He paused in his tickling to glare down at me. “Twenty? You think with a face like this, I really didn’t get a kiss until I was twenty?”
Before I could respond, he started tickling me again. “Fifteen! Fifteen!” I cried.
“Bingo.” He released my wrists and squeezed beside me. We hardly fit there, side by side. “Scoot over, girl, or I’ll fall off.”
“Serves you right,” I said, but I turned onto my side and made as much room for him as I could.
Ollie turned on his side to face me. Between him and the back of the couch, I felt warmer than I ever had in my entire life. Even warmer than the day Xav had married us on the boat. All I could think about was how long his eyelashes were, how close his face was to mine, how close all of him was to all of me. His breath smelled like the mint tea cooling on the coffee table. Christmas was only a few weeks away. I’d have to see if I could find him a nice gift. He’d once said he preferred loose-leaf tea but found it too messy during charter season. Maybe I could get him one of those tea balls we’d seen in the new tea shop downtown. When we’d gone there last week, Ollie had grabbed a tea ball in each hand and asked me which of his balls I liked better. I laughed at the memory.
“What’s so funny?” Ollie said.
“Tea balls,” I whispered, unable to bite back the smile on my face.
“I should’ve known you were thinking about balls,” he whispered back.
“Why?”
“That’s your thinking-about-balls smile,” he said.
“I don’t have a thinking-about-balls smile.”
“But now you will. Every time you think about balls, you’ll remember this conversation and smile, and it’ll be your thinking-about-balls smile.”
He brushed a thumb along my cheek, pausing at the corner of my mouth.
“Why are we whispering about balls?” I said. At his touch, a feelingI wasn’t sure I could name pressed against my ribs, sharp and good and almost painful. I wanted more.
“I don’t know. You’re the one who started whispering about balls.”
I didn’t know what the hell we were talking about. The words were nothing but filler. The real conversation was in the gentle pressure of his thumb at the corner of my mouth, in the way my chest (really, I had never been more aware of being braless) pressed against his with each breath I took.
Ollie ran his thumb over my bottom lip. “Do you think we’ll pull off the interview?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, hyperaware of how he watched my mouth move against his thumb.
He lifted his eyes to meet mine. “How can you be so sure?”
“Gut feeling.”
His hand drifted down the side of my neck, his touch so light it raised goose bumps on my skin. “Are you cold?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a million degrees in here.”
“If we get caught, I could be banned from entering the US for ten years. What will you do then?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, unable to imagine anything outside of Ollie’s hand running up and down the side of my neck. “Take a nap? Go to jail? Add to the impossible amount of debt I have already?”
Ollie’s hand stilled. “You can change your mind,” he said. “You don’t have to go through with this.”
“I want to go through with it,” I said. I wanted a lot of things at that moment. “We’re really not lyingthatmuch.”
“But the lies we’re telling are felonies.”
“What if...” I said, then let the words die. The idea was awful. It was the worst idea I’d ever had. It didn’t even make sense. But right then, with Ollie’s hand back in motion, gliding down my neck to myarm, and then along my side, everything he’d said about me still reverberating in my head, it didn’tfeellike the worst idea.
“What if what?” Ollie asked.
“What if we... took a few lies out of the equation?”
