Page 7 of Follow Your Bliss

My body was only on edge because I hadn’t been this close to a beautiful woman with that little clothes on in a long time. I flexed my thigh muscle really hard and held it, trying to make the blood flow somewhere else. It was a trick I learned off the internet a couple of weeks ago, and it didn’t work too bad. But even abstaining from self-pleasure was harder than it had been a few minutes ago.

Pun intended.

I flashed her a smile. “Did you wear all black just to sneak around in my yard and dig this up?”

“Yeah, I went full stealth mode for my wild Friday night,” she laughed. She casually brushed dirt off her chest and pulled the ripped hems of her short shorts down, as if wishing they were longer. I sure as hell didn’t.

“Also, most of my clothes are still in transit from New York.”

I glanced at her again just as a mosquito landed on the pale, soft swell of her breast. I reached out on instinct but froze before I touched her. “You have a mosquito on your…” I pointed.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, slapping at it. “They’re eating me alive.”

“You must be delicious.” My cheeks heated even more than the August night called for. Why did I say that? I was thinking it, but why say it out loud? I bit my lip and started on the sixth bolt.

She laughed nervously. “I guess so.”

What did I know about her these days, besides that she was making my sister’s wedding dress and standing in the wedding? “New York. Fashion internship, right? Becca mentioned you were moving back home.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

I nodded, starting on the last bolt. Another memory of her popped into my head, from my eighth-grade end-of year party. Pretty Rose, sitting wide-eyed across from me in a circle of classmates, where the bottle I’d spun pointed unmistakably at her. Crawling toward each other at the center with friends whooping all around us, her long curls hanging down, lips parted, eyes determined.

I dropped my wrench to the workbench, the cylinder unbolted.

“Thank you so much,” she murmured. I carefully emptied the contents of the capsule on the plywood as she rifled through it. A few stuffed animals, a bracelet, lots of folded up pieces of loose leaf, a rolled-up newspaper…

“There!” She grabbed a pink enamel and gold half-a-heart necklace. “It’s a little dirty, but I bet my mom has jewelry cleaner.”

I dropped a few items back into the capsule, but a Polaroid of a dozen campers caught my eye. There in the center was middle school Rose. “Oh wow, look at you!” Just as I remembered her—wide-eyed with her long curls everywhere.

She leaned in toward me, the heat magnifying her rosy scent. I smirked. Of course Rose would smell like roses.

She grabbed the photo from me, groaning. “Oh wow, look at those bangs. Let’s put that back in the time capsule, shall we?”

I shifted through the papers. What did people think was important enough to put in? “A poem for the future, a prayer, and oh, what do we have here?” An index card with Rose’s name on it. I’d hit gold. “‘Rose Guidry’s Bucket List’?”

“Oh my Lord, let me see.” Her hand snaked out for the card, but this was too good to hand over without reading it first.

I held it up over my head, laughing. “No, I wanna read it.”

“Give it!” She swiped for it but was too short to grab it.

I started to read it.

“It’s mine, Jason. Give it!” She jumped for it, chest-bumping me and knocking a sharp pain into my chin with her head.

“Ow!” She ducked her head with her hand over it. “I’m going to die the minuteafterI kill my sister,” she growled.

What was I, a little kid with a crush? “I’m sorry. I’m such an ass. Are you okay?”

With a triumphant cackle she made a sneak attack for the card, but I whipped it above my head again. “Ahh, you almost got me! Waltz with a cute guy, go to Paris…how many of these have you done already?”

“I don’t know,” she shot back, “because you won’t let me see it!”

I peered into her narrowed, angry eyes. “Okay, I’ll let you see it if you don’t take it and run. Deal?”

My heart stumbled as she glared back at me, her full, rosy lips turned up at one end. Her dark blue eyes were almost purple in the porchlight. Stunning. She’d always been cute, but now she was fucking gorgeous.

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