“Don’t you kiss me, Buck. I’m warning you.” I lean away from him, but his arms tighten.
He lets out a little laugh and dips his head, his lips grazing mine. His hands smooth down to cup my ass, squeezing and pulling me tighter to his hardening groin. An overwhelming sensation of déjà vu floods my fraying senses as his tongue sweeps in, his mouth teasing with a little nip.
It takes only the smallest taste for my body to remember what else Buck can do with that tongue, and warm wetness slips to my pussy as desire swamps me. But I’m not some hormonal teenager this time around. I won’t be as willing a participant as the first time. His tongue darts in again, and I seize the opportunity to teach him a lesson when I do more than nip.
He pulls back, a hand flying to his mouth. “What the fuck, Lou? Why the hell did you bite me?”
I extricate myself from his embrace, my traitorous heart pounding. “Next time a girl says not to kiss her, you should listen.”
He dabs the end of his tongue with his finger-tip, pulling it away to look—for blood? Good.
“Well, I didn’t know you’d bite me. I kinda thought you expected me to kiss you.”
I step backward, hands propped on my hips. “You’re such a colossal asshat, Buck. No doesn’t mean yes, ever. You’re a big boy. You should’ve learned that by now.”
He throws his hands in the air. “Well, of course, I know that. But you said the exact same thing to me a few years ago, and, that time, when I let you go, you grabbed my shirt and laid one on me.”
Shit.
He’s right.
Heat rushes up and over my face. Good thing it’s dark and he can’t see my embarrassment.
Fuck it. I don’t have the energy for this crap.
I turn toward the staircase. “Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry—I’d forgotten about that. Oops.”
“Oops? That’s all, just oops?”
I shrug and haul my ass up the steps.
He watches me, not making a move to leave, to follow, to do anything.
I call down to him. “Goodnight, Buck.”
Once inside, the trembling takes over as I rush to my room. I sink onto the edge of the bed, hands covering my flushed face.
Fuck. I can’t believe I said that. What was I thinking?
It all rushes back—that moment I thought I’d successfully stuffed so far into the recesses of my memory that I wouldn’t have to visit it again. Guess not.
On the road heading out of town, I dragged my ratty backpack behind me, the corner of my biology book scraping the ground where it peeked out of the hole in the bottom. Suddenly, the strap was pulled from my grasp.
Buck slung it onto his shoulder over his own book bag. “Why do you look like someone kicked your puppy?”
I turned away so he wouldn’t see the tears gathered in my eyes. “Nothing.”
He bumped my arm with his elbow. “C’mon, Lou, don’t give me that shit.”
I dashed away the tear that managed to escape, still avoiding his gaze. “You’ll think it’s stupid.”
“Probably, but you’ll just tell me I don’t know shit—which is true.”
I sniff. “Well—you don’t know anything.”
“See? What is it, Lou?”
I veered off the road into the weeds, snatching the top off a wild flower, picking it apart as I went. The thick air seemed a bit less suffocating in the shade of the trees lining the blacktop road that led to our street.
“I tried out for cheer squad.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I made the squad, but I didn’t know it was gonna cost so much. I’ll have to tell them I can’t do it, ‘cuz there’s no way Momma can shell out that kind of cash. Actually, even if she could, she wouldn’t. So, you know…”
“Why the hell did you try out for that anyway? It’s not like you run with that crowd.”
I cast him a wilting glance. “Because I wanted to be normal for a change. Be something besides Poor Little Loula Mae Fontaine, daughter of a junkie and her pimp.”
He dropped our bags, grabbed my shoulders, and pushed me until the bark of the nearest tree trunk pressed into my back. “Don’t ever say that. You are so much more than that, Lou—more than all those girls rolled into one.”
My hands pushed at his chest, but he didn’t budge. “You don’t understand. I don’t belong anywhere. I’m too black to fit in with the white girls, and I’m not black enough to hang out with the black girls.”
“Fuck them. They’re all just jealous as hell because you’re the perfect shade of beautiful.” His eyes bore into mine, the golden flecks dotting his turquoise irises so familiar, yet, at that moment, so foreign.