Page 28 of Black Heart

She sighed dramatically. “I was a sneaky one.”

“Yes, you were,” Tristan murmured in agreement.

“I still remember the last time you kissed me,” Marty said, smiling as she thought about her first kiss.

* * *

“Do you?”Tristan asked, surprised that she remembered. He remembered the last time he’d kissed her but for a completely different reason.

“Mmmhmm,” Marty murmured absently, pausing to squeeze more lotion into her hands.

“How could I ever forget the kiss that made my life a living hell?” she said with a heartfelt sigh that had him swallowing hard.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Tristan asked, only to groan when she started running her hands over him again.

“You don’t remember, do you?” Marty asked, gently massaging his shoulder.

“Refresh my memory,” Tristan said since his memory apparently wasn’t as good as he’d thought it was becausethatkiss always brought a smile to his face whenever he thought about it.

“It was at the high school bonfire after the dance. You were a senior and I was nothing but a lowly freshman. To my shock and your date’s horror, you gave me a ride to the dance and even danced with me a few times,” Marty said with a forlorn sigh as she ran her hands over his back and chest.

Tristan’s hands clenched tightly on the desk. It was the first and only school dance that he’d ever attended and it had nothing to do with his date, whoever it was. All she did was bitch, but that’s all he remembered about her. He went for one reason and one reason only. He wanted to dance with Marty. More to the point, he wanted to hold her in his arms.

“After the dance, the three of us walked to the bonfire, where your date, Karen Manor, a junior, bitched and threw a tantrum demanding that you ditch me.”

“And I didn’t,” Tristan said because that night he’d decided to find out if he could handle more with Marty. Unfortunately for his date, she’d just been a decoy, an excuse to attend the dance and spend time with Marty without any pressure or having to worry about her father killing him.

“You were always so sweet and protective of me. You said you weren’t going to leave me to fend for myself around a bunch of drunk jocks.”

That was part of the reason.

Even at fifteen, she’d been so fucking beautiful. He wasn’t the only one to notice. But the real reason had been quite simple. After spending three hours holding Marty in his arms, he’d decided that he was going to find out the real reason why he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

“So, there we were. The two of us sipping sodas and hanging out near the fire. Karen was with Matt Cabal a few feet away, trying to make you jealous.” He didn’t remember anything about that moment other than sitting with Marty and using the cool night air as an excuse to wrap his arm around her.

“Anyway, some genius decided to throw a beer bottle into the fire. It shattered against one of the logs and a small sliver slashed my cheek,” she said as Tristan carefully pushed back in his chair and stood up, moving away from her. He didn’t want to be near her when she finished the story.

“Are you okay?” she asked, frowning.

“I’m fine,” Tristan said absently as he pulled on his shirt and tie.

“After you punched the boy for hurting me, even though it was an accident, you walked back to me and pressed a kiss to the cut…and missed, kissing me full on the mouth. It sent your date into hysterics and for the next year and a half, her friends went out of their way to make my life a living hell.”

He hadn’t missed.

He’d meant to kiss her. If she hadn’t stumbled back when a drunk junior bumped into them, he would have continued that one perfect kiss. He remembered reaching for her so that he could pull her back into his arms when the spirit of a child walked up to him, reminding him why it could never be. That was the night when he decided that he had to do the right thing by her and walk away.

It was also the night when the weird dreams started.

Not that he would really call them dreams. They were more like flickers of scenes that played through his head while he slept. They never lasted long enough for him to figure out what was happening, but he sensed that they were about her, aboutthem. They didn’t happen often, but when they did, they were enough to wake him up in the middle of the night, sweating and panting, feeling heartache so deep that he actually thought he’d die, wished for it.

He’d do anything to avoid experiencing that type of soul-crushing pain again.

Whenever he experienced one of those dreams, he had to fight the urge to go to her. He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her until the pain stopped, but he couldn’t. He was a freak and she deserved so much better than him. He’d realized that years ago when he’d pushed her away to protect her.

Same as now.

“I guess some things never change,” Tristan drawled, watching her frown in confusion.

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