Mae thought she was possibly vibrating.
“When I tell you I thought I was obsessed with this man before,” Ben said across the table.
Mae didn’t know what to say, either during the performance or when Dell returned to the table, promptly putting on his coat and gesturing toward the door, eyes on hers.
Dear god.
She had truly just gotten wet from watching a person sing Wheatus. She was never going to forgive him.
“We’re going to go now,” she heard herself say, distantly, to Vik, whose lips were quivering with holding in their laughter.
“Yeah, you are,” they said.
And then she was up, and out, and the harsh night air revived her brain for a few precious seconds. Until Dell twined a hand through hers as they walked toward his truck, and she lost it again.
A second before they got there, before they separated for their respective doors, Dell pulled off some kind of clever maneuver that resulted in both of their hands grasped together, face to face. And with a tug and a push, Mae found her back against the metal of the driver side door, Dell’s stomach against her own, hands pinned just above her head. Mae couldn’t stifle the sound that escaped her at the relief of their bodies pressing together, everything she’d been aching to feel for so long, boiling up through her.
“Dell,” she said, needing to be honest, to finally get it out in the open. “Dell, I want you so badly.”
His face was in shadow; she couldn’t make out his expression. But the minute step he took, pressing their bodies even further together, said enough. She wanted to drag her hands away from his to slip underneath his clothes, to scratch his back, to squeeze his ass, to pull him, somehow, even closer than they already were, until she couldn’t tell where her body ended and his began.
“Mae,” he said, voice low, almost broken, breath hot against her cheek. Mae liked to imagine she could feel the rumble of that single syllable, vibrated from his chest to hers.
Her eyes drifted closed; she arched her neck. Dell groaned, and it wasn’t only her imagination this time. She felt it, his noises absorbed into her own skin, like they belonged there.
She was molten lava.
“Mae,” Dell said, voice strained. “I have a fisherman.”
It took a few long seconds for the words to process.
When they did, the lava plummeted, hot and icy all at once, through the cavern of her chest.
She had forgotten. She had somehowforgotten, in the heat of the moment, the blur of Moonie’s, that Dell already had someone.
She licked her lips.
“Your—your novelist is also a fisherman?”
A breath that might have been a laugh or a whimper, against her chin as Dell dipped his head.
“Yeah.” And it was hard to think against the force of her lust, but confusion began to pierce through. Because it was Dell’s hands, Dell’s body capturing hers against this truck. It had been Dell, singing to her inside, whispering in her ear. Dell who offered to come to Portland with Mae in the first place.
Mae hadtoldDell about Becks, about how shitty her history with cheating made her feel. What was he—what was?—
“But Mae, it’s?—”
A shot rang out.
Then two.
Mae recognized the sound, an instinctual alert felt deep in her mind. She’d been close enough to a shooting before—and one time was too many—to know the difference between the loud blast of a firework, the surprising boom of a backfiring truck, and this—the pop, so quick your mind might think you’d imagined it, if your body didn’t know.
And Dell’s body reacted immediately.
“In the truck.” His voice was quiet, deadly serious; his hands had disappeared from Mae’s in the blink of an eye. He already clutched his keys in his fingers. “Mae. Now.”
And even though somewhere in her brain, she knew the pops had been far enough away that they likely weren’t in immediate danger, Mae was scrambling around the hood, fumbling with the handle of the passenger side door. It was only when she was clicking in her seatbelt that her brain caught up.
