Definitely not disappointmentat all.
What the actual fuck?
I lean against the door, letting my head fall back as I pinch my eyes shut, lifting my hand to press my fingers against my lips that are still humming with the rough touch of stubble and warm skin left behind by his cheek.
It’s probably the most chaste seeming kiss I’ve given anyone since I was fourteen and kissed Tyson Lewis behind the school cafeteria.
The first time, not the second… Which is totally beside the point.
What isnottotally beside the point is, considering the seeming chasteness of that kiss, why do I feel like I can feel Jesse’s touch spreading out over every last inch of my body?
And, far more importantly than that,what the hell am I doing?
Because it’s not just that kiss and the totally, ridiculously overblown reaction I’m having to it.
Fuck, but I know better. I know better than to let myself feelanythinglike this.
The lessons I’d thought I’d learned from watching my mom’s life implode around us may not have ended up sticking, but the lessons I learned in Tucson sure as hell did, and I’m not about to forget them. Three years might not seem like much, but in those three years, I’ve left behind every last piece of that stupid-ass nineteen-year-old who thought he was tough shit but turned out to be nothing better than a starry-eyed kid, ready to make the same goddamn mistakes I’d always promised myself I’d never make.
Behind my closed eyes, the image of Jesse’s shy, eager face appears, framed by his sun-bright, un-styled hair, and I can’t hold back a frustrated groan, ‘cause no matter how hard I try, I can’t help believing he actually is everything he seems. Sweet, kind, genuine.
And maybe he is. The trouble is, if he reallyisall that, there’s no way in hell someone likehimcould ever actually want more than one thing from someone like me.
Is there?
Not that it matters. Because I sure as fuck don’t want anything more than that either. Not really, when it comes down to it. Just ‘cause Jesse makes me feel all warm and cozyand like Icouldwant something more, doesn’t mean I actually do, or ever will.
‘Cause I won’t. Not ever.
No matter how much his sweet kindness and that mussed-up-unknowingly-sexy thing he has going on try and trick me into thinking otherwise.
Obviously, that’s all that happened before, out there on the doorstep.
Right?
11
Jesse
Well, I’ve done it. I’ve checked the box and can tell Alex he doesn’t have to unleash Todd on me.
That is the one thing I do know for sure about tonight.
The rest though? I’ve spent the last half hour compulsively running through every detail of the evening in my head, trying to understand what exactly happened.
Despite the quick and rather panicked kiss Tristan planted on my cheek as he all but fled my presence, I’m definitely more than seventy-five percent sure that things did not end well, and now I’m plagued with a compulsion to determine, if that’s the case, what I did that made things fall flat. Other than simply being my awkward, boring self, that is.
Something, okay,many somethings—from his obviously overflowing stores of confidence to his easy flirtatiousness—tells me that Tristan is not the type to get flustered and up in his head with nerves over a simple little goodnight peck on the cheek. Given his obvious state of alarm on the porch and the fact that I’m pretty sure he literally pushed me away afterward, this only leaves me with the explanation that he just wanted to get the hell away from me as fast as possible.
And if that is the case, the most probable cause of the lookhe got in his eyes, right before he scrambled away from me and into his apartment, was that I had so obviously and so stupidly misinterpreted him telling me to go home and warm up, thinking instead he was inviting me in.
I have to press my lips together to stifle a groan of mortification at my next thought—that I’d actually believed he wanted me to kiss him, likeactually kisshim. That maybe, when he realized what I was about to do, he was so horrified that he couldn’t get away fast enough. That it might have been that he’d felt obligated to placate me with that quick peck before fleeing.
And then, with a gut-wrenching lurch of embarrassment, my thoughts fix on the explanation I’d given of my dissertation.
Not that things probably would have gone differently if I hadn’t done it, but who the fuck thinks torture, the dead bodies of hanged people being burned, and explanations of garroting are normal first date conversation material?
True, Tristan had actually seemed interested when I was explaining the less macabre details of my research to him, but he’s Tristan. He’s sweet and polished and so damn good at being good at things that he was probably just being polite and humoring the weird, creepy loser he’d suddenly realized I am.
