Embarrassment flooded her, automatically. Did men really and truly know when a girl got aroused? She took a breath and tried to calm herself down, because of course the theory was nonsense. Men couldn’t possibly know things like that.
But she’d still grabbed him, like a kiss-starved idiot. She’d put a hand in his hair and moved her mouth against his, while he probably did something like struggle to hold down his vomit.
And now she had to leave, immediately. Before things got worse. Before he accused her of being a face rapist or something.
“I have to…uh…go in the house now,” she said, because apparently her mind had gotten lost inside his mouth, and couldn’t come up with anything better than that. It wouldn’t even help her stand, either. She had to sort of haul herself up using the handrail, not quite making it to her feet but trying all the same.
“Evie—”
“I know, I know—it was awful. I shouldn’t have, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“What? No—just sit down back again for a second. Come on, honey—stop trying to climb the handrail.”
He caught hold of her wrist, then her forearm, then her elbow. Reeled her back in like some babbling species of fish. Of course, once he’d done it she couldn’t look him in the face. His face would tell the truth. The gross, gross truth.
“It wasn’t awful. Unless you mean you thought it was awful, in which case, you should probably know I recently had a stud removed, and it’s really affecting tongue flexibility.”
She had to glance up, for that. Was he joking? His mouth said no, but his eyes said yes. So maybe…half-half?
“I didn’t think it was awful,” she said, while inside her head someone gasped the words, His tongue can be more flexible than that?
“Sure?”
“You were the one who snapped away from me.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Because you’re stoned.”
Man, he was crazy. First he accused her of handrail mountaineering, and now this.
“What? I’m not. I’m not.”
“You said falled.”
“You said it was right!”
He shrugged. Eyes still smiling, face still impossibly handsome.
“What do I know? I think tongue flexibility is an actual thing.”
She went to shove him and missed. Good thing, really. It was the sort of thing she knew she’d regret later, when all of her faculties returned.
“You don’t. You just said that because you’re so…massive.”
Of course, she knew that massive made no sense, in this context. But then neither did the first word her mind had chosen to slot into the gap. And if she’d actually gone with hairy, God only knew how total her humiliation would have been.
“My relative bigness aside, I can’t make out with you when you’re stoned. You know that, right?”
“I think I stopped knowing things about five minutes ago.”
“Really? And how does that feel?”
She closed her eyes, for just a brief moment. Reached for the nearest emotion inside her.
“Amazing.”
He didn’t say anything for a long, long time. So long that she started to suspect she’d said something mad again, like the massive comment. And though most of her wanted to open her eyes and find out, another part found it so very peaceful, behind her own eyelids. Everything felt foggy, and yet so clear at the same time. Everything was okay, in the land of Evie Bennett.
Or at least, it was until he spoke.
“You’re amazing.”
She opened her eyes immediately, just to see if his expression backed up those two terrifying words. But the minute she did so he turned his face away, and the mood shifted.
“I better go,” he said, too abrupt for her to process. Had he finally sensed all of her foggy thoughts about sex and his tongue and her own disobedient body? It seemed almost impossibly hard to tell.
“You can’t go like this. You’re…um…stoned,” she tried, though she wanted to say something else instead. Something like—I didn’t mean those thoughts at all. I meant to think some other things, about flowers and ponies and happy rainbows.
I’m not like that, really.
“It’s cool,” he said, and that was the end of that. Or it would have been, if he hadn’t sort of canted to the left the moment he tried to get to his feet.
Seeing him do it made her stand too, though the results were pretty much the same. The world slid sideways, briefly, and nothing on her body seemed to be working right. Fog had infiltrated her limbs too, only it was a heavy sort of fog. A fog made out of anvils and black holes.
“No really—Van—” she started, but he didn’t let her finish.