Niko looked up at Tiana. “Zion messaged and said we should?—”
“I think I got the same one.” Tiana cut him off as she turned her phone around, revealing Zion had sent her the identical message. “What do you think his plan is?”
“I have no idea. I had dinner at Frankie and Liam’s last night, and Zion was there. I told them about our…arrangement, and he seemed to be very excited about the idea of fucking with Brock about it. But we don’t have to?—”
“Honestly, I’d rather just get it over with,” she blurted out as she shook her head and stuffed her phone back in her jacket pocket. “I’ve spent the past two days with a pit in my stomach, expecting to see him every time I turn a corner or the door opens on my studio. At least now this will be on my terms.”
Niko could see that she wasn’t happy about the prospect of seeing her ex, but he was glad he would be there by her side.
“Are you sure you want to do this now, with me, asus?” His question was loaded, and she knew what he was asking. She’d agreed to this ‘fake relationship,’ but this was go-time. Did she actually want to go through with it?
Her nerves were obvious as she pulled her plump lower lip between her teeth. He didn’t realize he was holding his breath until she nodded and he exhaled.
His chest filled with pride that she trusted him enough to be his fake girlfriend. It was strange that Niko felt honored to be her fake boyfriend. As they made the short walk to the coffee shop from the retirement home along the river up past the yoga studio, Niko could feel Tiana’s nervous energy radiating off of her with each step she took, it increased tenfold.
“How’s your grandfather feeling? I heard he was under the weather,” he said, trying to distract her.
She hesitated for a split second, as if she was about to share something, but then decided against it. “He’s doing better, thanks.”
Disappointment sank in his gut. He wanted to be the one she trusted to share everything with, instead of having to carry it all on her own, because as an outsider looking in, that’s exactly what it looked like she was doing.
As they crossed Main Street, Niko could feel her anxiety winding tighter and tighter. He wished he could do something, anything, to calm her down, that he could absorb all of her tension into his own body, that he could protect her from her own brain chemistry. At this point, he would settle for just being able to pull her into a hug for support.
When they approached the door, he noticed out of his peripheral vision that Gianna was seated in the corner of the shop with Brock. He would put money on the fact that Tiana had no clue they were being watched, or that her face looked like she was being marched to her execution.
Niko knew that he couldn’t let her walk into the shop in the state she was in. Making a split-second, executive decision, he wrapped his fingers around her wrist and pulled, spinning her around and into him. She gasped, looking up at him in pure shock at the suddenness of his actions. He took advantage of her momentary shock, kept one arm snaked around her lower back, trapping her body firmly against his, wrapped his hand around the back of her neck, and tightened his fingers, tilting her head back as he lowered his mouth to hers.
His plan had been to press a soft, chaste kiss to her lips. Nothing too much. Just intimate enough to show that they were more than friends, more than casually dating. That they were at the PDA stage in the relationship.
The thing was, the moment his lips touched hers, something happened.
Niko had always thought of himself as a man with a highly developed sense of self-preservation. He’d survived Yaya’s experimental old-country home remedies, dodgeball at Costasfamily reunions, and coaches who drove grown men to tears and therapy. He was unflappable, unshakable, and a glutton for every kind of torment, except the emotional kind.
But the second his lips met Tiana’s, the scaffolding of his identity crumbled like a sandcastle in the tide. There wasn’t just heat, though there was a lot of heat, the kind that made the tips of his ears tingle and his knees threaten to buckle, there was an actual full-body paralysis. If he’d been standing on the edge of a cliff, he would have toppled over with no awareness of the void beneath. If a meteor had obliterated Main Street in that instant, he would have died happy and blissfully ignorant. The world existed only in the microscopic space between their mouths and the way Tiana’s breath hitched against his cheek when he tilted his head a little to the left to give him better access to her.
He’d planned for a symbolic, scenery-setting PR stunt of a kiss. What he got instead was a supernova detonating in his skull, a rupture in the spacetime continuum reconfiguring all his previous ideas about desire.
Her mouth was soft against his but insistent, demanding, lips slick and warm as they moved together. The heat of her tongue sent electricity down his spine, her mouth working against his with bruising pressure. Her lips were fever-hot, the slide of her tongue against his turning his knees to water.
She made a small noise in the back of her throat, half-sigh, half-growl, that vibrated between them, causing every cell in his body to light up with awareness. Their breathing had gone ragged, quick gasps stolen between the collision of run-on kisses. A deep, guttural moan ripped from his chest, which should have embarrassed him but only made him pull her closer, his arms tightening around her.
Tiana responded with a fierceness so raw that it caused him to lose any sense of self-control. Where he expected resistance, he found her matching him, tongue against tongue, her bodyarching to close the gap, her hands clutching at his coat in a desperate, greedy fist. He had a flash, a cinematic split-second, of what it would be like to have her like this forever, this woman who was wary of letting anyone in, who wore her independence like chainmail, now pressed head-to-toe against him, making noises that shorted out all the higher functions of his brain. He couldn’t remember ever being kissed like this, like someone was starving and he was the only thing that could stave off hunger, like this moment was the only one that mattered and every previous kiss in his life was just rehearsal.
Dimly, through the blood roaring in his ears, he registered that they were in public, on a sidewalk in full view of Brewed Awakenings’ broad front window, and possibly a passing church group or a flock of impressionable children. But he couldn’t bring himself to care. The world had faded to grayscale—no Golden Years, no Brock and Gianna, no strategy or ruse, or even the possibility of his own humiliation. There was only the taste of Tiana, coffee, citrus lip balm, the faintest trace of wintergreen from her last breath mint, and the way her hair tangled in his fingers as he deepened the kiss, unable to stop himself even if he’d wanted to.
Someone cleared their throat loudly behind him, and a deep voice sounded, “Excuse me.”
The man’s request broke through the fog that Niko was floating in, causing him to reluctantly break the kiss, lifting his head up. The moment their lips were no longer touching, reality came crashing down around him. He realized where he was, what he was doing, and why he’d just kissed Tiana Matthews.
He gently guided her to the side, allowing the man who cleared his throat to pass. Her eyes lifted up to his, heavy lidded. If someone gave her a roadside sobriety test, he wasn’t convinced she would pass. Her raspberry lips were swollen, andevery cell in his body was alive with the knowledge that he’d been the one to make her look drunk and branded with his kiss.
Knowing that they still had an audience, he lowered his forehead down and rested it on hers. “I had to make an audible, we had an audience. We still do.”
“What?” she asked as her breaths came in short pants, sounding dazed and confused.
He moved to press a soft kiss to her neck, not because he needed to, just because he wanted to, before he whispered in her ear. “Brock. He’s at the corner table looking out the window watching us.” Then he returned his head to press against hers.
“Oh, right.” She nodded her head against his forehead, both their breaths still coming in short pants. “Okay, yeah.”
