“I keep trying to flirt with you in the lamest ways possible because I haven’t had feelings for someone in a long time and I…want the chance to keep talking to you.”
If he’s not going to throw up the obvious barriers, I’ll do it. “Butwe’re neighbors.Butyou have a kid.Butwe circle different age ranges on a questionnaire.”
He winces. “Ouch.”
“Sorry,” I say automatically.
Here’s the thing: I can’t remember a time in my life where a man I haven’t already hooked up with in some capacity told me he liked me. Plain and simple. Just like that. My brain doesn’t know what to do with it. How to dissect it to get at the real intent.
“So…any response?” Nick asks after a solid fifteen seconds of watching me perform these calculations in my head. “Other than calling me old?”
“As soon as I open my mouth, I make things weird. So I don’t think I should say anything, actually.”
He laughs at that. “You’ve already said things that made it weird about a dozen times—”
“Hey!” I instinctively reach out to swat at him. My palm is an inch and a half from its target—the familiarish but not-quite-placeable line drawing that’s tattooed on his bicep—when hisother hand reaches out to stop my momentum. There’s a light smacking sound as his hand catches my wrist just above the hem of the hoodie sleeve. Neither of us is laughing.
We stand there, too close, his fingers wrapped around my pulse point. I’m sure he can feel my unnaturally fast heartbeat.
He doesn’t letgo.
There’s a moment that happens before a kiss when you’re pretty sure it’s coming, but there’s just enough of an edge of uncertainty. Usually that moment is pretty quick—like, right before you see his head tilting down and a fight-or-flight reaction kicksin.
But this one stretches.
We’re staring at each other, his hand encircling my wrist, and I don’t know what else this could build to. Any second now, his head will tilt.
Except it doesn’t.
He moves his head past my mouth, toward my ear, and just as I think he’s going for my neck (oh GOD who goes for the neck first?), his lips touch my cheek and…
…I receive an extremely wet and loud raspberry.
“That Uber lady was right,” I say, pulling back. “Thatisdisorienting.”
“I’m sorry.” He rubs his forehead. “I’m sorry. I wanted to just…and I wasn’t sure if…”
“Oh,I—”
“I suddenly felt like this creep. And then at the last second I tried to break the tension.”
“You didn’t need to,” I say.
“I didn’t?”
“I like creeps.” Unfortunately, this is true.
Even though I can feel that nervous excitement in my chest, my gut, the back of my neck—basically every location on my body that actually tells the truth—Nick doesn’t move.
Something comes over me. I’ve never said or thought that specific cliché before, but it does. I can’t take the waiting.
I grab his shirt with my other hand and pull him toward me. Maybe it’s more of a yank. Impetuous and half formed. For a card-carrying overthinker, I am underthinking everything I do and say to Nick.
He must’ve been waiting for me to make the first move because he tugs the hoodie off my shoulders about 0.3 seconds later.
Three or four things happen at once. We bump noses and my glasses hit his forehead and there’s no finesse to this kiss—our hands are grabbing at each other’s clothes, chaotically searching for skin. It’s so good to be wanted that I’m feeling dizzy.
My nails dig into his back—maybe I’m trying to keep my knees from buckling—and I feel something physically between us that I don’t remember ever feeling. It’s like the tension between two magnets of the same pole—the kind that are supposed to repulse each other. When I was a kid I would always try to smash those against one another—pushing these two little magnets together to kiss and feeling the funny little force in the air between them, resisting it. There’s a gravity in that little space between our bodies. This peculiar feeling in the pit of my stomach, pulling me in, while some equal, opposite force tells me to hold back.
