“ We’re together, Abby,” Beck stated, coming to stand directly in front of me so that I was stuck between him and the wall. I still had my arms crossed in front of my chest, attempting to block him from pressing up against me.
“ I know we are,” I bit out, a little too harshly. I didn’t want to admit to being jealous.
“ So what was that? You were letting him touch you and you should have seen the way he was leering down at you. Like you were his latest conquest.” Beck wasn’t hiding his anger, but he wasn’t yelling. That wasn’t Beck’s style, yet his tone gave me chills and for a moment I feared that I’d pushed him too far. We didn’t know each other’s limits. We still hardly knew each other.
“ I didn’t want him to touch me. I came back from the bathroom and that girl was sitting there and it annoyed me. I just…I don’t know what I felt. I just didn’t want to come over and have to stare at her pretty face and compare myself to her. So I went to play darts.”
“ I wasn’t flirting with that girl. She’s here with her boyfriend and they wanted to go check out the Lights with us.”
My face flushed ten times brighter. Fuck my teenage logic. “Well, this,” I motioned between the two of us, “is new to me, and I’m apparently still a nineteen year old, whether I’d like to admit it or not.”
“ You’re my girlfriend. You can’t let another guy teach you how to play darts. I want to teach you how to play darts.” He unwrapped my arms from around my chest and then boxed my head in with his hands against the wall. His face dipped low to mine and I bit my lip in anticipation.
He just called me his girlfriend.
“ He was a shitty teacher,” I joked, staring up into the hazel eyes that were home to me.
Beck closed his eyes and smirked before leaning in and giving me a soul-stealing kiss. His lips met mine and I sighed into him, pressing my hands against his chest and giving myself over to the moment.
When he pulled away, I felt him take a little part of me with him. “I’m sorry,” he offered quietly.
“ Me too,” I smiled wistfully. “But that was a pretty lame first fight. I think we should break plates and stuff next time. Maybe one of us slams the door and leaves for the night to ‘get a pack of cigs’.”
Beck shook his head so that his nose ran across mine. “How about we skip all of that and just have really great makeup sex,” he offered, bending low to kiss my neck. My eyes fluttered closed and I desperately wished we weren’t in the hallway of a bar.
“ Oh…” I sighed. “Okay.”
Please take me in the bathroom. Please take me in the bathroom.
“ We have to go. Izzie and Tom are waiting to go see the Marfa Lights with us,” Beck said, stepping back and reaching for my hand.
“ Now?” I asked, surprised at how fast the plan had formed without me.
“ Yep. There’s a guy that offered to be our tour guide,” Beck answered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
There was a viewing platform in Marfa built so that tourists could have a good vantage point to view The Lights. It was made up of a small stone building with a large wrap-around porch. Our group made our way up the stairs that lead to the porch after we’d reconvened in the parking lot.
I’d briefly met everyone at the bar before we left. Tom and Izzie were from England and they were backpacking across the United States before heading off “to university”. Izzie wore a black dress with her pin-straight blonde hair. Tom was dressed really well in a pair of ankle jeans, boots, and an army fatigue jacket. Drew, our tour guide, seemed incredibly odd, but I was happy to have a guide so I didn’t complain.
“ So do you guys know much about these lights?” Tom asked with a thick British accent as he started to roll his third cigarette of the night. He was chain-smoking. He’d pull out a bag of tobacco, roll it into a thin piece of paper, and lick it closed, repeating the process as soon as the previous cigarette was finished. I wondered when he had time to eat or drink.