“She’s a good person. I care about her, as a friend. But she’s from another world, I guess. I thought, for a while, that I might try to fit into it, but we weren’t for each other. You knew it as well as we both did.” He pauses, strokes my hand, takes a breath. “As for your letters . . . well. Maybe I am glad to hear you’re reconsidering the things you sometimes hide, but my frustration last week, it was not about you. It was about—”
“New York,” I finish for him. “That’s three.”
He looks down at our joined hands. “New York,” he repeats. For the first time in this numbers game, Reid looks well and truly unsure.I’m leaving New York, he’d said to me once, and I don’t think all the games in the world could make him stay.
“This is home for me. This is where I built a life. And you’re leaving.”
There’s a long pause, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t holding my breath. I’d be lying if I said my heart didn’t dip in disappointment at what he says when he speaks again.
“I’m here now.”
It’s an incomplete answer, a thing that won’t be fully resolved between us—not today, and probably not ever. He may be here now, but what he means is that he’s leaving later.
“I don’t want to stop seeing you,” he adds. “I’d see you any way you wanted. Only the walks, if that’s all I can have.”
It’s not all you can have. The thought is immediate, but I say nothing, not yet. This will hurt, after all; I can tell already. I can have gone through all this work to make it so both of us stay—last night, this morning, anything that happens from this moment on—but in the end, he’ll still leave.
“It’ll probably never work,” I say quietly, but I also desperately, desperately want him to convince me. “We’re total opposites.”
The hand that’s not holding mine reaches out, and Reid sets a gentle finger to one of the buttons on my jacket.
“Letters, numbers,” he says, a familiar beat to the words, as though he’s sayingpo-tay-to, po-tah-to. “They’re not so different.”
I raise my eyes to his, and I’m not sure when we managed to get so close. Close enough that I can see the red-blond stubble along his jaw, close enough that I can smell my soap on his skin.
“Both codes,” he adds. Then he moves his finger, tucking it under the edge of the button, tugging gently. The movement exerts no pressure, but I still lean closer to him.
“That’s true,” I whisper, and when I raise my eyes to his I can see the heat there. I want that heat. I want it, and right now, it doesn’t matter to me if it’ll hurt someday soon. It doesn’t matter if this ends up being the fight of my life.
“We could do it on the count of three,” I say, and he smiles, close-up and perfect and so, so sexy.
“This is your game.” He leans in, but he doesn’t kiss me. He puts his mouth right against my temple. “Picture it,” he says, and somehow, I know exactly what he means. A code between us, the way we first talked to each other, even before we knew each other. My letters, and his ability to read them.
“One,” he says.
And I see it,o-n-e, theoshaped in that space of skin between my hairline and the outer edge of my eyebrow, a looping, upward curve connection to the scriptnI’m imagining over the arch of that brow, which is where the feather-light touch of Reid’s lips has moved. Theeat the bridge of my nose, a slim, delicate, terminal curve that fades away rather than ending.
My breath shudders between my parted lips.
“Two.”
He shifts, lets his lips rest softly against my cheekbone, and instead of pressing them there, he rubs them back and forth once, as light as a strand of my own hair in the wind, and I see that word, too, drawn in the same pink that’s the color of my natural blush, the pink I turn when I’m warm or embarrassed or aroused. Thet, thew, theo, all of them a heavily sloped italic. All of them on the way to somewhere.
“Reid,” I whisper, and he moves his head back, traces his eyes over the spots where he kissed before looking into mine.
“May I?” he whispers back, and I let my eyes slide closed at this—the mannered, magnetic,Masterpiece Theatreperfection of it.
I nod.
“Three,” he says, but I don’t see any of those letters. I only feel the press of Reid’s perfect lips against mine, and as soon as it happens, I know. I know that I could have my eyes closed this way and I’d still know Reid’s kiss anywhere, because Reid’s kiss is everything I like about Reid—firm and direct, with a sweetness you have to know to truly recognize. He sets one of his big, warm hands to the side of my neck, his palm pressing against the network of veins where the blood rushes to the surface for him, but with his thumb he lightly strokes the line of my jaw. His lips on mine tell me he wants more than a chaste, closemouthed kiss, but he waits until my tongue slips over his bottom lip to give me his own, and once he does, he makes that soft groan I’ve heard him make before, but this,thisis the perfect version of it, the one I’ll hear in my dreams for days and days.
I scoot toward him, moving to wrap my arms around his neck, and I’m barely thinking—barely thinking that we’re in the park, that we’re inpublic, that at any second some disgruntled jogger might shout a well-deservedGet a room!I kiss him and kiss him, my body growing desperate to get closer to him.
“This is the best game,” I breathe between kisses, my chest rising and falling quickly. I’m practically panting out here, but I don’t care. I want to keep his lips on mine; I want our tongues tangling; I want to press my whole self against him, and—unlike last night—I want to really feel it this time.
“Meg,” he says, his forehead resting against mine, his own breaths coming faster now. “I have a number four.”
I stiffen, worried we’ll have to stop now, worried there’s something I’ve forgotten.
