The Girl Who Fell(18)

But I can’t. It’s as if he’s in my head. Humming under my skin.

A soft breeze guides a curl across my cheek and Alec moves to catch it. He tucks it behind my ear, brushing my lobe with his fingers. Something inside my chest skips, like there’s a heart racing inside my heart.

“Would you go out with me?”

He can’t even know how his words paralyze. They tie and bind with a commitment I can’t give after living in the aftermath of my father bailing. Or the mess that is my relationship with Gregg since his kiss. I can’t do complication.

“Alec, I . . .”

Alec’s face waits on my words, patient and forgiving even though he appears to sense what I’m going to say. A small boy scrambles into the swing near us, reprimanding his mother’s offer of help. “I do it!” he shouts at her.

Alec smiles at the boy’s independence, his fierceness, and that is when the word slips out of me. “Yes.”

“Huh.” Alec lets out an enormous sigh, threaded with laughter. “I wasn’t exactly expecting a yes after that enormously elongated hesitation, Zephyr actually.”

“Me either.” My cheeks redden. His blush reveals understanding.

Alec moves behind me and gives me a gentle push. My feet leave the ground. My legs extend.

When I return to Alec, he catches my hips and holds me, suspended for the briefest second. His fingers lock onto each hip. A spiral of heat climbs inside me, pours into my blood, coats my skin. My whole body alights. Then, he whispers furtive words in my ear: “I used to space out in Latin all the time.”

He lets go. My insides curl.

I return to him with a gentle swoop. He grabs hold. “I’m not so bummed about being the new kid at Sudbury anymore.”

I swing.

“Not since I found a girl who digs muscle cars.”

Swing. And I smile.

“A girl I’m with and might already miss.”

Swoon.

I am lost on the cloud of his words until the little boy screeches. He’s figured out he can’t swing without his mother’s help so he gets down, scrambles toward the sandbox at the opposite side of the park. I watch him angrily hurl a red pail onto the grass when his mother lifts his wriggling body and starts toward their car. Then we are alone—the approaching dusk our only company. I curse the day for not being longer. Stretching out for miles like a summer afternoon.

When I see the wafer moon begin its rise over the ball field, Alec halts my swinging and twists my seat. He rubs the length of my fingers, follows each to the tips where they are wrapped around the cross of the chains. His touch lights my flesh, fire coaxing more heat.

“I have to go,” he says.

My body jolts. Go?

He slips his phone out of the front pocket of his jeans, checks the time. “I have a preseason game tonight.”

Tonight. Dinner. Mom. Oh shit . . . Lizzie. A visit to Gregg’s. All the things I spaced on today.

“I wish I could stay.” Alec takes a tentative step closer, whisper close. I smell his familiar cologne, that faint waft of mint. He brings his hand to my face and brushes the gentle rise of his knuckles along my jaw. My breath catches as he spirals a long strand of my hair around his finger. His touch drops to my neckline and I pull back. The heat of him too intense. His face flushes red and he spins me so that he’s standing behind me. I wait for him to push me one last time, but his hands slide along my shoulders until he gathers my ponytail, moves it to the side. Heat tightens my stomach into a fist.

The autumn air licks my neckline with a crisp draft. Every inch of me wants to feel his lips on the curves of my neck—soft and unhurried. And every inch of me thinks I should leave. Now.

But my flesh tingles. And begs.

I lean into him. He lifts my hands high on the chains and closes my fingers around the spot where he wants me to hold on.

“You smell like vanilla,” he tells me.

You feel like a dream. I don’t even know the me who thinks these words.

His hands trace along my outstretched arms, his broad palms smoothing over my coat but feeling closer, like warmed lotion against my skin. I allow my back to press into him, this stranger, this boy. My breath seizes as he cups the warmth of my neck. There is a spiraling ache between my legs, foreign and demanding. It is the same ache that tells me to run.

But I don’t.

I turn my head. I let my lips meet his. Alec’s mouth tastes of spearmint and flight, without a hint of complication.





Chapter 7


Driving home from the park, laughter bursts from me so free and light—a laugh I can’t remember laughing since Dad left. Somehow, Alec’s made me feel like me and someone wholly new at the same time. Like I’ve stepped out of my own shadow.