Ask me, I think.Please, please ask me.
“Jess,” he whispers, followed by an endless, throbbing pause. “Can I ki—”
I press onto my toes, already nodding. He doesn’t finish his question.
He wraps his arms around my waist and lifts me to him.
Then he sets his mouth to mine.
He kisses like the most impossible dream, a study in perfect contradiction. Soft and firm. Searching and assured. Eager and patient.
He kisses like Adam: this huge, hard slab of a man who is somehow the most gentle person I’ve ever met.
When my tongue traces the lush curve of his lower lip, he tightens his hold and makes a low sound from his chest that rumbles through me, settling between my legs. I press as close as I can; I slide my fingers against the short hairs at the back of his head.
Either my kiss is magic or Adam has had a miraculous recovery from his earlier unsteadiness, because as his tongue slides against mine, the lines of his body transform in some ineffable way—he’s planting himself, growing roots that go straight through the surface of the mat and deep down into the ground. It’s the most obvious display of strength I’ve ever felt from him, and having it against me is intoxicating, a shot of something totally pure to my bloodstream. For a second I think I must be dizzy with it, losing my balance, but no—that’s just Adam, bending his knees the slightest, sturdiest amount and running his big hands lower on my hips, around to the backs of my thighs.
In a smooth second I’m up and then around him, my ankles hooked at the base of his spine, and then he lowers us both to the mat in a slow, steady squat, somehow keeping our mouths fused, somehow keeping our teeth from knocking awkwardly together.
When we’re settled in it—me in his lap, his thighs and knees a cradle for my back, my smile breaks through the kiss, a clumsy interference after all those perfectly executed moves.
Adam murmurs his curiosity against my mouth. “What?”
“That was so athletic,” I say, then kiss him again, through his quiet chuckle.
“I came out of retirement for you.”
He ducks his head and shoves his hands through my hair roughly, tilting my head back and pressing his face against my throat. I know he feels my answering laugh, the happy vibration of it down the column of my neck. He opens his mouth against it, his tongue tracing up, and it may be absolutely impossible to be serious on a trampoline, but it is not at all impossible to be sexy.
At least it’s not impossible for Adam Hawkins.
When his mouth meets mine again, we kiss with new intensity, something so . . .determinedabout it. Maybe it’s that we’ve got to keep ourselves mostly still to keep this from turning ridiculous; maybe it’s that we’re worried what we’ll start thinking of if we stop. It is so fully the best kiss of my life that it must be the only kiss I’ve ever had, and I guess, in a way, it is—ten years since my last one, and ten years ago I was a different Jess.
This is my first kiss fully grown, fully an adult. It’s not an experiment or a distraction or a forfeit for a night out.
This kiss is achoice.
It is hot and perfect and all mine.
Until that screen door bangs again, and Adam and I freeze. Clutch each other and stopbreathingfreeze. If that’s Tegan, I don’t know what I’ll do.
I don’t know what I’ve done.
“Uncle Adaaaaaaaaaammmmm!” comes a bright, extraordinarily loud voice—Ginny’s voice, if I’m recognizing right from all the delighted screaming she did before Beth and Adam showed up here. She sounds as if she’s been sent on a mission, and that must mean we’ve been out here longer than anyone expected us to be.
I push myself off his lap.
And sure, I bounce.
But suddenly, I don’t feel all that funny anymore.
“Mom says you hafta come in here and help Daddy with the—!” Ginny breaks off, and I look at Adam.
He’s looking at me as if he hasn’t heard a thing. As if my heavy breathing is the only sound in the world.
“I forgot what!” Ginny screams into the night, and then the door bangs again, leaving us in stunned, serious silence. I drop my eyes away from Adam’s searching gaze.
Apart from the heat of his body, the pressure of his mouth—I’m returning to factory settings. Little mechanisms inside me turning and locking down tight. It’s the opposite of a choice.
