He couldn’t move, couldn’t make himself back away.
She drew dizzyingly close. “Did you mean everything you wrote?”
He meant to say,no, not even a little. An easy out. But his stupid mouth betrayed him. “Of course. I meant every word.”
Her eyes shone. “Then you were right. About language. It’s magic. I had no idea.”
He shifted his weight. He had no clue how to stop the barrage of inhalations piledriving into him. He was freezing. Or melting, he couldn’t fucking tell.
“And. . .” Her fingers twined at her waist. “I think about you, too, you know.”
He could hear himself breathing. Why the hell was it so loud? He sounded like a bull about to charge. “You think about getting me to leave you alone, you mean.”
“No.” She hugged herself across the middle. “I think aboutyou. About the things you’ve written. Especially the part about you wondering what it would be like to kiss me.”
He stared. That made no sense at all.
Her teeth dug into her bottom lip. “Say something. Please.”
He surveyed her, searching for the lie. But she looked sincere. More importantly, she looked cold. Goose bumps bristled as she rubbed her palms along her bare arms.
“You’re freezing,” he said. A true master of words, indeed.
“Yeah, a little. Can I use your coat?”
In nanoseconds, he’d unzipped the bomber jacket he’d “inherited” from a kid who’d picked a fight with him at lunch two years ago. It was too small in the arms now, but would swallow her trim frame with room to spare.
“I meant with you still in it,” Aubrey said.
He paused with the collar down around his elbows. “What?”
“Like this.” She sidled closer, hesitant. When he didn’t move, she pulled his jacket back into place and slipped her arms underneath, around his waist.
At the contact, his heart ballooned to block his throat. His mind fuzzed out. Yet somehow, his body responded, his arms folding open to cocoon her into the jacket. Into himself.
Aubrey burrowed against his shoulder and sighed, her breath a molten caress that seeped through his shirt. “That’s better.”
Seconds whirled past, each one tightening confusion’s hold on him. What? Just... what? One minute he’d been running from her, and now he was holding her, and the interval separating the two was a dissonant blur, like a needle-skip over a scratched record.
And Aubrey was trembling. Why was she trembling? She hadn’t been, a moment ago.
She lifted her head. She was tall for a girl, just an inch or two shy of his five foot ten, and her breath feathered against his mouth. Her pupils expanded, their swell visible even in the orangey sheen of the lights.
His lungs kept exploding, over and over. This wasn’t happening. Aubrey MacLean couldn’t possibly be pressed to his body, her heartbeat battering at his sternum like a thrashingbird. Her face couldn’t be inches from his, or her cheeks so flushed, or her green eyes heated and expectant, as if she really had thought about him kissing her.
But oh god, what if hedidit? What if he just did the same thing he’d done at her locker that day, and silently screamed all the doubts into shutting the fuckupfor once, because couldn’t he just pay for his idiocy later?
His body ran away with that line of thinking, because somehow he was easing her backward, maneuvering her until her ponytail hit the nearest wall. His hand landed beside her head, the brick an icy sizzle against his palm.
Aubrey reached up. He braced for her to shove him away, but her fingertips landed on his cheek, gentle. Heat blazed wherever she touched. An involuntary sound worked free of him, a wispy kind of moan.
She didn’t seem to want to talk. Thank fuck, because he wouldn’t have had any idea what to say. It was enough of a challenge trying to figure out how to keep himself upright, especially when she insisted on staring at his mouth like that.
“Well?” she finally whispered.
“Well, what?”
“Do you still want to find out?”
