Page 83 of Lost in the Current of You

When he dropped me home, he promised to call me later.

But I waited all night to hear from him. A text, a call. Something.

But nothing came.

And I half expected it. Half yearned to be wrong.

I was realising that this thing between us was quickly becoming more than either of us expected.

32

I spent most of the week with myself. Every day I found myself in a different place with my camera in hand, held high to the sky or the nature on the ground. I think I needed it, a moment in my own company to sort through my thoughts and fall even more in love with photography.

Contact with Reece was few and far between.

Three days after our day in the city, I finally received a text from him. But me being me, I ignored it and decided to get out of the house. I locked my phone in my drawer and grabbed my camera, with the aim of forgetting and clearing my head. Surprisingly, it seemed to do a lot of good for me that I just kept going and adventuring to new places.

I did end up messaging him back, but my conversations were sporadic, and he seemed to sense that.

The truth was that I scared myself. Words I avoided ever saying out loud had been so close to spilling from my lips that day, and I didn’t know what to do to myself. Even though I loved the idea of love and seeing it in the movies, it just wasn’t the same or as realistic in real life. It was a fairytale I could live in inside my head, but feeling it and saying those words had my fight-or-flight response flaring.

Those three words had become permanently buried behind a concrete wall that it had become a foreign feeling for me to say. I know how easily they can be taken advantage of. I’d seen it with my dad. I’d felt it with Mum when I was younger. Whenever I told her I loved her, all she ever replied with was, ‘That’s good, sweetie’. It made me slowly lose hope for the promises those words gave you. Slowly, those words began to slip from my vocabulary. I didn’t even say them to my friends. The closest I got was replying ‘you too’ when they said it. The only person I had ever been brave enough to say them to was my dad.

So the fact that I had almost let them slip with Reece had me retreating into myself in hopes of never coming out again. I was protecting myself.

It was late in the evening when my phone buzzed with an incoming call. My heart skipped a beat as I hesitantly grabbed it, reading the name written across the screen in bold. I held my breath, bringing the phone to my ear after clicking the green button. His breathing filtered through the speaker and an immediate sense of comfort washed over me just like it always did from feeling his presence from the other side of the line. I’d missed it.

“Hi,” I whispered into the receiver, hesitance and vulnerability filtering through my words.

There was a moment's pause. A heartbeat that had me clinging the phone closer to my ear so I didn’t miss his voice or even a single breath.

“Hey.” Reece’s voice floated through my ear, and that single word made my whole body lose every single ounce of tension it was coiling into.

There was another pause. Silence stretched through the space between us.

I chewed on my lip, trying to piece together something to say, but he spoke before I could.

“Are you alone?” he asked.

I nodded before swallowing, remembering he couldn’t see, and forced my mouth to open to speak. “Yes.”

“Good. I’m out front. Let me in?”

I didn’t answer. I just took the stairs by two with my phone still stuck to my ear before I whipped the door open. As soon as it was opened, I watched Reece, with his confident and purposeful stride, make his way up the steps of the porch while ending the call and pocketing his phone in the back of his shorts. He was standing in front of me then, but he didn’t stop. His hands came to frame my face as he entered my space, and I stumbled back into the door just as his lips pressed against mine, purposeful and desperate.

When his lips found mine, I could pretend the pressure in my chest that I had felt all week never existed and that my feelings for Reece weren’t developing into something real and dangerous. I could forget all that and shut it to the back of my mind just to be able to have moments like these where he could consume my existence with the touch of his lips. I could deal with physical and surface-level feelings. I could deal with lust, desire, and physical attraction.

He kissed me once, twice, all the while walking me backward into the house. The third time his lips pressed onto mine, he coaxed my lips apart with a swipe of his tongue before it tangled with mine in languid strokes, and it brought tingles to my skin from the tips of my toes to the top of my head.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered against my lips, pausing his assault as he hovered them above mine.

My heart cracked at the whispered apology. I was just as guilty as he was. But I’ve heard him apologise many times now. It was like it was all he did. I wanted to believe him, but it was getting harder to trust he meant them when his actions were starting to speak above his sweet words. I needed him to show me more. To step up and show me he means what he says.

But at this moment, I just wanted his lips on mine, his hands on my body, and his breath mingling with mine. I’d hold my breath for now just to be with him. I knew it was a discussion we needed to have, but it wasn’t something I could brave right now, knowing it could go one of two ways. I feared I already knew which way it would go.

So, I sacrificed what I knew was best for me and dove deeper into what felt like an escape.

“Just kiss me,” I whispered back, pulling him back down to me.

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