Page 106 of Perfect on Paper

Slept on my couch, and stared up at me with that aching in his eyes (which I was now certain I didn’t imagine) and yet didn’t initiate anything. Didn’t ask me to stay behind when I left to go to sleep. Didn’t reject my offer of platonic friendship. Even when he thought I knew.

“Why?” I asked.

Luckily for me, he didn’t pretend to misunderstand the question, for once. He raised his hands, then let them fall in his lap helplessly. “Don’t you… don’t youknow?”

I was too scared to believe I knew anything right now. But somehow, something within me got brave enough to take his hand.

He really was beautiful. And despite what I’d thought of him when I met him, now that I knew him, I was quite sure he might be the most beautiful person I’d ever met in my life.

His leg bumped mine underwater as he shifted. His hand tightened its grip on mine, and we pulled each other in, and our lips met in the middle softly, and Brougham drew in a sharp breath.

He tasted just as I remembered. He unthreaded his fingers from mine and rested them on my temple, before walking them backward to both push my hair back and pull me in to deepen the kiss.

I didn’t want the kiss to be gentle anymore. I tugged him into me to press his chest against mine with one hand, and the other I weaved up and around his neck. Then I shifted and pushed myself up and around so I was straddling him, my knees against the concrete. He kept kissing me, and grabbed my hips to move me into a comfortable position. We were getting water everywhere, but it barely mattered.

All I could do was kiss him for all the times I’d wanted to but couldn’t. Letting my hands roam wherever they ended up. Letting him run his hands under my shirt to touch my shoulder blades, and rake his fingertips down my skin when I sank low into his lap, drawing a moan from somewhere guttural. He broke his kiss away and moved it to my neck, holding me in place so I could arch my back without crashing into the pool. The warmth of his mouth and the sweep of his tongue against my collarbone almost made me lose my grip on everything completely, and I fought to draw myself back into the present before I gave in to abandon and pulled us both underwater.

Because we—

His hair was so soft and thick, and the bit by the nape of his neck was like touching a mink blanket—

—couldn’t do anything but kissing—

—and I felt myself slipping, or maybe Brougham was sliding forward, but my feet were in the water now, and I wanted to let him—

—because his dad was in thehouse and could be watching us right this second.

I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I steadied us by bracing my knee against the pool’s edge, and broke away, panting. “Brougham.”

He froze. A flash of panic swept over his face, like someone sobered by ice water. Straight into sharp focus.

He thought I was going to run off again.

I cupped his jaw with my hands and tried to give him a reassuringly warm look. “Your dad is right inside.”

Everything relaxed, so intensely I could physically feel the shift of his body beneath mine. “Right. Yup. Duh.”

I stayed in my position while we caught our breath andtried to bring things back to more of a three out of ten on the intensity scale.

“I wanted to tell you I had feelings for you,” I said. “But you’d already picked things back up with Winona. It happened so fast.”

Brougham tipped his head back in frustration. “Of course. Ofcoursethat happened. Fuck me. It’s what I do, I convinced myself you didn’t feel the same because you never reached out like you said you would, so I threw myself into Winona so I could try to get over you and go back to the way I used to feel about her. I thought it’d work. I just didn’t want to deal with having feelings for someone who didn’t like me back, so I tried to change them.”

Because that’s whathappenedwhen someone who was anxiously attached felt rejected. And I knew this, and yet I couldn’t logically apply it to Brougham at the time, because I was too close to see things clearly. “It’s okay. I get it.”

“I fucked up.”

“I think it’s fair to say we both did.”

His hands drifted lazily to my thighs, where his thumb started tracing circles over my skin, sending a rippling shiver up to my shoulders. “Today’s been a lot,” he said. Then he pulled his hands away, and leaned back from me, giving me full control over our position. “I’m sure you have a lot you wanna think about.”

“There’s nothing to think about,” I said.

“You have to get home,” he added.

“Not for a while still.”

“It’s kind of happening out of nowhere.”

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