“I look horrified?”
“To put it mildly.”
“I’m sorry. My face disobeys me all the time. I tell it to look like an ordinary freshman about to watch a movie with wrestling champ Tate Sullivan, and all it can manage is what feels like anxious frowning.”
“It looks a lot like anxious frowning, too. But we can easily make that go away.”
He stood, and lifted his desk chair like it was made of paper.
“See I can just move this to here.”
“Stop. Tate, stop a second,” she said.
But he didn’t.
He just kept on rearranging furniture.
“And then if I just angle the screen…”
“Tate, no, no. Stop I said.”
“It’s really not a problem.”
“I know. But I’m just being ridiculous. I don’t need you to sit in the bathroom, okay? I can sit on the bed with you and everything will just be normal and fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded after the word, yet still he hesitated. More than that, in fact. His eyes roamed over every item in his room, as though looking for an alternative solution.
And he found one.
A really stupid one.
“I tell you what, thenhow about we put something between us?”
“You want to put something between us. Like in medieval times.”
“Exactly, yes. That way, my leg will never touch your leg and my butt will never nudge your butt.”
“I wasn’t concerned about our legs touching. Or our butts nudging. Can butts even nudge?”
“My butt is a world-class nudging champion. But see, now you don’t have to worry about that,” he said, and he was completely right about that. She didn’t.
She had to worry about everything else.
When she sat down his scent assaulted her from all directions, too sweet and clean for her to fully accept it. He was supposed to smell like feet and farts and locker rooms, and instead everything was as fresh as a walk in the wintry air. His pillows could have been laundered that day. His comforter felt smooth and crisp beneath her fingers, and left the scent of meadows between them.
And then there was his body, his clothes, his hair.
That tart cologne she remembered so well from high school was gone, replaced by something that seemed incredibly familiar. It had a hint of almonds, warm and honeyed and so good she knew she should know it. It even reminded her of nice things, like sitting in the window seat of her bedroom with a book or driving to the movie theater for the first time with her friend Becky Rivero.
But it took her until twenty minutes in to dredge up the memory. Twenty minutes of puzzling and trying not to too obviously sniff him, before realization washed over her in a great facepalm-inducing wave.
It was her own perfume. The one she had worn in high school.
Or at the very least it was damned close. It was perhaps a touch more masculine, and that slightly musky man smell lurked beneath it. Yet once she figured it out, she couldn’t deny the fact. No matter how weird and inexplicable it was, Tate Sullivan had her favorite scent somewhere on him. Like a loaded gun, just waiting to go off and blow out most of her brains.
She already felt unable to think.
Logical reasons for this completely eluded her.
Questions she thought of asking were, at best, embarrassing.
In the end she just had to carry on watching the moviebut doing so hardly helped. Dirty Dancing was at least 30 percent sexier than she remembered it being. Within the first half hour, people were gyrating all over each other. Swayze had his shirt off before the second act, and everyone seemed to be sweating constantly. It made her sweat, just watching them.
Or was it just the temperature of the room? It seemed to have risen at least ten degrees since she’d gotten herequite possibly because of Tate. It was like sitting next to an enormous engine. Heat rolled off him in waves, thick and stultifying. She could almost feel it through the pillow, burning and burning until she could barely take it anymore. She came close several times to telling him to stop being so hot, and only resisted by patiently explaining to herself how stupid that was.
He would think she meant the other hot.
Even though she didn’t. She totally didn’t.
She hardly knew what she meant.
She only knew that he made her heart bolt its bone cage when he suddenly leaned across the pillow to whisper something. That her mouth went dry and all the hairs on her arms stood up and the heat…
The heat seemed to treble. Quadruple. Millionable.
“Do you think people were that sexually liberated in 1963?”
“I have no clue. We should probably write that question down,” she said.
Of course she knew why she did itbecause it gave her an out. She could lean down to get her pad and scribble, instead of enduring more of that scent and the heat.