Page 76 of Kiss Me Tonight

“They didn’t.” Another loose-limbed shrug, but the casualness of it is belied by the bone-weary fatigue in her voice. “I eloped with Rick like a total fool. Dropped out of BC during my senior year because Rick lived in Pittsburgh. He’d only been visiting London when we met, and I was so gung-ho about raising our baby together as a family. My mom begged me to reconsider, but I thought I was in love. People do all sorts of reckless things for the ones they love, right?”

I hear her utter self-loathing, and for the first time in my life, I hate that it’s in this moment that my soul recognizes it’s not so alone. Me and Levi, we aren’t so very different.

Sure, she grew up here in beautiful little London surrounded by her family and I grew up in shithole neighborhood after shithole neighborhood in and around San Francisco, but at the bottom of it all . . . we’ve both survived insurmountable obstacles and come out on the other side to tell the tale.

We’re one and the same—and Ihatethat.

I fucking hate to think of Levi hurting, especially at the hands of a scumbag like Clarke.

“My earliest memory of football is watching the kids in my neighborhood play on the street,” I say, a notch above a husky murmur, to make sure she hears every word. “I’d just ended up in juvie for the first time. I robbed”—fuck, this is hard. I close my eyes against any possible disgust that I’ll see in her face, even as I keep the biggest secret to myself—“a corner store, but that was the first tick on a whole lot of boxes that had me on the wrong side of the law.”

She breathes out my name.

I do my best to pretend there’s no pity in those three syllables.

“I was bad,” I go on, kicking my feet a little faster, relishing the burn in my thighs and my calves. “Kicked out of school. Wearing an ankle monitor like I was some sort of prepubescent savage. I was already big for my age—looked closer to thirteen or fourteen. But I was in bad shape, heading straight for a career in misdemeanor crimes at best, federal charges at worst, and then I looked out the kitchen window and saw them all throwing the ball.”

Hope burns in her voice when she asks, “Did you go out there and play?”

I laugh, the sound harsh and angry. “With that ankle monitor beeping every time I got close to the front door? Not a chance in hell. But I dreamed about it later that night. Every night after that, too. Football was my gateway out of the shithole that was my life.”

I stole money for pads and gear.

I rode a shitty-ass bike that I found in a junkyard to and from practice, its janky wheels bumping along like I was riding a roller coaster and not the black mountain bike that had seen better days.

When I hit middle school and found that the gym was open until six at night, I toiled away every extra hour that I could, lifting weights and building up my core strength.

But a kid is only as successful as his environment allows him to be, and I spent more time in juvie than I spent out of it by the time I turned sixteen. When Louisiana State actually looked at me as a potential recruit during my senior year and took a chance on a poor, troubled kid from Cali, I cried.

Big fat tears that my ratted blanket soaked up while I slept on the couch of my last and final foster home.

I look up at the sky. The stars are duller now, the encroaching sun already starting to peek out over the horizon. We’ve stayed out here long past our allotted twenty minutes, and I . . . I—

“I’m grateful for you.”

My head whips toward Levi. “What?”

She runs her tongue along her bottom lip, sending heat straight down to my groin. “It’s something I started doing when I first married Rick—finding little things to be grateful for when everything else felt like it was crumbling down.”

I swallow, hard.

“And you’re grateful for me?” My voice is thick, guttural. I don’t bother to clear it when I try to add a little levity to the conversation with a teasing, “Because you like how I kiss?”

“Because you remind me that life’s not worth living if we aren’t willing to take a risk.”

Before I can even predict what she’ll do next, she surprises me—yet again—by tossing her glasses into the kayak and jumping into the bay beside me. The pressure of her fall sends water splashing into my face, and I quickly re-grasp the side of the kayak before it floats away.

Levi bobs up next to me, slicking her hands back over her drenched blond hair.

A nervous smile pulls at her lips as she reaches out a hand and pats the air between us. “I’m blind as a bat without my glasses,” is all she says, missing my face by about ten inches.

I hook an arm around her waist, keeping her afloat. The feel of her almost naked body slipping against mine?Jesus fuck. It’s all I can do to keep hold of my restraint when I growl, “Get back in the kayak before you drown.”

“You asked me to trust you.”

My heart speeds up at a fast clip. “Aspen . . .” Her name is a warning and a request all at once. What the fuck is she thinking, launching herself into the water like that? “You’re scared of sharks.”

“You told me being scared is half the fun.”

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