“It’s a little bit the point.” He cocked one brow.
“The point is that ‘trust me’ covers a lot of territory, and my brain went to every worst-case scenario before it considered the possibility that you might kiss me.” I let the memory hit me full force. “And I would like to officially state, for the record, that it was the single greatest surprise of my entire life, even better than making varsity as a freshman or my first touchdown at FSU.”
“Better than Rosa’scarnitas?”
“Don’t push it, Bolt Boy. Just take the win.”
He shoved me again, laughing.
I grabbed his hand before it left my shoulder andtraced a slow circle on his wrist—a gesture I’d discovered yesterday made his breath hitch in a devastating way.
It worked again.
“I’m really glad you kissed me,” I said.
“I’m really glad you kissed me back.”
“You can’t back a guy into a wall and kiss him and expect immediate processing,” I said. “There’s a loading time, like those old computers with their floppy disks.”
Something wicked crossed his face. “My disk is never floppy, so you know.”
I blinked.
Skyler Shaw—golden boy, captain, and possibly the most earnest human being I’d ever met had just made a dick joke.
On our first date.
While holding my hand.
I loved him immediately.
The thought arrived without warning or fanfare.
It bore into me like a mother’s gaze, sharp and knowing and wholly empathetic.
Fine, maybe love was too strong of a word at that point in our whatever-we-were, but the tug at my heart every time I was near him was so close to what I believed love felt like that I had no other word to use. Everything else felt too small.
“Yournot-so-floppy disk, eh?” I managed, burying the revelation under humor. “I like the sound of that.”
He turned redder than the pagodas on the takeout boxes.
“That’s the least romantic thing anyone haseversaid to me,” he mumbled.
“You want romantic? Fine. You’ll learn to be careful what you ask for.” I tugged his hand, pulling him closer. “When you kissed me, it felt like every singlething that had ever gone wrong in my life had been leading me to that exact moment. It felt as though every heartbreak and every lonely night was actually the universe clearing a path to you.”
Silence.
He stared at me.
Blinked.
Opened his mouth.
Closed it.
I wanted to crawl inside one of the empty takeout containers and die.
“Too much?” I asked.
