Page 86 of The Summer I Destroyed You

Though God knows what I’m going to do with her in New York. I’m barely ever home.

He frowns. “I assumed you’d just stay with me.”

I freeze halfway through rolling up a jacket. “You mean tonight?”

He laughs ruefully. “Em, we’ve spent every day together for weeks. Would it be so terrible just to stay at my place until you’re done here?”

“I never said it would be terrible. I just didn’t think—” I hitch a shoulder.

“You didn’t think I’d want you there?” he asks, pulling me toward him with his hands on my waist. “Then you must not have noticed I can’t stand having you anywhere else.”

His lips brush against mine, then move to my forehead and hold there.

“She’s right, you know,” I say quietly. “My mom? You like me the way I am now. You wouldn’t look at me twice if I gained all that weight back.”

“Try me, Emmy. Regain every pound. Because there’s a long list of things about you I adore, and your weight has never, ever been on there. I was crazy about you before I’d ever even seen your face.”

I blink back tears as I stare at his chest. I don’t want to be the weak girl who just admitted to an insecurity. I don’t want to be the formerly chubby girl he’s forced to reassure.

“What about my mean mouth?” I ask, the words a little hoarse. “Is my mean mouth on the list?”

He laughs and presses his lips to my neck. “When you run that mean mouth, I’ve got this almost irresistible urge to bend you in half and fuck you until you can’t stand up straight, so yeah, weirdly, the mean mouth is on the list.”

“I’m suddenly tempted to say something mean.”

His smile is gentle. “Don’t do it,” he says, pulling me back to him. “That’s not what I want right now. I just want to hold you for a sec, and then I’m gonna take you and Snowflake home.”

I’d rather feel used and punished, but that’s not who he is.

I’ve accidentally fallen for a guy who can’t stand to see me hurt, who wants to ease every ache and pain.

“I guess I can live with that,” I whisper, relaxing against him.

41

LIAM

“Seriously, Liam,” she announces in the dead of night, “if you cared about me at all, you’d have killed that fucking rooster by now.”

I’m only half awake, but I’m already laughing. One of these days I’m going to call her bluff and tell her I’m doing it. She’ll have stopped me before I’ve even climbed out of bed.

Today, though, I have something else in mind. I climb above her and slide down the mattress, spreading her open wide.

“You know, you don’t have to pretend you want to kill the rooster every time you want me to go down on you.”

“I’m not—” She gasps as my tongue glides over her.

I smirk as I glance up. “So should I stop?”

She runs her fingers through my hair, signaling that she wants me to stay where I am. “Since you’re already there you may as well keep going.”

When we wake next, we are both in a rush. There isn’t time to do a quarter of the things I’d like to do, and that in and of itself is different: when was the last time I woke up with a woman and my first thought wasn’t about how to extricate myself?

Emmy makes me wish it was a Saturday, not that she’d take Saturday off. She makes me wish we had time to eat a leisurely breakfast, not that she eats breakfast, and then go for a hike.

“Do you hike?” I ask as she emerges from the bathroom with her hair wrapped in a towel.

“You mean…on purpose?”

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