Page 18 of Merrily You

“When I kiss you…it doesn’t feel fake to me, Holiday. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t real, but it feels real to me. I’m so sorry.” She started to cry, and I gathered her into my arms, pushing her head against my shoulder.

“Shhh, it’s okay.” I was still processing her words and it took me a moment to put everything together.

“Are you saying that you liked kissing me?” I asked. I’d never gotten a decent answer about the kissing situation.

Danny let out a pained sound and lifted her head. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

Why was she sorry?

“Because I’m going to ruin everything.” I must have said those words out loud because she’d responded to my question.

“Why are you going to ruin everything?” I was playing catchup with everything going on in her head. One of my hands brushed up and down her back trying to soothe her.

“Because I don’t know how to go back to the way things were,” she said, blinking away tears and sniffing. I wanted to get her a tissue, but I didn’t want to leave her.

“Hold on, let’s sit down.” I guided her over to the bed, my heart racing in my chest. This felt like one of those moments when everything was about to change, and my body was flipping out about it. If she was saying what I hoped she was saying, then both of our lives were never going to be the same from this moment onward.

Danny sat heavily on the bed next to me and I reached for a tissue from the box on my nightstand, using it to blot her face and give myself a second to try and calm down.

I didn’t calm down, but Danny had a moment to blow her nose.

“Are you saying that you want to kiss me?” I asked, my voice squeaking.

Danny nodded. “Yes. Yes, I want to kiss you so much I can barely breathe.”

Well. That was as strong a statement as any.

“Oh,” I said, exhaling. “Then we’re on the same page.”

“What?” she asked, tearing another tissue apart with her fingers. “You want to kiss me?”

Her surprise was fucking adorable. “Yes, Daniella. I want to kiss you. I don’t know why we’re sitting here talking instead of kissing except that I didn’t know you wanted to kiss me back. I thought I was the one who’d have to suppress their feelings.” I’d been worrying about it all day. Wondering how the hell I was going to hide my surprising and growing attraction to her.

“What the hell is wrong with us?” Danny asked, shaking her head slowly.

“No idea,” I said, laughing. It wasn’t funny, but it kind of was. A giggle burst out of my mouth and then I couldn’t stop. Danny laughed with me and soon we were falling back on my bed and trying to catch our breaths.

“What the hell, Danny?” I asked, turning to face her. She was so close, and she looked beautiful with her hair all over the place. Danny had always been beautiful, but it was like it hit me differently now after we’d kissed. Her beauty had an edge to it now. An intensity that sometimes made it hard to think around her.

“You’re beautiful,” I blurted out, as if my tongue had taken a cue from my brain.

“So are you. I’ve always known it but…” she trailed off again. “It’s different now.” She stroked a few stray hairs out of my face.

“Yeah, it is.”

I really needed to kiss her, so I reached for her face and pulled her closer. Danny didn’t stop me as I sealed my mouth to hers. Oh,yes. Kissing Danny was exactly perfectly right.

It truly was astonishing that we hadn’t been kissing before this. So many years of not kissing her that I was going to have to make up for.

This was the strongest kiss. The most uninhibited. Danny didn’t hesitate to move until she was straddling me and kissingme so hard that I could barely breathe. The only thing that mattered was that she didn’t stop.

The kind of want that I had for her was all-consuming. It was too big to contemplate. Too much, but just enough. Just enough for me. I could handle it.

I whimpered into her mouth and she moaned back at me. Our tongues tasted each other for the first time, and I was lost and found at once.

Kissing Danny waseverything.

“Oh my god, I want you so bad it hurts,” Danny gasped into my mouth. She’d grabbed me and had started driving her hips against mine and had turned the kiss from something sweetly desperate to something harder and more intense.

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