“I can see right into your nostrils,” she said.
“Don’t get hypnotized by their depths. You’re going to need to have your wits about you. Okay, I’m going to turn around now and we’re just going to eeeaaaase you down onto my shoulders. How’s your upper body strength? You’re going to need some. Mine is stupendous.”
“I’m good, thanks.”
She wasn’t going to mention that her upper body, every bit of it, was stiff from scraping wallpaper from the wall. But she didn’t have it in her to admit to a weakness in front of Mac.
She scooted forward, pressing her palms down on the dusty attic floor behind her to brace herself, and he maneuvered beneath her just as her foot swung down and brushed his face.
She saw his nose bend a little to the left.
“Ow! Watch the shoes! That’s my nose!”
“Sorry, sorry!” Oh, God. This was already mortifying and she wasn’t even on top of his shoulders yet, like some drunk twenty-something at Coachella right before she ripped her top off and waved it around her head.
Mac gripped her ankles loosely but firmly. His hands slid up a little farther, maybe to gain purchase, maybe to savor a bit, but there was no way he didn’t encounter a little razor stubble. This was easily the least sexy thing she’d ever done with a man as an adult. Nevertheless, a current that could only be described as lust shot from his hand right into her privates.
When his hands began gliding up her calves to clamp on top of her thighs, her head felt light as a balloon.
Of all the ways she had imagined touching Mac Coltrane again, none of them involved him guiding her on down like he was a foreman on the Golden Gate Bridge supervising a girder into place.
But her poor stiff arms wobbled as she lowered herself down and she landed a little too hard on board that shelf of shoulders, which made her arms windmill wildly, which sent him into a staggering lunge to the left to avoid the stair wreckage. She compensated by flexing her thighs to stay on top.
“Avalon, don’tsqueezewith your thighs, for the love of God! That’s my carotid artery! I’ll black out.”
“Sorry. Sorry.” She relaxed her thigh grip but she didn’t know where to put her hands unless it was to thrust them out parallel to the ground, à la an airplane, or grip his ears like handlebars. He hoisted his knee and took one Frankenstein-esque step forward. Which tipped her hard to the left.
She squeaked and reflexively seized handfuls of his hair and yanked back hard, like a rodeo queen ten seconds away from clinching the championship.
He gave a muffled squawk of pain, pivoted abruptly, staggered in a semicircle like a dreidel losing steam, barreled at a forward run toward the beanbag chair, shouted, “Look out!” and dumped her into it.
She bounced once and lay still.
It seemed unduly silent after that.
It was safe to say it was a stunned sort of silence.
She slowly, slowly turned her eyes up to his.
They stared at each other in something like mortified, almost impressed, slightly accusatory amazement. As if neither one of them had realized suchthoroughmutual indignity was even possible as adults.
His face was scarlet, either with exertion or pain or mortification—and his hair was standing up in little peaks all over like whitecaps whipped up on a bay.
She was pretty sure she was the same color. Judging from her temperature.
“Maybe we should have gotten a ladder,” she offered. Subdued.
“Maybe,” he said shortly.
More silence. He was still staring at her with an expression that suggested he thought she might be as possessed as the possum up there in the attic.
She cleared her throat. “Thank you. And... I’m sorry.”
Her parents had always taught her those were the go-to words when a situation was untenable.
He could take them however he wished.
He just shook his head to and fro, to and fro, slowly and wonderingly. Then rotated his neck experimentally.
