All the move really did was press their backs together— and so tightly it seemed incredibly intrusive to her. She could actually feel him breathing. Slow, enormous-seeming breaths, as if he were some big prehistoric beast slumbering beside her.
Or, at least, shethoughthe was slumbering.
Until he made it crystal clear he wasn’t.
“You’re trembling,” he said, so sudden into the still darkness she came fairly close to gasping. Then she had to somehow scramble for an excuse for this deep betrayal her body was putting her through.
“Because it’s cold.”
“It isswelteringin here. I feel like I’m in a sauna.”
“Well, maybe that’s just you. Maybe you just run hot.”
“Or maybe I’m lying next to the little engine that could.”
She scrunched up her face, mortified. It took her a good ten seconds to come up with the fury she needed. “If you’re trying to say that I’m unnaturally overheated—” she burst out. But damn, he cut her off fast.
“I wasn’t trying to say anything. Those are just the facts. You’re so warm it feels like a fever against my back, and you’re trembling hard enough it’s makingmyteeth chatter. So tell me why,” he said, and just as she was about to fumble out some silly excuse, he supplied his own. “You afraid of being in here with me?”
And he meant it, too.
He sounded almost cut up about it, damn him.
“Of course not. I don’t even see why I would be.”
“Because I touched you. I touched you.”
“I think I’ll survive a hand on my shoulder.”
“It wasn’t just a hand on your shoulder and you know it.”
She had to look at him then. But all she could see when she did was darkness and the barest hint of his back. No sign at all that he wasn’t being serious, even though he was saying some really silly shit. “You didn’t mean to grab me like that. I was falling out of the truck,” she said, baffled.
He didn’t accept the bafflement, however.
“Still, though, I got hold of a lot of you. And very close to some inappropriate places. If you had shifted a little I would have probably had a handful of things I shouldn’t ever have a handful of.”
“But that didn’t happen.”
“It could have.”
“Coulddoesn’t mean anything.”
“I’m just saying, if you’re feeling a little nervous of me—”
“I’m not, all right, I’m not. Honestly IwishI was.”
“Why the fuck would you wish a thing like that?”
Don’t, she ordered herself. But she was just too flustered and annoyed to listen. “Because then you wouldn’t be asking me these questions. I would just be me and you would just be you and things would be as they always were. Instead of everything feeling all mixed up and upside down. My mind telling me one thing, my body registering something else altogether,” she said, all in a hot rush. No thought going into the words at all.
Though she thought about them alotonce they were out.
And apparently, so did he. He took what felt like anexcruciating age to respond. She almost snapped somewhere in the middle of him clearly going over it all, inch by inch, and told him she hadn’t meant any of that the way it sounded.I’m not into you, she thought about saying.
Just as he acted as if she weretotallyinto him.
“Jesus Christ. Are you saying your bodylikedwhat I did?” he said, and to his credit he seemed absolutely flabbergasted by this fact. She felt him shift, too—like he was trying to look over his shoulder at her for any massive signs that she had gone completely round the bend.
