting primly on the other end in a way that’s sure to throw the whole thing off balance when it’s moving. I reach forward, hooking my hands under her arms and tugging her backward. She falls back, squealing, her body cradled by the tire. After a few seconds, she realizes that she’s not going to slip through, and she tilts her head back, looking at me from below.
My mouth goes dry at the sight of her.
Quickly, before I can do something stupid like lean down and devour that plump mouth of hers, I pull back on the ropes and send her swinging. When she comes back my way, I push on the tire, sending her higher, faster. I do this a few times before I allow myself to say, “So tell me about this list.”
Her tone blunt, she says, “No.”
I notice then that she’s still got ahold of the spiral, pressing it tight against her chest.
“Fine. I don’t need you to tell me what it is. It’s a list obviously, and judging by the contents, it’s a bucket list of things you want to do. What I don’t get is why. Most people’s bucket lists are about seeing the world and following their dreams and seeking adventures. Yours is about cursing and kissing strangers, which leads to the obvious conclusion that you’ve never done those kinds of things. Keep swinging if I’m right.”
I punctuate that last sentence with another push, and I think I see a faint smile across her lips as she flies away from me.
“I knew it.” Her eyes meet mine when she returns, and I grin down at her. “So I’m going to guess you’ve been pretty sheltered. Maybe your parents were strict. Religious probably. If you were a freshman, I’d say you were sowing your wild oats now that you’re out of your parents’ house, but I’m pretty sure Dylan said once that you two are the same age. So that can’t be it. You’ve been out from under your parents for a while. You are a puzzle, sweetheart.”
“It’s not that complicated,” she says, and I tamp down my wide smile at having won this little battle.
“Enlighten me.”