“I need to change,” I said, my voice loud in the quiet room.
“Okay.” He turned and left.
I could still feel his lips on my back as I slid a t-shirt over my head and put on some shorts. I should have put on a long-sleeved ensemble so as to leave the least amount of skin visible, but it was a warm night and our apartment had crappy ventilation.
I heard the microwave ding when I came out.
“I think I might need a little help with my zipper, why don’t you give me a hand?” Hunter said, turning his back.
“Sorry, my hands are full,” I said, grabbing the steaming popcorn bag and the bowl he’d set out and holding them up. “You’ll have to do it all by yourself.”
“Fine. But you’re missing out.” Didn’t I know it.
He closed the door, and I leaned against the counter. Why, why did the things he said have to start sounding good? Why did I want to walk into that room and say, ‘Hell yes, I’ll help you with that zipper and the rest of your clothes, get them off NOW.’?
I felt my forehead. Maybe I had a fever. Maybe it was the red velvet cake that had gotten me all riled up. Or maybe it was the damn song. What girl wasn’t a sucker for a guy who could sing? It was why Christine had gone down to the Phantom’s creepy underground lair. It was why so many women threw themselves at rock stars, good-looking or not so much.
By the time he came out, I was situated on the couch with the popcorn in a bowl and two sodas complete with coasters. Darah would have a hissy fit if she knew we hadn’t used coasters.
“Coasters, good thinking,” Hunter said, nodding to our drinks.
“I thought so.”
He had boxers and a gray tank on. On anyone else, it would have been boxers and a gray tank. On Hunter, it was… damn sexy.
“Do I have something on my face?” he said, catching me in the act of staring.
“No.”
“Then why were you looking at me like that?”
“I wasn’t.” Deny, deny, deny.
“Okay then, you weren’t.” He sat down next to me and grabbed his drink. “You got the movie in?”
“Yup.” I had the remote in my hand, but I didn’t want to push play. Hunter took a sip of his drink as I fought the urge to throw myself at him. I grabbed the popcorn bowl and put it between us as a buffer. Why had Renee and Darah done this to me? I knew they thought they were helping, but this most certainly was not helping.
I hit play on the movie, hoping against hope that it would serve as a distraction.
It worked for about five seconds. Then Hunter’s hand and mine collided in the popcorn bowl in one of those movie moments. I snatched mine back, but he stopped me.
“Can I be honest with you right now?” he said.
My mouth was dry as I said, “Sure. When are you not honest with me? With the exception of one time.”
“Yes, well,” he said, rubbing his tattoo one, two, three times. Uh oh. “I’m going to be brutally honest, okay?”
“Once again, when are you not? But carry on,” I said, waving my hand for him to continue. The movie blared in the background, but it might as well have been in Esperanto for all the attention I was paying to it.
He took a breath.
“I want you. Right now. If you said yes, I would kiss you. I would kiss you until we both forgot that lips were made for anything other than kissing. I’d take you out of that outfit, as cute as it is. I want to see what you look like with nothing on. I want to make you sigh like you did with the cake. I want to be with you. Right now.”
“Right now?” I squeaked.
“Right now. Fuck the movie.” He grabbed the remote and paused the movie. “I just thought you should know how I feel.”
I had to close my eyes for a second. He was so close, it was hard to think. My brain just went blank, and decided to picture all the things he’d talked about. My skin hummed, ready and waiting.
“I…”
“I’m not asking you to. I know this is hard for you. I just wanted you to know that that was something I wanted to do.” I opened my eyes.
“You’ve been saying stuff like that to me since day one.”
“Not like this. Those other girls? That stuff I did with them? That was just sex. I never want to have just sex again. I want to get lucky with you. Only you. Bottom line.”
I fumbled for a response.
“I’ll make a note of it,” I said.
“Okay, then.” He took the remote and turned the movie back on, settling back as if nothing had happened. What. The. Fuck.
I turned my head toward the movie, but I was even more distracted. He’d planted the seed of that idea in my head and now that thing was growing as if someone had Miracle-Gro-ed the shit out of it. Mental weed killer wasn’t going to work on that sucker.
The next hour was pure torture. Part of me wondered if he’d done it on purpose. To tease me. He’d done things like that before. Our hands didn’t collide in the popcorn bowl, and he pretended as if we were two friends watching a movie.
When it was over, and the popcorn was gone, I waited for him to say something.
“You tired?” I asked. I didn’t have to be up too early, but I knew he did.
“Yeah, I guess we should go to bed.”
It was a very anticlimactic end to our date. He got up and gathered the remnants of our movie snacks and threw them in the sink.
“I’m gonna go brush my teeth,” he said, stepping around me.
I went into the bedroom and tried to get myself under control.
Not good, not good, not good.
I had to put a cork in my hormones. I’d never reacted like that to anyone. No guy had ever made me feel like I was on fire. I’d thought all that talk about it was just people being melodramatic. Guess it wasn’t.
He came back and without another look at me, shucked off his shirt and got into bed. Oh that was it.
“What the hell, dude?”
“What?” He turned over, as if he had no idea what I was talking about.
“Are you kidding? Seriously? All that talk about the wanting and the kissing and everything and now you’re going to just pretend like it didn’t happen? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I just thought that I’d been too forward and I thought that I’d freaked you out. I was just giving you space.”
“Oh.”
“So how did you feel about what I said?”
I sputtered for a second, unable to use actual words. Just sounds.
“Can I take that as a confirmation that yes, it would be something you would be interested in?” His blue eyes begged me to say yes.
“I don’t know. Maybe?”
“There’s no maybe about it, Missy. Either yes or no.”
“Can I have some time?”
“Sure, Miss. There’s no expiration date on my offer. If you come to me in sixty years, I’ll be waiting with a bottle of Viagra.”
Ew and yuck.
“Thanks for tonight. I had a really good time.” How was this supposed to work? I mean, usually a date ended and the guy dropped the girl off and they said goodnight. With us, there was no goodnight. We’d see each other when we woke up.
“Good. That was the plan.” I got into bed, trying not to stare at his chest. “Can I ask one more thing?” he said.
“Uh, sure.”
“Can I kiss you goodnight?”
“I guess so.”
“You seemed to enjoy it the last couple times.”
“Shut up.” And kiss me, I didn’t say.
He got out of bed and walked slowly to mine. I got up and we stared at one another for a breath of time. He leaned down, and I waited this time.
“Goodnight, Taylor.”
He leaned down and pressed the sweetest, briefest kiss in the history of the world. He tried to pull away, but my lips and the rest of me wouldn’t let him. I pulled him back for just a second before I slammed the door on my desire and was able to detach myself from him.
“Goodnight, Hunter.” I somehow got myself back into bed. He stood there for a moment before sighing and going to his bed.
“Love me?” he whispered as he tossed his boxers on the floor.
“Nope.”
“Hate me?”
“Not as much as conjugating verbs.”
“Good.”
My body hummed with energy. There was no way I was getting to sleep at this point. It was going to be a long night.
Twenty-Three
I’d never experienced the “hot and bothered” feeling, but around 3 a.m., I had to get up and get out of the room. I could hear Hunter’s every breath and movement like never before. I had a brief notion of going to sleep, or trying to, in Darah and Renee’s room, but then Hunter would know that I was hot and bothered.
I didn’t look at my face in the mirror because I didn’t want to see it. Instead I sat on the rim of the tub and twirled my hair with one finger. It was a habit I’d picked up when I was a kid that I hadn’t done in a long time. When I’d been young, I’d twirled so much I’d actually pulled some of my hair out. My therapist at the time, Dr. Blood, had given me a stress ball, but that hadn’t helped. I was irreparably broken.
I’d accepted the fact that I was messed up a long time ago. It was one of the reasons I’d promised myself to not get involved with anyone. No one should have to deal with my issues, other than me. It was easy, because there wasn’t anyone that I wanted to be with anyway.