She puts her hand on my chest and says, softly:
“You’re really not my type.”
That knocks the wind out of me. I drop my arms from around her waist and take a sudden, uncertain step backward.
She cringes, covers her face with both hands. “I don’t—wow— I don’t mean you’re not mytype.” She shakes her head, hard. “I just mean I don’t normally— I don’t usually do this.”
“Do what?” I say, still wounded.
“This,” she says, and gestures between us. “I don’t— I don’t, like, just go around kissing guys I barely know.”
“Okay.” I frown. “Do you want to leave?”
“No.” Her eyes widen.
“Then what do you want?”
“I don’t know,” she says, and her eyes go soft again. “I kind of just want to look at you for a minute. I meant what I said about your face,” she says, and smiles. “You have a great face.”
I go suddenly weak in the knees. I literally have to sit down. I walk over to my bed and collapse backward, myhead hitting the pillow. It feels too good to be horizontal. If there weren’t a gorgeous woman in my room right now, I’d be asleep already.
“Just so you know, this is not a move,” I say, mostly to the ceiling. “I’m not trying to get you to sleep with me. I just literally had to lie down. Thank you for appreciating my face. I’ve always thought I had an underappreciated face.”
She laughs, hard, and sits next to me, teetering on the edge of the bed, near my arm. “You’re really not what I was expecting,” she says.
I peer at her. “What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know.” She shakes her head. Smiles at me. “I guess I wasn’t expecting to like you so much.”
My chest goes tight. Too tight. I force myself to sit up, to meet her eyes.
“Come here,” I say. “You’re too far away.”
She kicks off her boots and shifts closer, folding her legs up underneath her. She doesn’t say a word. Just stares at me. And then, carefully, she touches my face, the line of my jaw. My eyes close, my mind swimming with nonsense. I lean back, rest my head against the wall behind us. I know it doesn’t say much for my self-confidence that I’m so surprised this is happening, but I can’t help it.
I never thought I’d get this lucky.
“Kenji,” she says softly.
I open my eyes.
“I can’t be your girlfriend.”
I blink. Sit up a little. “Oh,” I say.
It hadn’t occurred to me until exactly this moment that I might even want something like that, but now that I’m thinking about it, I know that I do. A girlfriend is exactly what I want. I want a relationship. I want something real.
“It would never work, you know?” She tilts her head, looks at me like it’s obvious, like I know as well as she does why things would never work out between us. “We’re not—” She motions between our bodies to indicate something I don’t understand. “We’re so different, right? Plus, I don’t even live here.”
“Right,” I say, but my mouth feels suddenly numb. My whole face feels numb. “You don’t even live here.”
And then, just as I’m trying to figure out how to pick up the pieces of my obliterated hopes and dreams, she climbs into my lap. Zero to sixty. My body malfunctions. Overheats.
She presses her face into my cheek and kisses me, softly, just underneath my jaw, and I feel myself melt into the wall, into the air.
I don’t understand what’s happening anymore. She likes me but she doesn’t want to be with me. She’s not going to be with me but she’s going to sit on my lap and kiss me into oblivion.
Sure. Okay.
