Page 5 of XOXO, Yours

I reach for the candy bars before my body can do anything humiliating, like spontaneously ovulate.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I tear open one of the wrappers and take a bite. Peanut butter and chocolate flood my tongue, dense and sweet. Dopamine surges through me, and I close my eyes and moan.

Pretty sure I moan.

“So good.”

He laughs low, and I feel it more than hear it, some vibration in the three feet of air between us.

I open my eyes again. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“I’m really not.”

“You are.”

“I’m laughing near you.”

“That sounds suspiciously like something a man says right before a woman murders him in a hospital vending room.”

His smile gets wider. It does something unfair to the corners of his eyes.

Damn it.

He has a really good smile, which is unfortunate because the rest of him is already offensively attractive. He doesn’t need bonus features.

“You here for somebody?” he asks.

The question wipes away the momentary distraction, like someone flipped a switch. My stomach drops the two floors it had climbed back up while I was busy noticing his forearms.

“My sister.”

His expression changes immediately. The teasing disappears, replaced by something softer, something that reaches his eyes before it reaches anywhere else.

“She okay?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be assaulting hospital property.”

He nods.

No empty reassurance. No I’m sure she’s fine, or everything happens for a reason, or any of the other bullshit people say when they don’t know what else to say. The kind of thing that makes my molars grind every single time.

He just leans one shoulder against the vending machine, like he’s got nowhere else to be, like the hallway isn’t lit like an interrogation room and the air doesn’t taste like hand sanitizer.

“Waiting sucks.”

I look at him, really look, past the shoulders and the jaw, at whatever’s actually sitting behind his eyes.

“Yeah.” My throat feels tight around the word. “It does.”

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