Each excuse landed like a pin pushed into a balloon.Pop, pop, pop.He’d even laughed. He’d panicked. He had wrapped the whole thing in jokes and explanations until it sounded like something that had happened to him rather than something he had done because he had wanted it.
Or something I had wanted.
I pushed off the door and finally moved. My legs felt unsteady, like I’d run too hard and stopped too fast. I crossed the living room, stepping around the chairs and the map I’d spent hours designing. The smell of smoke and snacks hung faintly in the air. Everything looked the same. All but me.
In my room, I shut the door and leaned against it again, just in case the floor decided to give out entirely. My hands shook when I pushed my glasses up. I dragged them off and set them on my desk, then rubbed my eyes until I saw sparks.
Maybe it had been bad.
The thought slipped in sideways, unwelcome and sharp. Maybe it had been awkward enough to jolt him back into his senses. Maybe he’d leaned in on impulse and immediately regretted it. Maybe he’d tasted indecision and decided he didn’t like the flavor.
I crossed the room and sat on the edge of my bed, then lay back without bothering to take my shoes off. The mattress dipped beneath me. My heart still refused to calm down.
The walk replayed in my head whether I wanted it to or not. The way our shoulders had brushed again and again like magnets that couldn’t quite commit. The way he’d looked at me when I laughed. Hell, the fact that he’d made me laugh! The warmth of him beside me on the sidewalk. The way he’d leaned in so close I’d forgotten my name.
I turned onto my side and stared at the wall.
Was it bad? The kiss?
I pressed my lips together and then parted them slightly, as if testing the memory. It hadn’t felt bad. It had felt surprising and hot and unfinished. But I wasn’t exactly an expert. My empirical research on kissing was limited, to put it kindly. Maybe that rush I’d felt was just novelty. Maybe anyone would have made my pulse race like that.
Except I knew that wasn’t true.
I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling again. Jason’s face floated there uninvited, the crease between his brows when he got confused. The way his mouth curved when he smiled for real. The way his voice dropped when he said my name.
My chest tightened again for the millionth time.
He wasn’t going to do that again. I knew it with a certainty that made my throat ache. Jason had made his excuses. He had smoothed it over and laughed it off. He had tucked the moment away as a mistake and walked himself right out of it.
And I had stood there and let him.
I let out a shaky breath and pressed my palm to my chest, willing my heart to slow down. It didn’t listen. It kept racing, kept replaying that brief collision of mouths like it was something precious instead of something humiliating.
I should’ve known better. Jason lived in a world of ease and confidence and casual touches. He flirted like he breathed. I had walked straight into that and come out dazed, clutching something he’d already decided to forget.
I turned onto my side, kicking my shoes off, and curled slightly, pulling my blanket up, even though I wasn’t cold. My lips still tingled. I hated that part the most.
I closed my eyes and told myself it didn’t matter. It was one kiss. A bad one, apparently. A mistake. A footnote in a semester already complicated enough.
My heart refused to believe me.
As sleep finally crept in, slow and unwelcome, one thought lodged itself stubbornly in my mind.
No matter how much he joked it away, I wasn’t going to forget what it had felt like.
And that was going to make everything so much harder.
If only sleep hadn’t come at all. I could have stayed up all night, tossing ideas around in my head. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d stayed up all night, followed by a day-long library visit.
But I did sleep. And with the sleep came the dreams. An endless maze of dreams, coming and going, spilling into each other, morphing from the vivid images of the game we’d played to the cold whipping of the late-fall wind. And finally, to the fire that was Jason’s mouth on mine.
Yet it didn’t stop there. In some dreams, as I tossed and turned, he pulled back with a look of disgust contorting his beautiful face. The stab went deep between my ribs and hurt when I inhaled. In others, just as unbearable, he didn’t pull back at all. No.
I jerked my head back, but Jason followed, handclosing around my jacket and tugging me close. He kissed me harder. Kissed me the way nobody had ever kissed me. It wasn’t the innocent stumble, but a hungry, devastating, heart-ripping kiss, mouth smashed against mouth, his tongue meeting mine, his warmth growing so much that sweat broke all over my body.
As he turned us around, we were no longer outside, but stumbling up the stairs of the Thinkers’ House. An urgency possessed me like none before. I grabbed for the stairs, eating them with a long stride, but they were endless. Only Jason’s hand closing around mine got me to climb faster than new stairs could spawn. And as we reached the landing, we tripped, stumbled, and fell into my room.
The door slammed against my back. Jason’s weight pressed against my front. His lips found mine and never left them again. His tongue explored my mouth in the ways I’d only ever seen in movies and read about in books. But he kept on kissing me, panting and moaning with pleasure because it didn’t disappoint him at all. And as he leaned harder against me, I felt how hard he was.