“Any time you feel like explaining…?” Aiden says from beneath me, and my eyes snap open again.
“I just wanted to know how to best break in through a window,” I say, sniffling.
“Is this another experiment for your book?” he says.
I let my head drop, my face squishing into his shoulder. Maybe that will hide the flush of embarrassment. “Yes,” I say. Then I add, “You smell stupidly good.” Which somehow makes me feel worse. If I’m going to need rescuing, the least he could do is not be so freaking hot all the time. Level that playing field a bit.
“Next time you’re going to do research for a novel, tell me first,” he says. “So I can have the fire department ready.”
I give his shoulder a good whack, but I smile, too.
My smile inexplicably widens when I feel his hand patting my back, warm and firm. “Come on,” he murmurs, his lips no more than a hair’s breadth from my ear. “Get up. Unless you’re planning to stay there?”
“Just one more minute,” I say, taking another whiff of him. “You’re comfortable and you smell good. And…everything hurts,” I admit.
“One more minute,” he says with a sigh. When I lift my head to look at him, though, there’s a spark of amusement in his eyes, a little smirk on his lips.
“What’s that for?” I say quickly. “You’re smirking. There’s nothing funny here.”
“Yes, there is,” he says, his voice bland. “You got stuck in a bathroom window, landed on top of me, and then shamelessly told me how good I smell and how comfortable I am to lie on top of. I could tease you about this for years, and it still wouldn’t get old.”
I prop myself up on my elbows so that my upper body hovers over him by a couple inches—just enough that I can deliver a nice glare. “You wouldn’t dare,” I say, my eyes narrowed.
But that’s a stupid thing to say. Of course he would dare.
“I absolutely would,” he says—so there’s that suspicion confirmed. His little smirk tugs wider. “Did you not hear me? You werestuck in a window.In thebathroom.What part of that isn’t funny?”
“At least I don’t have mashed potatoes in my ears,” I say with a smirk of my own. “Unless that’s some sort of mold…?”
Aiden’s face morphs into a scowl, and hereaches both of his hands up. “Stupid high schoolers. I thought I got it all out the other day—which ear?”
“That one,” I say, nudging his right ear with my nose.
“Fine,” he says, pulling his sleeve over his hand and using it to rub furiously at the inside of his ear. “Fine. Maybe I have mashed potato in my ear. Butyou”—his other hand reaches down and pokes me in the side, causing me to yelp—“you called yourself a pear. I’m not the only strange one in this room.”
“Hey,” I say hotly. “Pear-shapedis a widely accepted term. Nine out of ten women would know exactly what I meant.”
Aiden snorts, a puff of breath I feel against my lips. There’s something challenging in his gaze, though, a spark of daring that appears two seconds before I feel them: his hands, on either side of me, starting at the outside of my hips and trailing lightly up until they reach my ribcage.
He never strays from his path up my sides, never drifts into territory that would earn him a knee to the groin, but his touch is full of fire nonetheless—though not even his fingertips burn as hot as his eyes. “There’s nothing pear-shaped about you,” he says.?*
“Careful.” I drop the word into the suddenly silent space between us, my heart thundering. “You’re moving awfully close to flirtatious.”
“At least I don’t go around telling people how good they smell,” he says, and there’s that smirk again.
“It’s called a compliment,” I fire back. “It’s part of beingniceandsocial.”
His hands tighten around my ribcage, pulling a little gasp from me, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “I can be nice,” he says as his eyes blaze hotter, full of thatstupid defiance that makes me want to slap him and kiss him at the same time. “I can be social.”
“I doubt it,” I say with a snort. “You sit around on the weekends reading Shakespeare?—”
“Shakespeare was a brilliant storyteller?—”
“He had a cute little earring, just like you,” I coo, leaning down a few inches and nudging his ear with my nose again.
“And maybe he went around licking his roommates, too,” Aiden shoots back immediately. There’s a breathless quality to his voice, and his hands tighten further around my ribcage.
Does he even realize what he’s doing? Does he realize that he’s trying to pull me closer as the fire in our words burns hotter?
