Page 78 of Broken Romeo

“Because if I don’t have my first kiss soon, then it will be on stage with you in front of our entire class! Is it so crazy that I want my first kiss to be while I’m me, not some character I’m playing?”

A trembling breath pushed from her lungs. Tucking her hair behind her ear, she added, more quietly, “I just… I can’t have an audience for my first kiss, okay?”

Her anger faded, melting with her admission.

Oh, fuck. She was right. I hadn’t thought about that.

“You saw the cast list?” I asked.

She nodded, peering up at me with widely set innocent eyes. “Congratulations… Romeo.”

“You too, Juliet,” I said with a chuckle, even though nothing about this situation was funny.

“The rehearsal schedule is attached to the cast list. We’re supposed to do the kissing scene next week.”

“Next week?” I raked my hands through my hair and groaned. “Professor McCay really is trying to torture us, isn’t she?”

Kate snorted a humorless laugh and crossed her arms. “I didn’t realize kissing me was such torture.”

I turned slowly to look at her from across the room. Space. Yes. That was what we needed. Space between us.

Because she was breathtaking. The way her smooth, tanned skin glowed in the moonlight, backlit by the hallway behind her, creating this supernatural radiance.

“Kissing you on stage and not being able to kiss you in real life would be torture,” I clarified, in a moment of raw honesty.

“Then why are you so opposed to kissing me in real life?”

Because my parents would eat you alive, I thought. But I didn’t say that. Unless you were the child of a politician or a celebrity, that wasn’t something anyone could understand. Instead, I answered with, “You’re young.”

“I’m eighteen.”

“Exactly. You’re eighteen. And I’m twenty-one.”

“That’s stupid. We’re both legal and in college. What other excuses do you have?”

Oh, I could play this game all night long. Kate wasn’t the first girl I’d pushed away… but she was the first girl I’d had such a hard time pushing away. “I don’t do commitments. And you’re girlfriend material.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I think there’s a compliment somewhere in there.”

“It is a compliment.”

“A compliment and a rejection all at once?”

I lifted my hands in the air. “See? You get it.”

“I call bull shitake.”

A brief laugh broke through my steely demeanor. “Shitake? I thought you said you were eighteen … not thirteen.”

A dash of pink flushed her cheeks, but to her credit, she stood tall. “My parents are super religious. If I wanted any social life at all, I had to make sure they never heard me cuss. It kind of stuck.”

“It’s kind of adorable,” I said without thinking.

The pink blush turned coral and spread across her nose as anger blazed in her eyes. “Puppies are adorable. Coeds asking you to kiss them are sexy.”

My joking retort strangled in my throat as my gaze raked down her body. Her tank top held up tight, small breasts with only thin spaghetti straps. Though she was shorter than me, her lean legs went on for days and did crazy things to my pulse. And her pajama shorts were thin cotton with lavender stripes. If I squinted, I could almost make out the outline of her panties.

Black.

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