“You can use it in your next book, if it’s not too much of a cliché. Don’t they all have shitty parents?”
“You’re thinking of dead parents. YA characters always havedeadparents.”
“Lucky them,” he says dryly. I snort-laugh in surprise, which makes him laugh again, and he wraps his arm around my shoulder and draws me into him. It feels like he’s placing a period at the end of a conversation that he’s dying to escape, and with his body pressed against mine, every nerve ending sparks to life.
We’ve almost made it to the end of Greek row when a couple tumbles out of the bushes, straightening their clothes and smoothing their messy hair. West blushes in the streetlight and turns his face away. My stomach riots at the sight of his pink-stained cheeks.
“No judgment on your life choices, but if you’d played things differently today, you could be having averydifferent kind of night,” I tease.
His eyes go wide. “What doesthatmean?”
“You could be in the bushes somewhere withBeth-any.”
He stops us in our tracks and drops his arm from my shoulders. When we make eye contact, I feel like I’m caught in a glue trap. “If I wanted to be with Bethany, I’d be with Bethany.”
I’m suddenly aware of all the blood in my body, pulsing faster than before. “Well, what do you want?” I ask brazenly, summoning heretofore unknown bravery.
His eyes flicker across my face as he runs his tongue along the inside of his cheek, thinking. He comes to a decision, and a wry smile appears at the corner of his lips. “Library,” he says with deadly precision.
“No!” I protest. “I won’t do it! You can’t make me. It’s too late. I—”
“Library,” he says again. “It’s close.” He tangles his fingers in mine, and I jog behind him, hissing a trail of protests at the back of his head.
“I can’t study now. I’ve hit my limit,” I whisper as we step over the threshold and a gust of icy air-conditioning hits my bare skin and the scent of old paper and books fills my lungs. “It won’t work. My brain is a black hole.” I whine my way up the steps to the third floor, right until the moment West pulls me into the empty stacks and my words die in my throat.
I glance at the shelves next to us—biographies—and register the goose bumps prickling at the back of my neck. West licks his bottom lip. He looks nervous and determined all at once, and it dawns on me that he’s not thinking about trigonometry.
His fingers press into my skin as he reaches under the strap of my bag and slides it off my shoulder. It hits the floor with a spine-tingling thud. The air between us is thick with unspoken words, like the moment just before a storm. It’s heavy with something inevitable.
“Ask me again,” he says in a whisper so quiet I might have imagined it.
Because I’m focused entirely on the shrinking spaces between us, it takes a moment to remember, but when I do, I whisper back, “What do you want, West?”
The amber rings in his eyes are nearly swallowed by his pupils. “I suck at talking. Can I show you?”
I couldn’t answer even if I knew what to say. I’m trapped in his gaze, an insistent hum of want stripping me of verbal dexterity. A linguistic blank where my brain used to be.
I can only nod. He takes half a step toward me, and I take half a step back until my spine hits bookshelves. I silently curse my nerves, because now West is looking at me with an arched brow. I’m inexperienced at this and too awkward by half. Exasperated with myself, I exhale a laugh as he watches me carefully.Waiting. My tongue darts out to lick my lips, and his eyes follow the movement. I nod again, hoping he understands what the gesture means.
His expression softens in apparent understanding, and his hands come up to rest on the shelves on either side of my head, bracketing me in. He tips his head down, and his lips presslightly against mine before he pulls back. “I wanted to do that,” he says, answering a question I asked in a different lifetime. A lifetime where I had not yet been kissed by West Emerson.
He leans in again, his thumb brushing the mole above my lip before he peppers hot, openmouthed kisses against my lips. Once. Twice. Three times. He swipes his questioning tongue across my lower lip, and I realize that he iskissingme while I stand frozen. I gasp, opening my mouth for him, and when his tongue slips between my teeth, his left hand moves from the bookshelf to slide into my hair, angling my face up toward him. When he starts to pull back, an embarrassing protest comes from my mouth, and I clutch the front of his shirt and pull him toward me, chasing his tongue with my own.
He exhales a laugh, and I feel his smile under my lips. It only lasts a second before he’s kissing me again, his mouth relentless. We stay locked in this position until my fingers ache from grasping his shirt and my spine hurts from digging into the bookshelf, but I won’t be the one to break the heady contact, and I don’t know how to maneuver us into a new position. My free hand itches to touch him, to run my fingers up his chest and over his throat, but I’m not brave enough to do it, so it hangs limply by my side. I’ll give up breathing if it means we get to keep doing this, kissing until we pass out, with West’s fingers tangled in the hair at the nape of my neck and his lips firmly on mine.
He pulls back for air, too soon and nearly too late, and heaves in a jagged breath. He rests his forehead against mine as I force oxygen to return to my vital organs.
“You could have done that outside,” I murmur, bringing us back to a conversation I barely remember.
Another smile breaks across his face, and I get to see thisone. It strikes like lightning, brief but brilliant. “Not the way I want to,” he whispers. This time I’m ready, and I push up to my toes to meet his mouth. My arms wrap around his neck, and his hand drops from the bookshelf. His palm flattens across my lower back, pressing us together. My chest and hips flatten against his body.
“You’re not a fan of PDA. Noted,” I say, silently marveling at the contrast: the restraint that brought us across campus to this private spot in the library and the utter dissolution of it now.
“I’m a fan of anything that involves you, Jupiter,” he breathes between kisses. “I’ll kiss you anywhere you let me.”
I feel like I’m on fire; West is singeing all my edges. It’s the best kiss I’ve ever had in my life, and that thought has me pulling away with a gasp. “I’ve been doing it all wrong.”
He narrows his eyes. “I really beg to differ.”
