Page 48 of Sounds Like Love

I barked a laugh. “Well, now that you said something, you’ve made it weird.”

He held up his hands in innocence. “I didn’t say anything!”

“You thought it—same thing.”

“Yousaid it,” he pointed out.

You’re infuriating, I thought.

“She’s cute when she’s pretending to be angry.”“I’m not doing anything.”

“I’m not cute,” I replied.

It was his turn to look thwarted. “I didn’t say—” I leveled a look at him. He sighed. “Yeah. Right. I get it. You don’t like being called cute. I clocked that back at the concert last week.”

“Because I’m not cute,” I said. “Cute is for puppies and babies and best friends since fifth grade. I’m hot.”

His eyes widened. “Uh—yes.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You sound unsure.”

“I can’t decide if you’d be even angrier with me if I called you hot right now,” he admitted, and sped up his step to fall in line with me. The wind buffeted his loose black T-shirt, showing a sliver of skin above his jeans. I wished the moonlight was nonexistent. I wished I hadn’t seen the quick flash of his cut abs and the ropy shadow of a scar cutting down the left side.I wished I hadn’t even looked.

I whipped my head back in front of me and trained my eyes on the pier. Bad, this wasbad.“So now that we’re in person, do you have any bright ideas for how to get you out of my head?”

“I was hoping you had an idea how to get me out of yours—that doesn’t involve throwing me off a balcony.”

I laughed—I couldn’t help it. “Did that hurt your feelings?”

He held up his thumb and pointer finger an inch apart.

“I’m sorry.”

He clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth. “I somehow don’t think you mean it …”

To that I shrugged. “Youdidsay you’d be a hot ghost.”

The pier loomed like a haunted shadow. At night, with the tide low, you could go under it, barnacles and seaweed hanging above you like summer holiday streamers. The shadow of a crab scuttled out into the waves. I turned back to him, hands behind me, and leaned against the waterlogged pier leg. “Okay, let’s start at the beginning:Howcould we be linked?”

“Well, we didn’t get struck by lightning together, and we didn’t piss off the same witch, and we aren’t stuck in a time loop …” He sucked on his teeth, and then paused, pinning me with a look. “But you know what wediddo?”

“Nothing that I can—” I froze. Realization crawled across my cheeks, as horrible as a blush. “No.”

He slid closer to me, his hands behind his back. “Oh yes.”

“I’m sorry, there isn’t a kiss cam this time to entice me.”

“Oh, it was thekiss camthat convinced you?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

“I didn’t want to disappoint Willa,” I said easily, because the truth was embarrassing.

“And who could pass up kissing Sebastian Fell?”I heard him think.

That made me defensive. “That’s not it. I didn’t kiss you because of who you are. That’s not why I wanted to.”

He studied me with a look of distrust.

“I mean it,” I said, leaning toward him. We were close enough that our bodies buffered the wind, so we could hear each other, and no one else. “I wanted to because when Willa turned the camera on us, youaskedme if I wanted to. You didn’t expect it. And that meant something—it …”It means something. It was thoughtful, and that was the man I wanted to kiss, I thought, because it was too big to say out loud. It implied things I really only thought about in songs.

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