“So,” I say at last, because one of us has to.
“So.”
“Should we?—”
Sudden motion from him clamps my mouth shut. But he’s just twisting in his seat to reach into the back. He finds something there, pulls it up, and offers it to me.
“Your jacket?” I ask in confusion.
“It’s a company pullover. Won’t look like a walk of shame outfit, and it beats flashing your chest to Frank and the rest of the construction crew.”
He’s got a point. Even though I know it’s a terrible idea to accept an article of clothing from him, I take it and pull it on. The sleeves go about a foot past my fingertips, but I do my best to roll them up and make it look halfway presentable.
When I’ve done the best I can, I clear my throat, feeling fuzzy-headed and stupid. “Are we gonna talk about?—?”
“We should get to the site.” Bastian’s hands grip the steering wheel at ten and two, like he’s taking a driver’s test. “Frank’s waiting.”
“Basti—”
“Eliana.” He doesn’t look at me. “I don’t know what to say right now. I don’t—” He stops, jaw working side to side. “I need to think.”
“Okay.” I swallow hard. “But we can’t just pretend it didn’t happen.”
“I’m not suggesting we pretend anything,” he replies hoarsely. “I’m suggesting we table this conversation until after we’ve dealt with the two-hundred-thousand-dollar HVAC disaster that’s currently threatening to derail the entire project on which both of our lives depend.”
He’s not wrong. As much as I want to dissect every second of what just happened in that elevator—and oh, boy, do I want to dissect it—we still have jobs to do. Jobs that, technicallyspeaking, are the entire reason we were in that elevator in the first place.
Jobs that have nothing to do with trying to climb inside each other’s mouths.
“Fine,” I agree. “Work first. Existential crisis later.”
“That’s the spirit.” He shifts the Range Rover into reverse, and I catch the ghost of a smile on his face before he schools his expression back to neutral.
As we pull out of the garage into the weak February sunlight, I sneak a glance at him. His hair is still a disaster, and there’s a faint pink mark on his neck that might have been my doing. Oops.
I turn to look out my window, pressing my fingers to my lips one more time. They’re still tender.
And the ants in my pants are more alive than ever.
25
ELIANA
al den·te: /al 'den ta/: adjective
1: Italian for “to the tooth”; pasta or vegetables cooked until tender but still firm when bitten.
2: that precise, fleeting instant when something is perfectly ready—not too raw, not overdone—and if you wait even one second longer, you’ll miss it entirely and ruin everything.
The thing about kissing Bastian Hale is that it makes everything else feel like background noise.
The HVAC disaster? Background noise.
Impending blindness? Background noise.
My mother’s eviction notice and the twelve hundred dollars I just transferred that she’ll almost definitely spend on wine? Background noise.
All of it fades to a dull hum compared to the electric memory of his mouth on mine, his hand cradling my neck, the warm heat of elevator darkness swaddling us.
