“You scoundrel,” she said with a small laugh.
“Scoundrel? Who even uses that word?” I asked with a nervous laugh, still not feeling quite right.
Jo took a step towards me, her hands on her hips. “You shifted without me. Didn’t you?”
I nodded, still not trusting that I could speak multiple sentences without my voice coming out a little shaky. Like some middle school boy who’d never seen a pair of tits and found his uncle’s porn stash. I’d done a lot of things, and why some girl touching my chest was making me act like a goon was beyond me.
Besides.
It was only Jo.
“Why wouldn’t you ever tell me?” she asked, shaking her head.
“I...I’m not sure.”
Then Jo fell silent. She got that far off look that alerted me she was working something out in her mind that I’d be too slow to comprehend without her. It was a look I saw often. When she looked back up at me, her smile grew a little sad. “Our first kiss was horrible you know. Have we had our first kiss yet?”
“What?”
First kiss? As in we kissed before? As in we kissed more than once?
I felt a little dizzy.
“We haven’t. Have we?” she asked, taking another step towards me.
If I wanted to move from her, I couldn’t.
I was frozen right there in that moment.
She placed her hand against my cheek and my heart starting pounding again. Like some damn warning system.
WARNING. WARNING. SOME CRAZY SHIT IS ABOUT TO GO DOWN.
“Though to be fair, the first time you kissed me you really did have the worst timing. And your game wasn’t at its best,” she said, taking one last step so her toes were touching mine. She sighed. “But I did always feel bad about how I reacted.”
She looked up at me, waiting for me to say something.
But there was no way I could even produce a single word at this point.
She shook her head slowly, smiling. “But I guess you’ve never kissed me. At least not yet. So, for you, we haven’t had our first kiss. Have we?”
Um. Um. Um. Um.
And then Jo’s lips were on mine. She was kissing me. I’d kissed girls before Jenna, but we’d been going out for awhile and I’d never cheated on her. So, to feel someone’s lips on mine that weren’t hers felt terribly awkward at first. As if my lips didn’t know what to do with themselves. They didn’t know how to react to these foreign lips that were pressed against them.
If they felt anything, I couldn’t think about it. All I could think about was Jenna. Jo. Jenna. Jo. The strangeness of the entire situation.
But when Jo pulled away from me, I felt something else.
Empty.
It was such an overwhelming, consuming feeling of emptiness that for a moment I felt like my knees would give out from under me. It was the sudden absence of something I could not yet define. Something I didn’t know was there.
Something I felt was slipping away from me.
Something that rested on this very moment.
When I looked down at Jo what I saw unnerved me. Not in a bad way. In an unbelievable way. She looked up at me with complete and unconditional trust. Jenna had never looked at me in such a way. In fact, I was pretty sure I’d gone my whole life without ever seeing, feeling someone look at me like this.
I felt a rush of heat throughout my body.
My lips felt dry.
I had to have her.
Without another thought, I wrapped my arm around Jo’s waist and crushed her body against mine. I brought my mouth down on hers without any hesitation. I felt my body relax against hers. For weeks, I’d been carrying it around. The whole damn fate of the world on my shoulders, but as my lips moved feverishly against hers, I didn’t think of it. I couldn’t. Not when all I could think of was how much I wanted her. As if I'd never known what it meant to want. At least not like this.
Her mouth parted and allowed me in. I grunted and ran my hand under the back of her shirt, my hand never pausing over the scars I felt. My other hand moved to her hair. The hair I always secretly wondered what it’d feel like to touch. She pushed her body harder against mine as the kiss deepened, and I stumbled a few steps back.
When she pulled away we were both breathing heavily. She pressed her forehead against mine. “Remember this...Logan...I kissed you first,” she panted.
I smiled. “Does everything have to be a contest?”
I was about to lean down and kiss her again when I saw her eyes flash me a look of alarm. “Your nose. You’re bleeding,” she said.
Before I could wipe the blood from my nose, Jo clutched onto my shirt with her hands and pressed her mouth against my ear. “Listen to me, Logan. They sent you here for a reason. I know what reason that is,” she said hurriedly.