When Liam described AJ, she figured, too good to be true. But everything he’d said about the man was true. She’d hit her non-negotiable jackpot.
Tessa lowered her camera and scrolled through the photos on her digital camera. When she lifted her head, she had a huge smile on her face. “Okay, great guys! We got that! What do you guys think of grabbing a few of you two dancing?”
They both glanced at one another and indicated a slight nod of agreement.
Poppy knew she had to stand, but her knees were literally weak.
“Are you okay?” AJ’s voice was so deep and rough, the pressure of his fingertips, the weight of his palm, the girth and strength of his thigh, her body was lit up with arousal like the Disney Main Street Electrical Parade.
She nodded. Despite feeling a little faint, a lot hot, and all kinds of bothered, she managed to rise to a standing position. AJ did the same. She noted his arm lingered around her lower back, which she appreciated for two reasons. The first was because she was not ready to lose physical contact with him. The second wasbecause she wasn’t being dramatic, her legs thought they were auditioning for the TLC song “Weakin the Knees.”
She faltered slightly, but thankfully, his arm steadied her. Her hands automatically grabbed onto his forearm.
“Sorry,” she apologized as her eyes lifted to his and quickly released her hold.
His eyes narrowed. “What are you apologizing for?”
Part of the reason she’d made the Santa Claus role play joke was to make light of the situation if he didn’t want her to sit on his lap. When he’d caught the garter, she’d overheard his Aunt Joanne say it must be his worst nightmare because he hated people touching him or grabbing at him. She wondered if it was a germ thing, but she wasn’t sure if she should bring that up or not. Unfortunately, Poppy had been accused, more than once, of not having a filter.
“I just, I heard you don’t like to be touched. Grabbed especially.”
His eyes narrowed, and the intensity in them made her core clench. “Who told you that?”
“Oh, no one.” She shook her head. “No one told me. I, um, I overheard your aunt talking about it. Sorry, I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop.” She blinked. “That’s a lie. Actually, I was. I heard her say your name, and I did listen on purpose. I eavesdropped.”
Shit. Why, Poppy? Why did she have to add that last part? He would never have had to know that she’d done that if she’d just kept her mouth shut. Overshare much? It wasn’t lying to omit embarrassing details.
She was so far gone in lust-brained daydreams that she barely remembered the primary side effect of being near a man who made her nervous, unchecked verbal diarrhea. It had been so long—years—since she’d actually been nervous around a boy that she’d sort of forgotten how her brain and mouth became two strangers passing in the night.
But if she was being honest, and she was nothing if not pathologically honest, it had been a really, really long time since she’d been nervous around a boy. By the time she got to college, she was the girl who marched up to her crush, tapped him on the shoulder, and asked if he wanted to get coffee. Or tequila. Or “skip the bullshit and make out under the bleachers like teenagers in a John Hughes movie.” He’d said yes. He’d also, it turned out, had a girlfriend. But once Poppy found out, she’d conspired with said girlfriend to catch the cheaterJohn Tucker Must Diestyle to balance out her karma so that she didn’t follow in her mother’s footsteps, which had always been her greatest fear.
The confident, bold, self-assured girl she was now was forged from fiery flames of embarrassment of growing up with a tick that whenever she was nervous, her mind would instantly unearth a cringeworthy anecdote and hurl it at the person she was trying to impress, as if testing how much humiliation they could withstand before fleeing. The worst was the time in sixth grade, during the Valentine’s dance, when her crush, Kevin Pyle, asked if she wanted to go to his house to watch Star Wars, and she told him that her neighbor Miss Carol’s rabbit, Luke Skyhopper, “eats his own poop for nutrients.” She hadn’t even realized she was saying the words until the uncomfortable silence that followed was broken by Kevin’s “Um, cool?” and his hasty reroute to the snack table. Later, she’d found out that her story had made the rounds at school, earning her the nickname Doo Doo Cottontail, a title she bore until the last day of seventh grade.
Still, Poppy had always believed that nervousness was something she’d outgrown, like her childhood lisp or her fear of escalators. And yet here she was, heart stampeding, mouth running wild, and every cell in her body vibrating with the certainty that she had never met a man like AJ in her life.
It was a little disconcerting to realize that, after years of emotional armor, she was right back where she started, crushed out, over-sharing, and barely able to control her own appendages. Who knew that all it would take was one Greek god, with a voice that vibrated in her chest like a bass-heavy playlist, to reduce her to a hormonal soup? Well, her mother had probably predicted it. Kerri Wilson had spent most of Poppy’s adolescence warning her that the right man would one day “turn your insides to pudding and your IQ to alphabet soup.”
AJ grinned in amusement as he put his hands on Poppy’s waist and pulled her into him with a gentle force that caused a tiny shock of bliss to explode in her core. The world narrowed to the pressure of his palms against her dress and the electric current that zinged up her spine as she looped her arms around his neck. She could feel the heat of his skin through the fabric, the solidness of his chest.
They began to sway back and forth as Tessa circled them, snapping photos.
After several rotations, Tessa declared, “Okay, thanks, guys! You were amazing! We got it!”
Without speaking, they both continued to dance. Being in AJ’s arms felt like discovering a new law of physics, one where her body’s gravitational center slid out of her own chest and installed itself somewhere in his. Every nerve ending in Poppy’s skin seemed rewired to tune in to every micro-motion he made, the flex of his hands at her waist, and the slow, deliberate tightening of his hold that told her she belonged right where she was. She could feel the rise and fall of his breathing, the steady, subtle pulse of his heart, and the way their bodies fit together as if they’d been designed as complementary puzzle pieces. The music was only background noise, she couldn’t even register the melody, only the low thud of the bass that synced up with herheartbeat and the shivery hush of his breath as it moved beside her ear.
She’d danced with men before, plenty of them—slow dances, dirty dances, line dances, she even took swing and salsa dancing classes with Ronnie—but none had come close to this. There was no adjustment for balance, no awkward shuffle, and no confusion about who was leading. AJ was in control of this dance, and she was happily the follower. It was as if they shared a secret choreography, each movement translated in a silent language.
His palm shifted to her lower back. His touch was steady, unyielding, but never possessive. His thumb stroked barely-there circles against her dress, the heat of his skin radiating through her ribs and straight into her bloodstream. She tried to focus on keeping her feet from tripping, her mouth from drooling, or otherwise embarrassing herself, but his presence kept short-circuiting her thoughts.
At one point, she let her eyes drift shut, letting the sensation of him, the weight and warmth and mysterious depth, fill her up. She’d half-expected some of the chemistry to dissipate when they weren’t pressed together thigh-to-thigh on a chair, but it didn’t. If anything, it intensified. She kept waiting for the awkwardness to set in, for the conversation to lag, or for him to pull back, but it never happened. He just held her, kept pace with her breathing, and when she unconsciously leaned in closer, he let her.
She tried to memorize every detail, the geometry of his body, the width of his shoulders, the way his jawline shadowed against the light, and the scent of his cologne mixed with the faint mineral tang of sweat and something else she couldn’t name but wanted to. She desperately wanted to remember this moment…the euphoria and electricity. It was so hard to think and not getcaught in the free-fall when it was all she could do just to hold on.
When the song ended, AJ took a step back. His hands dropped to his side, and her knees wobbled beneath her. She looked up at him and tried to catch her breath. She was panting like she’d just run a half K when all she’d done was slow dance to half a slow song.
“Your brother asked me to drive you home. I’ll be waiting for you outside when you’re ready to go.”
Poppy blinked up at him, convinced she must have blacked out for a few minutes and missed a crucial part of the conversation.
