Eliza winced and threw me a panicked stare.
“She needs to see that you’ve moved on. That you’re happy. But we need to sell it properly before she walks up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean...” I took a deep breath, hardly believing what I was about to suggest. “Lean in and kiss me. Like you mean it. Just for show.”
I knew it sounded ridiculous. I also knew that my heart was beating overtime at the thought that it might just happen.
Eliza stared at me for a moment, her eyes wide. Then she glanced over my shoulder, and something decisive flickered across her face.
Without another word, she cupped my face in her hands, looked me straight in the eyes, licked her lips, then pressed them to mine.
Even though I’d suggested it, nothing could have prepared me for this.
Because this wasn’t a tentative, awkward kiss. Not by a long shot. It was soft and urgent, making every nerve ending in my body wake up and pay attention as if they’d been sleepwalking for years. Her lips were warm and tasted faintly of that lethalshot, and when she deepened the kiss, her tongue sliding against mine with a confidence that made my knees forget their job, I forgot entirely why we were doing this.
I forgot about Michelle, about the bar, about everything except the way Eliza’s fingers gripped my face, and the small sound she made against my mouth that went straight through me like a live wire.
On the rooftop earlier, I’d wanted to kiss her. But this? This was something else entirely. What I’d suggested as a simple distraction was rewriting something fundamental inside me, as if my brain was frantically scribbling corrections in the margins of everything I thought I knew about myself. About us.
The trouble was, I had no idea if she was just that good at pretending, or if the ground was shifting under her feet, too.
When we finally broke apart, the absence of her lips was like a physical ache. My mind scrambled to reassemble the pieces of reality, but it was like trying to solve a puzzle after someone had shaken the box. It was as if I’d been struck by lightning, and then immediately hit by a bus for good measure.
Eliza no longer looked over my shoulder. Instead, she stared at me with something like the same freaked-out wonder that must be written all over my face.
She opened her mouth, closed it, then shook her head like she was trying to clear it. When she finally did glance over my shoulder, her eyes widened.
“She’s leaving. I think it did the trick.” Eliza ran her fingers through her hair, then sat looking at them, as if she’d forgotten they were attached to her body. When she glanced up at me, her gaze went to my lips, but she dragged it away almost immediately.
She stared at the door. “Should I run out after her?”
I reached out and ran a hand up her arm. Which only caused more shockwaves to echo through my body. I tried to control mynerves which were beyond frayed, but it wasn’t easy. I took deep breaths and tried to pretend I snogged my former friend-turned-nemesis-turned-mentor every day of the week.
“Why would you do that? You wanted to avoid talking to her, right?”
She nodded. “But now I feel a bit mean.” She stared at her drink, then back at me.
Her eyes had changed from their usual crystal blue to something darker: storm-cloud blue in the dim bar lighting. I wanted to chart the way her cheekbones caught the shadows, how her mouth was still slightly parted from our kiss. When had I started noticing these things about Eliza? When had the sharp angles of her face become something I wanted to trace with my fingertips?
We sat there for another moment, the weight of what had just happened settling between us like an uninvited guest. The kiss was fake, a performance, but it had felt 100% real to me. What if it never happened again? I couldn’t let that be one and done.
Before I could even think about what I was doing, I leaned in and pressed my lips back to Eliza’s. When she responded, my entire body sparked back to life.
This time, there was no pretence, no audience to perform for: just the soft press of her mouth against mine and the way she tasted of something that was purely her. Her hand found the back of my neck, fingers threading through my short hair, and right then, I didn’t care about how this complicatedeverything. Tomorrow was a different story. Right here, in this moment, she was perfect.
“You two!”
A familiar voice cut through the bar noise beside us.
I jerked away from Eliza like I’d been caught doing something illegal, my heart rate immediately switching from post-kiss flutter to full panic mode.
Roka slid onto the bar stool next to us, still in her Fleetwood Mac T-shirt, hair a little more slicked back. “I thought I picked up a vibe, but you were both being so coy about it.”
“We’re not—” I started.
“Actually, we’re really not…” Eliza said at the same time.
