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I look up at her. She’s watching me read it with that expression I can never fully decode, the one that lives somewhere between brave and terrified.
I hand her phone back and I don’t have a speech prepared for this. I don’t have three reasons or a clever comeback. I just pull her in and hold her on the sidewalk in Marseille until she stops being rigid against me and lets her forehead drop to my shoulder.
“It’s a start,” I say into her hair.
“It’s a start,” she agrees.
She sits down on the edge of the stairs to the hotel while I wander up the street a little. It’s beautiful out and I want to see if we can nab a pastis before bed. And I want to give her a second to process her mom and me a second to process the last couple days. We’re a couple. We’re text official. I lean against the building and look back at her in the moonlight as she leans back on her hands.
One of the waitstaff from tonight approaches and squats down to talk to Kat. I raise my eyebrows a bit and wander back towards her. He laughs and she smiles at him. I’m close enough to hear them now.
“You are interesting and beautiful. Let’s spend some time together tonight.”
“Oh. Wow. Thank you.” She looks over to me. “I can’t.”
“You are taken?”
She stands up, swigs from his open wine bottle and looks at me as she says, “Unfortunately, yes.”
She hands his bottle back and slides her arm around my waist and I wave bye-bye to the jacked up waiter. I kiss the top of her head and say, “Hell, yeah you are.”
Chapter 56
When the Moon Hits Your Eye
KAT
Venice
We’ve been here for three days and somewhere between the gondola rides and the gelato, waking up next to each other every morning without either of us making it weird, something has shifted. I make sure we kiss on every bridge we cross. We’re both getting chapped lips but totally worth it.
I exit the shower and he’s sitting on the edge of the bed. “Are you okay?”
“Why?”
“You’re on your phone again and you’re making the face you do when you’re annoyed.”
I step between his legs. I put my hands on his shoulders and he stares up at me with those long lashes and his eyes doing that dancey thing they do. It’s been almost a week of us moving as a unit and each moment is deeper. I don’t judge or snark it away but let myself actually fall for this man. His face is so beautiful and open.
“Are we a thing, or what?”
He looks up at me as his hands run up my legs and flirt with the bottom of the towel. “I’m pretty sure we’re ‘or what.”
“The honeymoon phase is over, you know.”
“Is it?”
“Time for fucking because we want to, not because we’re in a phase. So get your seduction tactics in line, Mister. I need to be wooed. Did you magically think when you flew across the world to tell me you like like me that I’d suddenly stop teasing you?”
“A little.” The left corner of his lip ticks up. “I worship you.” His hands are sliding up and down my legs, flirting with the bottom of my ass. I can barely concentrate. “I have an idea about the wooing.”
I let him pull me down to his face. “I’m listening.”
“No more talking,” he says it against my mouth.
“Finally, something we agree on.”
“How?” he asks in a raspy voice that I let wrap around my pebbled skin. I drink him in. I trace his lips with my fingertip as his hands run up and down my arms now.
